The poetry written by Twentieth Century American Jews has recently received substantial critical attention. In 1976, Harold Bloom wrote an influential article, "The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry" critical of the work of American Jewish poets, such as Charles Reznikoff, for failing to keep alive in their writings the prorphetic, moral character of the Jewish Scriptures. In 1997, Steve Rubin edited an anthology, Telling and Remembering, containing selections from over thirty Jewish-American poets.

With this as a background, Finklestein's book attempts to determine what in American Jewish poetry is significant and why it is so. He tries to select a number of writers illustrating important trends in Jewish-American poetry and to explain their significance.

The result is a challenging book, in places as difficult to follow as some of the poets it discusses, but one that can bring focus to reading. In my case, the book introduced me to poets I hadn't known about before.

Finklestein divides Jewish poets into to groups which basically fall within the broad divide of Twentieth Century American poetry: the objectivists and the symbolists. The leading objectivist poets are Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky and their late Twentieth Century successors. Their writing is spare and fact-based. As far as Jewish content is concerned, the attitude towards Jewish tradition becomes one primarily of history -- with a loss of traditional religious belief -- and an attempt to make something of this history in one's life as an American.

The "symbolist" school is an attempt to continue the romantic tradition in poetry, with ancestors in Blake, Whitman, and, in the Twentieth Century Wallace Stevens. Finklestein discusses Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish as the representative poem of this movement, even though Ginsberg has strong objectivist components as well, and even though Ginsberg left Judaism and disclaimed any ties to it. Finlestein also discusses the religious poetry of Alan Grossman and the "Ethnopoetics" of Jerome Rothenberg. Grossman, in particular, he sees as attempting to bring back a religious dimension to poetry and to American Jewish life.

As Finklestein recognizes, generalizations are treacherous. It is difficult to separate issues particular to Jewish-American poetry from broader issues common to American or contemporary poetry or to isolate issues as particularly bearing upon Jewish-American writers. In broad terms, though, he finds the writers he discusses have a sense of themselves as American and yet carry forward something of Jewishness. At the close of his book he alludes to a description by Jerome Rothenberg of Jewish poets as "technicians of the sacred" with one foot in modernity and secular America and the other foot in an attempt to recover something of the Divine and the Transcendent, whether this is viewed in specifically Jewish terms or not. In addition, he claims to find an underlying sense of affirming the value of life in the poetry.

There is a rich body of work produced by Twentieth Century American poets that remains to be discovered. The work of Jewish Americans forms part of this work. Some of the writers discussed in this book may be obscure, but the book will encourage the reader to explore further the canon of American-Jewish poetry.

This picture book covers the history of the Jewish people fromAbraham to the rebirth of Israel in 1948. It speaks of the holocaustand Yom Hashua (Holocaust Rememberance Day). Good overview and uplifting ending with the triumphan rebirth of the Jewish Nation and return of many Jews to their homeland.

Two things drew me to this poetry: the poet's understanding of the storyteller and his quoting of Bruno Schulz. An excellent example of his understanding of story is "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". Its epitath is from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows"; the poem explores the harsher reality of animals' lives while acknowledging their acceptance of their place in the universe. He uses the recurrent image of music - "absent music" or "music, seeming to have gone, glides through the reed on its sinuous way" - as the life-force of which the river animals feel a part.

In "A Poem for Storytellers" he acknowledges that stories are all we have to change the world, but the story has been lost in transmission. In this poem, as well as several with distinctly Kabbalistic references, the power of the word, its margins, its hiddenness is explored. Occasionally, his vocabulary reaches beyond the "average reader" as in "A Poem for the Gret Heresy": "From provincial gaardens given to weeds, / matter pullulates, forgetful of the season, / enticed to emulate / divine emanations: / the extoplasmic furniture of junk."

More frequently his language is that of a storyteller as in "Four Impromptus": "These are the goblins / who shadowed the old man, / leading him astray / as he walked in the forest."

Story, faith, music, humility ... these are the themes of this well written poetry. While not among the "greats" of English poetry, this poet is worthy of the readers' time.

I appreciate books that set right distortions and falsehoods about the past. However, I do not appreciate books that seek to rewrite history by setting up new distortions and falsehoods. This is not an objective history with the purpose of "deconstructing" the popular image of the American golden age of the mid-twentieth century. I'm not sure why, but the author has a quite different agenda- to deny that the prosperity and stability of the period ever existed.

A big part of the author's argument seems to be that because the consumer goods of the present day are more advanced or affordable, then our lives must be so much better. He makes the arguement that because so many households have color television and VCR's then we live in a paradise. The grim fact that the standard of living has continuously fallen for the average working person since 1973 is ignored. The fact that it now takes two wage earners working overtime to barely keep the same household standard of living that a single wage earner could maintain on 40 hours a week is ignored.

There is also no mention of the fact that all the superior consumer goods that the author values so much are for the vast majority of cases not made in the United States by decently paid American workers, but are almost always made out of the country by virtual slave labor. American workers usually can only find low paid retail jobs selling these goods....

Even in recalling the social unrest and protests of the 60's and 70's the author ignores the basic fact that everyone still believed that change for the better was possible. People only go out in the streets to protest or picket if they still have faith in the system. In these days of corporate control of both parties no one even bothers to protest- they know that the deck is callously stacked against them.

Yes, the purpose of this book is to mislead people into denying the basic historical, statistical fact that the standard of living was higher for a larger percentage of the total population in the 40's, 50's, and 60's than at any other time in history. The current huge and growing gulf between haves and have nots did not exist for income distribution was much more equitable. The author seems to be trying to make people more tolerant of the current unjust status quo by denying that the recent past was any better.

I am just not sure if the distortions in this book are the result of denial- or a deliberate attempt falsify the record. I lived through these years in a working class family and I KNOW what the truth is....

The author has attempted here to put American history in its true perspective (whatever that may mean). He successfully reports SOME of the differences between then and now, but his manipulation of the facts didn't convince me that we've got it better now than before. I grew up in the 50s and indeed DO remember simpler times. While Finkelstein laments our "limited choices" back then, and "black-and-white" television (oh, POOR US!) he fails to mention that our 'limited' choices were far more than previous generations had. Granted, we have more conveniences now than previously (COLOR t.v.---one-fourth the size of a small room wall, even!!), but we have over-crowded living conditions, deplorably crowded freeways, unbelievably high insurance rates for medical care, and, of course, the threat of nuclear disaster STILL is having over our heads. So, we are living longer? GOOD! But keep in mind that living longer has it's own set of problems. A so-so book.

Finkelstein does a tremendous job at showing that things in the past were not necessarily better than now. My own grandmother talks about how much better life was growing up for her. She doesn't seem to remember that she has lived through 2 world wars, the depression and countless other tragedies. A must read for young and old alike.

as a 30 minute read you'll get an overview of one of the most impressive leaders of the 20th century but you'll be left wanting to know more. the writing style feels heavily edited and the book leaves you with more questions than it answers. in fact for an overview you'd be better off watching gregory peck in the movie of macarthur. if you're a high school student and you need a quick read then this might be useful, but if you want to understand what drove mac arthur, why he did what he did, and get under the skin of this man - look elsewhere.

I thought that this book was very good but not very long and had few details lacking thouroghness . This book was a book that got it's point across very well with few words some people expect different things in a good book (there deffenition of a good book is different)some people like long books some people like short books but overall I think a good book can be the smae and different at the same time and thats how this book was and I recomend it to any action loving kid like me

First a warning: the author is NOT the Norman Finkelstein who wrote The Holocaust Industry and other iconoclastic works. This one, on the contrary, only reproduces the official history of Israel that is now being debunked by the new historians and other intellectuals like Norman G. Finkelstein. As one example, Norman H. Finkelstein tells us in this book that the Israeli attempt to sink the USS Liberty in 1967 was an honest mistake, which is inconsistent with the facts as related by the ship's commander. So he doesn't seem to be well informed.

This book is a fine introduction for young people to the history of Israel and its relationship with the U.S. Unfortunately, much that has been written today consists of revistionist history that ignores the facts: In 1947, six months before the declaration of the Independence by the state of Israel, Arabs were already fighting against her, with help from the British. In the war that ensured, some 6,000 Israelis were killed, fully 1% of her population. That is roughly equal to the half the U.S. losses of the Civil War--still the most devastating both proportionately and absolutely--of all U.S. wars. It is only a third of the proportionate U.S. losses of World War II. Subsquently, Israel fought four other defensive wars against Arab aggressors. The current low-level war, which makes six, was planned by Arafat during the Camp David talks, and started by Arabs on September 24 with bombs at Netzarim junction, and the murder of Israeli David Biri.

Children should learn that Israel, now 53 years old, has lived in a virtual stage of siege since her founding, with 20 of the 22 Arab nations remaining officially "at war" with her. Mr. Finkelstein's work is an important contribution to the understanding of this special friend to the U.S. Mr. Finkelstein's is a great contribution to the body of work on Israeli history. It provides a much-needed antidote to the propaganda war that the Arabs have mounted, with increasing success, for the last 25 years.