Abraham Socher isn’t a passive reader. He interacts energetically with books, debating with them and through them, arguing the world through the written word. That’s clear from his professional background — he’s emeritus professor of Jewish Studies at Oberlin and founder and editor of the Jewish Review of Books, a quarterly publication that reflects his deep engagement with literature and ideas.
This passion comes across in Liberal and Illiberal Arts, a collection of Socher’s essays on a wide range of topics, some esoteric and obscure, others dealing with broader American culture. All are characterized by a conversational voice that makes the general reader comfortable with the author’s erudition and interested in learning more about the things he’s writing about.
For example, I’ll bet very few general readers will be familiar with a party that took place in Riga back in 1843 when a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews celebrated their completion of a Talmud study cycle. Socher brings us gracefully into the lost world of Hasidic scholars, explains their philosophies clearly and unpretentiously, and somehow manages to work a reference to Chuck Berry into the discussion. Another essay of particular interest to me as a student of American literature is “Shades of Frost,” in which Socher acts not only as a scholar but as a literary detective to identify the short poem by Robert Frost that, he argues, provides a critical clue to understanding Vladimir Nabokov’s “most allusive puzzle novel,” Pale Fire.
Chuck Berry is not Socher’s only contemporary reference. In “How the Baby Got Its Philtrum” (the philtrum being “the name of that little, centered hollow we all have above our lips”), he convincingly links the celebrated Humphrey Bogart movie “Key Largo” to another Hasidic legend, not to mention Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection.
Socher is kind to the ancient and modern texts and contemporary scholars he’s writing about, but he’s not afraid to challenge them, politely but directly, when he deems it important. One example is in his commentary on the American-Israeli author Tal Keinan, whose 2018 God Is in the Crowd: Twenty-First Century Judaism combines what Socher describes as both autobiography and “big-think” policy. Agreeing that “[t]he Jewish issues Keinan addresses could not be larger: the accelerating demographic decline of American Jewry, the dangerous sociopolitical stalemate in which Israeli Jews find themselves, and the relation between the two,” Socher then argues that Keinan’s “definition of secularism is over broad … and his broad characterizations obscure a great deal.” In the same way, I would politely but directly disagree with his statement that people who defined themselves as a “Jew of no religion” in a recent Pew Research Center report, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” are not truly “Jewish secularists … but mostly Jews looking for the exit.” Instead, I’d argue that it’s the long history of mediocre-to-terrible Jewish education available to non-Orthodox Jews in the United States that has turned many of us away. In my own case, I was in my 50s before I was able to obtain any Jewish education other than the self-congratulatory “Zum Golly Golly” type. I suspect I’m not alone in having spent many years not so much looking for the exit, but searching for a way into the study of Jewish thought that paralleled my excellent secular education.
As the book’s subtitle indicates, most of Socher’s essays deal with Jewish topics, ranging from the Talmudic/Hasidic masters to 20th-century German-Jewish philosophers such as Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin to contemporary campus anti-Semitism. This raises an important question; to paraphrase an old tv ad, do you have to be Jewish to love Socher’s writing? The answer, in good Talmudic fashion, is yes … but on the other hand, no. For example, although he is speaking specifically about Jews when he writes that Saul Bellows’ Adventures of Augie March “is generally taken as the moment when Jews barged into American literature without apology … Augie March made an argument that the rough-and-tumble lives of Chicago Jews were as fit a subject for literature as any other,” the reader — Jewish or gentile — should remember that Bellow and the other ethnic writers of the 1950s and 1960s helped pave the way for the treasure trove of contemporary narratives that reflect the full range of American ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. In that regard, to answer the question of whether you have to be Jewish to enjoy Socher’s thoughtful and engaging essays, I turn to another well-known television advertisement: Try It. You’ll like it. At least, I think you will.
[Published by Paul Dry Books on March 15, 2022, 232 pages, $19.95 paperback]