[Avodah] Reading Newspapers and Other secular Literature on Shabbos

[Prof. Levine]

At 11:19 AM 10/28/2018, Micha Berger wrote:
>On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 12:04:29PM +0000, Professor L. Levine via 
>Avodah wrote:
>: Please see 
>http://personal.stevens.edu/~llevine/Reading%20Newspapers%20on%20Shabbos.pdf
>: The author points out that many are unaware of these halachas.
>
>And yet, the Netziv spend Friday night reading the haskalishe newspapers.
>One of the things in My Uncle the Netziv, a translation of excerpts from
>the Torah Temimah's Meqor Baruch, that got BMG to recall a mailing of
>them a couple of decades ago.
>
>Add to the list of issues with rewriting the past that it can cause an
>artificial evolution of halakh.


I have  been told that R. Baruch Epstein was not known for the 
accurateness of his writings. The person who told me this claimed 
that RYBS said this.

In any event see

http://traditionarchive.org/news/originals/Volume%2035/No.%201/Rayna%20Batya%20and.pdf

 From there

The findings in this article seem to confirm the judgment of some
scholars that the rabbinic sources cited by R. Epstein should not be
taken as accurate and that they require independent confirmation from
the original sources.61 Certainly the inconsistencies found in MB cast
serious doubt as to its value as a completely accurate historical account.
We will never know what lies behind the puzzling inaccuracies in R.
Epstein's oeuvre, nor is it for us to speculate. R. Menachem Kasher,
after setting severe strictures about the reliability of R. Epstein's 
citations, nevertheless expresses a charitable
understanding of the circumstances that may have brought this about. 
Noting R. Epstein's statement in MB
  that he lived a "life of suffering" (hayyei tsa)ar), R. Kasher
writes that R. Epstein was a "great man" (adam gadol) whose )) is "a
monumental work" (avoda anakit), and he attributes the many inaccuracies
  in the work to R. Epstein's difficult and inordinately busy life
which did not permit him to check his sources as carefully as he should
have.

One old lesson emerges reinforced from all this-a lesson for
researchers in any field, especially the field of Torah scholarship.
Primary material must be carefully examined, and if only secondary
sources are available, their veracity must be meticulously ascertained.
Rayna Batya seems to have been an extraordinary woman, but the inaccuracies
  in R Epstein's telling of her story cloud our ability to know her
and her absorbing story.

We close this article, which is written in sadness rather than glee, by
noting one final irony. When Mesorah Publications published a translation
of R. Epstein's MB, tided My Uncle the Netziv, it deleted certain
key words.64 The passage in which we learned of Rayna Batya's scholar-
ship was one of the changed passages. The original passage, for example,
mentioned the venous books she used and included, among others,
Mishnayot and books of aggada. In the English translation, these books
were deleted from the list, causing much indignation in the scholarly
world at this attempt to revise history.

How ironic it is that this effort to "sanitize" R. Epstein's reputation
should have inadvertency hit upon the truth: that the story of Rayna
Batya lie many other elements in MB and Torah Temima are in fact in
need of serious revision.

_________________________________
In light of all this can we really be sure that the Netziv read 
newspapers on Shabbos?

YL

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