JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Berger, David
*Milhaud. He taught at Mills College, Brooklyn College, the
Juilliard School, and Brandeis University. In 1979 he became
a member of the New England Conservatory, from whose
composition faculty he retired in 1998.
In the 1940s and 1950s Berger wrote musical criticism
for the Boston Transcript, New York Sun, and New York Herald
Tribune. He served as editor of the Musical Mercury (1934–37)
and was co-founder and editor of Perspectives of New Music
(1962–63). He contributed to many music journals (including
pieces on Stravinsky, Ives, and *Babbitt), produced a monograph
on the music of Aaron *Copland (1953; reissued 1990),
and wrote Reflections of an American Composer (2002). He was
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
the Institute of Arts and Letters.
As a composer, Berger was distinguished for his economy
of means, vigor of expression, and strong formal structures.
His music in the 1940–57 period shows the influence of
Stravinsky’s neo-classicism; later works categorizes him as a
serial or post-Webern composer. He evolved his own characteristics,
especially an interest in musical space, both vertical
and horizontal. From 1958 Berger showed increasing stylistic
independence and paid increased attention to the use of instrumental
color and to revisions of earlier works, utilizing
a variety of techniques which range from re-composition to
the simultaneous overlay of new materials. His compositions
include works for orchestra (such as Ideas of Order, 1952; Polyphony,
1956), chamber music, vocal works, and many piano
pieces.
Bibliography: Grove online, s.v.; Baker’s Biographical Dictionary
(1997); B. Boretz, in: Perspectives of New Music 41 (2003).
[Max Loppert / Naama Ramot (2nd ed.)]
BERGER, DAVID (1943– ), historian and Orthodox thinker.
Berger was educated at Yeshiva College (B.A., 1964) and Columbia
University (M.A., 1965; Ph.D., 1970). Primarily a medievalist,
he has written about the history of medieval Jewry,
Jewish-Christian relations and polemics, messianic ideas and
movements, and the intellectual history of the Jews throughout
the Middle Ages. In the 1990s he turned his attention to
the contemporary Orthodox world, coming to castigate it for
its indifference in the face of the “scandal” of the messianic
claims surrounding the last Lubavitcher rebbe. He argued that
Lubavitch messianism stands outside the acceptable range of
messianic claims and must be opposed by the contemporary
Orthodox world.
Berger was active in the major institutions of American
Jewish academic life, having served as president of the Association
for Jewish Studies and as a member of the Executive
Committee of the American Academy of Jewish Research and
vice chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the National
Foundation for Jewish Culture.
Among his publications are The Rebbe, the Messiah, and
the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference (2001); The Jewish-Christian
Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the
Nizzahon Vetus with an Introduction, Translation, and Com-
mentary (1979); and, as editor, History and Hate: The Dimensions
of Anti-Semitism (1997).
[Jay Harris (2nd ed.)]
BERGER, ELMER (1908–1996), U.S. Reform rabbi and anti-
Zionist propagandist. Berger was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and
ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1932. He had begun his
career serving two congregations in Michigan as rabbi when,
in 1942, he wrote a widely circulated essay Why I Am A Non-
Zionist, in which he challenged the Zionist claim “to represent
something called ‘the Jewish people.’” As a result of his manifesto,
which set forth the case for a universal and prophetic
Judaism, he became executive director in 1943 of the American
Council for Judaism, the leading U.S. Jewish organization
opposed to the creation and existence of the State of Israel. As
executive vice president of the ACJ from 1956, the pro-Arab
Berger lobbied vigorously in the national media against Israel.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, Berger fell afoul of the ACJ leadership
and left to form a splinter group, American Jewish Alternatives
to Zionism, which remained marginal. He summarized
his life’s crusades in his autobiographical Memoirs of an
Anti-Zionist Jew, published in Beirut in 1978. His other books
include The Jewish Dilemma (1945); Judaism or Jewish Nationalism
(1957); A Partisan History of Judaism (1951); United States
Politics and Arab Oil (1974); and Who Knows Better Must Say
So (1956). Upon his death, Berger was eulogized as a hero in
Arab scholarly publications.
Bibliography: K.M. Olitzky, L.J. Sussman, M.H. Stern,
Reform Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook
(1993).
[Bezalel Gordon (2nd ed.)]
BERGER, ISAAC (“Ike”; 1936– ), U.S. Olympic weightlifter,
winner of one gold and two silver Olympic medals, member of
U.S. Weightlifters Hall of Fame. Born in Jerusalem to a rabbi,
Berger was lightly wounded by shrapnel during Israel’s War
of Independence in 1948, a year before his family moved to
New York. Measuring only five feet tall as a teenager, Berger
started lifting weights and soon began competing, winning the
national AAU championship from 1955 to 1961 and in 1964. He
was the first featherweight to lift over 800 pounds and press
double his own body weight. Berger won the gold medal at
the 1956 Olympics, setting a record in the featherweight class
(776.5 lbs. / 352.5 kg). The next year he won the gold medal
at the 1957 Maccabiah Games and became the first athlete
to establish a world record in Israel by pressing 258 pounds
(117.1 kg.) in the featherweight class. He finished third that
year in the world championships in the featherweight class
but won the following year and again in 1961, while finishing
second in 1959, 1963, and 1964. Berger also won the gold
medal at the Pan American Games in 1959 and 1963. At the
1960 Olympic games, Berger won the silver medal lifting
798.75 pounds (362.6 kg.), losing to Yevgeny Minayev of the
Soviet Union in a face-off that lasted 10 hours, until 4:00 a.m.
Berger set an Olympic record at the 1964 games with a jerk of
424 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3