books and culture
The Magic of Good Teaching A fond memoir of mid-twentieth-century Americanization offers a welcome respite in our current environment.
Education
The Social Order
Amid an epidemic of anti-American wokeness, Henry Saltzman’s thinly fictionalized memoir of mid-twentieth-century Americanization comes as a welcome respite.
Saltzman’s story begins in 1953, just after he graduated from Brooklyn College and is working in a furniture store on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. He is an Americanized Jew who grew up speaking Yiddish but has embraced the English language and its literature, and American culture more generally. He finally lands a teaching position in, of all places, a Satmar yeshiva in Williamsburg Brooklyn. (The Satmars originated in Hungary, suffered major losses in the Holocaust, and were at the time assumed to be part of a dying cult.)