The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe Book

So, about 15-16 years ago, I was extremely interested in mysticism, including the kabbalah. A friend recommended a couple of books by Heschel: The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man , which I liked reasonably well, and this, which is self-congratulatory bullshit propaganda. I guess there's a chance I would have liked it OK if I'd gotten around to reading it when I bought it in 1998.... But I hope I would have known even then what's wrong with passages like this:
It was not by accident that the Jews of Eastern Europe thought little of worldly education. They resisted the stream of enlightenment which threatened to engulf the small province of Jewishness. They did not despise science. They believed, however, that a bit of spiritual nobility was a thousand times more valuable than all the secular sciences, that praying three times a day "My God, guard my tongue from evil" was more important than the study of physics, that meditating upon the Psalms filled man with more compassion than the study of Roman history.
In other words, they were every bit as anti-intellectual, insular, and parochial as redneck American Christians, and there ain't nothing admirable, worth emulating, or even interesting in that.