More in ‘Seth Rogovoy’

Seth Rogovoy, author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, joins a long tradition of people reading whatever the heck they want into the life and works of the elusive musician. (Some people are tired of hearing about him altogether.) Jews have a leg up on this practice—after all, the artist was formerly known as Robert ...

The one book Jews read most often probably isn’t the Torah or Talmud, but the siddur, or prayer book. Yet as regularly as it is paged through—many Jews recite certain prayers three or more times every day—the siddur’s typical readers attend very little to the literary and historical nuances of the text. Or so the proliferation of guidebooks to the liturgy suggests. The latest entry in this tradition, joining works by Adin Steinsaltz and Reuven Hammer, is Brandeis professor Reuven Kimelman’s The Rhetoric of Jewish Prayer: A Literary and Historical Commentary on the Prayer Book (Littman, November), which emphasizes the complex literary structure of each individual prayer.