New Reviews

Clifford Celebrates Hanukkah

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Clifford Celebrates Hanukkah by Norman Bridwell | Jewish Book Council

Clifford truly gets around his neighborhood. This time, Emily Elizabeth and he are invited to a school friend’s home for a Hanukkah celebration. Bridwell accurately describes in an organized and playful manner the elements necessary to create Hanukkah in the home. Emily Elizabeth and Clifford are introduced to latkes, dreidels, and the miracle of the oil. The word menorah is used instead of hanukkiah, although what is pictured in the illustration is a hanukkiah. In a home or classroom situation, this difference should be noted and explained to the child or children.

As games are played, family festivities and food is enjoyed and all join in the community candle lighting, where of course, Clifford saves the day.

The book clearly succeeds by introducing Hanukkah and making the key facts easily accessible for all ages. Clifford, as the recognizable and loving, friendly pup, will certainly please young readers who follow his antics.

The illustrations are clear, bright and descriptive, offering parents and educators a valuable entry point from which questions and conversations can be generated.

The book is excellent for early childhood education programs, beginning readers and as a resource for holidays and instilling differing cultural practices. Recommended for ages 1- 6.

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Colors In Hebrew: A Rainbow Tale: A Story in Rhyme For English Speaking Kids

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Colors In Hebrew: A Rainbow Tale: A Story in Rhyme For English Speaking Kids by Sarah Mazor | Jewish Book Council

This book is part of a series called A Taste of Hebrew published by Mazor Books. The series includes books on Hebrew letters and numbers, as well. This time, the reader is invited to follow a traveling rainbow to Israel in order to learn the names of the colors in Hebrew along with two children named Ami and Tami. The text rhymes successfully and rhythmically which is not always achieved in children’s books of this kind. The illustrations are bright, cheerful and are filled with deep colors which seem to saturate the page. This creates an overall tone which is upbeat, young, and fun and which will attract young readers. On the whole, the book is age-appropriate and appealing. There is some useful material in the back which will be helpful for families in learning and teaching the Hebrew words including some grammar tips, charts with the masculine and feminine forms of the colors, and some additional bonus words which are related to the themes in the book. Throughout the book, the Hebrew words are transliterated into English and shown in Hebrew, as well. There is also a pronunciation guide for parents. Children will enjoy this happy frolic with the rainbow as they learn the names of colors in Hebrew.

Recommended for ages 3-8.

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Dear Santa, Love, Rachel Rosenstein

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Dear Santa, Love, Rachel Rosenstein by Amanda Peet and Andrea Troyer | Jewish Book Council

Never losing its positive view of Judaism, this charming, humorous, focused holiday tale honestly handles the lure of sparkly Christmas for Jewish youngsters. Christmas arrives only in its secular, folkloric, modern cultural trappings; readers will find no liturgy, church scenes or dogma advanced.

Eponymous protagonist Rachel Rosenstein loves Christmas for good reasons: thousands of twinkly lights around the neighborhood; giant, bedecked Christmas trees; Santas, elves, candy canes, glittery tinsel and mountains of presents magnificently wrapped and presented. Who can blame her? She is a sad bystander as all the friends on her block celebrate with joy and loot. Rachel admits she cannot do this because she is Jewish.

Being Jewish does not deny her joy, but it is different and not as alluring by comparison. She admits being Jewish is fun most of the time. She fondly thinks of Shabbat’s warmth, afikomen hunts, shofar blows, eight presents at Hanukkah, yummy latkes. Rachel notes a Jewish friend has a tree; Grandpa’s deprecating response is spot on and hilarious.

Rachel decides to grab a bit of Christmas for herself; her sister ridicules. Rachel writes to Santa, admitting she is Jewish, but so was Jesus. She visits a mall Santa. Will he come down her chimney even though she is Jewish? He instantly sends her off. She puts left over latkes and milk on the fire place, hangs stockings, makes banners declaring love for Santa. She tries to stay awake for the reindeer, but nods off to visions of sugar plums.

Hilarity dampens as distressed Rachel awakes to cold reality. Her mother explains that wanting something very badly does not deny accepting what is. Her family ends Christmas Day in a Chinese Restaurant. Moping Rachel finds non-Christian classmates arriving. They agree the world is full of super celebrations and they should not sigh about one day, even a mega one. Rachel agrees, connects to her identity, but still feels a bit sad.

The illustrations and page layout support the message with mobile vignettes delivering Rachel’s innocence and desire to be included with lovely warmth. This wise, funny, fresh and refreshing picture book is highly recommended for readers ages 4-7.

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My Friend the Worrier: Conquering Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

My Friend the Worrier: Conquering Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Rifka Schonfeld | Jewish Book Council

Part of a bibliotherapy series geared to children and their parents, this book deals with anxiety issues and gives children the vocabulary and confidence to begin to identify what feels wrong and some tools to help control some of the problematic behaviors associated with anxiety. It is geared to an Orthodox reader but could be helpful for anyone who can use the information. It is narrated by a boy who has a friend who has an anxiety disorder which is escalating and causing problems in daily life. It may be helpful for children who suffer from some of these syndromes but it is also hoped that these children are receiving professional help through their schools and other sources. It will be helpful, though, for their friends and classmates who may not understand why these odd-seeming actions occur and it may help increase acceptance and decrease misunderstanding that could lead to unkindness and bullying. Back matter gives tips in chart form which may help control worrisome thoughts and behaviors and there is also a significant amount of background information for parents and other adults to deepen education and understanding.

Recommended for ages 8-12.

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Not for all the Hamantaschen in Town

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Not for all the Hamantaschen in Town by Laura Aron Milhander | Jewish Book Council

The three little pigs, Rishon, Sheni and Shlishi, decide to dress up as King Ahasuerus for the Purim carnival costume parade. Rishon and Sheni quickly make paper crowns and then race out to play, but Shlishi spends all afternoon making a sturdy crown of papier mache. Of course, in a story about three little pigs, there has to be a big, bad wolf. And though this wolf is big, and badly behaved, he doesn’t have a taste for little pigs. He only wants to eat hamantaschen but how to get some without grabbing? Shlishi tells him, “You just need to ask nicely.” The wolf politely says “please,” and also remembers to say “thank you.” The illustrator has created a colorful fairy-tale setting and lively, endearing characters. There’s also a recipe for hamantaschen, a brief note about Purim, and a glossary of Purim terms. And giving the pigs the names of Hebrew numbers is a fun way to learn to count to three.

Recommended for ages 3-8.

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On One Foot

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

On One Foot by Linda Glaser | Jewish Book Council

Can someone—anyone—in Jerusalem teach this foolish young man all of Torah…while standing on one foot? Of course! The very wise Rabbi Hillel, who reminds him: Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you. “All the rest is just comments and explanations,” he explains to his student. This is a fun retelling of the famous story, with an educational note at the back to put Hillel in fuller context. The author does a nice job of showing how the rabbi’s words actually work, and the collage-style illustrations are appealing.

Recommended for ages 5-9.

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Pinny the Peanut Learns About Allergies

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Pinny the Peanut Learns About Allergies by Rochel Burstyn | Jewish Book Council

With so many children who have allergies and so many others who encounter allergic children in school or at camp, it is helpful to increase education about allergic reactions for both safety and inclusion purposes. This picture book, geared to an Orthodox sensibility in its illustrations and emphasis on mitzvah, tells its story in well-scanning rhyme from the point of view of a peanut named Pinny and focuses mainly on peanut allergies. The book is filled with scientific fact about histamines, medications, and anaphylaxis as well as providing a reminder to children that, although they are taught that sharing is an important value, it is appropriate to say no when asked to share food. It is cautionary and educational without being unduly frightening and might be useful in school or camp environments as well as in individual homes. It is geared for ages 4-8.

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Enjoying the Book of Ruth: The Bible in Rhyme

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Part of a series in which the author attempts to present parts of the Bible in a simple, non-threatening form for young people, this book offers the story of Ruth, Naomi and Boaz told in the form of rhyme. While the rhyming lines are not always in rhythmically perfect cadence, the concept is interesting and it provides an opening for learning about the story in an accessible manner. The story of Ruth, read in the synagogue on the holiday of Shavuot, is a beautiful story of love, faithfulness and devotion and is filled with ties to the land of Israel. Any device for sparking interest in this wonderful story and in the fascinating characters it introduces can only be positive and helpful. Children ages 8 and up will connect to the fact that Ruth was a progenitor of the renowned King David and will, perhaps, be inspired for further learning.

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Stones on a Grave

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Stones on a Grave by Kathy Kacer | Jewish Book Council

When the orphanage that Sara has lived in since babyhood burns to the ground, Sara is already eighteen-years-old and poised to leave. With the money she’s saved and the mementos she’s been given, she travels to Germany to explore the Jewish heritage she has only just learned she belongs to. It turns out that her mother survived a Nazi concentration camp, only to die in a DP camp, giving birth to her. But Sara does reunite with her grandfather, find a romantic interest, and start to understand both the history of the Holocaust and the power of forgiveness. Part of a series of books by Kathy Kacer, Secrets, about interconnected characters, this is a moving story with a likeable protagonist—even if readers are asked to swallow a few too many coincidences.

Recommended for ages 12-15.

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Flames of the Tiger: Germany 1945

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Flames of the Tiger: Germany 1945 by John Wilson | Jewish Book Council

Despite the interspersing of armored tank silhouettes between sections, the reader will eventually realize that this is a book about the futility of war as well as the sins of those who perpetrate it. It uses members of a typical family living in Germany during Hitler’s reign to tell the story of World War II.

Each member of the family represents a different facet of the population. As a veteran of World War I, the father, leery of Hitler and all he stands for, recalls how in the first moments of the Armistice, he and a Canadian soldier, both from opposite sides, befriended one another and kept in touch over the years.

With the rise of Hitler, the Canadian has invited him and his family to come to Canada. This offer is considered by him, but his wife, from an upper class family, cannot countenance ever leaving Germany and her extended family. She looks down at her husband’s family, especially his brother, a simple farmer. She, however, with her formerly despised brother-in-law, will later typify the “righteous gentiles” of history.

The family’s eldest son, twenty-year-old Reinhardt, proud of his new uniform, the Nazi pageants and intoxicated by Hitler’s speeches is totally indoctrinated. In the future, he will plead innocent to what the Germans did to the Jews, although they all witnessed Kristallnacht, but he is “shocked” at what he saw in the camps, (described only briefly).

Dieter, who had joined his older brother in war through family loyalty, will escape with their little flute-playing innocent sister who suddenly becomes a tower of strength after her flute is destroyed in a bombing. They flee to escape the oncoming Russians and find that history will repeat itself, that not all Germans are evil, and that a flaming tank once again may signal a new friend. This is an interesting read and will provide much to talk and think about for ages 12-16.

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Saving the Persecuted

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Saving the Persecuted by Brian and Brenda Williams | Jewish Book Council

Nonfiction Holocaust books often dwell by necessity on the negative. It was, after all, a horrific time in history and there is no way to make it seem less so. Indeed, it would be a disservice to the truth to mitigate the horror. And yet, when educating children, it is developmentally vital to present them with pieces of this history that they can digest and comprehend without causing them damage, pieces that are presented in a developmentally appropriate way and which pave the way for a positive learning experience. These books, part of Capstone's Heroes of World War II series, do an excellent job of this by presenting historical role models who stand up against the prevailing evil. Resisting the Nazis focuses on resistance efforts such as The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and The French Resistance Movement but it also presents a broader picture by defining what resistance means, how it can sometimes be effected, how resistance recruits may be trained, and other basic factual information which puts resistance into historical context for children. The book identifies individual resistance heroes with short biographies and photographs. It contains a glossary, maps, a timeline, a list of suggested books and websites for further research, a list of related topics to think about and places to visit to enhance learning. Saving the Persecuted provides background about the Nazis and Jewish life in Europe during the Nazi period. It profiles individuals who helped save Jews, providing short biographies and photographs. It is filled with pertinent facts providing perspective and context and includes a map, a timeline, a glossary, a list of books and websites for further learning, a suggested research project, and places to visit to learn more about the era.

Recommended for ages 9–11.

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The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories by Carol Lipszyc | Jewish Book Council

There are many books based on experiences of Jewish children and adolescents during the Holocaust, biographical and fictional, and, like this book, some are an amalgamation of both, but this one is particularly fine. Lipszyc can take a story gained through a retelling or an interview, then pace it and reframe it so that prose becomes poetry in her writing, sometimes leaving the reader breathless. Even deadly reality becomes slightly mystical and is made graceful by her telling. Through the forests, in the ghettos, within the devastation and horror, how does she find a sort of poetry? From The Singers on Grodzka Street: “At the end of the tunnel, in the open, near the pots of burning coals, stood bagel peddlers eager to sell their hot rings of bread sprinkled with poppy seed or salt . . . .beggars who arrived at the scene chanting their pleas for groschen in an unending chain of lament.” In Merchants of Mercy, even while talking about the trials of begging in the ghetto, the children who have been subject to the police, to bullies, to the division of food after each one has begged, to the loss of a companion who has been shot, remind her of a discarded picture that resembles their threesome, as they were before. She picks it up and digs at the burial site, burying the picture there; a memorial. The mother’s tragedy in the Death Watcher is unforgettable, as is the peace and hope for the future, in Verses for My Priest. These stories do not dwell in one country or in one type of locale; this book defies such characterizations. The tales are valid, but seldom literal. They roam the ghettos, the camps and the forest. Beautifully told heartbreaking short stories that are totally compelling, they are taken from a variety of situations and locales.

Stealing Nazi Secrets in World War II: An Interactive Adventure

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Stealing Nazi Secrets in World War II: An Interactive Adventure by Elizabeth Raum | Jewish Book Council

This is one of those fun "You Choose" books in which the reader is offered a series of choices on each page and when the choice is made and the appropriate next page is selected, the story changes to reflect the reader's decision. Part of a publisher's series also featuring war spies of the American Revolution, Civil War and World War I themes, this one is exciting right from the start because the readers gets to role-play being a World War II spy and can steal secret information from the Nazis that may well affect the outcome of the war. The book can be read numerous times and a different ending can be achieved with each reading. Along the way, a great deal of history is learned in an effortless and engaging manner. A bit more historical context would have been helpful for those who are not using supplemental educational materials but for those who already have some background about the subject, this is a fun educational experience for a would-be secret agent. It is an easy-reading book, designed for a reluctant reader and can be used as recreational reading at home or can be incorporated into classroom activities to provide a break from the usual teaching methods. Recommended for ages 8-10.

Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir by Margarita Engle | Jewish Book Council

We open on the seminal story: the American artist meets the Cuban student in Trinidad, and asks her to marry him. “Enchanted Air,” is the memoir of their younger daughter, Margarita, who flies between these two places, trying to understand how she can be from multiple worlds.

In the woodsy home they make for themselves in the Western United States, she attends school, and learns of her love for reading. Here, her father’s Jewish family tells of an escape to the United States where freedom from oppression was found. In the lush green hills of Cuba, surrounded by her mother’s relatives and joys she knows nowhere else, she flies forward on horses but wonders why there it seems the boys have more freedoms. Her mother’s land is not one to be escaped, but rather adored.

Reading this poetic memoir, it’s easy to fall into the narrative and put aside the author’s awards to focus on the confused pre-teen navigating so many familiar and so many foreign waters. How can loyalties be torn? Why are the things so important to other children not on Margarita’s radar? Is she more like ancient cave dwellers who wrote poems on walls than like the popular girls in school? Can she grow just as fully once she can no longer visit Cuba? For a young reader, age 12 and up, the awkward years of first kisses and how not to wear your hair are no less critical than the terror of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Just as you emerge from the world of these stories with the final question: “When?” recall that today Cuba is once again open for U.S. visitors.

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Israel: Stories of Conflict and Resolution, Love and Death

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Israel: Stories of Conflict and Resolution, Love and Death by Gil Zohar | Jewish Book Council

Mitchell Lane's Voices From Israel Set 2 joins the first set as a fine resource in the education of American children about a part of the world rife with misinformation, both purposeful and inadvertent. This well-researched series avoids many of the pitfalls common to books of this kind which often lean to one side or another of the political spectrum. This is a series that teachers and librarians can turn to with a sense of confidence that no one agenda is being served. The information is presented with clarity and it is clear that ease of use was of importance in the preparation of these five volumes.

The first volume is Americans in the Holy Land and it focuses on the relationship between the United States and Israel. Americans have been interacting with what is now the State of Israel since long before the State was declared and a succession of writers, explorers, archaeologists, missionaries, "visionaries", idealists, Zionists, scholars, politicians, scientists, artists, and many others have been drawn to Israel for its biblical history or for adventure, spirituality, and a host of other reasons. A few notable Americans featured include Mark Twain, Golda Meir, John F. Kennedy, "Mickey" Marcus, and Dr. David Applebaum. American Jewish support for Israel and immigration to Israel from the U.S. are discussed as well as the ups and downs of attempting to bring some American passions such as baseball, Ben and Jerry's ice cream and Starbucks coffee to the Israeli scene.

Culture, Customs and Celebrations in Israel features the diversity of Israeli society which includes Jews whose families originally hailed from all over the world as well as covering the entire spectrum of religious observance from secular to ultra-Orthodox. Development of the Hebrew language, long considered dead but certainly now vibrantly alive and responsive to the modern world, holidays, and traditional foods (with one recipe included) are all addressed. The role of the army as a leveler and a common experience is highlighted.

Israel and the Arab World begins with historical background explaining the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the evolution of events resulting in the situation as it presently stands. The differing narratives of the two sides are acknowledged as are political and historic issues relating to Arab and Jewish claims to disputed land.

Israel: Holy Land to Many focuses on the many religions that originated in or have important ties to Israel. It is not only the Jews, Christians and Muslims who are tied to the land; it is also the Samaritans, the Druze and the Bahai. Religious sites are discussed in historical context and photographed in color with captions providing additional detail. Passages from the Torah, the New Testament and the Koran are used to highlight the importance of such sites to each faith. Various unusual customs are described such as the Samaritan Passover ritual and a recipe for an Armenian Christmas pudding is included.

Israel: Stories of Conflict and Resolution, Love and Death is the most timely volume of the set and leads the reader up to today and on into the future. It addresses terror, an issue that all Israelis must live with and integrate into their daily lives; no one is untouched. The author makes a valiant effort to be fair to all sides in his analysis of the forces that brought the region to this point and, in a thoughtful introduction, expresses his hope for a more peaceful future. He addresses the rise in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among the citizens as well as the techniques and treatments being developed to minimize its effects. Issues related to misunderstandings between differing groups in society and examples of racism are complex amidst the Islamic terror which periodically recurs. Less dramatic but important to understand are cultural issues related to driving and the legal system. One item of interest to tourists who hope to visit Israel and of importance to the overall economy is whether visiting Israel is safe. The author takes pains to assure those concerned that it is and explains with care why this is so.

Each volume in the series includes many color and black and white photographs, maps (with the disputed territories delineated), chapter notes, works consulted, further reading suggestions, suggested websites, a glossary of terms and in one case a glossary of foreign terms, and an index.

The series is appealingly designed, filled with information and color, and does not favor one political agenda. It would be an excellent addition to home collections and especially valuable for classrooms and libraries. Recommended for ages 12-18.

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Mira's Diary: California Dreaming

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Mira's Diary: California Dreaming by Marissa Moss | Jewish Book Council

Marissa Moss meshes time travel, historical fiction and a pinch of mystery in the fourth and final book of the Mira's Diary series.

Mira is a spunky fourteen-year-old who inherits the ability to time travel from her mother. In California Dreaming she travels back to San Francisco in the late 1800s. Her mom is on the lam through time, in an attempt to rectify a horrible incident that is to occur in the future. But because altering the past is forbidden, Mira must find her mother before the nefarious Watcher, a woman who is determined to stop all time travelers and to change history in her own way. It doesn't help that Mira's mom is also intentionally avoiding her daughter as it is risky for family members to time travel together.

Mira is armed with only a few clues, and some helpful hints from her brother and father who are stuck in the present day. Along the journey she meets pivotal historical figures like Mark Twain, whom she meets when he is still a young newspaper reporter named Samuel Clemens, and even gets a job at the newspaper herself, working alongside a boy named Scout who looks suspiciously like three other boys she has met on her time traveling adventures.

Mira makes a few remarks about her Jewish heritage and the history of Jews in the Bay Area, but historical Jewish events are not an integral part of this story. California Dreaming mostly focuses on censorship and the importance of personal freedom. The history of San Francisco is tantamount to the plot; the earthquake of 1906, the destruction of the city and the eventual rebuilding are chronicled.

In the end, Mira's mom's quest is to undo the "fixing" done by the Watcher whose goal is to change past events to stop freedom of expression. She has been trying to affect the world by use of censorship (such as stopping Mark Twain from writing satirical content). At the culmination of the story, Mira and her mom defeat the Watcher and stop her from destroying the development of the Golden Gate Bridge as it is a symbol of freedom and opportunity.

While this installment does tie up some loose ends left from the previous books, there are many unknowns and even Mira doesn't totally understand what is going on, as she is oblivious to her mother's exact plight until the very end which can be frustrating for readers. Despite several odd plot holes and unexplained elements, Mira's Diary presents a unique concept and puts an entertaining spin on history.

Although California Dreaming is a standalone title, it's recommended that readers check out the earlier Mira's Diary books for a more in-depth understanding of Mira's historical adventures, ability and Jewish experience.

Written "journal"-style and sprinkled with relevant little illustrations, California Dreaming is a fun and engaging romp through time. Moss includes an extensive bibliography and a detailed author’s note, including the historical accuracy of her entertaining spin on history.

Recommended for ages 8-12.

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The Colors of Israel

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Color of Israel by Rachel Raz | Jewish Book Council

The author/photographer has taken a close look at Israel and has focused on the many vibrant colors found in the cities, towns, beaches and just about everywhere. Each page is devoted to a particular color and features several beautiful photographs, with the name of the highlighted color printed in English, Hebrew and transliteration and shows several Israeli sites with which children can become familiar. This is a simple, fun way for young children to learn some Hebrew vocabulary and begin to identify with Israel.

Recommended for ages 2-8.

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Finding the Worm

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Finding the Worm by Mark Goldblatt | Jewish Book Council

Sequel to last year's Twerp, Finding the Worm explores the 1960s New York area world of protagonist Julian Twerski even more deeply as he continues to mature. His bar mitzvah is finally approaching and Julian, with the help of his somewhat cryptic rabbi, struggles with some existential questions, thrown into even higher relief as one of his closest friends has a brain tumor and Julian must confront, for the first time, immediate issues of life and death. This Julian does with great seriousness even as he navigates the daily life a twelve-year-old boy. Meanwhile school goes on with its sometimes unfair accusations and its daily tribulations and so do interactions with family members and with friends, both male and female, which can be both rewarding and confusing. This coming-of-age story rings true with poignancy and just the right mix of emotion and humor; it is never cloying or overly dramatic although there's plenty of drama. Well-drawn characters and a touch of old-time New York mix with universal values and will resonate with readers of today.

Highly recommended for readers ages 9-13.

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Hanukkah Is Coming

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

This is a cheerfully illustrated board book written in rhyme with meter that properly scans. Each three line stanza shares an aspect of Hanukkah and ends with the line "Hanukkah is coming", building excitement and glee. The final page satisfyingly ends with the line "Hurray! Hanukkah is here!" A fun addition to the shelf for the very young who want to turn the pages themselves.

Recommended for ages 1-4.

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The Mountain Jews and the Mirror

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Mountain Jews and the Mirror by Ruchama Feuerman | Jewish Book Council

This original folk story reads like a Sephardic Chelm-like tale set in Morocco. The story centers on Estrella (named for the author's own grandmother from Casablanca) and her newlywed husband. When the village couple moves to the city, they quickly become overwhelmed by their new environment: the beautiful people, the size of their apartment, the excess in furniture. Conflict rises when Estrella and her husband separately mistake themselves in the wardrobe mirror for their perceived spouse’s new love interest. All too soon even the rabbi is threatened by the man reflected back at him. The story, humorous at times, with its deep, dark-toned traditional North African illustrations, ends a bit melodramatically when the newlyweds confirm their desire for each other. The lesson can be one of many, including that sometimes we shouldn't be so quick to judge the person staring back at us in the mirror!

Recommended for ages 5-9.

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Shira, Detective, CHAMETZ Detective: A Passover story

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Shira, Detective, CHAMETZ Detective: A Passover story by Galia Sabbag | Jewish Book Council

Shira and her parents are back with another learning adventure as they teach young children about Passover in a delightful way. Young Shira discovers the crumbs which must be removed before the holiday by playing "detective" as she searches for the chametz around the house and readers become educated about the process of the chametz search as well as about the custom of the afikomen, the hidden matzah, at the seder. Charming color drawings accompany the creative text.

Shira is a composite of the students the author has taught in Hebrew schools and each book in the series focuses on a particular aspect of Jewish education.

Recommended for ages 5-8.

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Sammy Spider’s First Taste of Hanukkah: A Cookbook

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The team behind the Sammy Spider books is back, having created a Hanukkah cookbook. Like most cookbooks, it is divided into sections based on different types of food: Simple Snacks, Miracle Meals, Tasty Treats and a section titled Crafty Ideas. The recipes are simple, as are most of the ingredients, and the book is meant for adults and children to read and enjoy making the recipes together. Children need a lot of supervision in the kitchen and the directions make it clear to children that they will need adult help.

Katherine Janus Kahn’s illustrations are as bright and vibrant as ever.

The food is Hanukkah-themed and the team worked hard to fit all the recipe titles into the theme, as well.

Additional material in the back of the book teaches about Hanukkah and lighting the menorah. There is also an introductory section for adults to read to children which sets up the Sammy theme and introduces the recipes. This book would be a great resource for parents who have children home on "winter break" and has educational components, as well; it would be especially useful for number and counting activities. Families and classes will enjoy "digging into” this book.

Recommended for ages 4 - 8 with adult supervision.

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Time To Start a Brand New Year

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Time to Start a Brand New Year by Rochel Groner Vorst; Shepsil Scheinber, illus. | Jewish Book Council

Bright primary-color illustrations accompany metered rhyming text as we watch young children from visibly Orthodox families prepare for the start of the Jewish New Year. The Rosh Hashanah symbols make their appearances: shofar, pomegranate, apple and honey, New Year's wishes, round raisin challah are all there. A trip to a lake to symbolically cast off old sins to teach about the custom of Tashlich and an emphasis on the mitzvos that can be done in the coming year bring this light rhythmic read-aloud full circle.

Recommended for ages 2-15.

Working Together: Economy, Technology, and Careers in Israel

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Working Together: Economy, Technology, and Careers in Israel by Elisa Silverman | Jewish Book Council

Mitchell Lane Publishing has introduced Voices From Israel, a series of books designed to educate high school students about life in Israel: a challenging task in a world filled with media sources with particular slants and agendas and abundant misinformation thrust at young people from all sides. This is an extensive collection of short but pithy books, divided into two groups. The first set consists of the five titles listed above and will be addressed in this review. Set two will be addressed separately. Each volume in set one attempts to provide as complete a view as possible of its topic, considering the short format and the complexity of Israeli society, and each attempts to stray as little as possible into areas of major political controversy. The publisher and selected authors have done a good job of walking this tricky tightrope.

The first book in the set is a short picture biography of Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. It includes some personal biographical data and attempts to put his career into historical context. The text is accompanied by color photographs and includes a timeline, chapter notes, a list of works consulted, suggestions for further reading, a short list of works authored by Netanyahu himself, and a list of internet resources to consult. While well done, perhaps this volume might have been more effective later in the series when a greater understanding of the area's background has been absorbed by the reader, although the books do not necessarily have to be read in order. The Experience of Israel: Sights and Cities is the next volume in set one. It introduces readers to basic geographic locations including major cities, rivers and lakes. The descriptions include historical and biblical references as well as current information and the author points out the importance of many of the sites to the major religions of today. The descriptions are accompanied by appealing color photographs which help bring the text to life and which give the reader a good sense of local atmosphere. The volume entitled I Am Israeli: The Children of Israel addresses Israeli life through the eyes of five children. Four are Jewish children and one is a Muslim child from who lives in East Jerusalem. Each child shares a bit of what life is like for his or her family and friends. Crafts projects and recipes are included along with many color photographs and the author includes an introduction written by her own son. Returning Home: Journeys To Israel documents the return of Jews from all over the world back to their ancient and historic homeland, Israel. Stories of Olim (immigrants to Israel) from the U.S. and elsewhere are featured in historical and social context and the role of the Israeli government in their absorption as well as other organizations such as Nefesh B'Nefesh are addressed. The concept of an immigrant and what it feels like to be an immigrant are discussed. The final volume in the set, Working Together: Economy, Technology and Careers in Israel starts with a historical approach, tracing the Israeli economy from its kibbutz oriented roots to the vibrant free market of today, It does not ignore workplace problems such as the tendency of some of the Ultra-Orthodox to pursue religious studies rather than join the workforce or the various workplace issues relating to the Arab communities but it also discusses attempts to address these issues and primarily focuses on the vibrancy of the economy due to cutting edge creativity, drive, and entrepreneurship. It also highlights the role that universal conscription into the army plays in the development of this percolating economy. This volume is also illustrated with numerous color photographs as well as a timeline, chapter notes, works consulted, further reading, internet resources, a glossary of terms and an index.

This series is a welcome addition to Israel education, spanning a wide variety of topics with extensive of backmatter helpful for further research. It gives a good sense of atmosphere and color in addition to many facts. The chosen authors are knowledgeable and the background and experience of each is noted in the individual volumes. The series is a good jumping off point for learning about a complex country and would be useful both at home and in the classroom.

Recommended for ages 8-14.

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Little American Man: A Memoir

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Little American Man: A Memoir by Lior Lampert | Jewish Book Council

Little American Man: A Memoir, is the moving story of a young Israeli boy’s struggle to assimilate and fit in to American society, overcoming language and cultural barriers. It’s a first person account of personal growth from the age of five to the age of fifteen, starting with his first plane ride from Israel to America and his entrance into kindergarten where no one spoke his language, to his teen years when he identified as an American. Except for a brief mention of Sabbath observance, it has little Jewish content. Immigrants from any country and culture could relate to his experiences and feelings. In fact, it may foster tolerance for immigrants among American children. This book is suitable for ages 8 and up.

A Baby of Our Own

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

A Baby of Our Own by Sara Blau; Tova Leff, illus. | Jewish Book Council

A family of three children being cared for by an older woman, most likely their grandmother, is adorning their home in preparation for the arrival of their newest family member, a baby girl. But how should the formerly youngest child, a boy of three, feel? While this is a joyful occasion, can it not also be threatening to the younger child? It can and often is, but not when that child is included in drawing the welcoming signs that he is placing on the home’s walls, just as his older siblings are doing. Instead of being fearful of being replaced, he has made the jump to being an older sibling in the family who will be asked to help take care of the newcomer, an adorable pink-clad baby girl (but who seems to be asleep almost all the time). The message is clear and exciting. It even explains those ferocious crying sounds made by such a tiny baby. The book is beautifully illustrated with colors of teal, pink, lavender, and blue, and it is peopled by cheerful characters. This is a wonderful book for families to share with young children, especially if they are expecting an addition to the family.

Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet by Jeffrey Rosen | Jewish Book Council

Idealistic, deeply ethical, and committed to unflinching moral standards, Louis D. Brandeis—“Old Isaiah” to President Franklin Roosevelt—had a vision of democracy practiced at its highest level that drew, according to National Constitution Center director Jeffrey Rosen, on Brandeis’s interest in ancient Greek history and the thinking of Thomas Jefferson. To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Brandeis’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, Rosen offers an intellectual biography that demonstrates Brandeis’s foresight in explicating issues that are still at the heart of political and constitutional debate.

Early in his career, Brandeis emerged as a champion of the working man and small business owner. In his home state of Massachusetts, he fought against the entrenched corruption of public utilities and life insurance companies and backed legislation that benefited workers. He argued against corporate capitalism and consolidation, warning that a financial oligarchy—symbolized by J. P. Morgan and other investment bankers—threatened both the United States economy and democracy itself. As an economic advisor to Woodrow Wilson, Brandeis helped shape the administration’s policy toward monopolies, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve. His influence can be seen, too, in the Banking Act of 1933, generally called the Glass-Steagall Act. Brandeis also opposed big government, rejecting, with the rest of the Court, Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal initiatives, and favored judicial restraint, expressing his trust in the federal system in a 1932 dissent that advocated for states’ experimentation in social and economic issues.

Whitney v. California (1927), a landmark defense of freedom of speech and thought, sums up Brandeis’s deeply held conviction that informed debate led to informed decisions: “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” Brandeis also laid the foundation for the right to privacy in a Harvard Law Review article written with his law partner, Samuel Warren, prompted by photographers who “invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life.” In arguing a case before the Supreme Court in 1908, Brandeis based his brief not on legal abstractions but on lengthy investigation into the social and scientific facts of the case. An innovative approach, the Brandeis brief is now a model for judicial argument.

A secular Jew, Brandeis came to the leadership of the American Zionist movement in his fifties. Introduced to Zionism by Theodor Herzl’s American secretary, Jacob de Haas, Brandeis began an intensive study of the movement. Convinced of its goals, he successfully organized and raised funds, promoting the American Zionist cause and pressing Wilson to accept the Balfour Declaration. In the years that followed, Brandeis maintained his efforts, intensified by rising antisemitism in Europe, with both President Hoover and President Roosevelt.

In Brandeis’s long and multifaceted career as activist lawyer, Supreme Court justice, and American Zionist, Rosen underscores Brandeis’s lifelong passion for and dedication to social justice, freedom of thought and speech, and an informed citizenry. Brandeis’s faith in self-education and informed decisions may seem overly optimistic in the face of today’s corporate power and polarized media and some of his opinions are open to question, but his unwavering quest for justice and open exchange of information should remind readers of their responsibility in a democracy. Rosen gives readers the opportunity to absorb Brandeis’s breadth of interests and intellect and to encourage their own action.

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Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann by Frederic Spotts | Jewish Book Council

Novelist, journalist, and playwright Klaus Mann (1906-1949) left Germany with the rise of fascism in 1933 and wandered the émigré cities of Europe before landing in America, which eventually granted him citizenship. His writings addressed a wide range of cultural and political affairs; he is most famous for his 1926 novel, Der fromme Tanz, which explored themes of homosexuality; for autobiographical works like The Turning Point; and for scandalous roman à clefs, like Mephisto. Biographer Spotts tells the story of Mann’s life in a straightforward, chronological fashion, drawing from Mann’s letters, diaries, manuscripts, and published works.

The Klaus Mann who emerges is a free-thinking, uncompromising aesthete struggling to create an unconventional sort of lifestyle for himself in the first half of the twentieth century…rather than the first half of the twenty-first century, which might have been a better fit. Mann was openly homosexual; on rare occasions (when he was desperate to enlist in the US Armed Forces, for example) he had to deny engaging in “perverse acts,” which to him was not untrue. Rumors of incestuous overtures from his father or sister did not bother him particularly. What was depressing to him was his own inability to maintain any long-term romantic relationships.

While comfortable with his sexuality, Mann found the political realities of his time appalling. He watched the rise of fascism in Germany, as opportunists infiltrated key institutions and then seized power by appealing to the fears and frustrations of the masses. Unlike some fellow artists who thought they could work with the more “open-minded” Nazis, Mann knew it was impossible to compromise with such evil. After the war, he was not deluded that the problem was over. Germany was not de-Nazified; Klaus’s own Nazi nemeses were recycling themselves into postwar positions of power. His new home, America, was retreating onto insularity and worse—anti-Communist “cleansing” campaigns.

Klaus Mann’s persistent death wish, his drug use, his homosexuality—these are not problems for a biographer, as Mann himself was relatively open about them. The one issue Mann himself could not confront was the problem of living his life as the son of writer Thomas Mann. This was a father who considered himself a genius, the very embodiment of a great writer. His children were inconvenient nuisances. While they might have their occasional uses—Thomas did find the young Klaus physically appealing, and Thomas allowed daughter Erika to care for him and manage his literary estate in his old age—the idea that any of his children could be great at anything was absurd. His many children waited all their lives in vain for their father’s compliments, small kindnesses, or approval. It is hard to comprehend the pain this father inflicted on his children.

Frederic Spotts has a special mission in this biography: to emancipate Klaus from Thomas Mann’s overwhelming reputation, to allow the son to be seen as an artist on his own merits. So skilled is Spotts as a biographer, that—apart from the title of the book and a rather heavy epilogue—he lets the facts of Thomas Mann’s “parenting” speak for themselves. Spotts writes with humor and style, and a great admiration for his subject, which makes this biography valuable for literary historians but also quite accessible to the general reader.

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The Kaminsky Cure

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Kaminsky Cure by Christopher New | Jewish Book Council

“I don’t know it yet, but I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the nameless, omniscient narrator of The Kaminsky Cure tells us in the first paragraph of the novel. The Kaminsky Cure follows the stories of a Protestant minister, his converted, formerly Jewish wife, and their half-Jewish children in a small town in Austria during World War II. The narrator is four years old when Austria is invaded, and he wonders why his parents aren’t joining in the “general jubilation.” Soon, however, he is forced to understand.

The minister, Willibald, and his wife, Gabi, have a terrible relationship—one that consists of regular screaming and shouting, the throwing of dishes and pictures, and sometimes physical violence. These contretemps do nothing to help the children adjust, nor do the gall bladder attacks from which Gabi suffers after these scrimmages. The children are soon banned from the local school and must travel four hours a day to reach a school that will accept them, not without ostracism and mockery.

Each child is different: the eldest, Ilse is an otherworldly girl who prays constantly to have the taint of Judaism removed from her; Martin, the second child, is an avid non-Nazi and dreams of building panzer tanks to help defeat the German army—a fantasy no more tangible than Ilse’s. Sara, the next child, escapes reality by writing fables that have truth in them, and the narrator simply tries to get on. Willibald is uninterested in his children’s education, but Gabi is dedicated to it and goes to extreme, dangerous lengths in order to acquire schooling and tutors for her beloved offspring. Frau von Kaminsky, a high-born German who is an old friend of Gabi’s, instructs her in how to get along in a world turned upside down.

In a daring move, Gabi takes the narrator and Martin to Berlin to her best friend’s funeral. She is still considered “privileged” since she is married to an Aryan. Her friend’s sister convinces Gabi to meet with some of her Jewish relatives still in Berlin. They appear downtrodden and grey to the narrator, and he doesn’t want to touch them. As they leave, his great-uncle calls out, “Remember us.” This phrase means more and more to the narrator as time goes on and an evacuation order comes for Gabi. How she handles it is the crux of the novel.

This novel is unique for the combination of sophistication and naïveté that the narrator brings to its telling. The duplicity, starvation, and deprivation the narrator’s family endures despite Willibald is poignant. Towards the end, the family is surviving on boiled nettle soup with a few dry bread croutons that Martin acquires from a German girlfriend. Another interesting facet of the novel is its portrayal of the suffering the local Nazis undergo during the balance of the war when the Führer isn’t doing so well.

This is often a hilarious book as well as a heartbreaking one. The young narrator, with his constant attempts to understand what is going on, provides comic relief in a novel of cruelty, death and destruction.

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Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It by Michael Wex | Jewish Book Council

“Researching and writing this book has been one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life,” Michale Wex writes of his latest work, Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It, a whiplash-inducing overview of Jewish culinary culture that establishes how its subject exemplifies a world language, peppered with strains and sources from across the world.

In the first few chapters, studded with references to rabbis who wrote about food and eating, the use of italics is staggering: sources from the Talmud, Mishnah, Plutarch, television shows, and borrowed vocabulary from Czech, Polish, Yiddish, and German make for interesting, sometimes tiring, reading. If a television shtick, stories from the Book of Genesis, and dietary laws can be presented in one sentence, Michael Wex writes it: “The brisket that Howard Wolowitz’s mother is always yelling about on The Big Bang Theory can trace its lineage back to Jacob’s fight with the angel.”

Once he labels the central European cuisine as Yiddish, Wex goes on to treyf, cholent and its variations, Sabbath meals in general, holiday and weekday foods, and finally, what makes all of this cooking and food distinctly Jewish. He reviews of the baking of matzoh, enumeration of other kosher animals not found at local meat counters, with some urban dictionary asides taken from contemporary drug addicts’ verbiage. That Wex is Canadian can be noted occasionally by the absence of more American place references. Michael Wex has written a curiously interesting book, best digested slowly.

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44 Hours or Strike

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

44 Hours or Strike by Anne Dublin | Jewish Book Council

Sophie and Rose’s parents moved them from Russia to Toronto in the 1920s to make a better life for their family and avoid the terrible anti-Semitism of the time. In 1931, when Sophie is 14 and Rose is 16, their father has died, their mother is sick and homebound and they are both working in a sweatshop. The girls join the newly spreading International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in Toronto along with the other workers in their factory, and go on strike. Dublin tells of the awful working conditions and terrible poverty, including lack of medical care and proper clothing that this family and others encounter during this time. To make matters worse, Rose is imprisoned and used as an example to the other workers by being placed in a high security prison.

While all this is unfolding, Sophie makes a friend. He is enamored of her, and she finds him quite intriguing however he is not Jewish. They keep their budding romance a secret as long as they can – until Rose discovers it after her release from prison. Historical events and characters are woven in among the fictional characters providing a context for the events that unfold. The story is fraught with difficult decisions that no young person should have to make, but it provides interesting historical insights for the youth of today.

Recommended for ages 11 – 15.

Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History by Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller | Jewish Book Council

Two renowned social scientists illustrate the concept of social capital with salient features of Jewish communal life. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam points out that the mitzvah of mishloach manot, the custom of exchanging food and delicacies on Purim, promotes social connectedness and animates philanthropy and volunteerism. James Coleman describes how three components of social capital—trust, norms and networks—are critical in diamond markets. Like these two scholars, articles in this anthology explain how and why Jews deploy social capital to survive and sometimes achieve prominence and economic success despite anti-Semitism, legal restrictions and persecution.

Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller have made an important contribution to the broad subject of Jews and money especially their role in the evolution of modern capitalism and the global economy since 1500. Purchasing Power includes a series of essays that address the ways that Jews engaged with economic life in various contexts and at different times. Their strong communal ties and extensive transnational networks enabled them to exercise agency and adapt to the constraints and the opportunities they faced. Unlike most edited volumes, which focus on one or two themes, this book is especially remarkable because the individual articles develop two themes in a sequential fashion. The book begins with a discussion of moneylending in Rome at a time when modern capitalism was in its infancy in the sixteenth century, and includes a series of articles that bring us nearly to the present.

Scholarly discussions of the role of Jews in the emergence of modern capitalism date back to the late nineteenth century when “scholars tended to argue for an inherent propensity—religious, cultural, or even racial—on the part of Jews for capitalist activity.” This work had important political ramifications: it fueled the fires of anti-Semitism. Adam Sutcliffe observes in the final chapter that “The association of Jews with commercial and financial power has long been a stock trope of anti-Semitic stereotyping… The depiction of the Jews as parasitical capitalists featured prominently in the prelude to their genocide, and the field of Jewish economic history remains haunted by this fact.” This “haunting” meant that the economic role of Jews was subordinated to discussions of religion and culture for most of the twentieth century. But recent scholarship on Jews and money has shed important light on Jewish communities, the evolution of capitalism, and the nature of globalization. In their Introduction, Kobrin and Teller analyze past scholarship and trace the “economic turn” in Jewish studies in order to situate the book in contemporary scholarship.

Two concepts unify the collection: networks and power. Articles in Part I, “Networks and Niches,” describe the ways that local and transnational social networks promoted economic survival and success. Two examples are especially notable. Carsten Wilke’s “Contraband for the Catholic King: Jews of the French Pyrenees in the Tobacco Trade and Spanish State Finance” analyzes a unique situation: the monopoly on the sale of tobacco in Spain by crypto-Jews. Some tobacco merchants were transnational commuters: their families lived openly as Jews in France while they transvered the Pyrenees to conduct their business in Spain. The open secret of their Jewish identity did not guarantee protection from the Inquisition, but their pivotal role in state revenue—taxes on tobacco comprised nearly a quarter of the Spanish government’s income in the beginning of the eighteenth century—reduced the chances of prosecution. Adam Mendelson’s article, “From Moses to Moses: Jews, Clothing and Colonial Commerce” describes how Jewish clothing merchants and manufacturers benefitted from the expansion of the British Empire creating a highly integrated multi-continent family business manufacturing and selling clothing. Sons, nephews and brothers were sent abroad to promote business expansion and in this way, tap the trust and strong ties within families to promote global business enterprises. This case study suggests that the Rothschild family’s strategy of sending sons to different cities was not unique.

Part II provides vivid evidence of how Jewish philanthropy served as an instrument of global power and influence. The case studies consider the evolution of global advocacy networks and organizations, what Abigail Green labels the “Jewish International,” between 1840 and 1880; financing the 1948 Israeli War of independence through formal organizations and informal donor networks; the transplantation and revitalization of the community of diamond dealers in Antwerp during and after World War II; and the transnational activism which led to the mass migration of Soviet Jews.

The last article brings the discussion full circle with an analysis of Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Capitalism. While the fact of high earnings and the economic centrality of Jews is not as fraught as in the past (although the anti-Semitism it evokes is far from absent), the scholarly study of the role of Jews in the development of capitalism has become more nuanced drawing on recently developed concepts like agency, social capital and transnational social networks. In contrast to his contemporary, Max Weber whose Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is central to the sociological canon, Sombart’s work has not been influential. His essentialism and tacit support of Nazism in his final years cast doubt on his objectivity. Adam Sutcliffe contextualizes Sombart’s work noting that it was influenced by prevailing racialist theories and relied on the findings of German Jewish scholars. Recognizing the methodological and theoretical limitations of Sombart’s work, Sutcliffe suggests that the complex questions Sombart addressed merit serious examination since they illuminate our understanding of the role of Jews in the evolution of capitalism. Moving beyond Sombart, the scholars in this volume tackle important questions and, like other recent scholarship, have made major contributions to a lively debate about the evolution of the global economy.

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The Exodus You Almost Passed Over

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Exodus You Almost Passed Over by Rabbi David Fohrman | Jewish Book Council

One of the major if not the major theme of the Passover seder is transmitting the story of the Exodus from one generation to the next. Ideally, that transmission is conducted through dynamic interaction, questions and answers, and a shared enthusiasm for the Biblical text and its description of the process by which the ancient Israelites left Egypt. Rabbi Forhman’s new work, The Exodus You Almost Passed Over, is a welcome addition to the corpus of Passover-related literature that offers new insights into the timeless story of Passover. Like his earlier works, The Beast That Crouches at the Door (a book on Genesis) and The Queen You Thought You Knew (a book on Esther) this is a smooth, quick read, whose light tone belies its vast scholarship.

Utilizing his characteristic conversational tone (for example, in paraphrasing Moses’ request to Pharaoh to have ALL of the Israelites leave Egypt, Fohrman writes: “We’re talking everybody, Pharaoh—even Sally’s pet sheep, and Bobby’s lizard. How could we leave anyone behind?”) and playful chapter headings (eg. “Much Ado About Names”; “The Journey to Tomorrowland”), Fohrman guides his readers in investigating the word choice and structure of the Bible’s description of the Exodus. Covering topics ranging from exactly how the Israelites were to be considered God’s “firstborn” to the Torah’s description of Jacob’s funeral procession, and employing interpretive strategies ranging from academic-style literary analysis to gematria (Jewish numerology), Fohrman’s work never fails to accomplish the very goal he ascribes to God Himself in the Exodus process—namely, to educate. For example, in his discussion about the Israelites as firstborn, Fohrman notes how such a figure can serve as a “bridge between the generations. A bechor (firstborn) can take the values of the parents and live them, tangibly, in a child’s world. When a child-leader does that successfully, he or she takes a noble idea and breathes life into it, transforming that ideal into behavior that makes sense in a child’s world. That kind of behavior then becomes a real, living possibility for the other children, too.” Such an insight, both into the concept of firstborn-hood in the Bible, as well as in life as a whole, has a particularly salient relevance within the context of the Passover seder—with its theme of transmission and its discussion of the four types of children. On such a night, the value of transmitting, through a measure of transforming, is the center of our focus.

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Hot Dog Taste Test

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Hot Dog Taste Test by Lisa Hanawalt | Jewish Book Council

Hot Dog Taste Test serves up Lisa Hanawalt's devastatingly funny comics, saliva-stimulating art, and deliciously screwball lists as she skewers the pomposities of foodie subculture. From the James Beard Award-winning cartoonist and production designer/producer of Bojack Horseman, Hot Dog Taste Test dishes out five-star laughs as Hanawalt keenly muses on pop culture, relationships, and the animal in all of us.

Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ‘60s

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ‘60s by Richard Goldstein | Jewish Book Council

If the title of Richard Goldstein’s memoir makes you reach instinctively for a bottle of Southern Comfort, this book is for you. (If not, listen to Big Brother and the Holding Company’s “Cheap Thrills” a few times, then read the book.)

Goldstein came of age in the Bronx in the 1960s, and like so many of his contemporaries living in outer boroughs and suburbs throughout the country, his weekends were spent seeking refuge from ticky-tacky in whatever emerging counterculture scene could be found in the nether reaches of his metropolis – in Goldstein’s case, the mother lode comprising the streets, crash pads, and cafes of Greenwich Village and what would soon come to be called Alphabet City. The young Goldstein immersed himself in the sights and sounds of the East and West Villages and managed to parlay his talents and experiences into a gig at the Village Voice, where he rose to become the world’s first rock music critic ever.

The first half of his book is given over to an account of Goldstein’s adventures in this new wonderland, recalling an era that is almost impossible for anyone who wasn’t there at the time to imagine. The seeds of a new culture were being sown and germinated in the fertile soil of baby-boomer leisure and restlessness, dominated by musicians (the term “rock star” hadn’t been invented yet) who were seldom in it for the money, though they rarely said no to the sex, drugs, and alcohol that came with the territory.

Goldstein carefully documents both his hopes and disillusionments with how this promise played out, for good and ill. This is a book in which people loom large – from titans such as Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison to such minor figures as the Fugs, the Plaster Casters, Tiny Tim, and a plethora of young men who chose to adopt the nom de paix of Groovy – all of whom collectively give an indispensable, trippy tang to the main dish on offer. (Goldstein’s reflections on the sad life of Tiny Tim, as well as his recollections of hanging out at Ratner’s with Janis Joplin, are alone worth the price of the book.)

Ultimately, Goldstein cannot confine himself to discussing the music scene alone. He documents the growth of the hippie movement, including a lengthy excursion to San Francisco during the Summer of Love, where he found an ugly misery lurking beneath the flowers-in-the-hair, and concludes with the rise of such would-be revolutionaries as the Yippies and the Black Panthers, whom he sees as heroic and redemptive figures. Here, as throughout the book, Goldstein’s opinions are provocative, and his prose has a compelling flair.

Where Goldstein is synoptic and personal, Carlin stays firmly in the third person in his narrative of the career of one individual: Morris Levy, the driving force behind the Manhattan jazz club Birdland and the important independent label Roulette Records. While there is an impressive cast of musical artists parading through the pages of the book—Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Joey Dee, Tommy James, and more—they are treated as largely interchangeable figures in a seemingly timeless morality play that pits the Unscrupulous against the Unwary, important not for the music they created but for being exploitable putty in the hands of the avaricious Levy.

Tales of how intimidating machers like Levy took advantage of vulnerable artists who, at least early in their careers, put a higher value on fame and the hedonistic perks of stardom than they did on money, are legion by now, and schemes similar to those that Levy concocted, most of which revolved around the shadowy world of “music publishing,” have been documented many times over. What made Levy stand out from the crowd?

Carlin lives up to his title by documenting Levy’s ties to organized crime; Roulette’s offices were a virtually undisguised clubhouse for mob muscle who would make Luca Brasi seem tame. But when he gets down to cases, he provides both too much detail and not enough substance to sustain the reader’s interest. Levy’s schemes were so complicated that they are virtually impossible to explain, or follow, and despite the best efforts of able prosecutors and plaintiffs’ lawyers, many claims against Levy could not be conclusively proved, leading Carlin to fill in a lot of blanks with speculations about what might have, or must have happened, rather than solid facts.

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Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin | Jewish Book Council

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Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted by Patricia Keer Munro | Jewish Book Council

Patricia Keer Munro’s Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted is particularly compelling given the major role that the bar and bat mitzvah ritual has taken in American Judaism. In today’s America, writes Munro, Jewish identification is often a matter of choice. Outside of the Orthodox community, the bar and bat mitzvah ritual has become “the primary means of inculcating Jewish belief and practice” in the child and the family. It is, as Munro suggests, a system in which the youngster, parents, the clergy, congregations, and the larger community are involved in its performance.

Two major cultural shifts have contributed to the significance of bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies: rising rates of intermarriage and the growing gender equality brought about by feminism. The Reform movement’s 1983 Resolution on Patrilineal Descent required evidence that children had a Jewish upbringing; the bar and bat mitzvah has become prima facie evidence of that. Feminism sparked a demand that girls fully participate in their bat mitzvah ceremonies and that they, like their brothers, take on adult religious obligations and be counted in the minyan.

The book is filled with powerful, often poignant quotes from the over two hundred interviews that Munro conducted in the San Francisco Bay area in Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and unaffiliated synagogues. In addition, she has drawn upon her own experiences as a bar and bat mitzvah tutor. The result is that Munro provides many strategies for revitalizing the bar and bat mitzvah process for community and congregational leaders. She also postulates a helpful analytical model that identifies four “inherent tensions” that shape the bar and bat mitzvah system. A chapter is devoted to each of structural strains and ways to address them. One chapter, for example, is devoted to clarifying boundaries among participants; this includes a discussion of the role of non-Jewish parents, relatives, and friends within the ceremony. The last chapter includes important policy recommendations to ensure that the bar and bat mitzvah experiences provide youngsters and their families with a “Jewish cultural tool kit” and ensure their ongoing “Jewish allegiance in an American context.”

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From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

From Day to Day: One Man’s Diary of Survival in Nazi Concentration Camps by Odd Nansen | Jewish Book Council

In contrast to most Holocaust memoirs or diaries, From Day to Day is one of a few diary accounts from inside Nazi concentration camps providing descriptions of the regular torturous and cruel existence of those sent to the Nazi KL. Although Odd Nansen was not Jewish, his diary of imprisonment as a “court hostage”—a prominent Norwegian who opposed the Nazi occupation of Norway—reveals much about his witness to the suffering of both Jews and non-Jews in Grini, Sachsenhausen, and Oranienburg, where he recorded the sadistic cruelty directed by guards towards its helpless victims.

Odd Nansen, the son of Arctic explorer, scientist, diplomat, and Nobel Prize laureate Fridtjof Nansen, was a prominent personality in Norwegian life in his own right. An architect by profession, he organized relief efforts for Jews and other refugees beginning in 1936. After the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1940, Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician, attempted to seize power but failed after the Germans refused to support his government. Quisling served as Minister-President from 1942 to 1945, heading the Norwegian state administration jointly with the German civilian administer Joseph Terhoven. Opposing the Nazi racist policies supported by Quisling, Nansen was arrested and sent to the Grini concentration camp.

Risking punishment for the discovery of his diary, Nansen described an area of the camp where emaciated Jews were penned in, many of whom were hunger-crazed, fighting for the scraps of rotten garbage. He wrote of the truncheon- wielding camp guards who severely beat Jews, one of whom he dragged to safety at a nearby wall when the victim collapsed at his feet.

From Day to Day was first published in 1949, and it has been 65 years since the last edition was published. In a 1956 poll about the “most undeservedly neglected book,” in the preceding quarter century, Carl Sandburg singled out Nansen’s Diary as an “epic narrative and a tribute to the human spirit to rise above torture, terror, and death.” Indeed, Nansen witnessed all the horrors of the camps, yet saw hope for the future. The preface to From Day to Day is written by Thomas Buergenthal, who appears as “Tommy” in the diary: a ten-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz death march whom Nansen met at Sachsenhausen supplied with extra rations when he could. Following the war, Buergenthal served as a judge on the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and was the recipient of the 2015 Elie Wiesel Award from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Jewish Festival Food: Eating for Special Occasions

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Jewish Festival Food: Eating for Special Occasions: 75 Delicious Dishes for Every Holiday and Celebration | Jewish Book Council

Jewish holidays always have special foods; even fast days are associated with meals that precede and follow them. The foods served at holiday observances often have seasonal associations as well as symbolic meaning. This small volume offers readers an overview of each holiday and recipes from diverse Jewish cultures for traditional dishes served at the feasts.

With the exception of Shabbat, which occurs every week, Jewish celebrations are linked to the seasons of the year. The first chapter of Jewish Festival Food covers each holiday on the Jewish calendar with an explanation of its significance, associated customs and rituals, and foods. Transliterations of the appropriate blessings and color illustrations of artifacts augment the text. A chapter for each holiday follows with recipes. Since the book is a British publication, some of the terminology (aubergine rather than eggplant) and spelling might be unfamiliar to Americans, but the index provides cross-references. All measurements are given in both metric and English equivalents, making them easy for all cooks to use. The directions are clear and color photographs provide visual clues for techniques as well as pictures guaranteed to whet the appetite. All recipes follow the kashrut laws.

Those interested in broadening their culinary horizons will find recipes for both traditional and vegetarian chopped liver, Libyan spicy pumpkin dip, and Moroccan carrot salad. They can learn to bake mouna, the Algerian Shabbat bread, as well as challah; Ethiopian doro wat as well as roast chicken. There are recipes for horef and harissa for those who enjoy spicy sauces. Dessert lovers will find blintzes, Hungarian cherry soup, American cheesecake, and rugelach.

Jewish Festival Food is an affordable, accessible cookbook by an experienced food writer. It is a perfect size for use in the kitchen.

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Seminary Savvy

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Seminary Savvy by Michal Eisikowitz and Debbie Fox | Jewish Book Council

Seminary Savvy is a guidebook for young women who are about to graduate from Yeshiva high school and head to Israel for their year of study. The book contains many helpful tips and scenarios that will make a high school senior feel more prepared before leaving her family for an entire year. Some topics discussed are finding trusted adults to confide in, dealing with homesickness, navigating around Israel, learning about nutrition while away from home, and many more. The book tackles some serious topics that are unfortunately necessary for the woman of today, including what to do when an adult you trust begin to makes you feel uncomfortable, how to handle inappropriate male attention, and handling physical and mental afflictions while away from home.

The illustrated cover and various cartoons throughout the book may put off some high school seniors who feel this book might be too childish for them, but the information is mostly useful. Some of the advice in the book might seem obvious and unnecessary to state, but it tries to cover all bases, and will definitely help many girls in the Orthodox community.

Finally, the book was written with the express permission of several respected Orthodox rabbis, including Rabbi Sholom Kamenetsky and Rabbi Abraham Twerski, so even the most religious families in the Jewish community should feel comfortable giving it to their daughters to read.

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Sephardic Baking from Nona and More Favorites

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Sephardic Baking from Nona and More Favorites by Linda Capeloto Sendowski | Jewish Book Council

Growing up in a Sephardic family, Ladino was the native language in Linda Capeloto Sendowski’s grandparents’ homes. This cultural inheritance—from the language to kitchen practices to nostalgia—infuses this self-published cookbook of glimpse into different regions of the Sephardic world.

Beginning with a section on breads, Sephardic Baking with Nona offers a challah recipe with ground anise seeds and topped with sesame, among other variations including raisins, dried cranberries, dried cherries, candied orange peels, and even Dulce de Toronha, candied grapefruit peels, together with a list of useful tips for successful challah baking. Other breads make their appearance, as well: laffa, with its yeasty aroma, and panezikos, sweet rolls recommended for a Thanksgiving feast.

For the Jewish holidays, traditionally recognizable recipes like Hamentaschen appear beside folares, “a pastry dough flecked with cheese in a cage-like shape, representing Haman’s hanging noose.” She suggests kezadas, Sephardic rice and cheese pies, for Shavuot and lahmajun, a Turkish lamb-spiced pizza popular on Syrian tables, to be followed by a non-dairy baklava or ka’ak.

The book’s accessibility and clear instructions reflect its origins on the author’s popular cooking blog, The Boureka Diary—now a series on The Global Jewish Kitchen. The author takes a practical approach to these recipes, noting which ones can be frozen and how to best prepare made-ahead goods once they’re out of the freezer. The photographs are excellent and enticing, beckoning the reader to the kitchen and practically jumping off the page. The book also thoughtfully inserts blank pages here and there, sometimes at the end of a section or a recipe, allowing space for the home cook to write down their own notes for each dish.

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Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage: Folktales, Legends, and Letters

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage: Folktales, Legends, and Letters by Sandy Eisenberg Sasso and Peninnah Schram | Jewish Book Council

How many ways can one say, “I love you?” An anthology must, by its very nature, be selective, but it does seem that Sasso and Schram have included almost everything in Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage.

The volume presents both familiar love stories and the unusual—ranging from the better-known biblical Song of Songs to love letters from a husband showing appreciation for his wife's ordeal during childbirth. The stories inform those who have little knowledge of Judaism, and deepen the understanding of those who are already familiar with its tenets. Well-researched in archives and libraries, and well-documented, the material here is full of different voices. To mention only a few:

“The Wedding Blessing,” a brief story from the Talmud, is a particularly apt inclusion. In her creative retelling, Peninnah Schram guides the reader to extend the Talmudic version and bless others—at a wedding, birthday, or other milestone.

In midrash (stories written by rabbis after the Bible) the course of Jewish history is forever altered. The Book of Exodus tells us that Miriam, sister of Moses, led the women to freedom “with timbrels and with dances.” The Bible doesn’t mention her further. It is only in post-biblical imagination that we learn of Miriam's marriage to Caleb, who fell in love with her despite a hideous skin disease. Eventually she was the ancestress of King David and the messianic promise. A love story indeed.

In Jewish tradition, micrography (outlining a picture with letters rather than solid lines) is used to present passages of Torah. Here, in a five-page visual feast, skillfully executed by Schram's daughter-in-law, Sonia, small metal points were employed to tell the story in which love of Torah and love of festivals lead to love between man and wife. Use your magnifying glass to see what is hidden from the naked eye!

In Jewish folk literature, the greatest concern of young women is the subject of marriage. “Who will be my husband? What will married life be like?” are questions they often ask. The stories here, most of which are told by women, were created to answer these questions. Due to the international origins of the pieces, the reader feels a sense of connection with women from around the world.

One of the largest political and judicial scandals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the false treason accusation of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish soldier. After his conviction, he was banished to Devil's Island. His heart-wrenching love letters to his family, presented here, put a human face on history.

But what makes this book truly a treasure is the sharing by the authors of the most intimate feelings in their own lives: Peninnah Schram's father begins a letter to his wife, “My beautiful little bird Devorele” and Sandy Sasso addresses her dedication, “To Dennis, with whom my own love story began. With eternal love have I loved you.” It is clear that both authors are loving and loved. The reader feels loved as well. In fact, he or she might think, “These authors are so concerned about me that they included instructions for writing my own love story.” What a rich volume for anyone and everyone.

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They May Not Mean To, But They Do

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine | Jewish Book Council

Cathleen Schine's latest novel is a portrait of a family grappling with age, expectations, and entitlement. She incisively observes that familial squabbles—both petty and serious—create opportunities to demonstrate loyalty, comfort, and true love.

Joy and Aaron Bergman raised their children Molly and Daniel as a tightly knit unit, and the four of them have innocent, unassailable faith in each other. That faith has been tested—most strenuously by Molly leaving her husband to live in Los Angeles with another woman. Joy and Aaron are mildly befuddled by Molly “becoming a lesbian,” but Joy is acutely disappointed that Molly left New York City.

Now Aaron and Joy are old. As Aaron's dementia progresses, Joy steadfastly believes she's capable of caring for him, while simultaneously pining for her daughter and clucking over her son (who still lives in New York). Eventually, Joy is forced to face the limits of her abilities and the reality of Aaron's condition. Her life is devoted to sustaining his—and being a caretaker sustains her, at least for a time. But it’s impossible to survive on love alone.

Molly and Daniel oscillate between expressing guilt over their lack of involvement in their father’s care and issuing demands that Joy meet their expectations. They’re remarkably unskilled at reading the subtext of Joy's loneliness. Their tendency to take answers at face value, in order to retreat from offering real support, illustrates just how similar selfishness and selflessness really are. Even the best of intentions, presented for the sake of convenience, will turn sour. This collision of desire and practicality deeply challenges the Bergmans.

Indeed, the family's inability to put sentimentality aside is off-putting. They May Not Mean To is full of artfully timed humor, but the cloying relationships of the Bergman clan nearly suffocate the story. Maybe contemporary cynicism is to blame for desiring a family with more secrets and troubles, who fight and hold grudges and whose biggest sin isn't mere stubbornness. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to reconcile Schine’s pat characters with the wisdom the novel offers.

The best moments in the novel occur when Schine reflects on the value of dignity throughout a lifetime—that aging together means growing into each other; that growing up means pushing outward; and that being both a parent and a child complicates the relationship between parents and children. Through Aaron's dementia, Schine also raises the question of love in relation to selfhood. When is a person no longer him- or herself? Is someone still with you as long as they're still breathing?

Schine takes on the messy and frustrating aspects of old age, foregoing the cliché of a peaceful slide into death and the satisfaction of a life well lived. She confronts the confusing hollowness that comes from gazing at a body that was, moments ago, someone. It's too bad that the dynamic among the Bergmans can't be as tenderly shaded.

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Hidden Gold

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Hidden Gold by Ella Burakowski | Jewish Book Council

The Golds are a Jewish, upper-middle-class family who have creature comforts, social status, and political connections in Poland just before World War II. They have two daughters and a baby son. However, as the years pass and the Nazis gain strength, Leib, the father, recognizes the danger to his family. He contacts his cousin in Palestine and begins a plan to join him there. He is ready to leave when he receives a letter that tells him “…this is not the right time to join us. It is too dangerous.” Faced with “…the disintegration of his dream…” Leib tries to keep his family safe in Pinczow. But in 1939, the Germans invade Poland, and life is changed forever.

The rest of the book is an episodic narrative of how the family tries to survive. Initially, Leib sends his wife and children to a farmer who he thinks will hide them. The family hopes to reunite, and it is this hope that keeps them alive when the situation becomes desperate.

Each person or family who subsequently hides the Golds is faced with the same dilemma —how long can they keep them without discovery? Some who help are corrupt and want only money before they immediately turn the Golds over to the Nazis. One Polish woman who hides them temporarily says to David, the son, “I feel sorry for you Jews. We have no choice you know. It’s the way it must be. All you Jews must die.”

At one point, hidden but starving, the mother sends her daughter Shoshanah out with their remaining money to buy four cyanide capsules. “We need to escape to God on our own terms,” she says. The pharmacist tells Shoshanah, “The Red Army is close…if you just have hope you will survive.” The young girl returns without the poison.

Amazingly, through their grit, determination, ingenuity, and mutual support, all of the Golds but Leib survive. The final chapter is narrated by David, who returns years later with his grandson to their place of hiding.

This powerful book is presented like a mystery. The reader eagerly reads page after page in order to discover what will happen to the desperate characters. Written in simple but graphic language, this book is recommended for ages 14 and up.

Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America

Tue, 31 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America by Kenyon Zimmer | Jewish Book Council

Bracketing Italian and Jewish immigration to America has been a fruitful source of scholarly investigation by American historians. The two groups arrived in the United States at roughly the same time during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and they often settled together or in contiguous neighborhoods like New York City’s Lower East Side. Kessner and other historians have emphasized economic and social factors, including the diverse rates of social and economic mobility of Jews and Italians and their differing occupational profiles.

Kenyon Zimmer, an historian at the University of Texas in Arlington, has taken the study of Jewish and Italian immigrants into the political realm with this well-researched and eloquent reworking of his 2010 doctoral dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh. He estimates that there were anywhere from twenty to thirty thousand of both Jewish and Italian anarchists in America by the early twentieth century. This was a small percentage of the total Jewish and Italian immigrant population. Nevertheless, they, along with anarchists from other immigrant groups and with homegrown American anarchists, briefly made anarchism more popular than socialism or syndicalism within American radical circles.

The subtitle of Immigrants Against the State is misleading. What differentiated Jewish anarchists from other anarchists was not simply linguistics but, rather, the ethno-religious culture in which they had been raised and from which they sought to escape. Was the cultural baggage which Jews and Italians carried to America significantly different? Did their employment choices, family structure, and attitudes toward the role of women and traditional religion result in diverse political attitudes and practices? Jews from Czarist Russia, for example, had an understandable fear of authority, and Jewish politics in Eastern Europe were characterized by an emphasis on ideological purity and utopian fantasies. Was there anything comparable to this among Italian immigrants?

Jews, both in Europe and then in America, gravitated to political ideologies such as anarchism, socialism, and syndicalism, which held out the hope of a brave new world expunged of anti-Semitism and permeated with economic and social injustice. Politics for many Jews became their religion. Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, once complained in the 1980s that though he loved his Jewish constituents, they wrote too many letters. By contrast, sociologists have emphasized the amoralistic, sceptical, and apathetic attitudes of Italians and Italian immigrants towards politics. Italian immigrants had a far lower rate of naturalization than their Jewish counterparts, and they were slower to learn English. Even though Italian immigrants outnumbered Jewish immigrants, the American anarchist periodical with the highest circulation was the Yiddish Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor), and the most popular American socialist newspaper was the Yiddish Forverts (The Forward), which also had the largest circulation of any American ethnic daily.

Zimmer does not examine in depth the relationship between the politics of Jewish and Italian immigrants and culture, even though he claims his book offers “a social history of politics.” He asserts that one of his goals was explaining why thousands of Jewish and Italian immigrants became anarchists in the first place, but he does not provide any answers to this important question. Instead, he has produced a detailed history of the factional struggle among Jewish anarchists in New York City and Italian anarchists in an Italian neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey and the heavily Italian North Beach section of San Francisco, the home of Joe DiMaggio. His book also contains interesting discussions of the American anarchists’ responses to World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the postwar Red Scare, Zionism, and the Spanish Civil War.

Immigrants Against the State will be useful to scholars interested in the minutiae of radical American politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it has less value to other historians because of its narrow focus. In addition, some of Zimmer’s arguments are problematic. He claims, for example, that his subjects became anarchists while in America and not in Europe, even though relatively few American-born Jews and Italians ever became anarchists, and he frequently uses loaded words like “exploitation” in explaining why his subjects were attracted to anarchism. Most Americans a century ago were poor by the standards of the twenty-first century, but the economic and social conditions here were far better than those in Europe—and the potential for upward mobility was much higher. This explains why immigrants continued to cross the Atlantic in ever increasing numbers. Life in America was, as Zimmer quotes one Italian anarchist living in Paterson, “incomparably better than in Italy; you’re paid more, you dress better, even the factory girls wear bonnets.”

The history of American anarchists, as Zimmer admits, was one of utter failure. Their hope of a stateless world, he writes, “was egregiously out of step with the major political developments of the twentieth century. Their refusal to make peace with capitalism, communism, or ‘Americanism” rendered them anachronisms, especially as many ‘Third World’ anticolonial movements . . . turned to communism or authoritarian leaders for salvation.” They had little impact on local, national, and international politics, and they were unable, except for a few notable exceptions, to pass their political passions on to their children. Failure has also been the fate of other radical movements in America, and the major historical problem for historians of American radicalism has been to explain why this was so. Zimmer’s attributes the collapse of American anarchism in part to the end of the mass immigration from Europe after World War I. But if anarchism depended on a continual infusion of blood from Europe, then its prospects were bleak indeed. The acculturation of the immigrants and their children, their rise into the middle class, and their move out of the old immigrant neighborhoods inexorably lead them away from political movements seen to be foreign and un-American.

Zimmer, nevertheless, believes that the anarchists’ vision of a cosmopolitan and libertarian socialist future remains relevant. “Insofar as anarchists contributed to expanding freedom in their own day, and insofar as their legacy and influence continue to do so,” he says, “they may be judged as successful. . . . the anarchists’ dream of a patria without borders still stands as a tantalizing alternative.” The contemporary influence of anarchism, however, is faint, and there is little to indicate that its future will be any different.

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Isaac Mizrahi

Fri, 27 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Isaac Mizrahi by Chee Pearlman and Ulrich Lehmann | Jewish Book Council

You need not be a fashionista to enjoy Isaac Mizrahi by Chee Pearlman. This visually stunning book—meant to accompany the highly acclaimed exhibit Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History on display at the New York Jewish Museum March 18 through August 7, 2016—is clearly a labor of love devoted to showing the beauty and ingenuity of Mizrahi’s work. Mizrahi is more than an “interesting designer” writes Claudia Gould, the Helen Goldsmith Menshel Director of the Jewish Museum. He is, rather, “a great designer—one who merits the extended attention of a museum—is a change maker, a visionary, someone who both captures a key cultural movement and creates it.”

Mizrahi was born in Brooklyn in 1961 to observant Syrian-American Jewish parents. In a candid interview, conducted by Pearlman and reprinted in the volume, Mizrahi discusses how his sense of design appeared early in his life. “I started making puppets when I was quite young, and they were glamorous.” The puppets had a “dazzling color palette” that would remain one of his signatures, writes Pearlman. When Mizrahi was ten, his father, a children’s-wear manufacturer, bought him a small refurbished sewing machine. His first creations with the machine were a wool skirt and a shawl for his mother, which she wore on the High Holidays. By age fifteen, Mizrahi was selling his designs to high-end boutiques. However, life was not easy for him. He says; “I went to Yeshivah of Flatbush, the wrongest school imaginable. It was a very lonely time, and I was hugely fat. I was hopelessly bullied. In those days it wasn’t even called x bullying, it was just called society. Yet somehow I knew that they were wrong. And that taught me about following my own perspective, my own dream.” That is what Mizrahi has done throughout his life.

Mizrahi’s designs include costly haute couture worn by such celebrities as Natalie Portman, Sandra Bernhardt, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Liza Minelli, and Sarah Jessica Parker. He has also created dazzling costumes used in comedy, ballet, opera, movies, and numerous theatrical productions. Always a cutting-edge entrepreneur, Mizrahi was one of the first designers to develop a “high/low collaboration between A-list designers and mass-market retailers that are now commonplace” reports Lynn Yaeger in her essay, “American Master.” In 2002 Mizrahi launched a line of clothes for Target, a mass-market retailer. He also has produced a television program, Isaac Mizrahi Live!, which presents his ready-to-wear designs on the QVC network.

Isaac Mizrahi also addresses Mizrahi’s second career as a performer. As a youngster he attended the High School for Performing Arts; he studied acting for many years and also played piano. He created an acclaimed one-man cabaret act, Les MiZrahi. Theatre was, as he says in his interview, his “first passion” but for him he saw “Hollywood as a road to nowhere.” Nonetheless, he has appeared in several walk-on movie roles, and was the subject of the documentary Unzipped, which follows him through the making of his fall 1994 collection. The movie displayed his brilliant and whimsical working style along with his distinctive humor. As Mizrahi says of himself, “I think humor sets me apart. I thrive on self-mockery. A lot of designers out there have to take it all seriously.” Pearlman agrees, stating that “humor” is at the “core of his sensibility.”

This book is a delight to read and visually beautiful. The essays by Lynn Yaeger, Kelly Taxter, and Ulrich Lehman further clarify why Mizrahi is such a unique and important figure.

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Unspeakable Things

Tue, 24 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Unspeakable Things: A Novel by Kathleen Spivack | Jewish Book Council

In the midst of World War II, Herbert and his wife, Adeline, and their family move to the United States to escape the war and pursue the American Dream. Living in a small apartment in New York, each family member feels not only cramped at home but also confined in their respective public lives. Adeline is suffering from a mental disorder and is temporarily living in an asylum while David, Herbert’s son and Ilse’s husband, travels to Washington to read undercover documents relating to the war and his infrequent visits home leave an absence in the lives of his children, who, despite all the other adults around, aren’t cared for enough. Maria, Herbert’s granddaughter, is brought to the family doctor, Felix, a sadistic pedophile who ruins Maria’s childhood and sense of self. Through the character of Maria, Spivack shows the vulnerability not only of children but of recent immigrants. Felix, on the other hand, has a mission to not allow genius and beauty to leave the world, even if it means cutting away body parts to preserve in his laboratory, secrets that end up conflicting with his personal desires.

When Anna, who due to physical deformities and certain animal-like characteristics is referred to as “The Rat,” arrives in the United States to live with Herbert and his family, she reveals to Maria during late-night whispered conversations about her forced sexual experiences with the Russian Tsar Rasputin, which allows Maria to feel some sense of relief at knowing that she is not the only one who has endured unspeakable things.

Weaved between the narratives of Herbert’s family members is the story of the Tolstoi String Quartet, a Viennese group so engrossed in their love for music that they treat their instruments like lovers and their wives like pets. When their wives begin to protest their treatment, the Quartet begins to fall apart and is in need of specific services from Herbert’s family in America, who might be able to help them play great music again. The novel begins to fall into magical realism through the characters of the Quartet who require a certain kind of magic and belief to be successful, particularly in a time of war.

Each chapter of the novel provides a glimpse into a certain character’s relationship or experience so that each chapter feels like the reader is sitting in a room with these characters as their stories of distress or sexual awakening or family drama unfold. The somewhat short chapters often switch their focus on different characters, making the novel a page-turner. Later in the novel, it is revealed that some of the characters who did not seem to be connected to each other in the beginning are actually connected in very important ways, and due to many secrets, people turn out to be somewhat worse than originally imagined.

An unusual novel, Unspeakable Things is a pleasure to read and the music of Spivack’s prose lifts off the page.

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Where the Jews Aren't

Tue, 24 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region by Masha Gessen | Jewish Book Council

Welcome to Birobidzhan: “something between a fantasy and a joke . . . perhaps the worst good idea ever.” Thus award-winning journalist Masha Gessen describes the main subject of her book, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. By her own admission, Gessen grew up with a Russian Jewish identity of “non-belonging.” Here she explores the story of Russian Jewishness through the lens of the fantastical, failed Yiddish state, searching for “Birobidzhan, the concept of home, and knowing when to leave.”

At the far east of Russia, by the Manchurian border, lies the land of Birobidzhan,which was declared a Jewish autonomous region in 1934, with Yiddish as its official language; the Soviet committee in charge envisioned a site for “the preservation of [The Jewish People’s] nationality.” It was designed as an agricultural colony, but the region’s distinguishing features were vicious mosquitoes, swamps, and rocky terrain. The farms soon flopped and were replaced with industrial plants. Early settlers were fleeing poverty and pogroms in the 1930s; by the 1940s, they were refugees of World War II. At its peak, Birobidzhan had six Yiddish-language schools, the Birobidzhan Star newspaper, and a library. But the vision was short-lived. Designated to accommodate minorities in post-revolutionary Russia and favored for the patriotic boost it gave during the war, it was condemned as the fuel of an “internal enemy” shortly afterwards. By 1948 the Jewish nationalist project was perceived as a threat. Stalinist purges cleansed the region of its activists, thousands of Yiddish books were burned, and Russification set in with full force. A Times correspondent visiting Birobidzhan in 1954 remarked simply, “I could not see that the place had any special Jewish character.”

Gessen’s book reports on Birobidzhan as a historical entity, but also inspects the “Jewish Autonomous Region” as an idea. Between shtetl and state, religion and regime, where do the Jews belong? What language does the Jew use to express the political, spiritual and cultural feeling of “home”? Zeev Jabotinsky and Theodor Herzl are discussed, but Gessen finds the answer in two other figures: historian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941) and poet David Bergelson (1884–1952). Dubnow, rejecting Zionism and socialism, argued that the Jewish people could domesticate diaspora: Judaism did not need a land, but a strong memory and multipolar community. Bergelson believed in a cultural Judaism expressed in Yiddish, and in Why I am in Favor of Birobidzhan (1935), he described the region as the place to “build a glorious Jewish culture, socialist in form and national in content.” Granted, this was a propaganda piece. More than a decade earlier, he had cursed the Bolsheviks. In two decades, he would disappear, accused of treason, on the Night of the Murdered Poets. Gessen highlights Dubnow’s ideology, contextualizing the dream of Jewish diasporic nationalism. Through Bergelson’s story, she presents the complexity of that dream for the Yiddish activist of the early twentieth century, desperate for survival—first, devastatingly, in Western Europe—and then, very soon, in the Soviet East.

Where the Jews Aren’t, though eloquently written and chronologically ordered, wanders as unexpectedly as its subjects, shifting dizzyingly from Dubnow to Bergelson to Birobidzhan and back. As Gessen explains, the book is best understood as a reflection on Russian Jewishness with Birobidzhan as its case study. Two forces charge the history of Birobidzhan. One is Jewish identity, a pulsing memory of the power of Yiddish prose and politics. The second is terror. Gessen stresses the importance of a “flight instinct”: “the suitcase, packed, is always by the door.” Gessen’s moves—from the Soviet Union to the U.S. to Russia and back—bookend the Birobidzhan story, becoming a contemporary frame for the cycles of fear and hope of Russian Jewry. Where the Jews Aren’t begins and ends with bags packed, ready for departure. But how lucky we are that Gessen takes the suitcase by the door and opens it: a glimpse of what is being taken along, and what is left behind.

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Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Mon, 23 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen | Jewish Book Council

In the first months after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Nazis enacted the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of the Genetically Diseased Offspring, which allowed for Nazi “genetic health Courts” to forcibly sterilize any citizen who suffered from a list of alleged genetic disorders. This law designed to eliminate “lives not worth living” culminated in the Nazi Euthanasia program, initiated in 1939, which led to the death of over 200,000 “unfit” German citizens.

The Nazi law came six years after the United States Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), an 8-1 ruling upheld a Virginia law which allowed for the eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. At the center of the court case was Carrie Buck, a young woman, who was deemed “feebleminded” and shipped off to the Virginia-based Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. She was forcibly sterilized following the Supreme Court decision, although it was later shown that she was healthy and mentally able.

The court’s majority opinion was given by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Social Darwinist who believed that the Nordic Protestant elite was threatened by the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the increasing high birth rate by “imbeciles, morons, and idiots.” Holme’s conclusion reached its apex when he wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Imbeciles is the gripping history of Buck v. Bell, wherein Carrie Buck and a careless attorney were pitted against scientists , lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped by incompetence.” Cohen, a former member of The New York Times editorial board, a senior writer for Time magazine, and a graduate of Harvard Law school, tells the story with great passion and provides the reader with a history of the American Eugenics movement , which in its heyday, was not only responsible for the passage of The National Origins Act in 1924, which sought to protect the white Anglo-Saxon majority by curbing immigration (Hitler praised Congress’s passage of the act) but was also comprised of geneticists like Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin who were antisemitic. Cohen notes that Grant’s theories about racial superiority and the need to forcibly deal with the weak and defective greatly influenced the Nazis who translated his writings into German. Part of Mein Kampf and later Nazi racial policies “appeared to borrow directly from Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, later discovered in Adolf Hitler’s personal library.

Indeed, Cohen makes a strong case that American genetic theory was not only an influence for Nazi Germany’s deadly racial hygiene laws but indirectly to an immigration policy that prevented many Jews in the 1930s from seeking a refuge from Nazi persecution in the United States.

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The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

Mon, 23 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir (ridiculous spelled backwards), is the story of an imaginary city-state in eastern Iran, and in the course of the book three different archeological expeditions at three different points in history will look for Suolucidir. The first, a British expedition is launched on the eve of World War I, next the invented Franco-Soviet Friendship Dig whose members, on eve of World War II, are desperate to get out of France, and the present by a New York archeologist poking into the hornet’s nest that is Iran just after the Shah went into exile. The groups are searching for treasure, oil, evidence of the Lost Tribes of Israel. People disappear, relics are stolen. Lost Civilization has been compared to Indiana Jones meets Umberto Eco with a bit of Etgar Keret thrown in as well.

To quote the Publisher’s Weekly review: "Daitch’s fantastically fun novel is brainy, escapist fiction at its best. The novel is like a Scheherazade tale, never quite giving the reader time or reason to pause."

Deborah Rising

Mon, 23 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Deborah Rising by Avraham Azrieli | Jewish Book Council

A 13-year-old girl escapes a forced marriage to the brutish son of a local ruler in ancient Israel. A redhead orphan with an uncanny mix of intelligence, gullibility and resolve, she embarks on a quest to find a legendary Edomite elixir-maker, famed for having turned women into men. Her goal is to convince him to do the same for her. Deborah's journey proves increasingly perilous: her life is threatened by wild beasts, lustful men, unscrupulous priests and warring Hebrew tribesmen, whereas her unlikely allies include lepers, slaves, Moabite traders, and a dead tiger. But Deborah is determined to succeed. As a man, she would not have to endure a marriage of servitude, but instead become entitled to inherit her dead father's land and fulfill her dream of serving as God's prophet.

The Desert and Cities Sing

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Desert and Cities Sing: Discovering Today's Israel by Lin Arison and Diana C. Stoll | Jewish Book Council

Israel: the word conjures so many potent images. A land of challenge and abundance, solemnity and chutzpah. A vortex of ancient ritual and persistent strife. A spiritual homeplace. A country of mind-boggling creativity and enterprise.

The Desert and the Cities Sing: Discovering Today’s Israel by Lin Arison and Diana C. Stoll is an unprecedented project: a treasure box of four books, each focusing on a different aspect of contemporary life and culture in Israel; four related films; a portfolio of images by award-winning photographer Neil Folberg; an animated feature, a map, and much more. Together, the collection provides an experience of Israel that may surprise readers whose knowledge of the country is based solely on front-page news. This unique compilation reveals a vibrant land moving quickly into the future.

The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel by Uri Bar-Joseph | Jewish Book Council

Uri Bar-Joseph has written two “books” under the title The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel. The first book is a biographical portrait of Ashraf Marwan, loathed son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and trusted advisor (until he wasn’t) of Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadar. Bar-Joseph argues that Marwan’s life was ended when he was assassinated in his London home (by business associates, the Mossad, or Egyptian intelligence) while living out his final years as a wealthy international businessman, effectively exiled from his country of origin. The second book is a thriller of how the Mossad recruited Marwan, used the intelligence he provided to defend Israel and Israeli interests abroad—most critically during the Yom Kippur War—and then released his identity as a Mossad agent to the world. Both “books” are well worth reading, the former more so than the latter.

Since it was revealed that Marwan was a Mossad agent, the debate over Marwan’s true loyalties has centered on whether he was a double agent for Egyptian intelligence. Bar-Joseph successfully convinces the skeptical reader that an ambitious Egyptian national, born into a well-respected nationalistic Egyptian family, married to the daughter of the most revered Arab leader since the twelfth-century sultan Saladin, with no known Zionist sympathies or pan-national Arab antipathies, was no double agent for Egyptian intelligence. In fact, Bar-Joseph argues, he willingly provided, for relatively little money and at great personal risk, reliable and important information to Israeli intelligence over a long period of time. This information saved many Israeli lives and allowed Israel the opportunity to call up reserves during the Yom Kippur War in time to prevent the Syrians from recapturing the Golan Heights.

Bar-Joseph demonstrates that Marwan betrayed his country by effectively rebutting counter-evidence to suggest he was a double agent. The most interesting parts of this analysis occur when Bar-Joseph addresses how Egypt’s response to Marwan’s death—including the funeral honors accorded him by Sadat’s successor and president of Egypt at the time of Marwan’s death, Hosni Mubarak—further prove that Marwan was no double agent.

Bar-Joseph also delves into Marwan’s personality to show how his decision to betray Egypt compares with the personalities and motives of other twentieth-century traitors. The best parts of this analysis occur when Bar-Joseph shows how Marwan’s ambition, spite, ego (and, of course, opportunity) caused him to make the decision to betray his country. These parts could have benefited from a more thorough comparison to other twentieth-century traitors.

The second “book” reads like the John le Carre novel after which it is stylistically modeled. A question that runs through this narrative is whether or not the highest levels of Israeli intelligence, military, and government trust the information that Marwan provides—and how their continued skepticism impacts the Israeli government's decisions in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur War.

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Dreidels on the Brain

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Dreidels on the Brain: by Joel Ben Izzy | Jewish Book Council

A recognizable middle school antihero confides in readers in an empathetic, funny, and heartwarming story that cuts across the expected grain. Set during Hanukkah, this wonderful novel is full of universal dilemmas and realistic pre-teen situations at home and at school.

Despite its lighthearted delivery, including many laugh-out-loud scenarios and asides, the book offers serious consideration about being Jewish in a non-Jewish world, poor in a well-to-do one, and sharing a family that runs from difficult to odd when the narrator only wants to be normal, hang with his friends, and succeed as a young magician. The book runs chronologically through the eight nights of Hanukkah, each chapter a candle, with a bonus finale from the shamash when Joel, who only wishes to live unseen, is on display at the winter holiday assembly with his parents and older brothers. How and why he gets here is the trajectory of the book. With each succeeding chapter, the reader loves Joel more, cheering for him to star in his magic show, get the best of the dreidel spins, and find his miracles in dreidels, candles, or other signs.

Joel finds talking to God easier than his bar mitzvah lessons from the cantor or receiving help from a popular girl to perform his magic. He worries about himself, but moreso about his father, riddled with arthritis and facing a crazy cure that was popular in 1971 when this faux memoir is set. The beautiful lesson comes not from glowing candles or Joel, but from an orange, which an old man offers as a symbol of hope on the bus Joel is forced to ride in car-crazy California. Joel instigates chuckles as he pokes gentle fun at much of the Jewish culture around him, including an incredible array of the different ways to spell Hanukkah.

Dreidels on the Brain adheres honestly to the voice of the 12-year-old narrator, who begins to understand the world through his chatty, breezy, and humorous dissection of events. This book is a miracle of Jewish identity for Hanukkah and throughout the year.

Recommended for ages 9 – 13.

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Finding Mr. Rightstein

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Finding Mr. Rightstein: by Nancy Davidoff Kelton | Jewish Book Council

Nancy Davidoff Kelton’s heartbreaking, hilarious memoir of her journey from a Buffalo childhood with a depressed mother who was in and out of "the nervous hospital" to the often daunting but never dull world of dating as a divorced mom in Manhattan.

Jewish Lunacy

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Jewish Lunacy: 6,000 Years of Tradition, Pride and Stories as Told by Someone Who Missed the First 5,960 Years by Eric Golub | Jewish Book Council

Jewish Lunacy is a lighthearted slice of Jewish life meant to bring all Jews together. It is a humorous spiritual journey that weaves love of Judaism with love of family in a story of trying to obey religious laws amid the secular temptations of the world around us. Whether liberal or conservative, secular or religious, Jewish Lunacy can unite all readers in laughter and purpose.

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis | Jewish Book Council

Daniel Gordis’s new history of Israel should become a standard for years to come, perhaps even a classic. At 576 pages, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn can indeed be considered concise, as so much more could be and has been written about each era and associated issues addressed in the book. Clear, forceful, frank, and often inspiring, this mighty tome of both academic and personal writing explores the ups, downs, and turning points in a history that begins with Theodore Herzl’s vision and ends with tomorrow’s challenges.

Gordis is masterful at stepping into the personalities of the key thinkers and doers of the modern Jewish state. His portraits are alive, and his judgments are shrewd. He understands and conveys with authority the ways in which, for the most part, the right leaders arise to encounter the troubles of specific eras, such as Menachem Begin’s fruitful ascendency following a period of relative disgrace and invisibility. Quick to point out the flaws in his parade of Israel’s pre-state and later leaders, Gordis exposes how the times make the leader (and vice versa) with sensitivity and nuance.

As vigorously as he draws the pre-state decades of Zionist immigration, Gordis’s depictions of independent, modern Israel’s remarkable and even miraculous ability to absorb millions of émigrés are truly uplifting; the statistics are staggering, especially those examined from periods when Israel’s economy was relatively weak. Each of Israel’s major and minor wars receives its due in terms of its relative complexity and consequence. Perhaps the most intriguing chapter is “Six Days of War Change a Country Forever” about the 1967 war: the euphoria which followed Israel’s multilayered victory is palpable straight off the page.

The very next chapter, “The Burden of Occupation,” redirects readers’ understanding of the Israeli mood and sense of reality. Gordis quotes Amos Oz: “Even unavoidable occupation is corrupting occupation.” Such has been the unintended consequence or collateral damage for Israel, along with dangerous hostility from many quarters. Gordis’s decision not to employ a term less-charged than “occupation” is ultimately to his credit, though it will be a point of contention for many readers and reviewers.

One might not expect Gordis to quote poetry in a history book, but he judiciously employs poetic passages to help shape the history of the Israeli heart and soul—including the words of Naomi Shemer, whose song lyrics trace the shifting emotions and perceptions of the people of Israel. In later chapters, Gordis observes changes in Israeli sensibilities. Some changes are the result of generational contrast. After all, how many of today’s Israelis have memories of the Holocaust, or even of the great challenges of 1947 and 1948? Who really expected a Hebrew-speaking nation to emerge and produce a major body of literature in an old/new language? Who foresaw the ride from socialism to capitalism, from farm laborers to technocrats, from Zionist secularism to a growing religiosity?

Gordis guides readers through all of this and much more, with a blend of energy and grace, brain and heart in mutual embrace.

Acknowledgments, appendices, chapter notes, conclusion, epilogue, index, introduction.

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Weigh Your Words and Throw Away Your Scale

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Weigh Your Words and Throw Away Your Scale!: The Jewish Woman's Guide to Losing Weight and Feeling Great by Gloria Davidson Hope Stanger | Jewish Book Council

Weigh Your Words and Throw Away Your Scale! is a small book for Jewish women to carry with them as a motivational tool throughout the day, regardless of whatever food plan they choose. It's designed to support them in breaking the cycle of weight loss and weight gain. Using new cognitive-behavioral techniques that utilize power of positive speaking to create change in our thinking and actions, Weigh Your Words is a 26-day plan to help women struggling with their food, bodies, and weight believe and see that change is simple, doable and joyful. Once the 26 days are complete, a woman can go back to the beginning to give herself ongoing support while she meets her goals; shifting her thoughts into positive beliefs and weight-loss success. Complete with healthy plant-based recipes and nutritional action steps, Weigh Your Words and Throw Away Your Scale! is a Jewish woman's personal cheerleader; a best friend to turn to during difficult moments to help her say, "I can!"

Girl: My Childhood and the Second World War

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Girl: My Childhood and the Second World War by Alona Frankel | Jewish Book Council

Alona Frankel, author of the best-selling Once Upon A Potty, now offers readers an insight into her own childhood. Her parents were educated, Polish Jewish Communists— “nonreligious Jews,” as her father put it. Alona was only two years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. When the ghetto was “liquidated,” a Christian family agreed to hide her mother and father in a workroom in their apartment, but wouldn’t allow them to bring their baby; a young child could make noise at the wrong moment and get everyone killed. So Alona’s parents paid a woman to pretend their daughter was Christian and board her in the countryside. Alas, when her parents’ meager resources ran out, the deal ended. The woman simply dropped off Alona at her parents’ hidden room where she wasn’t allowed, forcing Alona to hide from both the Nazis and from her parents’ host family. Still, the three of them survived and after the war restarted their lives in what became socialist Poland. This might have been a good fit for a pair of Communists, except the anti-Semitism problem hadn’t disappeared like it was supposed to. In the end there was only one viable option—aliyah.

The story of a girl hiding with her family in a secret room during the Holocaust, naturally brings to mind Anne Frank. But Frank was a teenager, confiding her thoughts and feelings to her diary. Alona was so young, she had to be taught a simplified, survival version of reality: there was a “war in the world,” and there was an “Aryan side of the world,” where Aryans had life but Jews got death (except she was not to use the term “Zyd” or Jew, but “the children of light” instead). While her family’s faith that “Tovarish Stalin” would save them was painfully ironic, it did stave off despair, which helped them survive. So there is a tragic difference between Anne Frank and Alona Frankel as well: the Nazis murdered Anne Frank, so she never had the chance to revisit her experiences from the perspective of an older woman, as Alona did.

Frankel tells her story in the voice of a child. Significant events are repeatedly retold, retold, and retold before the narrative moves forward, as if obeying some recursive storytelling rule never to go forward without taking a few steps backwards. As she recalls various incidents, she repeats key phrases (“I cried, cried, and cried”) three times, recalling the three wishes in fairy tales. Her reluctance to tell everything at once, a sort of stubborn withholding, almost prepares readers for her unpleasant stories. From the “coffin” she sleeps in, to her fascination with the fleas and lice and roaches and bedbugs she lived with, to the pair of mice she and her father “trained,” or the dead rat she adopted, the facts of the stories are reiterated again and again, each time with another detail added.

We are reminded that there is nothing linear about the process of memory, especially when it carries such enormous emotional weight. The trauma Frankel went through was real, even if it wasn’t acknowledged. It seeps out every time she describes the survivors who came to her parents’ apartment, who rolled up their sleeves so the numbers showed, and told the stories of the loved ones who did not make it. As Frankel says, “it was exhausting, depressing, repellent, boring. And it always made me feel guilty.”

Like many Holocaust memoirs, Frankel’s is filled with unresolved pain, but there is something about her childlike wisdom that makes us listen.

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Dark Muse

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Dark Muse by Philip Mann | Jewish Book Council

Rewriting the myth of the muse in a manner placing it firmly in Jewish tradition and the Torah, Dark Muse is the fantastical story of Vi Gold and Lee Marvin, two women who have the unique ability to either inspire the gifted, creative few or drive them to suicide. Vi hates her role and would do anything to live a normal life; Lee is casual about her fate and about violence. As an uneasy friendship develops between the two, their dual paths are crossed by would-be lovers and a rabbi who becomes involved in their destinies—to his own demise.

Searching for John Hughes

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching 80s Movies by Jason Diamond | Jewish Book Council

Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching 80s Movies is Jason Diamond’s memoir of being a Jewish kid from a broken home in a Chicago suburb—sometimes homeless, always restless—who found comfort and connection in the likewise broken lives he saw in the suburban Chicago of John Hughes’ oeuvre. His obsession with Hughes eventually convinced him to write a book-length biography of his favorite filmmaker, despite lacking any qualifications, training, background, platform, or direction. The quest to do so is as hilarious as it is hopeless when it takes Diamond to New York City, where the reality that some dreams are not meant to come true, and that some books are not meant to be written, finally sinks in.

Loving and Leaving Washington

Mon, 16 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Loving and Leaving Washington: Reflections on Public Service by John Yochelson | Jewish Book Council

This memoir recounts a lifelong commitment to public service rooted in a Jewish immigrant experience. The thread that ties the author's career together is a desire to give back for the privilege of a preparatory school and Ivy League education. The personal story highlights the high expectations and support of striving parents in upstate New York, antisemitism at Yale in the early 1960s, falling in love with a French-Jewish girl in Paris, military service in Germany, collaboration with Jean Monnet, and an eventual return to Jewish tradition. The professional side of the book includes candid insights of working with Henry Kissinger and Paul Volcker for a decade, as well as assisting Baron Edmond de Rothschild with his philanthropy in Israel. The concluding chapters, which focus on the rise of bare-knuckled political combat in Washington and its impact on public service, should be of interest to a broad Jewish audience.

Bellow's People

Fri, 13 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Bellow's People by David Mikics | Jewish Book Council

The turbulent lives of Saul Bellow’s friends and family are filled with jealousy, treachery, fame and poetry, but despite their drama and historical impact, they are little-known outside of academic English departments. Fortunately, in Bellow’s People, David Mikics condenses an introductory survey course into a few hundred pages.

Familiarity with Bellow’s writing will help readers find and enjoy Bellow’s People, but isn’t required for comprehension. Mikics’s book is much more a collection of biographical essays about literati than a work of literary criticism. Rather than focus on the originality and genius of Bellow’s voice, Mikics fills the pages instead with fragmentary quotes of the author and his acquaintances’ idiosyncratic, natural speech. Mikics’s interest in Yiddish and the subtle way Bellow saturated his work with it deserves special note—and perhaps its own study—but it does not occupy a major place in these stories.

The tour is roughly chronological, following the order of Bellow’s novels from The Adventures of Augie March to Ravelstein, blending summary with biographical accounts of the bases of the characters in Bellow’s life. Some of Bellow’s people, like the novelist Ralph Ellison, never figured into his literature, but Mikics traces their impact on Bellow’s work convincingly. Bellow himself emerges as one of his own most interesting people, figuring as the model for the hero in many of his novels and a marker of his evolving idea of heroism, a sort of extended Shakespearian debate with himself as he matures about the absurdity of life.

The organization is sometimes awkward, as when Mikics emphatically ascribes personality traits to real people in the course of summarizing and drawing parallels between Bellow’s fiction well before those people appear in anecdotes. We’re reminded of the fury Saul’s brother Maury inherited from their furious father before any scene of outrage is introduced.

Mikics’s main critical argument that Bellow’s literary innovation is to make raw realism an uplifting comedic enterprise is undercut by the focus on Bellow’s chronic descent into bitterness and jealousy. Mikics is probably correct, but look to the novels for the comedy. Like Bellow, Mikics allows precise descriptions of his subjects’ antics to speak for themselves with very little editorializing. Each real-life episode (the infidelity and collapse of Bellow’s first marriage; his rebound remarriage to an ex-girlfriend of Philip Roth) reveals a depth of character vivid enough for fiction.

Mikics’s constant task is instead to situate the people in history and the voices in their literary contexts, comparing and contrasting everything in the style of an example collegiate essay. The book is academic for a popular audience, but it makes an approachable and rewarding course. Over the course of his own lifetime, Bellow preserved countless larger-than-life personalities in raw but masterful portraits of their lives in motion; Mikics couldn’t possibly approach the same task in these slim biographies, but he manages with a similar spirit to capture the epic scope of Bellow’s effort.

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The Koren Pirkei Avot

Fri, 13 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Koren Pirkei Avot | Jewish Book Council

Matthew Miller of Koren Publishers states that the goal for the Koren Pirkei Avot is to fulfill the teaching, "It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to stand aside from it" for the curious, thoughtful student. The translation provided by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and the commentary of Rabbi Marc D. Angel create a holistic approach to the text and encourage the reader to strive for a truthful and uniquely spiritual life. The structure is designed to provide original insights to the reader who is familiar with the text, and at the same time provide explanations of the sages’ personalities and the time periods in which they served to give the unfamiliar reader a clearer understanding of the teachings. Rabbi Sacks’s concise translation is true to Pirkei Avot’s straightforward presentation and Rabbi Angel's commentary, which includes contemporary creatives, scientists, and philosophers as sources, bring a new sense of connection to the teachings for the modern reader. It is evident that Rabbi Angel has internalized the text deeply. He does not shy away from questioning the motives behind the teachings, yet he compassionately crafts answers that encourage us to try to understand the sages and their personal challenges. What makes this version of Pirkei Avot unique is a recurring reminder to the reader to honor the teachings of the sages, yet balance those teachings with an honest personal understanding. In response to the teaching "Let your house be a meeting place for sages; sit in the dust at their feet, and with thirst, drink in their words,” Rabbi Angel explains that "The Talmudic tradition, too, fosters a spirit of questioning, analysis, and careful reasoning. While students must listen attentively to the words of their teachers, they must never surrender their own intellectual freedom in the process." This empowering explanation gives as much responsibility to the reader as to the two great leaders who collaborated on this version of Pirkei Avot, to continue the chain of creating new and exciting approaches to our tradition.

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Six Memos From the Last Millennium

Fri, 06 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Six Memos From the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud by Joseph Skibell | Jewish Book Council

Joseph Skibell, a Sami Rohr Prize choice-award winner celebrated for his rich, imaginative writing, takes on the stories of the Talmud, or Aggadah, in Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. Instead of a more typical reading of the stories as history, or even a literary analysis of the stories themselves, Skibell finds these episodes to be mythic, larger than life, and deliciously enigmatic. His treatment of them is highly readable, and deeply thought-provoking.

The style of the Aggadah is terse, describing characters’ dialogue and actions almost like stage directions in a screenplay. It does not describe their motivations, nor does it render definitive judgements, and Skibell rightly plays up that ambiguity as he fleshes out the narratives. It is not always clear if a line of Talmudic dialogue was meant to come across harshly or calmly, earnestly or sarcastically, or even as a question or an answer (this is even true in its legal sections, raising arguments that have spanned the centuries of rabbinic tradition). The best actors can convey multiple meanings at once, and, as Skibell unpacks these stories, he accomplishes the same effect in his writing to mesmerizing effect.

Each of the five chapters, or memos from the past, is based around a series of aggadic stories that is reprinted in translation and then elucidated. Skibell’s own writing is thick and lushly layered, providing a compelling contrast to his source material. He adds context by making reference to other stories about the characters that provide more detail, and by expanding each small detail into critical plot points. For example, his first story centers on the fourth century sage Rabbi Yohanan, whose last name, bar Naphha, literally means “son of the Blacksmith.” From there, Skibell constructs a story of Rabbi Yohanan the master smith or alchemist, eventually even blending him with the creative power of the fire itself. As he describes them, the rabbis blur the line between being historical people and disembodied, elemental forces, working against each other and reacting in each other’s presence.

The sages in Skibell’s stories are set against the devastating backdrop of the destruction of Judea at the hands of the Roman Empire, and compensate by creating rich worlds of their own. Through the ritualized back and forth of Talmudic discourse, they build the Torah that animates the inner world of their study halls. Through the intensity and passion of their argumentation, they build each other - and themselves. However, the stories Skibell selects are tragedies, not comedies (at least that is how he reads them). The sages were ultimately unable to keep their internal worlds from collapsing just as their external world had. In fact, they were usually the catalysts of their own downfall. Sometimes it was because they failed to live up to their own exacting standards. Chillingly, though, Skibell shows us that often it was precisely because they had. In this way, he presents the Talmud’s treatment of its own authors as both role models and warnings, a remarkably self-reflective approach that is needed today perhaps more than ever.

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Irena's Children

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Irena's Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto by Tilar Mazzeo | Jewish Book Council

In 1942, a young social worker named Irena Sendler was granted access to the Warsaw Ghetto as a public health specialist. While there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling children out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them. Driven to extreme measures and aided by a network of local tradesmen, ghetto residents, and a lover in the Jewish resistance, Irena made dangerous trips through the city's sewers, hid children in coffins, snuck them under overcoats at checkpoints, and slipped them through secret passages in abandoned buildings, keeping the names of the thousands of children she saved in a secret list buried in bottles under an old apple tree in a friend's back garden so that their families could find them after the war. She could not know that more than ninety percent of their families would perish.

The Nazi Hunters

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski | Jewish Book Council

Andrew Nagorski, a former bureau chief for Newsweek and the author of Hitlerland and Last Stop in Vienna, among other works of nonfiction, delivers a comprehensive and riveting account of the relatively small number of men and women who sought to bring Nazis to justice after the end of the Second World War. The efforts of recognized Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, Tuvia Friedman, Elizabeth Holtzman, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, as well as less familiar names— Benjamin Ferencz, Fritz Bauer, William Denson, Michael Musmanno, and Jan Sehn—are told by Nagorski in a book that is never dull and completely absorbing.

Following the end of the war, the Allied governments were engaged in preventing the spread of Soviet Communism. The creation of West Germany became an important barrier as well as a showcase in the ever evolving Cold War. A number of Nazis, however, who normally would have been tried as war criminals now became vital resources for the West in the struggle against Communism—and from the opposing side, as well. Nagorski notes that at the end of the war there were about eight million Germans who were members of the Nazi party, leading the Allies to conclude that it was almost impossible to try all of them, especially since many of them were useful in the struggle against the Soviet Union. The decision was made, therefore, to bring only the top tier of Nazi leaders to trial. Nagorski cites a memo, a secret telegram sent from the British Commonwealth Relations office in London to Commonwealth members, which rationalized the response to pursue a limited number of Nazi war criminals, “In our view punishment of war criminals is a matter of discouraging future generations than of meting out retribution of every guilty individual[…] we are convinced that it is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible.”

Not everyone in or out of government agreed with this policy: Nagorski describes the work of those “Nazi Hunters” who worked to convince their government to pursue second and the third tier of Nazi war criminals—resulting in the Auschwitz trials and the trial of the Einsaztgruppen—as well as the work of the United States Office of Special Investigations (OSI), whose establishment by Congress was made possible by the persistence of Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman. The book also addresses non-governmental Nazi-hunting organizations—such as the World Jewish Congress, which exposed the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim—and individual efforts, like those of the Klarsfeld’s pursuit of Klaus Barbie. Nagorski also describes the controversial work of Simon Wiesenthal in providing Israel with information that led to the capture of Adolf Eichmann, and much more.

Some seven decades after the end of the war against Nazi Germany, there remains only a handful of those war criminals who escaped justice. The full history of how the Nazi hunters tracked those who perpetrated the crimes of the Third Reich is told in full in this indispensable book.

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Ready, Set, Breathe

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Ready, Set, Breathe: Practicing Mindfulness with Your Children for Fewer Meltdowns and a More Peaceful Family by Carla Naumburg, PhD | Jewish Book Council

Being a parent is stressful, and when your child has a meltdown, it can be difficult to keep cool and help your child calm down. Ready, Set, Breathe offers real solutions to help you both deal with stressful situations using everyday games, activities, rituals, and healthy habits. Designed for parents of children ages 3 – 10, this book is a fun, engaging, and effective way to learn how to share mindfulness with your whole family.

Die Laughing

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Die Laughing: Killer Jokes for Newly Old Folks by William Novak | Jewish Book Council

From the co-creator of The Big Book of Jewish Humor comes a laugh-out-loud collection of jokes and cartoons about growing older that deals with memory loss, long marriages, medicine, changes in sexuality, the afterlife, and much more.

Growing older can be unsettling and surprising, so what better way to deal with this new stage of life than to laugh about it? Die Laughing includes more than enough jokes (and a nice sprinkling of New Yorker cartoons) to let that laughter burst out.

Die Laughing includes plenty of Jewish jokes, perfect to bring to Jewish programs and book festivals anywhere.

Ways to Disappear

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Ways to Disappear: Idra Novey by Idra Novey | Jewish Book Council

In the poetic meta-literary novel Ways to Disappear, American poet, translator, and debut novelist Idra Novey carves out a thrilling adventure across the streets and beaches of Brazil.

On a search for the elusive Brazilian novelist Beatriz Yagoda, who was last seen climbing up into an almond tree with only a suitcase in hand, the author’s children and closest colleagues embark on separate quests to explore their own internal turmoil. With every page, they delve deeper into the mystery of Beatriz’s disappearance and are confronted with elements of insecurity, mystery, and love that plagues them each.

As soon as the author’s vanishing act becomes public, Emma Neufeld, Beatriz’s American translator and admirer, drops everything in her snowy Pittsburgh—including her devoted boyfriend—to search for the beloved author in Rio, believing she can find her through the details of Yagoda’s quirky novels.

The moment Emma steps onto Brazilian soil, Beatriz’s daughter Raquel is temperamental and cold, threatened by the idea that her mother could be closer with her translator than her own children. Tensions rise as Emma, Raquel, and Marcus—Beatriz’s charming and free-spirited son—are forced to work together to find Beatriz. However, their joint discovery of the difficult truth about the missing author becomes both life-threatening and eye-opening, forcing them each to confront their own demons as they reach into the depths of their memories and resources.

Throughout Ways to Disappear, Novey demonstrates the magic, truth, and gravity behind language. Every word is open to interpretation, even those which ordinarily seem to have a concrete meaning. What these words truly mean is called into question in the novel’s motif of fictionalized dictionary terms personalized to the character’s predicament:

Hesitation: From the latin haerere, to adhere or cling. A delay due to uncertainty of mind, as in: The translator didn't hesitate before taking on her author’s next novel, or before declaring her life’s work was to further the recognition of said author, an identity she adhered to until, in a certain hallway, she hesitated.

Novey goes beyond a unilateral perspective, delivering a page-turning adventure with unanswered frantic emails to Emma, periodic radio announcements from Radio Globo, and omniscient, heart-sinking poems that describe moments only poetry can capture.

Blunt and simultaneously tactful, Novey writes a straightforward plot line but portrays every feeling metaphorically, offering a unique access point for empathy with the novel’s characters:

She was aware of it only the way a person might hear a faint rumble of thunder in a dry day and find its menacing sound exciting without believing there was any real reason to go inside.

The manifold structure and riveting journey of Idra Novey’s writing makes Ways to Disappear a memorable and truly one-of-a-kind novel, with a refreshing exploration about the stability of relationships, worthiness of sacrifice, true makings of a person, and effect of literature on the world and ourselves.

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Interview with Idra Novey

by Michelle Zaurov

Idra Novey is a poet, translator, and newly-minted fiction writer. Her first novel, Ways to Disappear, addresses the power and powerlessness of parents, children, writers, and their translators, brought to light when an internationally acclaimed Jewish Brazilian writer vanishes into the branches of an almond tree. Jewish Book Council sat down with the author to find out more.

Michelle Zaurov: I understand that Ways to Disappear is your first novel. Before writing fiction, you were primarily a poet?

Idra Novey: I’ve always written a mix of genres. I went to graduate school for poetry because it wasn’t possible to apply in more than one genre, or in both writing and translation. To be both a writer and a translator is more common in other countries than in the United States, but I encourage all my writing students to try translation. Working in multiple languages can push a writer in more surprising directions. That was certainly true for me writing in one language while translating from another.

MZ: And what language do you speak at home?

IM: Only Spanish. My husband grew up in a large Sephardic family in Chile and we lived in Valparaiso, Chile for several years together before moving to New York. We speak only Spanish with our children, so while I was translating for Clarice Lispector, I was working in Portuguese, living in Spanish, and writing a novel in English.

MZ: There was a part of the novel that really stuck out to me in the beginning where Raquel first expressed insecurity concerning the relationship with her mother, Beatriz: “She had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer has never written down—wasn't that the real knowledge of who she was?” What are you trying to relay about the relationship between a person’s identity and their own written words?

IM: One of the things I most wanted to explore in the novel is what happens, over time, to the partial versions we know of each other. What any of us says on social media, or tells at family events, or at work, are never more than slivers. In the novel, I wanted to explore how a mother and her grown children come to see more than slivers of each other, and what sort of emergency would bring them to a fuller view of each other’s lives. The same happens in the novel with Emma, the translator, who confuses her knowledge of her author’s work with knowledge of her author’s life.

MZ: In the novel, Emma escapes from her dull life in Pittsburgh through her translations of Beatriz’s writing. Did you feel that way with authors you've translated?

IM: I have found translation to be an exhilarating escape and form of adventure, but I also have experienced the opposite, and found translating drew me deeper into where I was in my own life. That especially happened with Clarice Lispector, who died long before I translated her novel, so I only knew her through her work but I found a book of letters that she exchanged with another Brazilian writer, Fernando Sabino, while she was living in Washington, D.C. The letters are about raising her young sons and trying to write; I read them while I was raising my sons and trying to write. The parallels between her letters and my life led me both deeper into her work and into my own.

MZ: Identity seems to play a big role in the novel. I saw that coming up a lot with Miles telling Emma, “This isn’t who you are, this isn’t your life.” It seems that every character has an element of you.

IM: I think that is often the case with a writer and her characters. If you haven’t experienced the emotions you’re describing, you won’t be able to convey them with authority. You don't have to have experienced that emotion in the same situation as the character experiences it, but you do need to have a deep understanding of the feeling you’re describing. I identified with Beatriz’s younger son, Marcus, having grown up the younger sibling. As a younger sibling, you don’t take the lead and it shapes your personality, and if there’s an absent parent, it’s usually the older sibling who assumes more responsibility, as Raquel does in the novel. Marcus, as the younger sibling, is allowed to continue being a child. He continues to be the younger less responsible sibling into his thirties, when his mother disappears.

MZ: Why did you decide to make the Yagoda family Jewish?

IM: The writer who was the inspiration for the author in the novel was Clarice Lispector, who was Jewish. I’m Jewish as well and have come to know a number of really fascinating Brazilian and Chilean Jewish families, whose stories and personalities informed the book. Like Lispector, my invented author Beatriz Yagoda is an immigrant to Brazil who arrived as a child. Lispector came as a two-month-old baby. The Brazilian media always made a point of identifying her as from the Ukraine, but in many instances I think that was a euphemism for identifying her as Jewish, as “other”.

MZ: Speaking of cultural divides, I noticed that a part of Raquel’s hostility towards Emma was because she was American. When you lived in Chile and Brazil, did you witness that kind of treatment to foreigners?

IM: Oh, absolutely. Everywhere I’ve lived or traveled in Latin America, there’s been a palpable hostility from all the American military interventions and the devastation they have created, and also hostility resulting from the overwhelming presence of American companies and products.

That hostility was something I wanted to explore in the novel, too, even if it’s often presented in the book in a comical way.

MZ: Despite the gravity of the situation, you managed to deliver a lot of the story lightheartedly. Humor was really well woven into the violence and magnitude of certain conflicts.

IM: Thank you! I really enjoyed working on the humorous sections of the book, and humor is subversive. When you're open to humor, you can actually go to a darker place than you could if you didn't incorporate it, because you can get away with more when you use humor. You can throw out things you probably couldn't throw out if you didn't embed it in a joke.

Continue reading »

Michelle Zaurov is a student at Binghamton University in New York, where she studies English and literature. She has worked as a journalist writing for the Home Reporter, a local Brooklyn publication.

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Ina's Kitchen

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Ina's Kitchen: Memories and Recipes from the Breakfast Queen by Ina Pinkney | Jewish Book Council

Ina Pinkney—the beloved restaurateur known affectionately as the Breakfast Queen—has been feeding people for over 30 years. When she closed her restaurant's doors in 2013, it headlined news across the country. Now, the favorite dishes that thousands came to love at Ina's are showcased in her new book, Ina's Kitchen: Taste Memories and Recipes from the Breakfast Queen.

Ina's Kitchen is part cookbook part memoir, collecting 39 of Ina's favorite recipes with stories from her life, such as her Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn, overcoming paralytic polio as a child, the intermarriage her parents disapproved of, and her mid-life choice to change careers and follow her dream. From milestone moments and warm memories to the true trials of owning a restaurant, readers will gain a deeper understanding of Jewish cooking and hospitality.

Ina's Kitchen is a love letter to the diners Ina has fed over the years. In it, she shares her wisdom with the same generosity—both of food and of spirit—that kept people coming back to her restaurant for decades.

Among the Living

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Among the Living: A Novel by Jonathan Rabb | Jewish Book Council

In 1947, Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Goldah arrives in Savannah, Georgia to start a new life with his American cousin Abe Jesler and Abe’s wife, Pearl. The generous Southern Jewish couple open their home to the exhausted Goldah and provide him with a job at their shoe store. The Jeslers’ friends are eager to meet Goldah, and he is struck by the contrast between the genteel life in Savannah and the brutal depravity he has just survived in Europe. The Czech refugee is grateful but often stunned into silence.

As Among the Living develops, readers, along with the Jeslers, will hope that Goldah grabs the opportunity to settle into the Jewish community in Savannah. But the survivor must make his own way, and those around him together must also figure out how to coexist. The Savannah characters are still in the process of discovering the details of horrors of World War II. For Goldah, the war is a sensitive subject that he does not wish to define him. Hauntingly descriptive scenes graphically tell his experience. At times the character of Goldah comes across as quiet and befuddled, but at other times it appears that he actually sees the society of Savannah more clearly than the residents. The local rabbi refers to him as “the strongest among us.” Those around him and Goldah himself are unsure about how to discuss the abuse and shame of his gruesome past.

This discomfort increases as Goldah takes up with a widow who is a member of the Reform Temple; the Jeslers themselves belong to the Conservative synagogue. Tensions rise when the two congregations decide to hold Tashlich services on the same beach. Goldah’s absorption into society is further disrupted by the appearance of his fragile fiancée, who he thought had perished. Crushed by her physical and emotional humiliations, she holds nothing but disdain for the Savannah Jews.

The Jim Crow backdrop and the experiences of the Jeslers’ black employees add a further layer of complexity to Rabb’s picture of the social dynamic of the time. A black employee explains the situation to Golda after his son is viciously attacked: “Here they kill us one at a time and that’s the difference.” Other political issues are also addressed; it seems that some of Savannah’s Jews are quietly showing support for the development of the nascent state of Israel, and the Jesler’s rabbi calls the Haganah “our own Minutemen.” Everyday interactions also add moments of levity, such as when a black maid admits she makes the food for a Jewish family taste so good by adding lard.

In the end, Among The Living is a love story depicting how people so hurt can possibly heal and move on. Beneath the gentility, trouble boils.

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The 613

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The 613 by Archie Rand | Jewish Book Council

Archie Rand's career as an artist spans five decades and myriad themes and genres. Among his pioneering explorations, The 613 is surely one of his most ambitious feats yet. Without any idea where the work would be exhibited, Rand began transforming each and every one of the 613 mitzvahs into its own breathtaking painting in a series that took five years to complete.

Each of the gorgeous and perplexing panels features a vibrant, unexpected image that brings forth the heart of its law and commands our eyes to linger on Rand's startling and original in his rich color choices, bold characters, and extraordinarily expressive approach. Each painting provokes a sense of wonder and self-reflection, making The 613 a book to be visited time and time again.

1924: The Year That Made Hitler

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

1924: The Year that Made Hitler by Peter Ross Range | Jewish Book Council

Adolf Hitler spent 1924 away from society and surrounded by co-conspirators of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. Behind bars in a prison near Munich, Hitler passed the year with deep reading and intensive writing, a year of slowly walking gravel paths while working feverishly on his book Mein Kampf. This was the year of Hitler's final transformation into the self-proclaimed savior and infallible leader who would appropriate Germany's historical traditions and bring them into his vision for the Third Reich.

In a book devoted entirely to that dark year of Hitler's incarceration following his attempted coup, Peter Ross Range richly depicts this year that bore to the world a monster.

The Velvet Hours

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Velvet Hours by Alyson Richman | Jewish Book Council

Inspired by the true story of an abandoned, treasure-filled Parisian apartment that sat untouched for decades, The Velvet Hours is a soaring, sumptuous novel about love, art, family, and sacrifice. From Europe of the Belle Époque to 1940s Paris on the brink of World War II, Alyson Richman takes us on a journey of memory and second chances.

“It would become yet another buried story in our family of reinventors and name changers, alchemists, and connoisseurs of beauty and love.” So begins the story of Solange, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Parisian pharmacist who, in the final months of 1938, discovers the paternal grandmother she never knew she had. Solange, who has lost her own beloved mother, is immediately charmed by the mysterious Marthe de Florian, living by herself in remarkable luxury. And Marthe, reaching the final chapter of her life, finds herself equally captivated with Solange, offering, “You come to me once a week, and I will tell you how I, a girl born in the dark alleys of Montmartre, came to be ensconced in this apartment.” A fascinating tale unfolds and Solange, a budding writer, is enthralled: “Those hours were like velvet to me. Stories spun of silken thread, her own light and darkness, unabashedly drawn.”

But Solange soon discovers that the insular beauty and security of her grandmother’s apartment is in stark contrast to the realities of the outside world. When Solange researches the provenance of a priceless fourteenth-century Haggadah left behind by her Jewish mother, she learns of the family rift caused by her mother’s marriage to a gentile. With lavish descriptions of art and antiques, The Velvet Hours explores how art binds people together, posing the idea that material things have the potential not only to bring meaning to our lives, but to save them.

Ironically, just as Solange begins to delve into her mother’s rich heritage—and her own—Europe begins caving in to Hitler, putting the lives of all Parisian Jews in danger. Suddenly, Solange’s Jewish identity takes on unimaginable importance. With this turn of events, The Velvet Hours deftly raises the question of who we are versus whom we perceive ourselves to be.

In the end, The Velvet Hours is a love letter to the stories we tell and the stories we keep. It poses the idea that even the most well-intentioned life can hold guilt, and even the most aimless can find absolution. Imaginative, rich, and emotionally satisfying, The Velvet Hours is a treasure.

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Nurture the Wow

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting by Danya Ruttenberg | Jewish Book Council

Over the past few years, we’ve been exposed to the ways of Tiger Mothers and taught how to bring up better bébés. Now, two authors offer parenting discussions that draw from Judaism, showing how yiddishe mamas mold mentschen, and how those little mentschen can in turn morph their moms.

Marjorie Ingall’s Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children is a book of parenting advice that seamlessly combines criticism, contemplation, comedic memoir and research—including tidbits from Hasidic teachings, obscure psychoanalysis, old proverbs, new science, German etymology, and pedagogical policy (NY state class size caps are based on Talmudic recommendations!)—written in an energized, compelling voice. With wit, wisdom, humor, and a triumphant use of parenthetical asides, Ingall fights her case: Jewish mothers have long been raising “moral kids who can thrive in a complicated world,” by honing their spirituality, honesty, creativity and chutzpah, and teaching them how to live among others while maintaining a strong sense of self.

Ingall looks at typical parenting topics through both broad and Jewish lenses. In a chapter on nurturing independence for children and parents, she brings up the idea of the “good enough” mother alongside the long history of the breadwinning Jewish wife. Discussing the importance of discipline, she refers to the Jewish tenet of “deed over creed”—action prevails over feelings. Parents need not instruct, but should rather model behavior; children need to say sorry—that will teach them to feel it. In a section on distrusting authority, Ingall draws on Judaism’s dialogic and conversational traditions. “Rabbi” means teacher and not leader, she says, “We have no pope.” Don’t let kids get away with facile reasoning, she urges, but make them back up their arguments.

Ingall encourages parents to promote geekiness, championing the obsessive, uncool, hardworking nebbishy type. Jewish humor (for which she offers a history and analysis) can help parents cope, and help kids succeed in the workplace. She recommends tying any discussion of money to that of tzedakah. For Ingall, the joy of learning and socializing with peers, the teaching of kindness, conscientiousness and self-control, the focus on process and passion, are all deep-seated Jewish values that should take precedence over test scores.

The takeaway messages of Mamaleh Knows Best have stayed with me, popping up in my daily parenting moments. I was about to ask my daughter the generic “What did you do in school?” when I recalled Ingall’s anecdote about how a Jewish Nobel prize winner’s mother used to ask instead: “Did you ask a good question today?” I was about to tell my daughter that her paint-drenched construction-paper morass was stunning, but remembered Mamaleh; instead of encouraging her reliance on my compliments, I described the work, probing her about her aesthetic decisions regarding glitter (in excess). Instead of questioning my child’s choice of bedtime book (incoherent narrative about a mermaid Barbie), I recalled that instead of shaming her for her taste, I should let her develop a love of books on her own terms. (Ingall recommends that if you want to get your kid to read a book, don’t push them, but just leave it lying around the house. Or, she quotes Judy Blume, who advises parents to tell their kids they aren’t ready for it yet.) I often think of Ingall’s call to help kids create meaning rather than self-esteem, to help them develop passions and know how to be satisfied in their lives. We’re too worried about kids being happy, Ingall laments: “We’re Jews. Happy is not our default state.”

{module_webapps,14253,i,8793905}Ingall’s book about folklore and culture picqued my baseline depressive curiosity; now I wondered what Judaism’s traditional texts have to say about parenting. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg starts her new book, Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Frustration, Boredom, Tears, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting, by telling me: nothing. There is no parenting column in the Talmud, or in any of our sacred texts compiled by men. Ruttenberg, a Conservative rabbi, aims to explore how Jewish traditions can offer new ways of looking at parenting, but also, how parenting can offer new ways of experiencing transcendence. Parenting, she suggests, is a spiritual practice in its own right. Nurture the Wow is a book about the emotions of parenthood, the boundaries between parent and child (and God), and fundamentally, about how we love.

Like Ingall, Ruttenberg merges her personal parenting experience with self-depracating humor and insightful discussion, offering a potpourri of sources for her contemplations, from rabbis to Rilke to Rumi. Ruttenberg probes the parental psyche and its shifting identity, untangling the idea of connection, focusing on the permeable boundary between parent and child (and the Divine) and the power each has over the other. A grounding principle is Martin Buber’s theory of “I/Thou”: are we relating to our children as full beings, seeing them for who they are without looking for ourselves in them, acting with true empathy? We all come to parenting carrying our pasts, our long-held, subconscious values about perfection, fun, consequences, and the ways in which we received love. All this, she claims, impacts how we love our children. We need to feel our feelings, she suggests. Parental love takes hard work and self-awareness; locating our compassion in the face constant discomfort is an active struggle, and a way into spirituality.

Ruttenberg explains that children learn how to maneuver in the world by watching parents (“the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice,” she quotes author Peggy O’Mara,) but throughout, she’s as concerned with how kids help their parents grow, too. Our children know us better than we see ourselves, and can show us our weaknesses. Becoming a parent changes you, morphing how you experience time, patience and ways of seeing the world. When parents are more empathic with our kids, we might become more generous with strangers; playing with our children helps us to lose our need to control, to enter our flow. As parents, our priorities change: we don’t have the same kinds of friendships (she didn’t say much here; I could have read a whole book on this), nor do we do the same kinds of work. A parent has to create art or pursue activism around screaming and diapers, but this can lead to new forms of art, greater social compassion, and new ways of understanding God.

Ruttenberg doesn’t offer concrete parenting tips like Ingall’s ‘Mamaleh Methodology,’ but she does offer coping strategies for the emotional struggles that accompany the daily grind. For instance: change your mindset to appreciate the minutiae (a successful poo is a sign of miraculous biology) and try to think of mundane, repetitive work—doing dishes, preparing a bottle—as holy offerings. Prayer “cleans out copious internal gunk that accumulates when we’re doing the hard, hard work of parenting.” It can help a parent feel present; it can channel feelings—just offering thanks aloud makes us feel better. Ruttenberg does not agree with those who separate prayer from child-rearing, arguing that it’s all connected: loving God teaches us how to love our kids, and loving our kids brings us closer to God.

Taken together, these witty, insightful books—one of religious questions and the other of culturally-based answers—provide a rich discussion of how to stretch Judaism’s past into the future, literally, in the very kids we raise. The authors probe, suggest and reflect, but perhaps the most compelling element of each work is simply its descriptions of the constant questions that plague the (Jewish) parental mind.

In reading Ingall and Ruttenberg, I felt befriended. I won’t push you to read these books, however: I don’t think you’re ready yet.

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Chasing Portraits

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter's Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy by Elizabeth Rynecki | Jewish Book Council

While helping her parents sort out her grandfather George’s possessions after his funeral in 1992, Elizabeth Rynecki discovered a memoir he had been working on for more than fifteen years. In this record, George described his experiences living in Poland during World War II. Although he and his mother, Perla, managed to survive, his father, the artist Moshe Rynecki, was deported from the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis and murdered at Majdanek. The author tells us that Moshe’s death “had a profound impact on my choice of study and my interest in both my family history and the broader history of the Holocaust.”

Moshe Rynecki, a highly regarded painter of Jewish folk scenes and Polish life, completed over eight hundred works of art before the German occupation of Poland in 1939. After the war, Perla was able to locate 120 of them; these she brought to the United States when she and her son immigrated. Elizabeth Rynecki grew up surrounded by her great-grandfather’s vibrant paintings of Jewish life in the 1920s and ’30s.

Chasing Portraits depicts Elizabeth Rynecki’s determined, almost obsessive, hunt for the remaining works. It is a fascinating, if a bit too personally detailed, saga of the discoveries and frustrations she encounters along the way. Naïve at the start, the author becomes aware of the legal and even political factors involved in the recovery of art and other possessions lost or confiscated during the Holocaust. Governments and private individuals are reluctant to participate in identifying or releasing works to family claimants. She cites several examples (besides the well-known Woman in Gold), and becomes wary of lending her family’s personally held paintings to a Polish Museum for exhibition, lest the museum refuses to return them. A chapter on the legal field of looted art and the enormous expense of filing claims is particularly sobering.

As Rynecki follows up on clue after clue, the story takes on a detective-novel quality. Sometimes the search provides serendipitous rewards. Invited to give a talk in Toronto, Rynecki is told about a collection of archived papers in the University of Toronto’s rare book library. This collection contains photographs as well as her great-grandfather's personal papers—a treasure trove. By contrast, the author’s pursuit of leads in Israel are, for the most part, unrewarding. She also returns to Poland, visiting concentration camps as well as Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute together with a local videographer to create a documentary film about her great-grandfather.

Chasing Portraits provides insight into the haunting effect that a “lost legacy” can have on survivors’ descendants several generations after the Holocaust. Due to the author’s meticulous research and documentation, this work is an impressive addition to the genre of Holocaust memoirs.

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Don't Think Twice

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Don't Think Twice: Adventure and Healing at 100 Miles Per Hour by Barbara Schoichet | Jewish Book Council

A late-in-life coming-of-age escapade told with humor and heart, Don't Think Twice is a moving and irreverent account of grief, growing up, and the healing power of adventure. Within six months, Barbara Schoichet lost everything: her job, her girlfriend of six years, and her mother—to pancreatic cancer. Her life stripped bare and armed with nothing but a death wish and a ton of attitude, Barbara pursued an unlikely method of coping. At 50 years old she earned her motorcycle license, bought a Harley on eBay, and rode it from New York to Los Angeles on a circuitous trek loosely guided by her H.O.G. tour book and a whole lot of road whimsy.

On the open highway, Barbara battles physical limitations and inner demons through the majestic Appalachians, the enchanting Turquoise Trail, and along America's iconic Route 66, from Gettysburg to Graceland to a Cadillac graveyard in the middle of nowhere. She meets kind strangers, odd strangers, and a guy with violent road rage. She is vulnerable and broken but determined to heal—or die trying.

The Hungry Love Cookbook

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Hungry Love Cookbook: 30 Steamy Stories, 120 Mouthwatering Recipes by Cindy Silvert | Jewish Book Council

The Hungry Love Cookbook is a collection of light-hearted romantic vignettes interwoven with luscious kosher recipes. Even readers with the most basic culinary skills will be able to follow the easy-to-follow steps to creating impressive, succulent dishes. The Hungry Love Cookbook is beautifully illustrated with photographs of food and retro comic graphics, featuring many vegetarian (and all kosher) dishes to make at home.

Visiting Scribe: Cindy Silvert

30 Steamy Stories and Corned Beef on Rye

In Defense of Kosher Food: A Recipe

Asylum: A Survivor's Flight from Nazi-Occupied Vienna Through Wartime France

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Asylum: A Survivor's Flight from Nazi-Occupied Vienna Through Wartime France by Moriz Scheyer, translated and with an epilogue by P.N. Singer | Jewish Book Council

Asylum is a memoir that was surrounded by conflict before it was ever bound into pages and sent out to the public.

Moriz Scheyer was a prominent journalist in Vienna until he was forced to flee after the Anschluss in 1938. While hidden by the Resistance in a French convent after his release from a concentration camp, he secretly wrote down the details of his struggle to stay alive. He finished the manuscript in 1945, but died of a heart condition four years later, having failed to find a publisher in the interim.

After Scheyer’s death, his stepson found the manuscript and destroyed it, thinking it too “anti-German.” Little did he know his stepfather’s words would surface again. Years later, in 2005, Scheyer’s step-grandson, P. N. Singer, found a dusty carbon copy of the manuscript buried in a suitcase in his grandmother’s London attic. He translated it himself and shopped it out successfully to publishers.

The result is this raw but rewarding volume, which details the events and experience of persecution in careful, measured prose and tells the reader precisely what it feels like to be “a Jew under the swastika.” The book is both tense and moving, partly because the story is so compelling, and partly because the writing is so riveting. Scheyer is rational and highly literate, and the reader follows his progress in horror as he is hunted and humiliated while the ordinary people around him live their daily lives.

When Scheyer realized he would have to leave Vienna, having lost his job and nearly all of his possessions to the Nazis, he chose to flee to France because he loved the country—having lived there and written about its culture in the 1920s—and because he trusted the people. Yet he and his wife found that their miserable existence returned once Hitler invaded the country. They survived in hiding for three years, with little help from the French people, only to be overwhelmed by a sense of outrage and betrayal once again when Scheyer was rounded up along with 5,000 other Jews and sent to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp in May 1941.

Scheyer spent three years there until—beaten, humiliated, and starved—he was suddenly and unexpected released. Still hounded by the Nazis, however, he was finally able to find shelter through a contact in the French Resistance. A hiding place for him, his wife, and their devoted non-Jewish housekeeper was found in a convent in the Dordogne that served as an asylum for mentally ill women.

P. N. Singer, the author’s English step-grandson and translator of the book, is known for his expertise in translating ancient Greek and Latin texts as well as those in German and Italian, and the work he did on Scheyer’s book is faithful to the original. Unlike his father, Singer found significant merit in the work, and this shows in the respectful and delicate treatment he gives the material. Originally entitled A Survivor by Scheyer, the book was renamed Asylum by Singer, who felt it told the story of a man who, although he was considered an enemy of the state, managed time and again to find within himself both the will and the means to survive.

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Girl Walks Out of a Bar

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Girl Walks Out of a Bar: A Memoir by Lisa F. Smith | Jewish Book Council

Lisa F. Smith was a bright young, Jewish lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith's formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. In this darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story, Smith describes how her circumstances conspire with her predisposition to depression and self-medication in an environment ripe for addiction to flourish, presenting a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism.

Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days by How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days | Jewish Book Council

How did the Muslim Brotherhood win power so quickly following Egypt's dramatic 2011 Arab Spring uprising? Why did the Brotherhood fall from power even more quickly, culminating with the overthrow of Egypt's first elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in July 2013?

Eric Trager examines the Brotherhood's decision-making throughout this critical period. Based on interviews with dozens of Brotherhood leaders and cadres including Morsi, Trager argues that the very organizational characteristics that helped the Brotherhood win power also contributed to its rapid downfall. The Brotherhood's intensive process for recruiting members and its rigid nationwide chain of command meant that it possessed unparalleled mobilizing capabilities for winning the first post-Mubarak parliamentary and presidential elections, but its hierarchical organizational culture alienated many Egyptians, including many within Egypt's state institutions.

Family History of Fear

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Family History of Fear: A Memoir by Agata Tuszynska | Jewish Book Council

Every family has its secrets. The major secret of Family History of Fear is revealed on the very first page: at the age of 19, a blond, blue-eyed Polish girl named Agata learns from her mother that she is Jewish. Confronted with such a “humiliation and a disfiguring feature,” young Agata hides the secret from the outside world and from herself. Forty years later, writer Agata Tuszyńska takes up the task of reconstructing a heritage concealed by fear and forgetting.

Growing up in Soviet-occupied Poland, Tuszyńska never met a Jew. Tuszyńska’s mother Halina survived World War II as a hidden child, having escaped from the Warsaw ghetto to the “Aryan side” with hermother Dela. As a student after the war, Halina found “refuge” and protection with the young Bogdan Tuszyński (later a famous sports journalist). Resolving to put aside the difficulty and fear of the war years, Bogdan and Halina committed to a bright vision of Communism, and to each other. Yet Tuszyńska cannot recall that harmony: “I did not have parents. I do not remember them. I had a mother. I had a father. Each distinctly separate.” Her approach throughout the book is this constant separating: dividing a nuclear family into a mother and father; sorting the maternal, Jewish and paternal, Polish grandparents, great-aunts and brothers; untangling the strings of divorces, baptisms, births and deaths. We quickly learn about Bogdan’s Polish, working-class family from Perlowa Street. And then slowly, carefully, with the help of a historian named Mirek, Tuszyńska recovers her mother’s family: the assimilated, aristocratic Przedborskis and the pious, traditional Goldsteins. She also delves deeply into the complex motives and experiences of maternal relatives who stayed in Poland after the Holocaust and after the anti-Semitic campaigns of 1968.

The book is characterized by rapid jumps and skips. The table of contents promises slices of stories—there is a “Bogdan I,” “Bogdan II,” and “Bogdan, 37”—and any odd paragraph might begin in the present day and conclude in the Third Reich. Figures move in and out of focus: a familiar Polish grandmother’s face appears frighteningly close—wrinkles and age spots magnified—but a Jewish great-grandfather with only one document to his name is summoned, blurrily, in a speculative description. Although Tuszyńska writes in the first person, stray quotes are scattered throughout and whole sections appear to be neatly reported speeches of different interview subjects. Tuszyńska herself often plays with perspectives. As the book opens, for example, she imagines herself twice: first as the little Jewish girl escaping from the ghetto, and then mere pages later as a Polish acquaintance or simply a neighbor of that little girl, watching her steps. With all of these shifts in time, space, and voice, the title’s claim to a “history” may seem surprising. But it is only through this fragmented, non-linear, polyphonic creation that Tuszyńska can hold her mixed heritage together: “Both of them—the Polish and the Jewish—are alive in me. Both make me what I am. Even if they oppose one another and accuse each other—I belong to both.”

Tuszyńska reveals a history that is raw, painful, and personal. Several times, she almost loses hope: “my efforts to stop time, to change the course of events, restore the memory despite history, the tiredness of humans, the passing of time, despite the despair, the tragedy—all my efforts seem in vain.” But she does not stop writing, researching, and remembering. This book is Tuszyńska’s beautiful, terrifying fight to bring her heritage alive in a family where fear of identity has caused a forgetting—at times passive, at times willed—on both sides. Thus Family History of Fear emerges as a work of fierce courage.

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Immunity

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Immunity: How Elie Metchnikoff Changed the Course of Modern Medicine by Luba Vikhanski | Jewish Book Council

Nobel Prize laureate Elie Metchnikoff, the first modern scientist to claim that human beings have innate curative powers, was once named one of the ten greatest men in the world. Yet today this Russian-Jewish zoologist is little known, despite his lasting influence in many areas of science. He spurred the study of aging with his controversial theory that people could live 150 years. He introduced the Western world to yogurt, making a revolutionary impact on the diets of future generations worldwide. And his daring theory of immunity earned him the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, shared with his arch-rival, also a Jew. Metchnikoff attributed his own love of science to his Jewish roots. “Immunity” revives the fascinating story of this towering figure of the early 20th century.

Aphrodite and the Rabbis

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism As We Know It by Burton L. Visotzky | Jewish Book Council

In Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It, Burton Visotzky reconsiders the influence of Roman civilization on the rebirth of Judaism. Jewish tradition has positioned the Romans as the historic enemy of the Jewish people, both because of the destruction of the Temple and because of what Rabbinic Judaism characterized as Rome’s ongoing assault against Jewish culture. However, Aphrodite and the Rabbis argues that Judaism’s transformation into a world religion was in fact made possible by the Roman Empire.

A recognized scholar on Midrash, Visotzky opens this book with a story that draws readers into his search for Roman-Jewish cultural melding. Walking through the Jewish catacomb of Rome’s Villa Torlonia in 2007, the author sees first-hand the influence of Roman burial rites on the Jewish community of the Ancient Rome. “In short, what is now called ‘Judaism’ was invented in the matrix of Roman culture,” he writes. “Even as some rabbinic texts depicted Rome as the enemy, there is overwhelming evidence that Judaism took root in Roman soil, imbibed its nourishment, and grafted the good and pruned the bad from the Roman Empire, until a vibrant new religion—Judaism—arose from the wreckage of the Israelite religion and the Temple cult, nurtured by the very empire that had destroyed it.”

Aphrodite and the Rabbis supports this argument in ten chapters, each of which explores a particular influence of Roman culture had on Jewish life. In chapter five, Visotzky delves into the mixed message given by Rabbinic literature on the value of learning Roman rhetoric. Likening the study of Roman rhetoric to learning the language of one’s adopted country as a new immigrant, Visotzky argues that for the leadership of Rabbinic Judaism, the study of Roman rhetoric was an accepted and valued part of an education. In defense of this point, he draws parallels between a standard rhetorical form, the chreia, and rabbinic texts. For example, the well-known episode from the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 31a)—that of Hillel instructing a would-be convert while standing on one foot—is a Jewish interpretation of the philosophy of the celebrated rhetor Seneca in the form of a chreia.

Although the focus of this book is the intersection of Hellenic and Jewish culture, the author concludes by drawing a parallel between the Jews of Ancient Rome and American Jewry today. “If the rabbis and other Jews took the best of their Roman culture and heartily imbibed Hellenistic civilization as they invented a Judaism to survive the destruction of the Jerusalem cult, then it can be an encouragement for us to do the same,” suggests Visotsky. “Much as they swam in the waters of Greco-Roman culture, so we flourish in American society, transforming Judaism as we go.” With this, Aphrodite and the Rabbis is a book that teaches of the Judaism of the past, but encourages us to be proud and hopeful of it in the present—an important message from a book that is a scholarly, lively, and worthwhile read.

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The Rose Temple

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Rose Temple: A Child Holocaust Survivor's Vision of Faith, Hope, and Our Collective Future by Mitchell Weitzman and Lucia Weitzman | Jewish Book Council

A Jewish girl saved in infancy by a Catholic couple during the Second World War discovered her true heritage after the war, but remained with her adoptive family. In her early twenties, however, circumstances forced her to escape Poland and begin a new life in America, where she married and raised a Jewish family.

With her husband's unexpected death, at 53 years old Lucia Weitzmann embarked on a spiritual journey that began with confronting God at the Western Wall. Mystical experiences then began to populate her dreams and writings, leading her to discover who she really is and what her life purpose is about.

Inspired by his mother's experiences and emboldened to share its messages of hope and healing, Lucia's son tells her story in The Rose Temple.

Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life: Stories by Ronna Wineberg | Jewish Book Council

The power of Ronna Wineberg’s writing lies in her ability to create lovable characters. From the moment her stories begin, you feel for these smart, intense, and highly self-critical men and women who inhabit the pages. Most of them are involved in or have been divorced. All of them have had complex relationships with their mothers, fathers, or children. And, they are all still exploring their motives, misdeeds, past history, and current situations for answers.

Her opening sentences always draw you in. “Melody” begins this way: “When I was ten years old, I smashed my best friend, Melody Andrews, against her locker in the hallway after school.” This confession alone is enough to command attention and questions that prod us to read on. Another story, “Happy to See You,” starts with “I stand in the hallway of the house, my baby, Jennifer, straddling my right hip, the other hand holding the vacuum cleaner. The stereo is turned up high. I sing to Mozart, pretending my voice is a violin or a piano.” The reader is drawn to a woman who is capable of vacuuming and carrying around a baby while she improves herself culturally by listening to Mozart. Rebecca is highly relatable when she ruminates about her anxieties: “Nights when the baby is crying or Sammy has awakened even after everyone has gone back to sleep, I stay awake and think. What if Brian died, or if I was crippled, or something happened to the children.” These universally maternal fears endear Rebecca to us before the plot even begins to evolve.

Another poignant theme explored in the book is the pain of separation either from children, husbands, or parents. “Taking Leave” depicts the day parents take their freshman daughter to move her into her dorm. Told from the mother’s viewpoint, we perceive the dorm room’s claustrophobic shabbiness down to its yellow linoleum floor as she thinks,“This is where they will leave Meg, their masterpiece, whom they struggled to conceive, regulating monthly cycles with charts and thermometers for years, the beautiful baby born on a Tuesday morning.. Eighteen years, three months and two days ago.” How clearly Wineberg explains the roots of what is known as the empty nest syndrome.

Other kinds of separations permeate the book from falling out of love while staying married, to the slow ordeal of the divorce process. All of these are presented in graphic detail. This book is a collection of vignettes, depicting slices of life as if they were half-finished paintings which require finishing touches applied by the reader. It is an exciting type of writing which coerces the reader into sharing the writer’s experience by predicting the future of the characters’ lives.

Read Ronna Wineberg's Visiting Scribe Posts

Researching and Writing Short Stories

My Father’s Letters

The Devil's Diary

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich by ROBERT K. WITTMAN & DAVID KINNEY | Jewish Book Council

The two most influential books that shaped the ideology of Nazi Germany were Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most hated men in the Nazi hierarchy. Along with his published writing, Rosenberg kept a 500-page diary, which was smuggled out of Germany along with hundreds of other documents by Robert Kempner, the former Nuremberg prosecutor, to his home in Landsdowne, Pennsylvania.

Robert K. Wittman, the founder of the FBI’s Art Crime team and a national expert on cultural property crime, and David Kinney, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter deliver a complicated but riveting account of the Nazi war against the Jews as seen through the prism of Rosenberg’s diary, as well as a comprehensive account of Rosenberg’s Einsatzstab, an office responsible for the confiscation of more than 650,000 pieces of art and cultural artifacts from Jews and others. The authors also provide an unflattering account of Kempner, better known as an opponent of the Nazis, but who used his knowledge of the Nazi political system toward ruthless self-promotion.

Kempner was a Jewish lawyer in Berlin in the 1920s, but his German citizenship was revoked by the Nazis in 1935. He was forced to emigrate to Italy, where he ran a school for wealthy German Jewish children, but abandoned them when Mussolini implemented Nazi-like racial laws in 1938. Eventually Kempner migrated to the United States and sought a position at the FBI, where he touted himself as an expert on the Third Reich, Subsequently, Kempner served as an assistant counsel on behalf of the United States during the International Military Tribunal prosecuting Hermann Goering and Wilhelm Frick.

Among the 23 major Nazi defendants at Nuremberg was Alfred Rosenberg, charged with war crimes. He was accused of waging ideological warfare against the Jews and the churches, preparing the Nazis with psychological and political justification for its wars of aggression, and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity as Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. At his trial, the prosecutor argued, that “it will be seen that there was not a single basic tenet of the Nazi philosophy which was not given authoritative expression by Rosenberg… .” Rosenberg was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Although the book focuses on the search for Rosenberg’s diary, it is also about Nazi murder against the Jews in Eastern Europe, Rosenberg’s tacit consent to the German plan for starving the Soviet Union, the recovery of stolen art, and the search for priceless documents—including the Rosenberg diary—in an excellent book that proves itself welcome addition to Holocaust historiography.

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The Gefilte Manifesto

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods by Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alpern | Jewish Book Council

Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alpern are two of the leaders of the movement to revolutionize Ashkenazi cuisine. Together, they co-founded The Gefilteria, a Brooklyn-grown business that sets out to reimagine Jewish classics while championing Old World slow food techniques, in 2012. In their first-ever cookbook—including over a hundred recipes, pulled deep from the culinary histories of Eastern Europe and the diaspora community of North America—they draw inspiration from the legacies of Jewish pickle shops, bakeries, appetizing shops, dairy restaurants, delicatessens, and holiday kitchens. Tapping into the zeitgeist of rediscovering Old World food traditions like pickling, fermenting, and baking—as well as the foundational values of these techniques for resourcefulness and seasonality—The Gefilte Manifesto encourages anyone and everyone to incorporate healthy and vital Ashkenazi recipes into their everyday repertoire.

Visiting Scribes: Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz

Blueberry Pierogi in Warsaw

Bringing a Taste of the Old World(s) to Sunny California

Get the Recipe: Spiced Blueberry Soup

Get the Recipe: Lilya's Summer Beet Borscht

Recipe: Spiced Blueberry Soup

Jeffrey: There’s an intriguing tradition of fruit-based soups in Ashkenazi cooking, much as there is in Scandinavian cuisine. Growing up, I was familiar with sour cherry soup, but I hadn’t heard of blueberry soup until I began reviewing old Jewish cookbooks. I’m glad I found it.

Many old recipes call for straining out the blueberries, but Liz and I prefer the texture that the stewed fruit adds to the soup. This recipe is a great way to highlight the berry harvest in early summer or a delicious way to utilize frozen berries when the weather turns cold. Also, it is a very quick recipe. You can serve it hot right after it’s finished cooking, but the flavor develops nicely after a day. Once cooled, you can refrigerate the soup and serve it cold (our preference) or at room temperature.

SERVES 4 TO 6

Ingredients
2 cinnamon sticks
2 teaspoons whole cloves
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
2 teaspoons whole black peppercorns
6 cups fresh or frozen blueberries
¼ cup honey
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 cup cold water
2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
2 teaspoons lemon zest, plus more for garnish
Sour cream, store bought or homemade (page 24), or plain yogurt, for serving

Instructions

Tie the cinnamon sticks, cloves, coriander seeds, and peppercorns in a square of cheesecloth for easy removal later.
In a medium saucepan, combine the blueberries, honey, lemon juice, spice bundle, and cold water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to maintain a simmer and cook for about 8 minutes. The berries will break down quite quickly and release a good deal of liquid.
Remove the pot from the heat. Very slowly spoon 3 tablespoons of the hot blueberry liquid into the egg yolks (1 tablespoon at a time to avoid curdling the egg yolks). Whisk with a fork until thick, 1 to 2 minutes, then return the blueberry-egg mixture to the pot and return the soup just to a boil. Immediately reduce the heat to maintain a simmer and cook for 3 minutes more, until the soup has thickened. Remove from the heat, and immediately mix in the 2 teaspoons of lemon zest.
Remove the spice bundle before serving hot, cold, or at room temperature, garnished with sour cream and remaining lemon zest.

Recipe: Lilya's Summer Beet Borscht

Liz: One summer day, Jeffrey and I headed to Little Odessa in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. We were visiting our business partner Jackie’s ninety-two-year-old Russian-born great-aunt, Lilya. She had immigrated to Brighton Beach from the Soviet Union in 1989. Lilya was known for her borscht, and she’d invited us to spend time with her while she salted and seasoned three varieties of the soup. At ninety-two, she was extraordinary, foisting shots of vodka on us and showering us with words of wisdom. We left Brighton Beach inspired and feeling lucky to have met her. She passed away a couple of years later. We developed this recipe with her in mind.

This beet borscht is perfect served chilled on summer days or served hot in the colder months. The ideal borscht, writes Aleksandar Hemon in The New Yorker of his Bosnian family traditions “contains everything . . . and it can be refrigerated and reheated in perpetuity, always better the next day. The crucial ingredient is a large, hungry family, surviving together.” Jeffrey thinks that this recipe should utilize rossel (the brine from fermented beets, otherwise known as beet kvass) instead of vinegar to add tang, since traditionally borscht’s coveted sour flavor was cultivated by first fermenting the beets. But I disagree. I like the flavor that vinegar adds, even if it isn’t as Old-World. This recipe uses vinegar (I won!), but if you’d like to be more old school and first wait a week to ferment your beets, follow the Beet and Ginger Kvass recipe (on page 290 in the book) but omit the ginger. And while this recipe calls for roasting beets and adding them to the soup, it also tastes great without roasted beets. Just cut the beet amount to 1 pound if omitting the roasting step.

SERVES 6 TO 8

Ingredients
2 pounds whole beets, scrubbed but unpeeled
2 carrots, unpeeled and coarsely chopped
2 celery stalks with leaves, coarsely chopped
2 medium onions:
1 quartered, 1 diced
5 garlic cloves: 2 left whole, 3 minced
2 dried bay leaves
2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns

2 tablespoons caraway seeds
4 cups cold water
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
Sour cream, store-bought or homemade (see page 24), or crème fraîche, for garnish
Chopped fresh dill, for garnish

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Wrap 1 pound of the beets individually in aluminum foil and set on a baking sheet. Roast until they can be easily pierced with a fork, 40 minutes to 1 hour, depending on the size of the beets (larger beets take longer). The skin should peel off easily under cold running water. Dice the beets into bitesize pieces and refrigerate until serving.
While the beets are roasting, in a large soup pot, combine the remaining 1 pound beets, the carrots, celery, quartered onion, whole garlic cloves, bay leaves, salt, peppercorns, caraway seeds and 9 cups water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 1 hour. Remove from the heat.
Fill a large bowl with water and ice. Remove the boiled beets from the pot and place them in the ice-water bath. When cool, peel and coarsely chop them. Strain the broth through a fine-mesh strainer into a large bowl, discarding the solids.
Rinse and dry the soup pot and set it over medium heat. Add the olive oil and diced onion and sauté until the onion is fragrant, about 3 minutes. Add the minced garlic and sauté for 3 to 5 minutes more, until the onion begins to turn golden. Add the beet broth and coarsely chopped boiled beets to the pot and simmer over low heat, covered, for about 20 minutes.
Remove from the heat and puree the soup in the pot using an immersion blender. (Alternatively, transfer it in small batches to a standing blender and puree—just be careful!) Add the honey and vinegar and simmer over very low heat for 5 minutes.
If serving hot, place 2 tablespoons of diced roasted beets in the bottom of each bowl and then ladle the hot soup over them. Garnishing with sour cream and chopped fresh dill. If serving chilled, remove from the heat and let the soup cool completely and then refrigerate overnight. Be sure to stir the soup well and taste immediately before serving. Once cooled, many soups require a touch more salt. If necessary, add more salt, a teaspoon at a time. As with hot borscht, place 2 tablespoons of the roasted beets at the bottom of the bowl and ladle the soup on top. Serve garnished with sour cream and chopped fresh dill.

Excerpted from the book The Gefilte Manifesto by Jeffrey Yoskowitz & Liz Alpern. Copyright ©2016 by Gefilte Manifesto LLC. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. Photography by Lauren Volo.

Judenstaat

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Judenstaat by Simone Zelitch | Jewish Book Council

Simone Zelitch’s fiction—Judenstaat is her fifth novel—ranges over wide swaths of history, from Moses and the Exodus (Moses in Sinai), medieval rebellion (The Confession of Jack Straw), post-Holocaust survivors in Israel (Louisa), and the American civil rights movement (Waveland). Most of her work, she notes on her website, is rooted in Midrash and thus does not adhere literally to verifiable historical fact (where we know it); rather, her characters and situations build on the known or the traditional view to strive for new meanings and interpretation. In Judenstaat, she presents a Midrash on the meaning of Jewish identity and nationalistic aspiration in the wake of the Holocaust by putting forth an alternative history of the Jewish State called for in Herzl’s late-nineteenth century pamphlet of the same title. The twist here is that the Jewish state founded in the wake of the Holocaust—or the Churban, as the characters in the novel refer to it—is not in Eretz Yisrael but in the East German state of Saxony, which the survivors of the camps have seized with the help of Soviet troops.

Zelitch’s protagonist is Judit Ginsberg Klemmer, an archivist-filmmaker working at the National Library in Judenstaat’s capital of Dresden. Forty years after the “liberation” and the founding of the state, Judit is tasked with making a commemorative film, just as the world outside Judenstaat is changing and its role in it is likewise undergoing a metamorphosis. Judit’s work is also shadowed by a personal tragedy and the two strands of the national and personal come together in what becomes her quest for understanding of the deeper roots of Judenstaat’s founding.

Alternate history has long roots in science fiction and has recently attracted more mainstream authors. Zelitch claims affiliation with Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi alternate post-World-War-II historical novel The Man in the High Castle (the basis of Amazon’s recent streaming series), in which Japan and Germany conquer and divide the United States, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which a fascist-leaning Charles Lindbergh becomes president of the United States in 1940 and makes life difficult for American Jews. Also relevant is Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which rests on a similar premise to Zelitch’s novel (the Jewish post-Holocaust homeland is not Israel but the region around Sitka, Alaska!) and also involves a genre plot (two Jewish policemen investigate a series of murders).

The success or failure of such ventures into “what-if” fictions is based on the credibility of the details and the frisson of recognition the reader feels when confronted with the distorting mirror of these alternate worlds. Zelitch provides many moments of such responses. One detail that can be disclosed without unduly spoiling the plot for prospective readers is the presence in Judenstaat of a large minority population of “black hats,” ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, who have their own neighborhood and operate outside the laws of the socialist-dominated Judenstaat. Zelitch sketches in details of the state’s founding and development and alludes to its past political disputes and disruptions without bogging the plot down in copious exposition (an appendix provides a timeline). This allusiveness makes Judit’s quest for understanding more dramatically real as the reader tries to piece together what happened in the founding years along with her. On the negative side, aspects of the central mystery Judit tries to unravel remain somewhat unresolved by the novel’s end.

The novel’s allusions to “real-world” events outside of Judenstaat raise interesting questions about the contingent nature of history. In the novel, set in the 1980s, the Soviet Union, Judenstaat’s erstwhile protector, is on the verge of Perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev puts in a cameo appearance. Would history develop along lines that lead directly to today’s world if such a profound change as the founding of Israel were erased, or if, indeed, a Jewish state had replaced the East German Democratic Republic?

Zelitch does not sacrifice her characters in favor of the ideas of the novel. While Judit herself is a somewhat passive character (questers generally tend to be blank spaces in novels of this type), she is surrounded by a number of colorful figures that Zelitch brings to life with skill. Highly memorable are Judit’s mother, Leonora, a Holocaust survivor, and Judit’s former history professor, a Hannah Arendt-like chain-smoking polymath. The dominant figure in the novel, Judenstaat’s founder, Leopold Stein, is not present for much of the novel, having disappeared years ago; but his words and ideas and his blurry images in old films that Judit discovers bring him to the forefront.

Like Ari Shavit’s recent book about the founding of Israel, My Promised Land, Zelitch’s Judenstaat raises some profound questions about the cost of the Zionist enterprise. Shavit struggles to understand the implication for modern Israel of the layers of denial and violence involved in its founding, such as the massacre of Palestinians in what became Lod, the neighborhood of Ben Gurion Airport. In Judenstaat, Judit finds similar questions haunting her work, but the reader is left to wonder what the future implications will be of her discoveries, as Judenstaat stands on the brink of a new era. Zelitch succeeds admirably in raising, if not fully answering, such questions in this provocative novel.

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On the Origins of Sports

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

On the Origins of Sports: The Early History and Original Rules of Everybody's Favorite Games by Gary Belsky and Neil Fine | Jewish Book Council

Our passion for sports has started wars, emptied treasuries, ended marriages, and set cities aflame. Sports fans regularly spend hundreds of dollars on tickets, devote entire weekends to watching games, argue with colleagues over the greatest game and athlete of all time, and root for their governments to win the rights to host money-losing mega-events like the Olympics and the World Cup. What does this say about us, and how did we get here?

In their new book, On the Origins of Sports, award-winning editors Gary Belsky and Neil Fine set out to understand why and how sports have become so important to us. They gather the original rules, history, and miscellany of the world's 21 most popular sports in one volume, complete with detailed diagrams and illustrations. By taking readers back in history to learn the lore behind these sports and how they have changed over time, they give fans a new context for watching and competing in games.

The Last Goodnight

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal by Howard Blum | Jewish Book Council

New York Times bestselling author of Dark Invasion Howard Blum channels Ben MacIntyre and Erik Larson in this fascinating biography of American debutante Betty Pack, who became an Allied spy during World War II. Blum explores Pack's groundbreaking career and complex personal life, including her relationship with her besotted male boss.

Who Shot Sports

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History by Gail Buckland | Jewish Book Council

From the creator of Who Shot Rock & Roll, Who Shot Sports shows the range, cultural importance, and aesthetics of sports photography through the work of 165 extraordinary photographers—most of them heralded, most of their names unknown.

Sew Jewish

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Sew Jewish: The 18 Projects You Need for Jewish Holidays, Weddings, Bar/Bat Mitzvah Celebrations, and Home by Maria Bywater | Jewish Book Council

Experience the joy of Jewish tradition through sewing. Set your holiday table, celebrate life, and decorate your home with this collection of 18 projects that rejoice in Jewish life: a mix of modern projects and classic Judaica—including a tallit, challah cover, and wedding chuppah—reinterpreted for today's sewing enthusiasts.

Sew Jewish provides detailed, step-by-step instructions, expert tips, and basic techniques for even beginning craft enthusiasts to achieve beautiful results, along with interesting tidbits about the teachings and history behind classic Judaica and Jewish traditions.

If you can set your sewing machine to a straight stitch or a zigzag, you can make all the projects in this book!

90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (...or more)

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (...or more): by Felice Cohen | Jewish Book Council

Histapkut bamuat, being content with less, is considered a virtue in Jewish law. Living in 90 square feet, Felice Cohen would say that makes her pretty virtuous. 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (...or more) is an inspirational self-help book that shows how living small for five years made her life big. It also offers lessons to help others downsize, organize, and realize the life they want to live, in whatever size space they choose.

Felice moved into that tiny Manhattan studio for one reason: to quit her full-time job and finish writing her first book, a memoir about her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. But then strangers from around the world began to ask for her advice on decluttering, praising her philosophy about living large in a small space and even hiring her to organize their homes. People today want experiences over stuff. Here is a €want-to€ guide for making that life possible.

The ABC's of Adulthood

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The ABC's of Adulthood: An Alphabet of Life Lessons by Deborah Copaken (text and photographs) Randy Polumbo (photographs) | Jewish Book Council

A book of sane, humorous, and spiritual advice about becoming an adult, for the high school or college graduate in your life€or even for an older adult, still trying to figure it out. Originally written for her eldest son when he left for college, Deborah Copaken€s guide to emerging out of adolescence will delight readers of all ages.

Operation Thunderbolt

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, the Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History by Saul David | Jewish Book Council

On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by a group of Arab and German terrorists who demanded the release of 53 terrorists. The plane was forced to divert to Entebbe, Uganda—ruled by the murderous despot Idi Amin, had no interest in intervening.

Days later, Israeli commandos disguised as Ugandan soldiers assaulted the airport terminal, killed off the terrorists, and rescued all the hostages but three who were killed in the crossfire. The assault force suffered just one fatality: its commander, Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of the current Israeli prime minister. Three of the Israel's greatest leaders, Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin planned and pulled off one of the most astonishing military operations in history.

The Mommy Group

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Mommy Group: Freaking Out, Finding Friends, and Surviving the Happiest Time of Our Lives by Elizabeth Isadora Gold | Jewish Book Council

In 2010, seven women met in New York to form a mommy group. Commiserating about the typical issues they faced as new mothers, things became more complicated with postpartum depression and anxiety, developmental delays, a failed marriage. Through it all, they learned lessons from one another that the "experts" hadn't delivered.

Journalist Elizabeth Isadora Gold reached out to other mommy groups and found that mothers across all class, geographic, religious, and racial boundaries appear to be searching for the same thing: a way to be strong, loving, engaged parents—without losing their sense of self.

A witty, relatable, and honest look at the realities of parenthood, The Mommy Group is a companion that will help any mom feel understood and empowered, and keep her laughing all the way.

The Underdogs

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

The Underdogs: Children, Dogs, and the Power of Unconditional Love by Melissa Fay Greene | Jewish Book Council

When Rabbi Harvey and Donnie Winokur of Atlanta brought home a son from a Russian orphanage in 1999, they plunged into a life of bedlam, exhaustion, confusion, and isolation: it turned out that Iyal was severely brain-damaged by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

When Iyal was nine, Donnie discovered 4 Paws for Ability, a service dog academy in Ohio training dogs for children. In time, the Winokurs were matched with Chancer, a big, self-confident golden retriever unfazed by Iyal's meltdowns. The household stabilized and Iyal had his first-ever friend.

The Underdogs tells the story of the Winokurs and half a dozen other families across the United States contending with their children's autism, attachment disorder, seizure disorder, or terminal illness. The family stories are interwoven with current science on the amazing capacities of dogs, with experts exploring how a dog like Chancer is able to offer safe haven, friendship, and fun to a boy like Iyal.

Widow-Wise

Tue, 03 May 2016 04:00:00 GMT

Widow-Wise by Alyce Gross | Jewish Book Council

Three nice Jewish girls share a dormitory room on the campus of the Ohio State University in September of 1956. 53 years later, they sit together and share the stories of their lives.
The values and strengths of middle-class Jewish families in the 1950s Midwest is reflected in the decisions these young women made and set the tone of their adult lives. Each expected the same life: marry, have children, live happily ever after. Each life had its own story. The one constant was the strength of their Jewish identity.

Widow-Wise is vivid in description and laced with humor as the author poses thoughts and observations about widowhood, sex, and realities in today's world.