The Liars' Gospel

Review by Ada Brunstein

"It is important to quiet the lamb, that is the first thing." So begins Naomi Alder­man's The Liars' Gospel, a fictional account of Jesus' life set against the backdrop of the Jews' struggles against Roman rule.

Alderman gives us four points of view, or gospels, on the life of Yehoshuah (Jesus), focusing mainly on the time between his departure from home and his death. We hear from his mother, Miryam (Mary), who laments her son's departure and has trouble accepting him in his new role as a “teacher.”

We hear from his follower, confidant, and later his betrayer, Iehuda (Judas), one of the most compelling characters in this story. It is through Iehuda's eyes that we see Yehoshuah evolve from a man who has gathered a few supporters through his messages of forgive­ness and healing, to a man who is leading a movement of thousands of followers. Through Iehuda we see how Yehoshuah loses his way gradually, in small missteps, veering incrementally farther away from the messages he started his teachings with and into a more self-serving role.

We hear from the high priest, Caiaphas, whose life's work was to maintain the precari­ous balance between the desires of the Jews and the demands of the Romans.

And finally we hear from a young Jewish rebel, Bar-Avo (Barabbas), in whose hands lies the fate of the Jewish people at the time.

Continue reading the review and an interview with the author, Naomi Alderman.

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Ancient History: A Jew Among Romans

On the long list of all-time greatest Jewish calamities, the destruction of the Second Temple is surely among the Top 10. We remember it every year on Tisha B'Av, and at every wedding when the groom smashes a glass. But how do we even know about this 2,000-year-old catastrophe?

Mainly from the writings of one man: Flavius Josephus, a remarkable Roman-Jewish warrior-historian. Frederic Raphael's recently published A Jew Among Romans captures both the gory ancient war that led to the Temple's destruction and the life of the scribe himself.

To be sure, the book is not an easy read. It's interspersed with dry patches and esoteric phrases like "mimetic opportunism" and "divine afflatus." But it is also filled with wry observations and unexpected humor. About Nero: "He was the first ruler for whom the X factor of showbiz trumped statesmanship or martial prizes." About Josephus: "Josephus entertained many ideas, and they entertained him."

Ultimately, Raphael concludes that the Judean Jews had "no great principle at stake" in their rebellion, and that they "had only themselves to blame" for the Temple's destruction.

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Francesca Segal wins Sami Rohr Prize

Novelist Francesca Segal won the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature for her debut novel, "The Innocents."

Segal will receive the Jewish Book Council's first prize award of $100,000. The novel is set in modern-day London, in a community living in the shadow of the Holocaust and the demands of tradition.

"Segal's attention to details of Jewish traditions will deeply resonate with Jews of all communities," the judges said.

The award ceremony will be held in New York on May 30.

The runner-up was Ben Lerner for his novel "Leaving the Atocha Station." He will receive a $25,000 prize.

Other finalists were Shani Boianju for “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid"; Stuart Nadler for “The Book of Life"; and Asaf Schurr for “Motti."

The Rohr prize has been given annually since 2007 and considers works of fiction and non-fiction in alternating years. It honors the contribution of contemporary writers in exploring and transmitting Jewish values.

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Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

An armed man forces his way into the house of a man named Etgar Keret. He orders Keret, "Tell me a story." But before Keret can rattle something off, there's a knock at the door. And then another. Suddenly, Keret has 3 armed men in his home, pistols aimed at him, and he can’t come up with a story that appeases any of them.

This scene isn't just a glimpse into the strange and ingenious imagination of Israeli writer Etgar Keret; it's also the plot of the title story of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, his latest collection.

Like his prior short story collections—which are peppered with unusual characters overflowing with big hearts—Suddenly exemplifies the kind of idiosyncratic and magical fiction Keret is famous for. In "Hemorrhoid," a man's hemorrhoid replaces his conscience as the ethical center of his body. And in "Lieland," the protagonist finds himself in a mystical land in which all of the lies he has ever told come to life, and are played out before his very eyes. Sounds crazy, and it is. But that's just an ordinary day in Keret's world.

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Open with a Joke

It's a common rule of public speaking: Tell a joke, and you loosen up the crowd. This idea isn't a recent one--it can actually be found in the Talmud.

"Before he began his lesson to the scholars," says the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 30b), "Rabba used to say a joking word, and the scholars were amused. After that, he sat in dread, and began the lesson."

According to Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin in his book, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, the joke isn't merely an attention-getter or an aperitif, something to make the serious lesson go down easier. Instead, Boyarin says, the two are equally necessary to teach any lesson. On one hand, laughter creates connection with another person, making it possible to communicate knowledge from one to another. On the other, there needs to be some yirah--usually translated as "fear" or "awe"--which refers to the respect, deference, and attention that students pay their teacher.

We've all had teachers that we've feared, and teachers that we've loved. Perhaps what the Talmud (and Boyarin) is suggesting is the best teachers are those who, in measured doses, make us feel a bit of both.

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A Secret History of Yiddish

If languages had personalities, then Yiddish would probably be gruff and sardonic, with several unexpected surprises up its sleeve--much like the admired comic book writer Harvey Pekar who died last year.

One of Pekar's last projects was co-editing Yiddishkeit--a new, gorgeously illustrated cartoon history of the Yiddish language and its speakers. Though Pekar's books were nearly always personal memoirs, this collection is well-researched and authoritative.

Some pieces are more straightforward histories, and some take liberties, both with art and story. Hundred-year-old Yiddish political cartoons are explained and placed side-by-side with tribute comics created especially for this volume. "Shrayber un Arbeter (Writers and Workers)" portrays the Yiddish newspaper in a Wizard of Oz-type theme--the world of the immigrant is depicted as a stark, black-and-white place, but the newspaper offers an escape, a color-soaked fantasia of Yiddish stories and jokes.

Stories about the lives of luminaries such as Sholem Aleichem and Leon Kobrin are interspersed with more personal tales, such as Pekar's own recollections of reading I.J. Singer in a hospital room, conducting imaginary arguments with the author about the future of Judaism.

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The Wanting

The long-awaited second novel from Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award recipient Michael Lavigne. Michael's new novel follows Roman Guttman, a Russian-born postmodern architect who is injured in a bus bombing, as he journeys into Palestinian territory. Roman's story alternates with the diary of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Anyusha, and is enriched by flashbacks of Anyusha's mother's life, a famous Russian refusenik who died for her beliefs.

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Jewish Book Club

The National Jewish Book Awards host America’s most lucrative literary prize

By Jessica Weisberg

The winner of the Sami Rohr Literary Prize—which, at $100,000, is one of the most generous literary awards in the world—won’t be announced until April, but many of the finalists, along with some 150 writers, editors, and publishers, attended the National Jewish Book Awards, held last night at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Sitting for dinner at what people took to calling the “Rohr Kids Table,” writers, both nominated and not, gossiped nervously about the five finalists: Francesca Segal (The Innocents), Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station), Stuart Nadler (The Book of Life), Shani Boianjiu (The People Forever Are Not Afraid), and Asaf Shurr (Motti). “If you don’t hear by 10 a.m., you didn’t get it,” said Allison Amend, a novelist and Rohr finalist in 2011, to Boianjiu, who was visiting New York from Israel.

The Rohr Prize is intended for an emerging writer of Jewish literature—but the way the award defines “Jewish literature” is somewhat vague. “We look for books written with a Jewish pen and Jewish eyes, that have a kernel of Jewish content,” said Carolyn Starman Hessel, the director of the Jewish Book Council, which hosts the awards. “Strong feelings of Jewish identity now might change the writers’ focus in the future.” There are no submissions; finalists are nominated by a panel of judges. “Otherwise, I’d have to rent out the Empire State Building,” to house all the eager entries, Hessel said.

All of the council’s other awards are submission-based and define Jewish literature in a more straightforward way, recognizing books about Jewish people and history; there are categories like “Education and Jewish Identity” and “Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice.” In 1992, when Hessel became director of the National Jewish Book Council, awards for books written in Hebrew and Yiddish were given on the basis of more traditional categories, such as “Children’s Picture Book,” and “Israel.”

Continue reading.

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New haggadahs: Edgar Bronfman’s and an interactive version for kids

BOSTON (JTA) -- Francine Hermelin Levite and Edgar Bronfman have been using unique versions of the Passover Haggadah for years. Now both have decided to publish their versions of the Exodus story.

Hermelin Levite, 43, the mother of three school-aged children, is the author of “My Haggadah: Made it Myself,” an interactive version for children of the ritual-laden book that is now available on Amazon.

Bronfman, 84, the business giant and Jewish philanthropist, offers “The Bronfman Haggadah” (Rizzoli) illustrated by his wife, the artist Jan Aronson.

Hermelin Levite's journey to publishing a Haggadah began about eight or nine years ago when she joined some unaffiliated young Jewish families living in lower Manhattan who were banding to create a Passover celebration. Growing up in Detroit, Hermelin Levite says she enjoyed lively and inspirational seders led by her father, who followed the traditional haggadah embellished by music he composed and other innovations. But she knew it was not a universal experience.

Hermelin Levite, a one-time journalist, educational software developer and graphic designer, volunteered to compile the haggadah. She said it had to resonate with kids and families of multiple backgrounds.

She also was motivated by the needs of her young son, who has severe food allergies to nuts, chicken and wheat.

“He was allergic to the food of Passover,” she recalls thinking and vowed to create a seder in which he could participate.

Hermelin Levite recognized that children communicate in various ways.

“The book is designed to invite artistic expression ranging from simple stickers to more complex collage and discussion,” she said, adding that her husband, also a graphic designer, helped with the images.

Over the years, her do-it-yourself, hands-on haggadah has become popular through word of mouth. Last year she decided to self publish and was amazed with the number of orders from far-flung locales such as Budapest and Hong Kong.

This year, with a grant from Reboot, a nonprofit that supports innovative projects to engage young, unaffiliated Jews, Hermelin Levite is traveling across the country introducing the haggadah to new audiences. The spiral-bound haggadah will appeal to kids with all levels of knowledge of Jewish observance.

To illustrate the passage of the four children -- the wise, wicked, simple and silent -- the haggadah offers four blank faces in which kids are asked to draw the personalities of guests at their seder. Blessings are written in Hebrew with English transliteration.

In retelling the Exodus story, children are presented with an empty suitcase and asked to think about what they would take if they had to leave in a hurry. Hermelin Levite hopes the provocative questions spark conversation.

She credits her Jewish education and a family that fostered a love of Jewish experience with the inspiration for creating the haggadah.

“I used to think I was an accidental children's book author,” Hermelin Levite wrote to JTA in an email. “But given my upbringing, professional path and journey raising my kids, [writing the haggadah] seems to make the perfect sense.”

Bronfman, too, has fond memories of his childhood seders as joyful gatherings of family, but says they were uninteresting, uninformative and rote. Over his lifetime, dissatisfied with the available haggadahs, he has cut and pasted passages from various versions to create more engaging seders in his own home. A few years ago he decided to create his own haggadah.

“I wanted to get all the words right,” he said.

The popularity of Passover offers a unique opportunity, he tells JTA.

“We have a chance to teach young people what Judaism is about,” Bronfman said.

Children's author Eric Kimmel, the author of “Wonders and Miracles,” a Passover companion filled with art that in 2004 won a National Jewish Book award, applauds that spirit.

“If the traditional version doesn't work for you, come up with something else,” he advocates, with a nod to the tradition but also with a dose of disrespect, he adds with a laugh. “What's important is to follow the biblical injunction to tell your children the story of Passover.”

“The Bronfman Haggadah” is written entirely in English -- Bronfman quips it's to appeal to most American Jews, who do not know Hebrew. The reading takes about an hour-and-a-half. Unlike the traditional haggadah, Bronfman includes Moses, who he holds as a role model of a leader who asks questions and disrupts the status quo. But all the characters of the Exodus, including God, are represented as metaphor and not historical facts, he writes.

Welcoming Elijah the prophet earlier in the seder underscores the Jewish value of welcoming in strangers, Bronfman says.

New words to the popular song "Dayenu" express gratitude for establishing a homeland in Israel. Bronfman ends the seder with a call for spiritual peace in Jerusalem among Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, and all warring peoples.

Notably, Bronfman expands the narrative of the traditional haggadah to include the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. While the foundation of Jewish law is the theme of Shavuot, he acknowledges that most Jews are unaware of the holiday that follows Passover.

“Freedom doesn't mean anything without the responsibility of law,” Bronfman tells JTA. “To be free is a privilege we too often take for granted.”

Aronson, who has fond memories of Passover seders growing up in New Orleans, spent nearly a year working on the illustrations for the "Bronfman Haggadah," determined to avoid cliched images. To keep the images fresh -- and to entertain youngsters -- she changes up the artistic styles from one page to another -- some are realistic, others abstract or geometric -- and also varies the mood and colors. A biblical map of the Exodus depicts the possible routes traveled by the Israelites.

For the Ten Plagues, Aronson draws a large singing insect that will capture the attention of children. Miriam's tambourine is vibrantly colored with long flowing ribbons that complement the joy described in the narrative as the Israelites escape bondage.

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Data: A Love Story

Amy Webb, in-demand internet consultant and math whiz had experienced one too many disastrous JDates.

After one particularly awful one—on which the guy started taking phone calls from his wife—Webb went home, settled down with a bottle of wine, and began creating order out of online dating chaos.

First she created a series of male JDate profiles so she could scope out her competition. Then she gave her own profile a makeover so she appeared as easygoing and unintimidating (not to mention skin-bearing) as the top-ranking women. She found herself besieged with suitors.

Webb refused to even consider going on a date with anyone who didn't pass a threshold qualifying score on her list of non-negotiables. And it turns out she was on to something; her next first date was her last one. Webb found love, settled down, and wrote the just-released book Data: A Love Story. In addition to some very practical tips for online dating, Data offers a quirky tale of self-actualization and romance, and some words of wisdom about putting your best face—or other body part—forward and refusing to compromise when it comes to love.

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Unterzakhn: The Graphic Novel

In the beginning, there was the Lower East Side – the place where it all began for hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews. Crowded, dirty, poor. Home to more hopes and tragedies than should ever be squeezed into two square miles.

Author-artist Leela Corman perfectly captures the tumult and heartbreak of the neighborhood circa 1910 in her graphic novel Unterzakhn (Yiddish for "underthings"). It’s the story of twin sisters growing up in relentless poverty with an overbearing mother, and whose lives take dramatically different paths. Death stalks nearly every page – death by horse cart, by botched abortion, by Cossacks (in a flashback). If tragedy isn't your thing, you might not love this one – but if amazing illustrations are, you will.

"Pictures are central," Corman said in an interview. "I'm a visual artist, not a novelist." The book is chock full of indelible images of a time long past: Laundry hanging on the clothesline between tenements. Packed-earth streets crowded with pushcarts. Salesmen hawking herring and apples. Newsboys shouting at passersby. Burlesque girls and whorehouse madams.

We’ve seen the Lower East Side in movies, but seldom in such gritty detail, in a setting that will resonate with every American who traces their lineage through the Lower East Side.

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Breaking and Entering

The year is 1994 and psychologist Richard Shapiro has accidentally burned down a California state forest. Weeks earlier, his young patient had committed suicide, and the blazing forest hastens Richard's slide toward mental breakdown. He and his wife Louise, an exasperated school guidance counselor, decide to start their and their daughter's lives anew in small-town Michigan. They look forward to a life of simplicity: the cornfields, the friendly neighbors, the Victorian house they renovate for a song. And those are just the opening pages of Breaking and Entering, Eileen Pollack's utterly absorbing, juicy, and timely new novel.

But the Shapiros' hopes for idyll quickly fade: Richard starts joining a Michigan Militia member for target practice even though the friend believes Richard will go to hell for being a Jew; Louise falls for a Unitarian minister who seems to offer everything Richard lacks; and 6-year-old Molly runs away from home without anyone noticing. Meanwhile, Louise's liberal politics threaten her employment prospects and Molly finds graphic anti-choice propaganda strewn across their front lawn. When the Oklahoma City bombing happens and Richard and his militia friends find themselves on the defensive we see just how enmeshed the Shapiros have become in America's cultural and political battles, and just how high the stakes really are.

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Sydney Taylor Blog Tour February 11-15

2013 Blog Tour

The Sydney Taylor Book Award will be celebrating and showcasing its 2013 gold and silver medalists and a few selected Notables with a Blog Tour, February 11-15, 2013! Interviews with winning authors and illustrators will appear on a wide variety of Jewish and kidlit blogs. For those of you who have not yet experienced a Blog Tour, it’s basically a virtual book tour. Instead of going to a library or bookstore to see an author or illustrator speak, you go to a website on or after the advertised date to read an author’s or illustrator’s interview.

Below is the schedule for the 2013 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour. Please follow the links to visit the hosting blogs on or after their tour dates, and be sure to leave them plenty of comments!

THE 2013 SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD BLOG TOUR

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013

Ann Redisch Stampler, author of The Wooden Sword
Sydney Taylor Honor Award winner in the Older ReadersCategory
At Shelf-Employed

Carol Liddiment, illustrator of The Wooden Sword
Sydney Taylor Honor Award winner in the Older ReadersCategory
At Ann Koffsky’s Blog

Continue reading.

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A Priest and a Rabbi Walk Into a Book

Isaac Frankel’s recently-released first novel, Sacred Apples, fascinatingly explores the intersection of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—both in Jerusalem, where the plot unfolds, and beyond. With some lines taken directly from the Bible and the Talmud, and the rest matching their high, formal tone, the novel's language evokes Jerusalem's religious atmosphere and heritage. The story follows a young Catholic priest, Father Joseph, and, through his friendships and acquaintances, a religiously diverse cast of characters.

One of the most poignant of these relationships is between Father Joseph and a Haredi rabbi living in the orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Mea Shearim. The two pursue a friendship (despite their communities' harsh disapproval), and it is ultimately their trust and faith in people, regardless of religious background, that brings about a somewhat miraculous turn of events that saves Father Joseph's life.

Frankel, himself an observant Jew who regularly visits a monastery in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, creates characters whose complex relationships with each other illustrate the value of being open to the wisdom of religious traditions other than one's own.

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The Loopy Truths of Jewish Signatures

By now you've probably heard: Jack Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, signs his name like your Uncle Saul after too much Manischewitz. And now his sloppy John Hancock may get scribbled across our $10s and $20s for years to come.

Though Lew is the one currently in the spotlight, he isn't the only Jew who writes like a kindergartner.

Have you seen Adam Sandler's comedic autograph? How about Mark Spitz's waterlogged scribble? Or Henry Kissinger's, which is a diplomatic crisis in the making? Luckily, we have Dr. Robert Yaronne's The Genius of Jewish Celebrities: What Their Handwriting Reveals to tell us what all this scribbling means.

"We all possess secrets – strengths as well as weaknesses – which carve their influence into our subconscious, essentially controlling our behavior, and this is revealed in handwriting," Yaronne writes.

Among his findings: Bette Midler’s open "B" indicates a very talkative personality. Ben Stiller’s "N" indicates a self-deprecating character. And Goldie Hawn's illegible signature suggests she's hiding her true identity. Hiding or not, if autograph were any indication, she may have what it takes to be the Secretary of the Treasury, too.

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The Plot Against America

Political zealots had a field day during the recent presidential election. Right-wingers painted Obama as a Kenyan communist. Leftists painted Romney as a plutocrat who would steal bread from babies.

A new low? Not really. Fear-mongering has a long, nasty history in American politics, and Philip Roth’s 2004 The Plot Against America has never seemed more relevant. The novel explores this unfortunate American tradition through the eyes of a nerdy Jewish boy in Newark, N.J. named Philip Roth. The novel asks: What if aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who became a prominent—and anti-Semitic voice—of American isolationism in the 1930s, had won the 1940 presidency?

You might have guessed: It turns out badly for the Jews. Anti-Semitism sweeps the country. The Roth family disintegrates. The Jewish neighborhood is decimated. The novel climaxes with a conspiracy that invokes Amelia Earhart, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, all at once. In a 2009 TV interview, Roth said he never intended The Plot Against America as a cautionary tale, but acknowledged it struck a nerve among many Americans. "The atmosphere of fear…touches something that’s alive in their experience," Roth said. And as November’s election illustrated, the same seems true today.

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Persian Literature, in Hebrew

When Orly Noy did a Hebrew-language Google search for "Persian literature" Google asked her: "Do you mean Russian literature?" Amazingly, not a single Persian novel had ever been translated into Hebrew.

Noy, whose family left Iran for Israel shortly after the Islamic Revolution, when she was 9 years old, was already an accomplished translator when she decided to translate two novels from the language of her childhood to the language of her adopted country. The first, Iraj Pezeshkzad's My Uncle Napoleon (1973), is a popular comic Iranian novel set during the 1940s, and the second, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel, was deemed subversive by Iranian authorities and was published in German translation in 2009 instead.

For most translators, selecting a work is the easy part. Not so for Noy, who tasked herself with a historic burden: "You're talking about 6,000 years of culture and civilization, and not a single translation," she said in an interview.

The Hebrew translations that result are major feats of not just literary and cultural merit, but of political value as well. It was a challenge, Noy says, "to get the Israeli reader to see how much [Iranians and Israelis] actually have in common, what happens when great ideologies and great thoughts and hopes and revolutions become violent and lose their humanity." Through this literature, Noy is aiming to undercut ideology—in both her native and adoptive countries— and restore what humanity has been lost.

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Treasure Hunt in Prague

In the late 1500s, Prague was a cultural hotspot. The reigning monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Rudolf II, was a patron of the arts and humanities, including scholars, sculptors, and mystics.

Rudolf also had a close relationship with the Jews of the region. Rabbi Judah Loew, the reputed creator of the Golem, was a guest at the Emperor’s castle--and, according to some historical accounts, Loew taught the Emperor about kabbalah and other Jewish mystical ideas.

The new novel The Book of Blood and Shadow, by Robin Wasserman, starts in the present day--but it doesn't remain there for long. A group of friends have been working on a college project, translating a series of letters from the 1500s. Soon, their work attracts the attention of a secret society, and the friends find themselves traveling to Prague, retracing the footsteps of Rudolf's inner circle of artists. This leads the students right to Rabbi Loew's old haunts, the Old-New Synagogue and the Old Jewish Cemetery.

It's thrilling to read as the friends find themselves trapped in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, following clues they find tucked inside a centuries-old mezuzah. The story's climax is like all the good parts of The Da Vinci Code layered together, but without the extended history lessons, and with some cool winks to those of us who know about Judaism. It's half historical mystery, half thriller…and wholly amazing.

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Telegraph Avenue

Critics have been speculating for years about who will pen the next Great American Jewish Novel. All signs pointed to Michael Chabon when his 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union conceived of an alternate history in which a Jewish homeland was established in Alaska instead of Israel. But Chabon’s latest release is sending critics and Jewish-literature soothsayers back to their laptops and crystal balls.

Chabon’s new novel, Telegraph Avenue, is markedly not so Jewish. The novel tells the story of Brokeland Records, a used vinyl store in 2004 Berkeley, CA. It explores the friendship of the shop’s two co-owners, as well as the lives and dynamics of their families.

Instead of defining the basic idea of the novel as in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the Jewishness of Telegraph Avenue, Chabon says, is "not an overt theme of the book." We see it, rather, in the way the characters live their lives: in the tensions between the black and Jewish families at the center of the story and, as Chabon said in one interview, in "the thread of Jewish involvement both in the production and distribution of [black popular] music." But, the author insists: "The book is not about that… It’s about two guys who own a record store."

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Meet the Middlesteins

In Jami Attenberg's new novel The Middlesteins, the relationships between members of one suburban Chicago family are riddled with emotional landmines that all seem to link back to one woman: matriarch Edie Middlestein, sixty-something and morbidly obese. The novel centers around the family’s relationships with Edie, her food addiction, and the spiraling health problems which are now threatening her life.

The character of Edie is an unusual protagonist in contemporary American literature: a woman whose health struggles are front and center, whose physical being, in all its inelegant detail, is depicted viscerally on the page. This in itself makes The Middlesteins a notable new fall read, but the ensuing family mishugas makes it a juicy character drama as well.

The action begins with Edie’s husband, Richard, leaving her, protesting that he "couldn't watch her kill herself anymore." Now Richard cruises the internet for Chicago’s middle-aged Jewish widows and divorcees while negotiating the new, painful tension between himself and his grown children, who want little to do with him.

One of those children, the ever-brooding Robin, falls into a romantic relationship seemingly against her own will, and the other, Benny, starts balding under the stress of planning his twins' b'nai mitzvah of the century with his high-strung wife. It’s a tumultuous series of events complete with a blowout b’nai mitzvah party. Mazel tov!

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So You Want to Dress Up As Santa?!

By: Joshua Eli Plaut

So you want to dress up as Santa?!!! This is not as unusual as it might seem! I have covered this phenomenon in my recent book A Kosher Christmas; ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and other published articles. Interestingly, it is still a noteworthy occurrence as occasional reports of Jewish Santas still appear in the press. The phenomena of a Jewish Santa is still alive and kicking!

In a New York Times article (November 18, 2012) titled “Skinny Santa Who Fights Fires,” journalist Corey Kilgannon writes about Jonas Cohen, a member of the West Hamilton Beach Volunteer Fire and Ambulance Corps. Jonas has played Santa for his department for over thirty years!

Also, take note of a fabulous short story by Nathan Englander, included in his debut collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Alfred Knopf, 1999). Englander recounts the story of Reb Kringle, an Orthodox rabbi, who, despite inner turmoil, plays Santa Claus in a department store for forty years. Reb Kringle’s motivation is purely economic. All starts to unravel when a young boy tells Santa that his new stepfather is imposing the celebration of Christmas on the household and then asks Santa for a menorah and to celebrate Hanukkah.

Lastly, comedian Alan King described his encounter with a Yiddish speaking Santa Claus at the corner of 57th Street in Manhattan. The Jewish immigrant from Ukraine justified the ho-ho-ho by quipping in Yiddish: “Men makht a lebn—it’s a living.”

The underpinnings for playing Santa Claus are myriad. Whether to enhance neighbors’ holiday Christmas celebration by promoting good neighborly relations between Jews and Christians, or whether from a yearning to be a participant in the good cheer of the Christmas holiday or whether purely for economic gain, Jews are enacting Jewish values that are syncretized with the Christmas message of bringing joy to the world.

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The Best Kids’ Books of 2012

It was the best of publishing years; it was the worst of publishing years. OK, mostly it was the worst. But it was a remarkably good year for books aimed at the 8- to 14-year-old crowd. I can’t remember another year with such a diverse, well-written, and fascinating crop of books with Jewish themes.

Here’s a list of the best of the lot, just in time for Hanukkah, so you can find the perfect selection for the kids in your life. Because you know what the best gift is for a little Person of the Book? A book!

PICTURE BOOKS

As usual this year, I thought most of the picture books were pretty meh. Why are so many Jewish picture books so didactic? Why do they feature tooth-achingly cutesy or smeary-sappy pastel art? Why are the texts so leaden, the rhyme schemes so awkward? Don’t ask why. Just celebrate and buy the few good ones.

How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah?, by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague. The holiday season can make wee Jews feel like the odd kid out. So, it’s nice to be able to give them a book from a series familiar to the majority culture but aimed specifically at Jewish audiences. Most will already know the gazillion-selling “How Do Dinosaurs” series by Yolen and Teague. In this installment, naughty dinosaurs model bad Hanukkah behavior (a Dracorex dances around maniacally, sticking out its tongue as the text tsk-tsks, “Does a dinosaur act up/on Chanukah nights/when Mama comes in/with the holiday lights?”). Good dinos, of course, sing along with the prayers, take turns with the dreidel, clear the table, and are gracious to Bubbe and Zayde. Charming, oversized, beautifully published. Teague’s illustrations are funny, and your kid will learn new scientific dino names (written in tiny letters alongside each creature) along with good manners. What more do you want? (Ages 2-7)

Jean Laffite: The Pirate Who Saved America, by by Susan Goldman Rubin, illustrated by Jeff Himmelman. How the hell did I not know the pirate was a Jew? Lafitte led a double life as a dashing privateer on the high seas and a handsome, respected Jewish citizen of Louisiana. He grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the late 1700s, then saved New Orleans during the War of 1812 by foiling a British plot to invade the city. In an author’s note, Rubin explains that after the Spanish expulsion of 1492, many Jews hated Spain and were happy to hire themselves out to plunder Spanish ships. (One pirate-rabbi even had a kosher chef aboard his vessel!) I loved learning about this swashbuckling Hebrew and appreciated Rubin’s thoughtful afterword about Jewish piracy and Lafitte’s ambivalence toward slavery. The book is utterly compelling even though the stately, slightly stilted illustrations (done with Photoshop and paint) are not my thing. (Ages 6-10)

A Hen for Izzy Pippik, by Aubrey Davis, illustrated by Marie LaFrance. A new book by the author of Bagels From Benny should make all Jewish parents sit up and take notice. This one is based on both Jewish and Islamic folktales. A little girl finds a gorgeous chicken, whose emerald green feathers have golden speckles. She knows it belongs to the absent Izzy Pippik and protects it and its ever-growing band of babies from the irked and greedy denizens of her village. The faux-naif, scratchboard-esque art is fun, with chicks running crazily all over the place. Spoiler alert: The little girl’s menschiness is rewarded, and the village lives happily ever after. (Ages 4-8)

Continue reading.

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Arise! Arise!

I’ve adored illuminated manuscripts all my life — as a child and teenager, these were the postcards I’d take home from museum trips. I’ve done hundreds of ketubot and this is my third book project published in 7 years, and as absorbing as each of these projects has been, Arise! Arise! has the deepest claim on me.

Arise! Arise! is a memorial to my late husband, David, who passed away in March 2009 after a long struggle with a unique spinal cord cancer. A couple of afternoons before he died, my father-in-law, Arnold Band, a renowned scholar of Hebrew literature, and I were sitting and talking quietly beside David’s bed in our family room, which had now morphed into a home hospice. “So, you know what your next project is going to be?” he asked. I rolled my eyes and said something like, “I know you’re going to tell me.” He knew perfectly well that I’d been working on Esther insofar as the illness allowed. “Yes,” he said, “your next project is going to be “Shirat Devorah and do you know why? Because you are the Devorah.” The real reason, however, the one that neither of us could yet bring ourselves to say, was that this would be a memorial to the son and husband we were about to lose.

Why Shirat Devorah? This two-part tale from Judges —a prose narrative and the much older epic poem, one of the oldest chunks of the Tanakh— had been David’s bar mitzvah haftarah, and he really loved its blood and guts war story. Indeed, the previous night I’d asked our younger son, Gabi, to chant the haftarah for his Abba so that he could hear it one more time. So, Deborah intrigued me, but two aspects of the project presented a puzzle. Solving those puzzles, however, gave me something from “my own life” to focus on, a sense of future against the backdrop of the bitter absurdity and disaster of my husband’s loss.

Continue reading.

Debra Band's most recent book, Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah, is now available. Her work in Hebrew illuminated manuscripts draws upon her love of both the manuscript arts, and Jewish tradition and learning.

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Herman Wouk’s ‘The Lawgiver’ Marks Return to Form

 At 97, a Writer Remembers the Past

What kind of author writes himself into his own novel? One with a great deal of hubris, it would seem. But if that writer is a 97-year-old Pulitzer Prize writer, with over 60 years of best-selling books behind him, we might judge him more sympathetically. His story, after all, amounts to literary history. And in the case of Herman Wouk, it is a highly unusual history.

Wouk’s life work presents some unusual literary statistics. How many writers have the opportunity to update one of their best-selling novels, 55 years after its original publication? How many have contributed to American literature on the scale of Herman Wouk? Approaching his centenary, Mr. Wouk has been writing for the majority of that time, showing considerable range in style and subject. A strong candidate for the “most widely-read American Jewish novelist,” Wouk won a Pulitzer for “The Caine Mutiny,” appeared on the cover of Time. His books, including “Marjorie Morningstar,” “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” have been made into movies, Broadway plays and television miniseries.

Highlights of Wouk’s past books are on display in his latest novel, “The Lawgiver.” The story follows the making of a movie about the biblical figure, Moses — a topic that the character of “Herman Wouk” just happens to be trying to tackle in a novel. Although it is a fine place for Wouk beginners to start, “The Lawgiver” offers a trip down memory lane for those familiar with his oeuvre. In particular, Wouk looks back to his 1955 “Marjorie Morningstar.”

“Marjorie,” a novel with a long gestation period, caused Wouk much anxiety, coming as it did after the Pulitzer prize-winning “The Caine Mutiny.” In 1952, Wouk wrote in his journal (portions of which are now housed at Columbia University’s Manuscripts and Archives): “At the moment I’m all muscle bound — rusty, aware of the Mutiny, vague, unsure of where or how to get going. But all this will pass and the cork will come out of the bottle, and Marjorie will let live. She does live. She asks only ink and paper and some honest sitting at the desk.” 


Continue reading. 

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Books for Children This Hanukkah

Looking for some great Jewish books for children this Hanukkah?  Look no further than Jvillage's Pinterest page.  A whole slew of Jewish books, Hanukkah and non-Hanukkah themed, for your child's reading pleasure.

 

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Dream of Scipio

When you think of Provence you probably think of the region’s famous French scenery and wine. But when novelist Iain Pears thinks of Provence he thinks of its deep—and often dark—history.

His 2002 novel The Dream of Scipio weaves together three Provencal stories. One concerns a Gallic aristocrat obsessed with preserving Roman civilization in the midst of its fall. The next concerns a medieval poet involved in the Papal Court at Avignon during the Black Death. And the third, set during World War II, features a French scholar deciding whether to cooperate with the Vichy government. Linking these three men is their obsession with "The Dream of Scipio," a classical text that poses philosophical questions as pertinent in the Middle Ages as they are today.

Though The Dream of Scipio does not seem primarily concerned with Jewish matters, Pears illustrates how anti-Semitism and Jewish scapegoating have, throughout history, been employed to solidify communities threatened by barbarian invasions, the Black Death, and economic decline. In each section, we, along with Pears's characters, wonder at how often Jews become cast as a threat.

With Hanukkah around the corner, The Dream of Scipio could be a perfect gift for a history buff, a philosophy student, or anyone who loves a gripping read.

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One Book, Two Holocaust Novels

The next great Jewish novel is coming from the heart of Germany.

The Canvas by Berlin-born Benjamin Stein, is a mystery novel with an innovative form. It's actually two books in one: Start from one side, read your way through, then flip the book over and find a separate novel waiting for you on the other. The Canvas features two distinct stories that are tied together through some common characters and the same mysterious, final event.

Amnon is a young ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student in Israel. One day, he discovers a locked cabinet in his parents' house containing secular books. Shortly later, when a rabbi at school catches him with an Oscar Wilde novel tucked inside his Talmud, he is sent away to Switzerland, where he meets an elderly man with a riveting Holocaust history. He convinces the man to write a book.

On the novel’s flip-side is Jan Wechsler, father of two. He lives in Munich, where he's a recently-Orthodox baal teshuva and a member of the city's small Jewish community. One day, a suitcase arrives at his house bearing his name containing books that he's apparently written, though he has no recollection of writing them. Through these books Wechsler discovers that he had once investigated a fake Holocaust memoir by an elderly Swiss man.

The way these two storylines--and three characters--spiral together is perplexing, but seductive. Not just an ingenious riddle, The Canvas is a tantalizing, innovative, and psychologically complex story.

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Jewish Spies and Arab Wives

 In movies and TV, intelligence operations are often portrayed as glamorously dangerous human chess matches with a series of sexual entanglements and ingenious double crosses. The operatives are master manipulators, forming intimate relationships they must cast off at mission’s end.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to discover just how closely these storylines reflect reality.

A new book by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Spies Against Armaggedon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, tells the history of Israel’s intelligence establishment, whose main (known) arms are the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), the Mossad (foreign intelligence), and Aman (military intelligence).

One of the book’s most vividly described operations launched in 1952. A Shin Bet unit of Iraqi Jews infiltrated Arab villages to monitor the population as a potential "fifth column" that might join with Israel’s enemies in case of war. The spies lived in these villages and most of them married local women and had children. As time passed, the intelligence provided by the men "proved to be almost worthless," according to Melman and Raviv, but the emotional toll suffered by agents and their families was profound.

The unit was disbanded in 1959, and the spies’ wives, who faced particular hardship, were given the choice of being relocated to an Arab country or resettling with their husbands in Jewish communities in Israel. Almost all chose to stay with their husbands. Decades later, the project’s commander is still haunted by the social and psychological trauma the operation had on the children of these marriages.

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The Secrets of Arab Men

Sayed Kashua has made a career out of being an anomaly: A Hebrew-speaking Muslim Israeli Arab. As a writer, he pens a weekly column for Ha'aretz, a major Israeli newspaper, and he writes the hilarious sitcom Arab Labor for Israeli TV.

His new novel, Second Person Singular, is about being Arab in a majority-Jewish country, and it's also about being a man, and a husband, and a father. In the set-up, an Arab lawyer from Jerusalem--we never learn his name--finds a love letter inside a secondhand book, written in his wife's handwriting. It's addressed to someone named Yonatan--a Jewish name. Consumed with jealousy, the lawyer attempts to track down the letter's original recipient, a quest which takes him across the country--ending in a poor Arab village, just like the one where he grew up.

Most of the book takes place inside the lawyer's head, but it's about very real conflicts--with the lawyer's wife, who was the first woman he ever dated (and whom he still doesn't know very well), and with Israeli Jews, whose upward mobility he identifies with, but whose social and sexual mores threaten him.

Second Person Singular is a startling novel about a culture in Israel that's all but invisible. As the lawyer becomes consumed by tracking down Yonatan, the pressure builds to a crescendo in his head--showing us the very real insanity caused by clashes of both relationships and cultures.

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Are You a Member of the Scribe? You Can Become One

ABOUT MEMBERS OF THE SCRIBE

Storytellers

 As a Jewish blogger and editor, I always say that the period leading up to Jewish Book Month is one of my favorite times of the year. So many books come across my desk for review—I only wish I had the time to read them all. Each author, each new book, is not just a potential article for my magazine or blog post. To me, every author—whether they write fiction or non-fiction— is a storyteller, adding their own piece to our collective Jewish story.

This year the tables have turned, and I’m the one hoping and wishing that Jewish editors and writers will choose my book from among the great pile for review—the thought makes me feel proud, humble and frightened all at once.

In putting together my new anthology, Living Jewishly: A Snapshot of a Generation, I hoped to be a storyteller as well. In the Jewish world, engaging 20- and 30-somethings is a hot button issue—questions like ‘How do we get young Jews to feel connected to Israel? To affiliate with traditional Jewish institutions? To care about Jewish continuity, ritual and tradition?’ float around waiting to be answered.

Continue reading.

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The Jewish Don Quixote

Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote is considered one of the greatest books of all time. So it's no surprise that the epic is subject to plenty of parodies and spoofs, including a Jewish version, written by one of the founders of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Shalom Yakov Abramowich, commonly known by the name of his most famous character, Mendele the Book Peddler.

In Abramowich’s novella The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third, we're told the story of two "fools" from a poor Jewish town who get the travel bug in a major way—yearning  to find the Jewish kingdom that they have read about in the legends of the Ten Lost Tribes.

But like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Benjamin and his crony Sendrel don't make it very far. In fact, they barely make it past their own town limits before falling into hijinx after hijinx.

The title of the book itself refers to a well-known travelogue by the medieval Spanish-Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, making Benjamin the Third a book steeped in the influence of other texts. 

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Books for Sukkot and Simchat Torah

Judaism.com has a treasure trove of children't books for Sukkot and Simchat Torah.  Here are a few for your child's enjoyment:

     

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High Holiday Books for You and the Kids

In this candid and comprehensive probe into the nature of moral transgression and spiritual healing, Dr. Louis E. Newman examines both the practical and philosophical dimensions of teshuvah, Judaism’s core religious-moral teaching on repentance, and its value for us—Jews and non-Jews alike—today. He exposes the inner logic of teshuvah as well as the beliefs about God and humankind that make it possible. He also charts the path of teshuvah, revealing to us how we can free ourselves from the burden of our own transgressions. 

Some other books to check out:

“Every Person’s Guide to the High Holy Days” by Rabbi Ronald H. Isaacs
“Who by Fire, Who By Water; Un’taneh Tokef,” edited by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman
A Faithful Heart: Preparing for the High Holidays by Benjamin Levy, Foreword by Rabbi Norman Cohen

Some of our favorites for the kids:

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Like Father, Like Son, the Sendak Men Collaborate, Sort of

 In Grandpa's House

Maurice Sendak illustrated over a hundred books, both his own stories and those written by others. The illustrated book In Grandpa's House might be his most personal illustration project--the author of the text is Philip Sendak, Maurice's father.

Written in 1970, the year before Philip Sendak’s death--and just after the death of Philip's wife Sarah--the short book is a simple, lyrical story (with illustrations, it's a mere 40 pages). It starts out as an autobiography about Philip's boyhood in a Polish shtetl. Then, in the middle, it abruptly becomes a magical story about a boy named David whose grandfather dies and whose parents disappear. To find them, he must go on a search through a demented fairy-tale world filled with talking animals, miniature people, and giants.

If one were to name the source for Maurice Sendak's own preoccupation with death, kidnapping, and the macabre, this book might be it. (Remember some of the books authored by the younger Sendak: Where the Wild Things Are, in which Max runs away from his parents to a land where monsters rampage all night, and Outside Over There, in which Ida's baby sister is stolen by goblins.) But unlike many of Maurice’s scary stories, Phillip's gives us a satisfying resolution and a happy ending.

 

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Ten Books You Should Read This Summer

By Jordana Horn 

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Jewish Wild West Women

 Looking for interesting reading this summer?  Two biographies of Jewish women make for a fascinating read.  Read the stories of Rachel Bella Kahn and Rebecca Cohen Mayer to see what tough stock from which these women were made.

In 1894, eighteen-year-old Rachel Bella Kahn travelled from Russia to the United States for an arranged marriage to Abraham Calof, an immigrant homesteader in North Dakota. Rachel Calof's Story combines her memoir of a hard pioneering life on the prairie with scholarly essays that provide historical and cultural background and show her narrative to be both unique and a representative western tale. Her narrative is riveting and candid, laced with humor and irony.

The memoir, written by Rachel Bella Calof in 1936, recounts aspects of her childhood and teenage years in a Jewish community, (shtetl) in Russia, but focuses largely on her life between 1894 and 1904, when she and her husband carved out a life as homesteaders. She recalls her horror at the hardships of pioneer life—especially the crowding of many family members into the 12 x 14' dirt-floored shanties that were their first dewllings. "Of all the privations I knew as a homesteader," says Calof, "the lack of privacy was the hardest to bear." Money, food, and fuel were scarce, and during bitter winters, three Calof households—Abraham and Rachel with their growing children, along with his parents and a brother's family—would pool resources and live together (with livestock) in one shanty.

Continue reading.

Rebecca Cohen Mayer was born to German-Jewish immigrants in 1837 and raised in Mexico and Texas. When she was 15 years old, she married a man twice her age and set off on the Santa Fe Trail. In a company of over 50 explorers, she was the only woman.

The new book With a Doll in One Pocket and a Pistol in the Other is a retelling of her life. Historian Kay Goldman came upon Mayer's diary, written in the style of a memoir, and Goldman used it to reconstruct Mayer’s story and family history.

Curiously, Mayer's diary opens not with her own birth, but with her husband's, in Ober Ingelheim, Germany. Mayer can be forgiven for romanticizing, if only because her style is so colorful and energetic:

"In the quiet little town where Henry Mayer was born, very few exciting things ever happened. However, when Henry was seventeen he visited an aunt who lived some distance away. While there he heard a great deal about America, the land of adventure, where all men were equal and even a poor man could amass a fortune. Best of all there were Indians there to conquer."

Unlike Rachel Calof, a frontier mail-order bride who kept a diary, Mayer was born in America, and embarked on the wagon train of her own free will. As the story attests, she also has a much more daring spirit: Meeting Indians, exploring on her own (on foot and on horseback) when the wagons are camped, and managing the sometimes-less-than-competent menfolk.

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Best Bathroom Reading

  

According to Jewish law, it's inadvisable to read holy materials, or even mention God's name, in a bathroom.

On the other hand, there's a classic rabbinical admonition never to waste a second. According to one apocryphal story, the famed 18th-century Rabbi Elijah of Vilna reconciled these competing values by writing his book of mathematical philosophy, Ail Meshulash, while on the can.

In the same vein, for the past twelve years, Time Out New York music writer Jay Ruttenberg has written and compiled a magazine, The Lowbrow Reader, that's billed as "bathroom reading for intellectuals." Highlights from quarterly magazine were recently collected in the just-released bookThe Lowbrow Reader Reader.

The Lowbrow Reader Reader isn't all Jewish stories, but many are, including a piece on the comedic genius of Adam Sandler, the story of an uncomfortable date with Jackie Mason ("Dinner with Jackie is like falling into an Old World Jewish fortune cookie....Imagine unspooling a Dead Sea Scroll of Yiddish-inflected commentary from the inner helix of a rugelach"), and biblical-minded cartoons by David Berman, the singer for the band Silver Jews. It's not officially a Jewish publication, but, written mainly by Jews, featuring Jews, and with a distinctly Jewish sense of humor, it might as well be.

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Summer's Coming. How Many of These Jewish Books Have You Read?

Jewish Books: 18 Essential Texts Every Jew Should Read

Jews are known as the "People of the Book" for good reason. The Torah, otherwise known as the Hebrew Bible, has inspired debate and sparked imaginations for thousands of years, and the Talmud is itself an imaginative compendium of Jewish legal debate. Throughout the centuries, reflections and commentaries on these texts have continually expanded and transformed the way Jews understand their religion, their history and the possibilities of their future.

Given how much has been written by Jews, for Jews on the subject of Judaism, we thought it would be good to get guidance on where those looking for quintessential Jewish knowledge and wisdom should start. We asked some of our Jewish bloggers to submit their top picks for books that every Jew should read. From the good Five Books and the wisdom of the Sages to mystical musings and a feminist Jewish treatise, this list spans the ages and tastes of Jewish thought. But it is by no means comprehensive. That's one debate we don't wish to ignite.

What's your favorite Jewish book? Send your suggestions to religion@huffingtonpost.com.

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The Book of Ruth

 Excerpted with permission from Every Person's Guide to Shavuot (Jason Aronson, Inc).

In traditional settings, the Book of Ruth is read on the second day of Shavuot. The book is about a Moabite woman who, after her husband dies, follows her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi, into the Jewish people with the famous words "whither you go, I will go, wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people will be my people, and your God will be my God." She asserts the right of the poor to glean the leftovers of the barley harvest, breaks the normal rules of behavior to confront her kinsman Boaz, is redeemed by him for marriage, and becomes the ancestor of King David.

The custom of doing this is already mentioned in the talmudic tractate of Soferim (14:16), and the fact that the first chapter of the Midrash of Ruth deals with the giving of the Torah is evidence that this custom was already well established by the time this Midrash was compiled. [Tractate Soferim is one of the latest books of the Talmud, probably dating no earlier than the eighth century.]

There are many explanations given for the reading of Ruth on Shavuot. The most quoted reason is that Ruth's coming to Israel took place around the time of Shavuot, and her acceptance into the Jewish faith was analogous of the acceptance of the Jewish people of God's Torah.

Continue reading.

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Judaism's Great Debates

We Need More Jewish Debate, Not Less

Some will tell you that we need less debate in the Jewish community; that for the sake of unity we need to stifle dissent and limit the amount we argue. I say that we need more debate, not less, and that we will emerge the stronger for it. But what we need is the right kind of debate….

My new book, Judaism’s Great Debates, posits that debate is not only desirable but is central to Judaism. Abraham, Moses, Ben Zakkai, Hillel, the Vilna Gaon, Geiger, Herzl… heroes of every era of Jewish history are engaged in great debates. Moreover the Talmud is replete with debate; it is at the very core of rabbinic reasoning. Indeed it is the Talmud that coins a unique Jewish expression, makhloket l’shem shamayim-an argument for the sake of heaven. The tractate Avot famously teaches: “Every debate that is for the sake of heaven will make a lasting contribution. Every debate that is not for the sake of heaven will not make a lasting contribution.” (5:20) Our sages understood that a debate for the right reasons enhances Judaism. A debate for the wrong reasons detracts from Judaism.

Perhaps the most famous debating pair in Jewish history was Hillel and Shammai (after Abraham and God, that is). In actuality it was not these two sages but their disciples that did most of the arguing. A wonderful passage in tractate Eruvin states: “For three years there was a dispute between Beit Hillel and Bet Shammai, the former asserting, the law is in agreement with our views, and the latter contending, the law is in agreement with our views. Then a voice from heaven announced: eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim hayim, both are the words of the living God.” Deep respect is given to both schools because both sides are speaking the truth as they see it, and have the welfare of the community in mind.

Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote that although in practice one viewpoint will usually prevail (the law went according to Beit Hillel almost every time), “both views will have permanent value because…[they] shed new light on the issue under debate, and will have contributed to the attainment of the proper understanding of the question discussed.

Continue reading.

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Haggadah - With Many to Choose, Find One That's Right for Your Seder

Has your family ever led a Seder before?  Are there young children present?  Is it all adult?  

Do you enjoy discussions or would you rather just get on with the meal?  There are many Haggadot to choose from.  

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, an athiest or a non-observer, find one that’s right for your needs:

Adult-oriented

 

 Every few years there’s one Haggadah that comes out that captures the imagination and prevailing zeitgeist.  This year Jonathan Safran Foer (“Everything is Illuminated”) and Nathan Englander (“For the Relief of Unbearable Urges”) have come out with the New American Haggadah.  Jonathan Safran Foer orchestrates a new way of experiencing this text. His unique book is beautifully designed and illustrated by the acclaimed artist and calligrapher Oded Ezer, with a new translation by Nathan Englander. It brings together: Howard Jacobson, Lemony Snicket, Alain de Botton, Simon Schama, Tony Kushner, Michael Pollan, Jeffrey Goldberg and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. 

 Read an interview with Jonathan Safran Foer in the latest edition of Hadassah Magazine.

  

  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's Haggadah: Hebrew and English Text with New Essays and Commentary by Jonathan Sacks
From the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, this Haggadah is actually two books in one. At what would be the back of an English-language book is the Haggadah in large, beautiful Hebrew typography, with an English translation adapted and with a running commentary by Rabbi Sacks.  

  

 Go Forth and Learn:   David Silber (Author), Rachel Furst (Collaborator) Hebrew and English text with new commentary and essays.  Rabbi Silber has given us two books in one: the Haggadah itself, in English and Hebrew, with his Seder commentary and a collection of essays that provide close readings of the classic biblical and rabbinic texts that inform Seder-night ritual and narration. Both parts work beautifully together to illuminate the central themes of Passover: people hood, Covenant, our relationship to ritual, God’s presence in history, and other important issues that resonate with us all.  

 

 Elie Wiesel (Author), Mark Podwal (Illustrator)

 With this Passover Haggadah, Elie Wiesel and his friend Mark Podwal invite you to join them for the Passover Seder. Wiesel and Podwal guide you through the Haggadah and share their understanding and faith in a special illustrated edition.
Accompanying the traditional Haggadah text (which appears here in an accessible new translation) are Elie Wiesel's poetic interpretations, reminiscences, and instructive retellings of ancient legends. The Nobel laureate interweaves past and present as the symbolism of the Seder is explored.

Children

 Shmuel Blitz and his brilliant children’s books never cease to amaze. This is his seventh book -- and they just seem to get better and better. This time, he puts his talents to the task of creating a Children’s Haggadah, and the result is one that will be enjoyed by child and grown-up alike. Specifically written for children ages 4-8, the full Hebrew text of the Haggadah is accompanied by a child-oriented, yet accurate English translation. There are clear, precise instructions that will guide the child through every stage of the Seder. And, each page contains a box that provides additional information about the Pesach narrative for the interested youngster.

by Harriet Goldner.  Adults and children alike will appreciate this traditional Seder presented in a non-traditional way.

It is easy to understand, enjoyable, and interesting.  One six-year-old asked if it was written by Dr. Seuss!

What better way to engage children in this wonderful, ritual observance?

  

All

30-Minute Seder

The "Must Have" Haggadah written for the contemporary Jewish family.
Whether you purchase the book or download the print-your-own version of 30minute-Seder™... this refreshingly brief, rabbinically approved Passover Haggadah maintains the reverence of Passover while keeping the high points intact. The contemporary gender-neutral text, beautiful full-color illustrations, and Seder songs make for a memorable Passover Seder that engages and entertains the entire family.

New for 2012 

 Written by Alan S. Yoffie Illustrations by Mark Podwal 

The inclusive text, commentary, and magnificent original artwork in this new Haggadah will make all family members and friends feel welcome at your seder. Young and old, beginners and experienced seder participants, will experience the joy of celebrating Passover together with clear step-by-step explanations, inspiring readings on the themes of justice and freedom for all, and opportunities for discussion. Songs to sing along with will be available for download also.  

Feminist

    

Feminist Haggadot emphasize the role of women in the Passover story.  “The Journey Continues: The Ma’yan Passover Haggadah,” from 2006 as part of the Jewish Women’s Project, tells the story of the Exodus in the voices of both men and women and reflects a vision of a world in which freedom belongs to all people.  

  

Downloadable

About.com  

This website offers 8 downloadable Haggadot crossing all lines, from novices to experts, even non-observant Jews, including the vocalized Haggadah, enabling you to hear the Seder service.

The Wandering is Over - from JewishBoston.comThis free, downloadable half-hour Seder might be just the thing for you and your guests.  It’s pretty bare bones but has all the essentials.
  
  

  

GLBT Passover Haggadah

Downloadable:  

The GLBT Haggadah integrates GLBT Passover traditions within the spirit of the traditional Passover experience. It includes a GLBT-specific Seder plate, the Four GLBT Children, the Prophetess Miriam's Cup, a Timeline of GLBT Events that parallels the Magid and much, MUCH more. This Haggadah is interactive and allows participants to color-in graphics for a unique & colorful personal touch. Download and read more.

 

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Anne Frank: Still Writing in the Attic

At the start of Shalom Auslander’s staggeringly nervy new novel “Hope: A Tragedy,” a doleful Jewish non-farmer named Solomon Kugel climbs fearfully into the attic of his recently acquired farmhouse. He hopes the tapping sounds in the attic are being made by nothing worse than mice.

No such luck. The tapping is from a typewriter. And the typist, a stooped, foul-mouthed old lady who does not suffer fools gladly, is the single person about whom Jewish writers most avidly fantasize: Anne Frank.

Other fiction writers have gotten this fresh with Anne Frank. But they don’t get much funnier. Mr. Auslander (not to be confused with Nathan Englander, whose “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” is imminent) is neither a voyeur nor a romantic when it comes to conjuring Anne. He is an absurdist with a deep sense of gravitas. He brings to mind Woody Allen, Joseph Heller and — oxymoron here — a libido-free version of Philip Roth.  

As a man who becomes involved with a famously and totally unattainable woman, Mr. Auslander’s Kugel aligns nicely with Mr. Allen’s Kugelmass, the guy who was dropped into the midst of “Madame Bovary” only to find out how overrated Emma Bovary’s charms could be. Certainly that’s how “Hope: A Tragedy” unfolds at first. When Kugel first encounters the old bat claiming to be Anne, he is too dumbfounded to be diplomatic. Indignantly, he calls her an insult to the memory of the young girl who died in Auschwitz. “It was Bergen-Belsen, jackass,” Anne Frank replies. (She was imprisoned in both.)

“While there’s never a good time to find Anne Frank in your attic, this was a particularly bad time,” Mr. Auslander writes. The Kugels are recent transplants from New York City to the countryside; they have a dangerously nosy tenant who demands storage space in the attic where Anne is living; and Kugel’s mother lives with the family, pretending to be dying. She is also obsessed with the Holocaust; she travels with baggage that she will never unpack, “just in case.” The only item she makes an exception for is a large framed picture of Alan Dershowitz that she hangs on the wall.

Continue reading. 

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Is Jewish Funny? Is Funny Jewish

 

The Arts: Comic Relief Leah F. Finkelshteyn What is “Yiddishkeit”? The term encompasses Jewish culture, secular or religious. Its language, Yiddish, was born from a fusion of Hebrew, German and Slavic tongues. Its attitude can be cultured and warm or folksy and abrasive. A new, superbly illustrated anthology, Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land (Abrams, 240 pp. $29.95), edited by the late comics writer Harvey Pekar and historian Paul Buhle, seeks to describe what Neal Gabler in the book’s introduction admits is a “large, expansive and woolly” concept. With a loving eye—and emphasizing early socialist leanings—Pekar and Buhle extract moments and personalities from Yiddish history. They trace the culture from Eastern Europe, through its flourishing in American theater, periodicals and novels and to current nostalgia, influences and revival, with rich vignettes illustrated by over a dozen artists, largely using the storytelling argot of comics. As Gabler notes, the book is “sprawling, kaleidoscopic, eclectic,” because Yiddishkeit cannot be defined neatly in word or pictures. “You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.”  Click here to enjoy a selection of the wonderful, eclectic and evocative illustrations from the book. Q&A: Calvin Trillin on What's Funny By Curt Schleier Journalist Calvin Trillin is a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker who has written over two dozen books. But he is perhaps best known as a humorist, a career that began in 1978 when then-editor of The Nation, “the parsimonious Victor Navasky,” took him to lunch. As Trillin recalls, Navasky wanted to “discuss his grand vision for transforming The Nation from a shabby Pinko sheet to a shabby Pinko sheet with a humor column.” That column, which ran from 1986 to 1995, was eventually syndicated in newspapers and then ran in Time magazine from 1995 to 2001. It was in 1990, with a brief rhyme titled “If You Knew What Sununu,” that Trillin added poetry to his repertoire. He became what he called a “deadline poet” for The Nation, writing one new poem about current events each week, except in warmer months. “The Nation is published only every other week of the summer, even though the downtrodden are oppressed every day of the year,” Trillin explained. Over the years, many of his columns and poems were collected in book form, including the just-published “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff.” It includes a number of his Jewish-themed pieces in a section called “Bagels, Yiddish and Other Jewish Contributions to Western Civilization.” Trillin spoke to The Arty Semite about finding inspiration and his Jewish sense of humor. Curt Schleier: When did you realize you could make people laugh? Continue reading.

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Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe

Lisa Alcalay Klug’s new book, Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe, is a history and how-to manual of…well, being a cool Jew. Among other things, she has a yarmulke decoder, a “Marley or Matisyahu?” lyric contest, and the funniest example of Jewish Geography-in-action I’ve ever seen. But our favorite part of the book is this brief history of the book Curious George…and how it narrowly escaped from the Nazis. And just to give you an extra bonus, Klug has done a DVD-extras version of the page. Just click away to see.

The following is an excerpt from Cool Jew. Printed with permission, Andrews McMeel Publishing and Lisa Alcalay Klug, © Lisa Alcalay Klug 2008

Did you know Curious George is a Heebster? It’s true. The “parents” of Curious George, Hans Augusto Rey and his wife Margret Rey, first met in their native Hamburg, Germany. They remet and married in Rio De Janeiro.

Later, the happy couple moved to Paris and there, they conceived their story about a lovable, inquisitive monkey. As the Nazis began their advance on Paris, Hans realized they were in danger. Much like their beloved George might, Hans cobbled together spare parts into two bicycles. And in the early hours of June 14, 1940, he and Margret started pedaling.

Within hours, the Nazis occupied Paris but the Reys had already escaped to safety. Four days later they reached the Spanish border, bringing their precious manuscript with them. From there, they traveled on, to Lisbon, Brazil, New York City, and finally, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they lived out the rest of their days.

Continue reading.

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Best 100 Contemporary Jewish Books Since 1985

With 2011 coming to a close and the holiday season upon us, you may be looking for some books as gifts to friends, or yourself, of great Jewish reading.  Michael Lerner compiled a list of 100 significant books from the last 25 years that have a profound message or are written in ways that are overwhelmingly beautiful and compelling or have had a profound impact on public Jewish discourse or have influenced the most creative people in their take on reality or are likely to have that impact.

And so, in alphabetical order: 

1. Rachel Adler,

Engendering Judaism 

2. S.Y. Agnon,

Only Yesterday 

3. Rebecca Albert,

Like Bread on the Seder Table 

4. Robert Alter,

Canon and Creativity 

5. Yehuda Amichai,

Open Closed Open 

6. Judith S. Antonelli,

In the Image of God 

7. Aharon Appelfeld,

The Conversion 

8. Yehuda Bauer,

Rethinking the Holocaust 

9. Saul Bellow,

Ravelstein 

10. Meron Benvenisti,

Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 

11. Ellen Bernstein,

Ecology and the Jewish Spirit 

12. David Biale,

Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History 

13. Harold Bloom,

The Book of J 

14. Daniel Boyarin,

Carnal Israel 

15. Melvin Jules Bukiet,

Stories of an Imagined Childhood 

16. Jules Chametzky and others (eds.),

The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature 

17. Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen,

The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America 

18. David Cooper,

God is a Verb

 

19. Anita Diament,

The Red Tent

 

20. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (eds.),

Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality 

21. Evan Eisenberg,

The Ecology of Eden 

22. Yaffa Eliach,

There Once Was a World 

23. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi,

Booking Passage 

24. Marcia Falk,

The Book of Blessings 

25. Michael Fishbane,

The Exegetical Imagination 

26. Eva Fogelman,

Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust 

27. Ellen Frankel,

The Five Books of Miriam 

28. Saul Friedlander,

Nazi Germany and the Jews 

29. Tikva Frymer-Kensky,

In the Wake of the Goddesses 

30. Neil Gilman,

Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew 

31. Sander L. Gilman,

Jewish Self-Hatred 

32. Allan Ginsberg,

Selected Poems, 1947-1995 

33. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,

Hitler's Willing Executioners 

34. Elyse Goldstein (ed.),

The Women's Torah commentary 

35. Rebecca Goldstein,

Mazel: A Novel 

36. Allegra Goodman,

Paradise Park 

37. Roger S. Gottlieb,

A Spirituality of Resistance 

38. Arthur Green,

Seek My Face, Speak My Name 

39. Irving Greenberg,

The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays

40. David Grossman,

See Under Love 

41. Moshe Halbertal,

The People of the Book 

42. David Hartman,

Israelis and the Jewish Tradition 

43. Geoffrey Hartman,

The Longest Shadow 

44. Judith Hauptman,

Rereading the Rabbis 

45. Susannah Heschel (ed.),

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel 

46. Lawrence Hoffman,

My People's Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries 

47. Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore,

Women in America 

48. Rodger Kamenetz,

Jew in the Lotus

49. Aryeh Kaplan,

Innerspace 

50. Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer (eds.),

Reading Ruth 

51. Alfred Kazin,

God and the American Writers 

52. Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz (eds.),

The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology 

53. David Kraemer,

Reading the Rabbis 

54. Chana Kronfeld,

On the Margins of Modernism 

55. Lawrence Kushner,

God Was in This Place and I, i Did Not Know 

56. Tony Kushner,

Angels in America 

57. Lawrence Langer,

Art from the Ashes 

58. Emmanuel Levinas,

Nine Talmudic Readings 

59. Deborah E. Lipstadt,

Denying the Holocaust 

60. Bernard Malamud,

The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud 

61. Daniel Matt,

The Essential Kabbalah 

62. Diane Matza (ed.),

Sephardic American Voices 

63. Benny Morris,

Righteous Victims 

64. Jacob Neusner,

Recovering Judaism 

65. Peter Novick,

The Holocaust in American Life 

66. Carol Ochs,

Our Lives as Torah 

67. Debra Orenstein,

Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Life Passages and Personal Milestones 

68. Amos Oz,

In the Land of Israel 

69. Grace Paley,

Collected Stories 

70. Marge Piercy,

The Art of Blessing the Day 

71. Peter Pitzele,

Our Fathers' Well 

72. Judith Plaskow,

Standing Again at Sinai 

73. Letty Cottin Pogrebin,

Deborah, Golda, and Me 

74. Marcia Prager,

The Path of Blessing 

75. Riv-Ellen Prell,

Fighting to Become Americans 

76. Adrienne Rich,

Selected Poems, 1950-1995 

77. Thane Rosenbaum,

Elijah Visible 

78. Philip Roth,

The Counterlife 

79. Steven J. Rubin (ed.),

A Century of American Jewish Poetry 

80. Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi,

Paradigm Shift 

81. Nosson Scherman (ed.),

The Stone Edition of the Chumash 

82. Howard Schwartz (ed.),

Gabriel's Palace: Stories from the Jewish Mystical Tradition 

83. Tom Segev,

The Seventh Million 

84. Rami M. Shapiro,

Minyan 

85. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (eds.),

The Other in Jewish Thought and History 

86. Isaac Bashevis Singer,

Shadows on the Hudson 

87. Art Spiegelman,

MAUS: A Survivor's Tale 

88. Ilan Stavans (ed.),

The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories 

89. Adin Steinsaltz (ed.),

The Steinsaltz Edition of the Talmud 

90. Aryeh Lev Stollman,

The Far Euphrates 

91. Joseph Telushkin,

The Book of Jewish Values

 

92. Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton,

Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality 

93. Michael Walzer and others (eds.),

The Jewish Political Tradition 

94. Arthur Waskow,

Down-to-Earth Judaism 

95. Susan Weidman Schneider,

Jewish and Female: Choices and Changes in Our lives Today 

96. Elie Wiesel,

Memoirs 

97. Leon Wieseltier,

Kaddish 

98. A.B. Yehoshua,

Mister Mani 

99. Richard Zimler,

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon 

100. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg,

Genesis: The Beginning of Desire

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Books You'll Kvell Over this Fall

Summer ends, and things begin to get a little more hectic.  That's why we're recommending a bit of "light" that we think you'll kvell over.  Take a break from preparing your holiday meals and pick one up today!

Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish
by Abigail Pogrebin
Abc.com
Journalist Abigail Pogrebin first began to grapple with her Jewish identity at 25, when her Jewish mother disapproved of her Irish Catholic boyfriend. Fifteen years later, married (to a Jewish man) and raising two children, she was still trying to understand her own relationship with Judiasm. She decided that speaking with other Jewish people would help her find her own answer.

In her new book, "Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish," Pogrebin interviewed 60 people about their cultural and religious experience. She spoke with Hollywood stars, such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Dustin Hoffman, and luminaries such as Gloria Steinhem. Barney Frank and Tony Kushner talked about what's like to be gay and Jewish.

[Linked] is the prologue of the book and the "Sarah Jessica Parker" chapter.

One Foot in America
By Yuri Suhl
Tablet Magazine

Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep—a masterpiece of Jewish immigrant life—was published to considerable acclaim in 1932 but soon vanished from literary consciousness. It languished until 1960, when Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler named it “the most neglected book of the past twenty-five years.”

Make it the second-most-neglected book: One Foot in America, Yuri Suhl’s recently reissued immigrant novel, covers much of the same territory as Roth’s masterpiece, but whereasCall It Sleep is dark and brooding, Suhl’s book is a fast-paced, entertaining picaresque.

Continue Reading

Sarah's Key
By Tatiana de Rosnay
Good Reads

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

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Summer Reading Lists

It's finally time to brush off those beach blankets, pull out those umbrellas and head to the beach or pool!  What better than to relax under the sun with a good book?  Why not try a book from one of Amazon.com's Jewish reading lists?   

These lists compile the best fiction, non-fiction and memoirs from Jewish authors, on Judaism or Jewish history.   

With thousands of titles to choose from, you're bound to find something that inspires you pool-side or maybe just makes you smile.

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Get a Head Start on Your Summer Reading List!

Spring means that summer is right around the corner!  Every summer, we sit at the beach or pool and dive into a great book, but why wait?  This year, spend your spring reading some of the best books in Jewish-American literature.  In his American Jewish Fiction, Josh Lambert lists what he thinks are the top 125 books in this category.  Or you can start by checking out some of the best young, Jewish authors like Jonathan Safran Foer.

Everything is Illuminated: a book by Jonathan Safran Foer

by Judy Bolton-Fasman

reprinted from MyJewishlearning.com 

Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel showcases two distinct narratives that illuminate the truths embedded in historical events and acts of memory. It's an ambitious agenda that Safran Foer advances with sharp observation. But Everything is Illuminated is also a very funny book, a laugh-out-loud funny book that earns the reader's admiration through linguistic acrobatics and feats of good, old-fashioned storytelling. 

Continue Reading 

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The Consummate Showwoman

Reprinted with permission from My Jewish Learning 

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Jewish Voices, New and Old

The Foundation for Jewish Culture has awarded the 2010 Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers to Joanna Smith Rakoff. Her debut novel, A Fortunate Age was also a New York Times Editors' Pick, a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize, a selection of Barnes and Noble's First Look Book Club, an IndieNext pick, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. As a journalist and critic, she's written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe, Vogue, Time Out New York, O:The Oprah Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has degrees from Columbia University, University College, London, and Oberlin College.
 

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On One Foot

A new Nextbook Press biography of Hillel makes clear that the rabbi's words and thoughts—though millennia old—resonate today  

By Joseph Telushkin 

According to rabbinic tradition, Hillel the Elder, one of the great sages in Jewish history, died 2,000 years ago, in the year 10. But even after two millennia, there is a contemporary urgency to his life and thought, particularly at this moment of debate not simply over the mechanics of conversion but over the very essence of Judaism itself. Hillel was, as the Talmud describes him, a poor man so desperate for an education that he nearly froze to death as he lay in a snowstorm on the roof of a study house, listening in on the study of Torah below. That sense of being the outsider never left him and lights up many of the stories told about him in the Talmud. He emerges, in Joseph Telushkin’s new book, Hillel: If Not Now, When?—the prologue of which appears below—as a sort of once and future rabbi, a teacher whose fearless openness to Gentiles seeking conversion, and whose insistence on morality as the core of Judaism, make him as relevant today as he was 2,000 years ago. 

 

Credit: Allison Michael Orenstein  

I was sitting with a rabbinic friend swapping stories about our lives and our work. He started talking about an encounter he had recently had: “A Jewish man, probably in his early thirties, and his non-Jewish girlfriend came to speak with me. They want to marry, but his parents are dead-set against their only son marrying a Gentile. I asked the woman what she thought about the parents’ attitude, and she was honest. She said it seemed primitive and ridiculous. But she also said that, if necessary, she’d be willing to convert. After all, she wants to be a good person, and Judaism, she assumes, wants people to be good and might well have something to teach her about goodness. That’s how she put it, ‘might well have something to teach her about goodness.’ ”

“And what did you tell her?” I asked.

My friend, a rather traditional rabbi, answered: “I told her that we’re in no rush to bring people in, that conversion to Judaism is a not a quick business: ‘Presto, you’re a Jew.’ There’s a lot to study, a lot of rituals to learn, and I certainly can’t convert you before you do all that studying, and commit yourself to practicing all that you study.”

“And what did she say to that?”

“It was the boyfriend who spoke up. He seemed really annoyed. ‘I told you this was pointless,’ he said to the girl, and then he turned to me. ‘We’re getting married in six weeks, rabbi. With or without your help.’”

My friend shrugged. “I told them that even if the two of them had come in with a more open attitude, six weeks was way too quick to do a conversion. Six months would be a stretch. They walked out with a book I gave them, but they’re not coming back, I can tell.” My friend shook his head back and forth a few times, his expression a mixture of sadness and annoyance. “What I was really thinking was that they’d be better off going to City Hall, and just getting their license. We don’t need converts like that. One day, if she’s interested in becoming a real Jew, she can come see me.” He shrugged his shoulders, and regarded my skeptical face. “I know, I know, that day’s never going to come.”

Interested in Jewish literature?

 

    

 

Check out this nifty breakdown of David Lehman's poetry at JBooks.com. See how his drafts progressed into a poem later published in The Atlantic 

I was quiet a minute, thinking about, of all things, a 2,000-year-old talmudic sage named Hillel, and about an American-Jewish community that’s been getting smaller and smaller and whose members have now been intermarrying at rates of 40 percent for over 30 years.

“What about that comment she made to you?” I finally asked him.

He looked puzzled. “Which comment?”

“That Judaism might well have something to teach her about being a good person.”

“Nice words,” he conceded. “But I would have been a little more encouraged if she had actually said something about religion. Like maybe she had read about Shabbat and wanted to observe it. Or was willing to keep kosher. At least then I would have felt that I had something to work with. But this couple gave me nothing to work with.”

Nothing to work with. His words reverberated in my head.

Read the rest. 

This article was reprinted with permission from Tablet Magazine. 

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On the Bookshelf

On rootlessness and family trees 

By Josh Lambert

A midsummer day’s nightmare: shlepping all your worldly possessions to a new apartment. Everybody wants to settle in before the High Holidays and the school year starts, making June, July, and August the busiest season for moving companies. This also explains why the sections of Brooke Berman’s No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments (Harmony, June) typically run from one summer to another. A prize-winning playwright who had already auditioned under a stage name (“Brooke Alison—it sounds less Jewish”) by the time she began her peripatetic New York City sojourn at the age of 18, Berman manages somehow to make relocating almost 40 times in half as many years sound more like an ongoing adventure than like a godforsaken, perpetual exile.     Check out Rabbi Harvey's cartoon interview of Gary Shteyngart on his new book, Super Sad True Love Story, from JBooks.com.  

Berman’s bohemian-ish wanderings may seem inevitably less stultifying than life in the suburbs, but as readers of John Cheever and Richard Yates know, subdivisions harbor roiling inner lives all their own. Soon to be available in paperback, David Kushner’s account of harsh real-estate politics, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb (Walker & Company, August) describes the attempt integrate one of the famed model communities planned by Abraham Levitt and his sons. While the Levitts were self-conscious of themselves as Jews and claimed to have “no room … for racial prejudice,” they sold homes only to whites. In late summer 1957, a Communist-leaning Jewish family in the Pennsylvania Levittown subverted the developers’ policy by arranging a private sale to an African-American couple. Riots and harassment followed, with visits from the Ku Klux Klan, all of which provides a reminder of the complex and often distasteful history of American suburban living. 

But then again, the city has its fair share of problems. Adam Langer’s The Thieves of Manhattan (Spiegel & Grau, July) romps its way through a borough so thoroughly saturated with literary pretension that it would be insufferable to visit, let alone reside there. (Sort of like the real one is, some might say.) Telling a tall tale of publishing aspiration and fraud, Langer packs the novel with inside jokes and goes so far as to invent a slang based on the names of contemporary and classic authors, in which, for example, a “chabon” is “a wavy mane” and a “ginsberg” “a somewhat unruly beard.” The author knows whereof he satirizes, having toiled as a literary journalist before publishing his own fiction: “I’ve been blown off by E.L. Doctorow,” he reports, “condescended to by Harold Bloom … treated to lousy herring by Gary Shteyngart, [and] regaled with unprintable, really yucky stories by Jonathan Safran Foer.” 

Read more about this book and others.  

Reprinted with permission from Tablet Magazine. 

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Unorthodox Theology

Ashkenaz Unbound 

   

Two years ago, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which is devoted to the study and preservation of Ashkenazic culture, published the trailblazing Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. A remarkable resource, it offers some 1,800 entries on everything from general topics like art to key figures like Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. Earlier this month, YIVO launched an online version, which not only offers free access to scholars and students the world over, but also provides supplemental material like audio and video recordings that the print edition couldn’t.

To discuss the project, and the new possibilities offered by its digital version, Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders had a chat with the encyclopedia’s editor in chief, McGill University historian Gershon Hundert.

Hear the conversation at Tablet Magazine.

By Adam Kirsch 

An anthology of liberal Jewish thought evinces a deep unease with traditional conceptions of God 

Earlier this month, in Jerusalem, more than 100,000 haredi Jews took to the streets to protest the Israeli government’s attempt to desegregate an Orthodox girls’ school. The school had been physically separating Ashkenazi and Sephardi students, ostensibly because the latter did not live up to the standards of piety and modesty demanded by parents of the former. When Israel’s High Court ordered the barriers removed, a group of parents belonging to the Slonim Hasidim withdrew their daughters from the school, and when the court ordered them to return, the parents preferred to go to jail. These arrests triggered the massive protest, in which signs were displayed that read “God will rule for all eternity.”

To turn from headlines like these to Jewish Theology in Our Time (Jewish Lights), a new book of essays by professors and rabbis associated mainly with the Reform and Conservative movements, is to see the dilemma of liberal Judaism in a starkly ironic light. In Bnei Berak—and, for that matter, in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Crown Heights—are thousands upon thousands of Jews who not only know with utter certainty just what Judaism is and what God wants from them, but are willing to defy the powers of the earth to do it. Meanwhile, the contributors to this book—edited by the rabbi of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, Elliot Cosgrove—can barely even use words like God and Judaism without a blizzard of explanations and qualifications.

“God,” writes Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of rabbinic studies at American Jewish University, “is the dynamic that makes for novelty, innovation, complexity, and growth.” Similarly, Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum writes that “divinity is the radical force that moves the entire cosmos.” Such a God, quite obviously, cannot be the God who walked in the cool of evening in the Garden of Eden, or spoke to Moses out of a burning bush. Eitan Fishbane, Men of Mystery                    Alan Furst’s bestselling spy novels depict the secret allegiances and betrayals that animated interwar and wartime Europe, but what distinguishes his work from others who’ve toiled in the genre is the attention he pays to the flavor of everyday life. Amid the forged documents and concealed identities, he still manages to conjure things like the meal a well-to-do couple traveling through the Belgian countryside might have eaten in 1941: radishes, salted beef tongue, “some kind of white, waxy cheese,” dried winter apples, and a loaf of bread.Hear the podcast with Alan Furst at Tablet Magazine. assistant professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, confesses that “I could not believe in the God of heavenly transcendence, the highly anthropomorphic deity of classical Judaism.” And if, as Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky agrees, “The character in the Bible is not God,” then everything the Bible tells us about the covenant between God and the Jewish people is equally incredible: “[W]e cannot imagine that only Israel … possesses the covenant with God.” Rabbi Or N. Rose is still more explicit: “I do not believe that the Jewish People are God’s chosen people.”

This article was reprinted with permission from Tablet Magazine. Read the rest.
 

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Coffee & Conversation

Back in April, JBooks teamed up with Peet's Coffee & Tea to present a very interesting live event in which Elinor Lipman kibbitzed with Anita Diamant about Diamant's latest novel, Day After Night, and a batch of other Interesting Things (Jewish, Literary, Feminist, and Otherwise). Well, this illuminating conversation has been videotaped and edited and can now be seen in three easy-to-watch parts:

Part I, in which Elinor Lipman admits to pitching Diamant's latest novel, Day After Night, as a movie and Diamant tells the fascinating story of the Atlit detention camp.

In Part II we learn how Bill Moyers and Tony Kushner helped Diamant write The Red Tent. There's also a little joke about hummus...

Part III showcases Diamant's idea that we're living in "the century of the Jewish woman." She also says that she and novelist Stephen McCauley have "study hall," in which the two authors force themselves to get together and write at the same time. "It's a way to keep... the ass in the chair," says Diamant.

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Alice Apologizes

 By Elinor Lipman

"I came up with the opening line standing at my stove, then went up to my computer and pretty much wrote it," says Elinor Lipman about this story. "I liked the sound of the 'Jews-on-the-beach' theme, with its suggestion of something slightly comic and (sorry) fish-out-of-water-ish. If the assignment had been 500 words on just anything, I don't think I would have been inspired." To see what else the assignment inspired, read Dara Horn's "Song at the Sea," Neal Pollack's "Mr. Pacific Beach," and Danit Brown's "Jews at the Beach."

It is absolutely not the making of amends, nothing 12-stepish or externally imposed, merely Alice, on her 50th birthday, promising herself she'd apologize to those whom she thinks she's offended. Her list is short. There is a sweet boy from tenth grade whose sexual overtures she had rebuffed for a prudishness she now regrets. There are playground and roommate insensitivities and a Thanksgiving meltdown over a dropped chafing dish that didn't even break. But first: her 30-year-old discourtesy, a week's worth, from her whitewashed lookout, Red Cross lifesaving badges sewn proudly to her orange tank suit, whistle between her straight front teeth.

They were a whole family: mother, father, two boys, unmistakably Jews on the Edgartown beach, needle-pointed yarmulkes bobby-pinned to dark hair. Their lunch was the same every day: hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks, grapes, cheese, crackers. She knew the boys' names because their mother called to them unabashedly, "Dovey! Shmuely! Not yet! You just ate! Another ten minutes!" Had Alice heard accents? Were they from New York? Were they even Americans?

She had studied this family, and had noted a failure of fashion in their bathing suits and motel towels. Her fellow lifeguards knew them, too. Dovey and Shmuely were ecstatic and squealing little fish, requiring attention. Between car and sand, they'd drop whatever bundles had been assigned them, and run into the water, regardless of temperature, of sand castles, of tides.

Their chosen spot hardly changed, in the shadow of the lifeguard's chair, umbrella never planted with any athletic grace. Despite the smiles and waves offered to the handsome college students on duty—we're here; please protect us—Alice pretended that her job was ignoring those on sand, while staring conscientiously out to sea. Who had recommended Martha's Vineyard to these Bernsteins, their name shouted in Magic Marker on their red-and-white cooler, their rations kosher, their skin pale?

And finally to be reckoned with: An impulse within Alice that had allowed Mr. Bernstein to flounder for—how long had it been?—ten seconds longer than the fastest leap she was capable of from chair to ocean? "You have no business out here in rough water if you can't swim," she had scolded.

"I can swim," he had answered. His wife, throwing a towel and a protective arm around her husband's shoulders, had given Alice a condemning stare. I know the person you are, it said.

They hadn't come back to the beach. "Embarrassed," said the blond Duke senior who shared Alice's shift and who lived on his own, unchaperoned, that summer. "It's Saturday," she might have said.

In order to apologize, she would have to find them. The Bernsteins of where? Dov, David, Shmuel, Sam? 

Alice remembered the overhead buzz of planes towing banners, aerial declarations—"I love you, Brenda, marry me, Vinny." What would hers say that was adequate, and over what crowded beach? "Dear Bernsteins, wherever you are. Forgive me. I didn't hate you. I knew you. Your lifeguard, Alice Eisenberg, coward."

 

 

 

Elinor Lipman is the author of nine novels, including "The Inn at Lake Devine," "Then She Found Me," and most recently, "The Family Man."

This article was reprinted with permission from JBooks.com, the online Jewish book community. To hear Elinor Lipman read “Alice Apologizes,” click here.

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