Jehiel Jacob Weinberg was, and remains, one of the outstanding figures of Modern Orthodoxy, along with David Zvi Hoffmann, Isaac Herzog, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Shapiro's exemplary biography marks the onset of a new stage in biographical scholarship about leading Orthodox personalities, moving beyond the hagiographies (which brought the figures to attention while affirming the Orthodox community) and the pioneer studies of Aharon Sorasky and Aharon Rakeffet-Rothkoff, and is a mandate for Judaic scholars to study the other greats (including the Hofets Hayim, Hayim Hirschensohn, Meir Shapiro of Lublin, Nathan Birnbaum, Hayim Ozer Grodzensky and Jakob Rosenheim). This book tells us what it takes to be a pathfinder in the world of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism: the courage to carry a Hegelian-like dialectic about religious options to conclusion in a world of societal turmoil and historical trauma. As Weinberg moved from Slobodka to Pilwishki (Lithuania), to Giessen, Berlin, and then through the Warsaw ghetto, detention camp in Wülzburg, and finally to Montreux, he existentialized the struggle between the isolated talmudic culture of Eastern Europe and the Talmud cum secular culture of the West and its synthetic conclusion.