Among the reasons I wish I had written this book

"It is now quite clear that Da Costa knew perfectly well that 'modern' Judaism entailed practices that went beyond the letter of the biblical text before he arrived in Amsterdam. He was thus no more surprised to find Rabbinic (i.e extra-Biblical) practices going on in Amsterdam than Captain Renault was to find gambling going on in Rick's Casablancan cafe."
~Jay Harris, How Do We Know This: Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 106.
When the two great loves of a Jewish history and movie geek converge....