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In its important achievement, this book offers a profound rethinking of the postmodern meanings of Jewish tradition. Adam Zachary Newton's privileged tropes of the tactile also stand for his 'tact' of reading as secular midrash. His ethics of reading shows us that the boundaries separating Jewish and other texts ultimately connect the foreign with the native, the distant with the near, without collapsing the two, through an impurity inseparable from the revelation of the other. The utter originality of this book thus consists of its conception of impurity as the redemptive effect of the sacred and its prescient reassertion of Jewish sources in postmodern critical form. --David Suchoff, Colby College This is criticism as literature, literature as anthropology, anthropology as ethics. Ambitious and generous, it is a profoundly creative step in the renewal and integration of Jewish and critical discourses. -Jonathan Boyarin, Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Cornell University Newton's new book, a tapestry of readings that becomes a contrapuntal symphony, heuristically suggests it is no longer the case that reading the Bible is the same as reading any other piece of literature, as Spinoza suggested, but rather that reading any piece of literature is like reading the Bible, if one reads it the way rabbis do. --Sergey Dolgopolski, University at Buffalo SUNY To Make the Hands Impure brings together Newton's impressive and successful academic/scholarly writing career. But it does not do so in a way that merely repeats and organizes what he has already done. The book is new and expansive and shows that Newton has not stopped rethinking the questions that have engaged him throughout his career. --Tsvi Blanchard, National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership

To Make the Hands Impure brings together Newton's impressive and successful academic/scholarly writing career. But, it does not do so in a way that merely repeats and organizes what he has already done. The book is new and expansive and shows that Newton has not stopped rethinking the questions that have engaged him throughout his career. --Tsvi Blanchard, National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership

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Adam Zachary Newton is University Professor Emeritus, Yeshiva University.

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