I recently finished reading Professor Andrew Porwancher's book The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton and I have a mixed reaction. I remain unconvinced by the scant evidence he offers that Hamilton himself was Jewish. Hamilton's mother, Rachel, married a man named Johan Levine, who his grandson identified as a "rich Danish Jew." From here, Porwancher makes the leap that Hamilton's mother must have converted, even though there is no evidence of her practicing Judaism. As evidence that she was Jewish he points to Rachel and Johan's first child, Peter, only having been baptized as an adult, when he chose to join a church, and not as a child. He also points to the fact that Hamilton, who was born of of wedlock when Rachel ran off with James Hamilton, was enrolled in a Jewish school as a child. Many assume he was sent there because no school would accept a child born out of wedlock, but Porwancher shows that this was not the case at the time. That's pretty much all he has. Yes, Alexander Hamilton may have been more supportive than other founders of equal rights being given to Jews, he may have rubbed shoulders with Jewish clients, he may not have been a churchgoer, but that to me does not even meet the bar of being circumstantial evidence. Read it and decide for yourself.
The rest of the book is enjoyable if you are interested in Jewish history during the colonial period, but I don't see why he tied that to Hamilton, other than the need to make this a book and not just an article. Hamilton was involved in every pivotal moment of the Revolutionary period, be it the war against the British, be it crafting the Constitution and arguing for its adoption, be it setting fiscal policy so the new US government did not dissolve into bankruptcy, so to the extent that all these events touched on Jewish life, Hamilton had an impact of Jewish life, but I see that as a grama, not kocho.
While on the topic of books, The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles deserves the near 5 star rating over 15k have given it on Amazon, where it is an Amazon Editor's pick for Book of the Year for 2021. I still think his first book, A Gentleman in Moscow, is better, but it's like comparing gems -- each is wonderful in its own right. The positive's: amazing character development, pitch perfect dialogue. The negative: a hefty 500+ pages and there are still loose ends to the story that do not get wrapped up (this bothered my wife more than it bothered me).
I thought the The Thursday Murder Club was better than its sequel, The Man Who Died Twice: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery Club, which is very, very good, but just shy of great. Maybe I was spoiled too much by the first one. It is hard to hit back to back home runs. (On the topic of mystery books, Anthony Horowitz's A Line to Kill was not worth it. There are better Sherlock Holmes imitations out there.)
An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn is moving and beautifully written. Mendelsohn is a professor of classics. His father, a retired professor of Comp Sci, sat in on a seminar he taught on the Odyssey. Mendelsohn weaves together his analysis of the literary work The Odyssey as he takes us on another odyssey, a far more personal one, and discovers things about his father and his father's personality that he never knew or appreciated before.
Last one for now: Eric Metaxas, known for his biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has a wonderful autobiography called Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life. This is one of those books that takes some time to get going, but then gets better and better as you go along. It's the story of Metaxas growing up as a child of Greek immigrant parents through his early adult years, ending at the point that Metaxas becomes a committed Xstian. One point that struck me as odd is how unmoved he seemed to be when a girlfriend he had at one point had an abortion. He was not religious at that point in his life, but even so, I would have thought given how deeply he reflects on other events in his youth and adolescence, this would have been fodder for deeper soul searching.
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