September 2025 Book Review

Review of Ezra Glinter, Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.

By Rich Robinson

Menachem Mendel Schneerson perennially fascinates, not least because of the claim of some Lubavitcher Hadisim that he was the Messiah, a claim he himself seems to have fostered to one degree or another. With his development of Chabad and the proliferation of Chabad centers worldwide, he was also the most influential rabbi of modern times. Ezra Glinter—senior writer and editor at the Yiddish Book Center—contributes this volume to Yale University Press’s sprawling Jewish Lives series of lively and compact biographies.

Glinter describes himself as a “nonbeliever”: “How can we make sense of the fact that such an intelligent man held beliefs that, to a nonbeliever, are absolute nonsense? It may not be possible,” he writes. But his attempt is welcome, because he attempts to get at the man behind the hagiographical myth.

In Glinter’s twelve-chapter book, we first encounter Schneerson as a young man—it is striking to see photos of him at around 3 years of age and then in his 20s—who marries Chaya Mushka, daughter of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Yosef Yitshak Schneerson, and a distant cousin of Menachem Mendel. This first part of Schneerson’s life is not known by many; Glinter narrates it in detail and it fascinates in how different his life was than after he became rebbe.

And becoming rebbe was a bit of a slow process. Schneerson did not intend to rise to that position; he was a reluctant inductee. And he believed that his father-in-law Yosef Yitshak was still at the head of the Lubavitcher dynasty even after his death, on the grounds that (in the words of Shneur Zalman of Lyady), “a tsaddik’s life is predominantly spiritual, it can express itself more strongly after death, when the impediment of the body is removed.” And even more: “Even after he became rebbe he continued to refer to his father-in-law as the current leader of Chabad, as if Yosef Yitshak had never died.”

It is a matter of record that when Rebbe Schneerson eventually suffered a stroke affecting his speech, his followers saw that as a fulfillment of Isaiah 53: “like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.” It is instructive that Schneerson said:

“My saintly father-in-law, our master and teacher, who ‘bore our sicknesses and endured our pains,’ who was ‘wounded by our sins and crushed by our iniquities’—-just as he saw our suffering, so, speedily in our days and in our time, he shall redeem the sheep of his flock from both spiritual and physical exile . . . Now the matter is dependent only on us, the seventh generation.”

Moreover, Glinter writes that:

The identification of Yosef Yitshak as the Messiah, made at the moment of his [Menahem Mendel’s] inauguration, was a claim he would continue to make over the coming decades, and it would inspire his followers to make the same claim about him.

This close relationship with his deceased father-in-law characterized Schneerson throughout his life.

As Glinter continues into this later, more well-known, period of Schneerson’s life, he writes: “The contrast between the first and second halves of Schneerson’s life is confounding.” And so Glinter details Schneerson’s early activities, his daily schedule, what it was like for those who sought an audience with him. As to his messianism, Schneerson emphasized the need for repentance, which meant getting out the message to millions of Jews worldwide. He interpreted Genesis 28:14, “break out” or “spread abroad,” to mean that Judaism must be spread throughout the entire world. This was the genesis of the Chabad houses, Chabad emissaries in numerous cities, and the “Mitzvah-mobiles” in which, once a Hasid ascertained that a passerby was Jewish, people could, often a bit reluctantly, don tefillin.

By the end of his long life, the Messiah had not yet arrived, but the media-intensive “Moshiach Campaign” focused on bringing the Messiah to Israel, to the world. The Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn took on a central significance not only due to the number “7” in its address, but as the place where the Messiah would first come. Some Orthodox leaders came to see Schneerson as arrogating to himself an unwarranted supreme role in Judaism. “Most of all,” writes Glinter, “Schneerson’s antagonists were concerned about the troublesome combination of his unrelenting messianism and his apparent cult of personality.” Schneerson himself seemed to suggest at one time that the Messiah had already come, and at another time that he had not yet arrived. At one of his last talks, he virtually blamed his followers for the Messiah’s failure to show up; he himself had done all he could. And he later said that the Messiah had indeed been revealed; now people needed only to discern that. Did he mean revealed in himself? That is the question for the ages.

Glinter’s insightful book is a wonderful read and will likely tell you more about Menachem Mendel Schneerson than you ever knew. And it will help you understand the rise and rapid explosion of Chabad, a truly unique and still-vibrant movement in contemporary Judaism.