@smerel, with all due respect that’s not really an accurate description of the book. It’s not a “gedolim book” whose aim is to show that they had human struggles too. The biggest testament that it’s not a gedolim book is that among the 6 transition figures (as the author labels them) it discusses is Abraham Joshua Heschel (who went to JTS) and Harry Wolfson (who became a professor at Harvard). So not exactly a gedolim book.
Also, Berlin and Slobodka aren’t meant literally–the idea is to look at leading Jewish figures who were steeped in the yeshiva world in Europe and then made the transition to the Western world and engaged in Western culture, and to provide an in-depth analysis of how they each navigated that transition differently, and why some of them remained Torah-true Jews (and did become gedolim) and others less so.
(anyhow, if I remember correctly, Wolfson and/or Heschel were also talmidim in Slobodka.)
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