Reviews for The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson

The average rating for The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-22 00:00:00 Terri Harn Not having dug through the charges and counter-charges, I can't really comment on the disputes over how accurately the book recounts the details of the Rebbe's early life. I can say that the story is amazing to the extent it is true (and would be an amazing novel if it wasn't!) The basic outline is as follows: in the 1930s, Menachem Schneerson, despite his Hasidic ancestry and father-in-law, basically lived as a modern Orthodox Jew (although an extremely pious one, at least in some respects). He tried to become an engineer, but his ambitions were frustrated when France refused to allow him to practice (because he was not a French citizen) and Hitler's invasion of France forced him to flee to America (where his lack of English skills limited his opportunities). He then worked full-time for his father-in-law (the then-leader of the Chabad/Lubavitcher sect) because of some mix of personal piety, personal devotion to his father-in-law, and the lack of any career alternative. Schneerson was so brilliant and charismatic that Chabad Hasidim drafted him as rebbe of the sect himself a decade or so later, and over the ensuing decades he turned a tiny sect into a worldwide Jewish outreach organization. This is a story as astonishing as Moses' evolution from Egyptian prince to leader of Judaism- except it happened in our lifetimes! The book tries to explain why the Rebbe was so successful in leading Chabad. Some of the factors in his success were: *Because he had lived outside the bubble of a Hasidic neighborhood, he was somewhat able to relate to Jews outside that bubble. *In particular, while the previous Lubavitcher rebbe emphasized that the Messiah would only come after Divine punishment for secularism, the Rebbe re-engineered Chabad to emphasize hope and positive evolution towards Messianism; *He realized that Chabad's home base in Brooklyn was already saturated with Hasidim of various types; the only way for Chabad to grow was to go beyond Brooklyn. So the rebbe sent many (if not most) of his younger Hasidim beyond Brooklyn, to create Chabad Houses (essentially outreach-oriented mini-synagogues, just to oversimplify for brevity's sake). *By reaching out to marginal Jews, as well as providing assistance to Orthodox travelers, his Chabad Houses created a base of financial and moral support for their activities. The book does suffers from two weaknesses: first, it speculates perhaps a bit too much and with a little too much certainty about what the Rebbe might have been thinking. Second, in describing the last years of the Rebbe's life, it emphasizes the colorful antics of those Hasidim who believed that the Rebbe was the Messiah, implying that nearly all the Rebbe's followers believed this- something that seems not to be true today (although I don't know much about the situation when the Rebbe was still alive).

Review # 2 was written on 2011-05-04 00:00:00 Craig Mitchell The book doesn't represent Chabad in the most positive light, so I can understand why Chabadniks had a problem with book. I most enjoyed the parts about Menachem Mendel Shneerson's life in Europe. If circumstances had been different, he and his wife might have led a quiet life in France, Poland or Russia, with Menachem Mendel working as an engineer. But she was the daughter of Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Shneerson, the 6th Lubavitche rebbe, and Europe was a mess, a tragic place for Jews. One learns about Moussia, Menachem Mendel's wife, and how she liked lipstick and fashion. She is described by other hasidim as "a private person." The book emphasizes the messianic qualities of the movement that Rabbi Menachem Mendel S. did not squelch. I would have perhaps liked a little more on the positive qualities of Chabad, such as those that might have been uplifted from a drug-addicted life, but this wasn't the author's main focus. If you have the opportunity to hear Samuel Heilman speak, I recommend his lectures. He spoke at Rutgers about this book, and I heard him speak a few years back in Edison about his previous book, Sliding to the Right.