Jewish Unity Through Crisis? A Study of Chaim Grade's "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner"

In the early 1950s, the Yiddish poet and novelist Chaim Grade wrote a short story depicting a multi-year dialogue between himself and an alter ego.  Unlike Grade, this character, Hersh Rasseyner, had been through the camps and had remained a pious Jew. The text raises questions about the potential for
Jewish unity, particularly in times of crisis, that continue to reverberate in our time. To mark the first yartseit of Rabbi Henri Zvi Szubin z"l, who lived and embodied much of the history and discourse contained in this work, Rabbi Benjamin Weiner will lead a study of some of its exemplary passages.

Rabbi Benjamin Weiner is the spiritual leader of the Jewish Community of Amherst, Rabbi Benjamin Weiner is also a writer, a scholar of Yiddish and Irish literature, a musician, and a homesteader. A 2008 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Rabbi Weiner studied English literature at Columbia University and received a Masters of Philosophy degree in Anglo-Irish literature from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, focusing his thesis on the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.