Beware of God and Man at Harvard

Sara Ivry (Nextbook) questions Shalom Auslander, who sounds like he could make Wendy Shalit's eyes roll back in their sockets with the stories in Beware of God or maybe just with his take on his Orthodox upbringing:

"I remember going into the laundry room on Friday night at a young age and going OK, I want to see what happens if I put this light on. And you do it and hold your breath and wait to die. And you don't. You shut it off before your parents find out. At some point, you do the math: If God didn't kill me, my parents will. How are you supposed to grow up wanting to be around that?"

Over at Harvard, though, Crimson staffer Daniel J. Hemel wonders if maybe Auslander's material is "narrowly targeted only to those who have suffered the trauma of a bris." And I know this is the 21st century, and things have gotten ever so much better, but my first reaction was still, "Oh, like Harvard's got anything meaningful to say about Jewish culture, right." But that's possibly a function of having recently read Kai Bird and Michael Sherwin's excellent Oppenheimer bio, due next month, which speaks frankly about how, while he was a Harvard undergrad, the college attempted to institute a quota to bring down the number of Jewish students. As James O. Freedman relates, the formal effort failed, but Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell still managed to cut the Jewish enrollment in half with informal suggestions to the admissions committee. (Amazingly enough, he actually argued that fewer Jews at Harvard would reduce anti-Semitism, since Christian students wouldn't get resentful if there weren't so many Jews on campus in the first place.)

All of which I guess kinda veers off the subject of Shalom Auslander...but Maud Newton has more info if you're interested.