In a Jewish Bookstore: Read this 1878 account of a visit to a Jewish store. #David #Brooks

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It feels wrong to continue beating this particular dead horse now that both Avi Shafran and Yaakov Menken have pronounced the David Books article about Pomegranate as being entirely without flaw. But I did want you to see what the piece might have looked like had Brooks, you know, done a good job.

After the jump, you can see a description of a visit to a Jewish bookstore from an 1878 edition of Harper's Magazine.

* 1878! Not to go off tangent, but I hope the Hungarians who think they colonized the new word for Torah Judaism after 1950 read this and comes to a new understanding about pre-war American Judaism. 

Though the Harpers write-up has its own flaws, of course, the writer avoided all of Brook's mistakes. In particular, he tells his readers what he saw, without extrapolating it to define every Jew in the world. Also, the Harper's man doesn't try to draw any lessons or morals. He just paints a word picture, and let's the description stand on its own merits. Brooks, on the other hand, drew lessons, none of them correct. 

* Though as S has said: "Brooks didn't see anything. He didn't see Jewish Flatbush. He was blindfolded, pushed against an elephant, told to touch it, and Meir Soloveitchik told him what it was he was touching"

Great Comment from MarkSofla: "[From 1878 to 2013] we went from being people of the book to people of the fress"

Hat tip Philo

.   Search for more information about Harpers at4torah.com