Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition

Exploring the fundamental harmony along the continuum between scientific inquiry and religion, the authors of this text examine a series of encompassing issues such as purity, perception, authority, precision, and the supernatural comparing how each is handled in the realm of science, art/poetry and Jewish scholarship. The result of the study provides a range of contemporary values that arrive at a respect and appreciation for the underlying unity of all knowledge.

A felicitous meeting between an Israeli engineer and an American chemist who is also a Nobel Laureate has produced one of the most unique books the reviewer has come across in years...This is my nomination for the 1997 National Jewish Book Award. -- The Western Jewish Bulletin, November 7, 1997

If you like detective stories, or crossword puzzles, or intellectual games, you're missing pleasure by not reading it. -- Endeavor, Vol.22, 1998

The authors have presented a well-written, concise, and thoroughly enjoyable reconciliation of the old, the new, and the scientific...All in all, the book is a new flask filled with some very fine old wine. -- San Francisco Viewpoint, Sept.19, 1997

The complexity of the book mirrors the complexity of truth itself. Bits of science and Jewish lore are tossed together with poems and diagrams of chemical structure and correspondence between the authors and colleagues, e-mail discussions, scripture, basic lessons on physics, law and art. The authors don't apologize for this lack of focus, though readers may find it frustrating. "We tell stories, inherently digressive the way real life is," they write. Their digressions are enchanting, but sometimes they play in too many different keys at once. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, K. C. Cole

This book will read with pleasure by those who adjure the simplistic, enjoy complex ideas, and have abandoned hope for definitive answers for unanswerable questions. -- Endeavor, Vol.22, 1998

This is a very different kind of book, often insightful, occasionally hillarious, never dull. We recommend it for those who live either within the world of science or the world of Judaism and would like to walk - or dance- on a bridge that has been constructed to connect the two. -- St. Louis Jewish Light, February 18, 1998

Throughout, Old Wine, New Flasks is a remarkable blending of earnestness and playfulness, learning and imagination, prose and poetry, rigorous scientific thinking and critical humanistic considerations. Indeed, the book is a validation of the philosophy of Torah U-Madda, of the union of Judaism and culture, religion and secularism. -- The New Leader, March 9-23, 1998