Overbalanced: A Rejoinder to David Kraemer

Scholars write books, at least in part, to elicit critical responses, and reviewers review them to draw authors into spirited exchange. So, I welcome the opportunity to reply to David Kraemer’s response to my review of his book Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora (“The Unbearable Lightness of Exile,” Spring 2026).

Kraemer complains that I have committed the fallacy of criticizing his book by suggesting that I would have written a different, better book. As both a reader and an editor, I also detest such reviews, but I don’t think that I wrote one. One can only assess a work by comparing it to some imagined ideal. Properly evaluating a “book . . . on its own terms,” as Kraemer puts it, doesn’t mean applauding whatever the author hopes will be applauded—that’s what collegial blurbs are for; rather it means reading it against an archetype.

In this case that ideal or archetype is popular scholarship, to which the Jewish Review of Books is also devoted. Given the scope of the Jewish publishing universe, which includes everything from pious works of learning and densely learned monographs to breezy books by adult educators, public scholarship plays a crucial role. It also presupposes an unspoken contract between its academic authors and nonspecialist readers. Scholars who write such books promise to share rigorous and hard-won findings on topics of broad relevance, while avoiding the technical jargon, scholarly shadowboxing, and tiresome footnotes that alienate an educated public—Professor Kraemer, the editors at Oxford, and I are all in agreement on that. The work of criticism involves assessing to what extent an author has actually fulfilled these promises.

To its credit, Embracing Exile is a clearly written book on an important subject, and it never gets lost in the weeds. But as a work of public-facing scholarship written by an established academic and published by a prestigious academic press, it demonstrably shirks some of its scholarly and civic obligations.

The question of Jewish exile (and its inverse, Jewish homecoming) could not be more urgent at this tumultuous moment in Jewish history. Indeed, that is why Kraemer’s book has received such attention, so noting that it ought to have addressed the reader on the immediate significance of the subject was not an idle remark about what I would have done; it was a moral claim about authorial responsibility. Relatedly, such a book should articulate the nature of the author’s contribution by positioning itself alongside other recent writing on the subject. For that reason, I was genuinely surprised that Embracing Exile hardly mentions any of the recent books and articles on diaspora and Jewish exile, nor does it so much as gesture at the current predicament facing world and Israeli Jewry. I was also puzzled by Kraemer’s framing of his work as rebalancing the historically negative view of Jewish exile, since it doesn’t bring readers up to date on the well-documented, decades-long reassessment of Salo Baron’s famous critique of the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.

I was perplexed at how a book whose stated aim is to bring much-needed balance to a subject like Jewish exile could come across as so . . . unbalanced. Kraemer’s explanation here does not resolve the question. Claiming, of the tosafists who experienced the Second Crusades, that “neither they nor other Jews suffered as a result, for both Jews and Christians learned the lessons of the abuses of the first crusade and were thereafter able to prevent violence against Jews” is, as Kraemer now admits, “overly sanitized.” But why sanitize? If Kraemer’s goal here was to bring nuance to his subject and show that the history of Jewish diaspora was not uniformly dark, he should have gone into more detail, not to encumber his readers but to show them how varied and multilayered the exilic experience has been. It was precisely for that reason that I drew attention to complex characters like Sahl ben Masliah and unusual works like Ephraim of Bonn’s Sefer Zekhirah: not to argue for an unrelievedly dark diaspora, nor to point to the texts I would have included had I written such a book, but rather to highlight the kind of rich and nuanced sources that might have been deployed in a revisionist account of the Jews and their exile. (Although Kraemer now recycles my description of Sahl ben Masliah, what he originally left out as “not appropriate for the book and its intended audience” was precisely that he was the leader of a group called the Mourners of Zion.)

But most of all, I was bothered by the many unforced and unfortunate mishaps in this book, whether they were errors of fact or errors of omission. Kraemer doesn’t really address any of these problems in his response to my review, and I remain stunned by their frequency in Embracing Exile. Of course, part of writing a book on such a large subject means making painful decisions about what to include and what to omit. But not all choices are equal. Just as Kraemer, in his 1994 monograph Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature, could not have avoided a famous talmudic passage about why bad things happen to good people (Berakhot 7a), one cannot, or at least ought not to, write a survey of positive responses to Jewish exile without so much as invoking the Bundist notion of doykeit, or “hereness.”

And yes, a general readership need not be burdened by the kind of heavily documented philological research that dominates the corner of Jewish studies that Kraemer and I occupy. But such readers do need to know that the books of popular scholarship to which they turn are grounded in careful, systematic study of the subject at hand, so that they can trust the author’s claims or at least evaluate his arguments. The implicit contract between scholarly author and general reader requires that the author be at least nominally aware of the relevant scholarship on the topics he covers, whether concerning medieval Kabbalah, the Maharal of Prague, or modern Jewish literature. Such readers should not have to worry whether, say, a quotation from the Zohar is actually from the Zohar or whether it’s true that “traditional Hebrews had no word for ‘diaspora.’”