Rating: 
Summary: Void and Unformed
Review: A tip of the old hat to Keith Leverberg who expressed my thoughts almost exactly with his title, although I judge Rosen a little less harshly. This book is carelessly constructed, with such screamers as, at page 130, "The Talmud that my wife and I study from together belonged to her grandfather, who immigrated to Palestine, thanks to the Balfour Declaration, in 1924, was wounded in the 1948 War of Independence and devoted the rest of his life to the study of Talmud." Or something like that. Read it with a grain of salt, and buy it at your peril.
Rating:
Summary: Void and Unformed
Review: A tip of the old hat to Keith Leverberg who expressed my thoughts almost exactly with his title, although I judge Rosen a little less harshly. This book is carelessly constructed, with such screamers as, at page 130, "The Talmud that my wife and I study from together belonged to her grandfather, who immigrated to Palestine, thanks to the Balfour Declaration, in 1924, was wounded in the 1948 War of Independence and devoted the rest of his life to the study of Talmud." Or something like that. Read it with a grain of salt, and buy it at your peril.
Rating: 
Summary: A LOT More Talmud than Internet
Review: All the other reviews I read about this book describe it as a 'poetics of the Internet' but it falls way short of that lofty goal. It is 95% Talmud and 5% Internet.That said, it is an inspired but plain book about the Talmud (quite and accomplishment?) and where the two worlds do end up meeting, I got the feeling that Rosen got it mostly right. I am very happy to have bought and read it, but I wanted a lot more Internet with my Talmud. This book is still quite mindwarming, very creative and unique.
Rating:
Summary: Internet, Talmud, history, change ...
Review: As a computer nerd, I'd always heard that an article in a 1940's magazine used the model of the Talmud to "invent" the concept of hypertext which is the conceptual model of the internet. Therefore, in reading the first section of this book I was bemused by the author's "discovery" of the similarities between the internet and the Talmud.
The subtitle of this book, however, gives an accurate hint of the contents "A Journey between Worlds". The book is broad in scope considering a variety of different worlds - Judaism before and after the destruction of the temple, the titled upper class in Scotland before and after the erosion of their wealth and position, European / American Jewish experience in the World War II, ...
While the meditation focuses primarily on living with the dichotomies of life rather than forcing an unreal reconciliation on them, there are a handful of sentences that open wide and interesting questions. For example, he contrasts the Christian "the word became man" i.e. became embodied with the Jewish experience of the destruction of the temple - seeing the temple to book transistion as the physical becoming "word".
This is an excellent, thought-provoking book that should appeal to anyone with an interest in religious and/or emotional displacement in our rapidly changing and chaotic world.
Rating:
Summary: Internet, Talmud, history, change ...
Review: As a computer nerd, I'd always heard that an article in a 1940's magazine used the model of the Talmud to "invent" the concept of hypertext which is the conceptual model of the internet. Therefore, in reading the first section of this book I was bemused by the author's "discovery" of the similarities between the internet and the Talmud.
The subtitle of this book, however, gives an accurate hint of the contents "A Journey between Worlds". The book is broad in scope considering a variety of different worlds - Judaism before and after the destruction of the temple, the titled upper class in Scotland before and after the erosion of their wealth and position, European / American Jewish experience in the World War II, ...
While the meditation focuses primarily on living with the dichotomies of life rather than forcing an unreal reconciliation on them, there are a handful of sentences that open wide and interesting questions. For example, he contrasts the Christian "the word became man" i.e. became embodied with the Jewish experience of the destruction of the temple - seeing the temple to book transistion as the physical becoming "word".
This is an excellent, thought-provoking book that should appeal to anyone with an interest in religious and/or emotional displacement in our rapidly changing and chaotic world.
Rating: 
Summary: Exciting access
Review: I read this book in one sitting. The writing is extremely eloquent and the personal history moving. I can see why Frank Kermode gave Rosen such a rave review in the New York Times. But what excited me was the personal way in which Rosen made the Talmud so accessible. Not just to a Jewish person who never really studied Talmud in any formal way but, I can imagine, to anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who has wondered about the Talmud. It's an amazing achievement. I have given the book to a number of friends, including several who aren't Jewish.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing, but....
Review: I was disappointed by The Talmud and the Internet for two reasons. First, it was more a collection of essays on a common theme than an extended meditation, which is what I was expecting. As such, it was frequently redundant. Slight as it was, it could have been even more so. Second, it was very much more Talmud than Internet, which the author does in fact mention in his preface. But the connection between the Talmud and the Internet was not very well developed. Some of the problem may well be, of course, that my expectations were off. Leaving those aside, it was worth reading. The prose is thoughtful and graceful, and the tone very personal. Rosen's description of the Talmud as a sort of literary replacement for the Temple at Jerusalem was new to me. I was also interested in his comparison of the multi-generational, non-linear aspect of the Talmud to the idiosyncratic character of the Internet (and, as mentioned above, would have liked to see this better developed).
Rating: 
Summary: A lot of fluff, no meat.
Review: I was very disappointed with this book. The concept of connecting the Talmud with the Internet is intriguing, but the entire book takes the concept no deeper than the contents of the flyleaf.
Rating:
Summary: A lot of fluff, no meat.
Review: I was very disappointed with this book. The concept of connecting the Talmud with the Internet is intriguing, but the entire book takes the concept no deeper than the contents of the flyleaf.
Rating:
Summary: Learning To Live With Uncertainty
Review: Is uncertainty (or ambiguity, loss, exile, conflicting inheritances, conflicting traditions, multiple interpretations, contradictory information) something to eliminate and overcome, or something we should learn to live with and even celebrate? In this short meditation on the relevance of the Talmud in the modern world (despite the title, this is *not* a book about the Internet, which is only touched on briefly as emblematic of the confusions of modern life), Jonathan Rosen shows us that ambiguity, loss and conflict are ancient issues, and that not only can we live with them, we can even find a kind of freedom and creative energy in the process. Rosen gives his ruminations immediacy by exploring the different cultural strains to which he is heir: the grandmother who lived a long and comfortable life in America, the grandmother who perished in the Holocaust, the monolithic Western culture that Rosen identifies with Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot, the Jewish culture of elusive words, whispered to the child in the womb and forgotten at birth. The process of learning from these contradictions, of living with uncertainty, becomes a goal in itself, connecting us to prior generations of strugglers, and giving us a kind of rootedness (a "homepage") in the midst of chaos. Rosen makes many unexpected connections in this beautifully written book (how many people would think to compare Henry Adams' attitude toward Chartes with the rabbis' attitude toward the Temple?). Although loss is a major motif (the death of his grandmothers, the destruction of the Temple), and the tone is elegiac, Rosen does not leave us without hope. If we cannot answer all questions, perhaps it is enough that we try: as Rosen quotes from "Pirke Avot," "It is not your duty to complete the work; neither are you free to desist from it." I know that I will come back to this book again in my own struggles with the uncertainties of life.
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