Jewish Book Council

The Silly World of Chelm

Wed, 17 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Silly World of Chelm by Zalman Goldstein | Jewish Book Council

The Silly World of Chelm is a rich collection of the folk tales of the backwards world of Chelm, a legendary Eastern European Jewish city filled so-called “fools.” The textbook-sized volume includes more than 150 short stories telling of the lives of the world’s most foolish Jews. Readers will meet Mendel the tailor and his wife, who argue over whose father to name their baby after, even though both fathers share the name “Chaim.” Readers will also find Old Kalman’s wife, who purchases a dog license even though she doesn’t own a dog. And, most importantly, readers will love the Sage of Chelm, who, page after page, story after story, solves problems in this crazy little town with the most ridiculous “wisdom.”

The book includes “A Non-Introduction Introduction,” explaining the “obtuse logic” and history of the town in Poland, as well as the origin of the book. Filled with pen and ink cartoon-like drawings, as well as a “Photo Journal” and pages to Draw Your Own Story Images, The Silly World of Chelm is a necessary addition to Jewish libraries in homes, schools and synagogues everywhere. Recommended for all ages, many of the tales are wonderful for read-aloud fun.

Almost Autumn

Wed, 17 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Almost Autumn by Marianne Kaurin, translated by Rosie Hedger | Jewish Book Council

In October 1942, the inhabitants of an Oslo apartment building have secrets. Norwegian teenager Ilse Stern is in love with neighbor Hermann Rød. Her father, Isak, has stashed all his family’s money in a cigar tin hidden in a dresser drawer. Hermann makes Ilse and his parents think he has an apprenticeship with a landscape painter, but he is working for the resistance. Ilse’s sister Sonja has found a new job outside the family’s tailoring shop to make costumes for the national theater. Neighbor Ole Rustad has a secret, too. He and his taxi will be transporting Jews to deportation points, first for the Nazis and then for the resistance.

In this intricately woven novel with alternating point-of-view narrators, Norwegian author Marianne Kaurin plays with the concept of chance. The most important instance of chance here is Ilse’s fight with her mother, her trip outside Oslo with Hermann, and her ultimate absence during the round-up of Jewish women and children in November 1942. While the book’s opening is slow, the pace picks up quickly and is enhanced by multiple story lines and their narrators.

Although there have been a few novels about the Nazi occupation of Norway, Kaurin’s tale shares the little-told narrative of Norwegian Jews during the Holocaust. Her author’s note explains her own family’s roles during World War II and the Holocaust.

Recommended for ages 12 – 15.

Challah vs. Matza

Wed, 17 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Challah vs. Matza by Melissa Berg, illustrated by Alejandro Shiela | Jewish Book Council

Challah vs. Matza is a bright, colorful, amusing picture book which vividly communicates some important Jewish values to children ages 5 – 10, including the lesson that although confrontation is not ideal, there are times when it is essential to advocate for one's most important beliefs. Children will chuckle as the matzah stands up to the bully challah, but they will learn a bit about Jewish holidays and even more about standing up for themselves and what is important to them. The story is easy for children to relate to and identify with; the art is integral to the story and admirably communicates the message to even the youngest reader.

Jewish Day School: Yes Or No?

Wed, 17 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, April Peveteaux shared how she balances her kids’ kosher demands with her own diet. With the publication of her new cookbook, Bake Sales Are My B*tch: Win the Food Allergy Wars with 60+ Recipes to Keep Kids Safe and Parents Sane, April is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

Some people think parenting gets real when you bring that baby home from the hospital and realize it’s now totally on you to keep it alive. As a more seasoned parent, I know that parenting gets real once you have to enroll your baby into big, bad Kindergarten. Yes, I’m being serious. No, I’m not belittling the fact that keeping your baby alive is a big freaking deal.

Like most parents living in Los Angeles of a certain creative/business/lawyering class, we are simultaneously lucky and cursed to have so many options for educating our children: lucky because the fact that I’m even able to write this piece about the pros and cons of Jewish Day School means that my husband and I CAN AFFORD JEWISH DAY SCHOOL; cursed because those who are given too many choices can often make bad ones. Or expensive ones. Or ones that give you indigestion.

Our choice of sending our children to a progressive, Reform Jewish day school was not the obvious one. But at the time, and even now with the benefit of hindsight I would maintain, it certainly seemed like the best. Still, we’re a mixed religious family and not particularly observant, so spending every day learning Hebrew from ages 5 to 11 seemed excessive.

Surprisingly, our ambivalence became the strongest reason to choose the path of Moses. Since my husband is Jewish, but very hazy on his Hebrew school knowledge, this felt to me like the best possible way to introduce our children to half of their heritage. As a Protestant from the Great Plains, I was not going to be able to help them with their Torah portion if they decided to be a bar and bat mitzvah. I’d always been interested in learning more about Judaism myself, so we decided this was a fantastic opportunity to give our children an excellent education while allowing them to discover Judaism and what it meant for them.

We have been incredibly happy with our children’s school. The focus on tikkun olam in our community has been the most impactful part of their early education. Living in a huge city like Los Angeles this school affords them the opportunity to exist and learn in a small, loving, like-minded community. This has also been a blessing. Yet, we have had our doubts about wrapping up our little citizens of the world in a tiny bubble.

Teaching our Jewish kids how to heal the world through service is an amazing start that I wish for every child. I will never undervalue the impact these years have had on my children and their ability to empathize and act when they see injustice in the world. Yet, I can’t help but feel that allowing our children to experience diversity of all kinds on a daily basis will enhance empathy in a real world way.

Eventually, our children need to live in the world outside of their bubble. To study alongside children who are not exactly like them. To understand that some classmates may be hungry, that some face racial, religious, gender, or class discrimination. They will see these children, because they’re sitting next to these kids in class, asking what they got for #9, and where everyone’s going after the after-after party.

Living in a city with such diversity but keeping our children away from the majority of its citizens started to feel like a disservice to our children. As parents of young ones, we do want to keep them surrounded by love and comfort at all times. But as parents of future adults, we have a responsibility to teach our children that they do not, in fact, exist in their own universe. Other people occupy the world who have different needs, different beliefs, and won’t agree with them at every turn.

While some people may think throwing children into the wilds of public school in Los Angeles is cruel and unusual—I mean the lunch options alone—we are not those people. Or maybe, we are no longer those people. Perhaps it took us too long to come to the realization that our job as parents is to not only protect and nurture our children, but to create good people who truly get what other people have to endure simply to get an education, and to prepare them for adulthood. At some point our kids have to learn that their worldview is not shared by all of their peers. And their fresh, organic, kosher lunch is a privilege, not the norm for children who eat one or more meals at school every weekday.

We are so grateful for the time our children spent surrounded by love, and the supportive families who will always be part of their journey. We are especially thankful for the lessons in Judaism they learned every day. We know they are able to look outward and question what they think they know, and that is because of the years spent at the Jewish day school. That is not nothing. That is not to be taken for granted, and forgotten. It’s simply that now, for many reasons, some altruistic, some convenient, it’s time to leave the nest and live in the real world. All four of us.

April Peveteaux is the author of Gluten Is My Bitch. Her new cookbook, Bake Sales Are My B*tch: Win the Food Allergy Wars with 60+ Recipes to Keep Kids Safe and Parents Sane is now available!

Related Content:

Joshua Braff: Memories of Hillel Academy, Part I: Kissing Girls at Jewish Day School
Josh Lambert: Finding a Place for Contemporary Jewish Literature in Jewish Day Schools
Cliff Graubart: Higher Education: A Revelation and a Jewish Perspective

Distilled: A Memoir of Family, Seagram, Baseball, and Philanthropy

Tue, 16 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Distilled: A Memoir of Family, Seagram, Baseball, and Philanthropy by Charles Bronfman with Howard Green | Jewish Book Council

In this memoir, written with Howard Green, Charles Bronfman traces the mixed effects of extraordinary wealth. As one of the heirs to the immense Canadian Seagram’s liquor fortune, Bronfman was raised in a Montreal mansion, served by a butler, and driven by a chauffeur in a Rolls-Royce. Nevertheless, this mild and modest macher experienced early challenges and difficulties. His story is that of a troubled “slow starter” who has finished strong.

Although Charles and his older brother, Edgar, sold off their family company by the year 2000, Charles’s fortune was still valued at $2.1 billion some fifteen years later. But while he can now reflect and write as a “contented man,” he still feels the emotional pains of his youth. His father could be difficult, and young Charles “lived in fear—as did my siblings—that we could be the next target of one of his explosive rages.” Bronfman describes himself as a “childhood basket case,” lacking in resolve and self-confidence. Since he panicked during his exams, he never did complete his undergraduate degree at McGill University. It was not until he reached his thirties that Bronfman began to conquer his deep anxieties. After gaining majority control of baseball’s Montreal Expos in 1968 for $10 million, he sold his interest in 1991 for $110 million. As an ambitious pioneer of major league baseball in Canada, the youngest Bronfman had asserted his autonomy and “was no longer just Sam Bronfman’s son.”

John D. Rockefeller Jr., the youngest sibling of that rather affluent family, once commented that “the only question with wealth is what you do with it.” In his slow but gradual development, Charles Bronfman also realized that pragmatic truth. Identifying as culturally Jewish, Bronfman has had a long and varied association with Israel. In his mid-fifties, he was able to do something with his wealth consistent with his passion and principles. His second wife, Andrea, had deep ties to Israel, and in the 1980s, he became the largest foreign investor in the country.

That success led to his very notable philanthropic program—the Taglit-Birthright Foundation. This attractive and generous program sponsors free ten-day trips to Israel for young Jewish adults. Since 1999, Birthright has financed trips for more than 500,000 young Jews, and the Bronfmans’ foundation has supported these educational ventures with more than $325 million. Rejecting any religious or ideological “coercion,” Charles clearly articulates the program’s aims for its participants: “To be happy you’re Jewish, to identify with the Jewish people, and to have a positive emotional relationship with Israel.”

In preparing this thoughtful and candid memoir, Bronfman participated in extensive interviews, an intense process that actually became a cathartic and helpful one. What affects the reader is the unexpected and tragic events that occur even in his very advanced years. Despite the cruel setbacks, Bronfman continues his journey with personal resolve and the worldview that “hope trumps despair.”

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Bed-Stuy Is Burning

Tue, 16 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Bed-Stuy Is Burning by Brian Platzer | Jewish Book Council

Bedford-Stuyvesant is a Brooklyn neighborhood with a storied black history. Until recent years, Bed-Stuy’s reputation had been one of a crime-filled, dangerous, and gritty area. Now, its magnificent brownstones are in demand, police presence has increased, young white families and professionals are moving in and populating the parks and streets, new restaurants and stores are opening, and tensions ensue. Gentrification is happening!

Black families are feeling the pinch and young blacks are resentful of their privileged wealthier neighbors. City politics, policing strategies, real estate values, race relations, and cultures all collide in Brian Platzer’s significant first novel, Bed-Stuy is Burning.

The book focuses on the complex and conflicted lives of six Bed-Stuy inhabitants on one fateful and tragic Rosh Hashanah. These character studies unfold throughout the novel’s past and present narratives.

Aaron has moved with his journalist girlfriend, Amelia, and their infant sonto a beautifully restored Bed-Stuy brownstone. Once a practicing rabbi, Aaron’s lack of faith, and self-defeating personality have led him to work as a Wall Street banker. His gambling addiction impacts on every aspect of his life, yet his social consciousness, training, and sense of justice cause him to have concerns about the events he witnesses in his new neighborhood.

Amelia, who won’t fully commit to marrying Aaron, writes fluffy celebrity magazine pieces in her upper- floor home office.Amelia and Aaron are always second guessing their motives, their lives, and their love.

Other characters include their nanny, Antoinette, a religious single mother whose strong spiritual beliefs have found her leaning toward Islam; their neighbor, Jupiter, who has worked hard all his life, brought up his teenage son by himself and, is distressed by the changes in the neighborhood; and Aaron’s tenant, Daniel, an unmotivated, hostile, and suspicious college professor who is developing a fascination with guns,

Neighborhood tensions rise after a twelve-year-old black boy is shot ten times by police. A demonstration erupts into a riot. Shots are fired and murders are committed. The ugliness escalates, buildings burn, stores are looted, and dangerous crowds assemble. Ironically, the riot finds its epicenter at Aaron and Amelia’s house. The main characters’ lives are in dire jeopardy. The terror that ensues is heart pounding and relentless. The aftermath is subdued, but still terrifying.

Bed-Stuy is Burning offers a suspenseful, well written, and empathetic story filled with wit, wisdom, and hard truths. It stands as an examination of people caught up in today’s urban realities.

Platzer’s letter to his readers explains that the book is a culmination of, “intense debate with my family and friends, of personal observations, academic research, overheard conversations, and countless interviews with my neighbors and fellow Bed-Stuy residents.” This is most apparent in the finely drawn and diverse characters, the authentic rendering of events, and the “feel” of the streets the reader experiences.

The impact of this debut novel is unsettling. While the characters endure darkness, grief, and challenges, there are many unresolved issues and no easy answers.

Bed-Stuy is Burning is an engaging, timely, and provocative read.

Read Brian Platzer's Visiting Scribe Posts

An Open Letter of Apology to Chad Harbach

An Inside Look at an Early Draft of Bed-Stuy Is Burning

Discussion Questions

Courtesy of Atria Books

Download the reading group guide for Bed-Stuy Is Burning here

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Bake Sales Are My B*tch

Mon, 15 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Living the food allergy life and having a kid who can't have dairy, tree nuts, peanuts, or soy is not easy. And neither is worrying about accommodating all the food requirements at a play date.

From avoiding major food allergens and respecting food preferences like vegetarian or vegan to being aware of religious practices like keeping kosher, making a simple snack resembles navigating a minefield. Thankfully, Bake Sales Are My B*tch is here to help.

April Peveteaux's 50-plus recipes cover the eight major food allergens and everything from school lunches, kids parties, sleepover foods, after-school snacks, and, yes, bake sales. In Bake Sales Are My B*tch, she gets into the nitty-gritty of food allergies, from deadly serious reactions to how to deal with those who don't take your kid's allergy seriously. Whether you're a freaked-out parent or not, Pevetaux lends some much-needed guidance—and teaches you to make party foods that'll be a surefire hit.

Visiting Scribe: April Peveteaux

Breaking Kosher: When Your Kids Make the Rules

Jewish Day School: Yes Or No?

The Exhibitionist: Living Museums, Loving Museums

Mon, 15 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Exhibitionist: Living Museums, Loving Museums by Karl Katz | Jewish Book Council

Navigating the art exhibition world is an art in itself, and Karl Katz seems to have been a master talent. Well-trained by the legendary Columbia University art history professor Meyer Shapiro and later mentored by Elisheva Cohen at the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem, Katz found his niche in the early 1960s while working to bring the Israel Museum into existence. Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek identified Katz’s strength when he said, “…on some level, Karl, you’re a showman, an exhibitionist. What you really want to do is be a showman and an educator.” With that mandate, Katz successfully secured donations of art and money from the Bronfman family, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Billy Rose, among others.

Katz’s career included curatorial or directorship stints at the Metropolitan Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York, and at the Bezalel Museum and the Israel Museum in Israel. He later worked as an independent consultant to the Diaspora Museum and the Jerusalem Citadel. (Some projects never went beyond the planning stages.) Along the way, Katz recruited talented architects and designers who are acknowledged with conceptualizing spaces to best display the archaeological or historical elements that are the bases of the exhibits. Particular credit is given to London designer James Gardner, who completely revamped the original design of the Tel Aviv Diaspora Museum. This required the capitulation of the planners, who included historian Salo Baron, poet and WWII resistance fighter; Abba Kovner, former assistant to Chaim Weizmann; Meyer Weisgal and World Jewish Congress president Nahum Goldmann. According to most reports, Katz’s vision prevailed.

After “commuting” between Israel and New York in the 1960s, Katz returned to The Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he was put in charge of temporary exhibitions. By his own account, he produced some “blockbusters,” all of which are described in fascinating detail. Here, too, personal contacts were invaluable—such as when the Greek government refused to lend antiquities for an exhibition until Jackie Kennedy Onassis got involved.

The title’s double entendre is a charming gateway into this memoir of more than fifty years’ involvement in museum exhibitions. Katz’s insider story is filled with anecdotes of convincing wealthy collectors to lend or donate valuable art; of masterminding shows to which museum board members were frequently opposed; of following leads that put him in personal risk as a Jew (including stays in Egypt Turkey, Iran); to ruefully noting that the recognition of the success of each show did not ordinarily give him the credit he felt he deserved. For art aficionados, this is a fascinating read. For the uninitiated, it is a wonderfully intimate narrative of a “go-getter” in the cultural milieu of the second half of the twentieth century.

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Breaking Kosher: When Your Kids Make the Rules

Mon, 15 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

April Peveteaux is the author of Gluten Is My Bitch. With the publication of her new cookbook, Bake Sales Are My B*tch: Win the Food Allergy Wars with 60+ Recipes to Keep Kids Safe and Parents Sane, April is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

I am a woman who loves to eat. I consider feasting upon great foods one of my greatest passions and an intimate, yet universal, way to connect with other like-minded people who enjoy stimulating all of their senses. In other words: If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my blended spinach and ricotta dip.

It was no accident that my husband and I fell in love over every ethnic meal we could indulge in while dating in New York City, and some that we were not sure qualified as any ethnicity. Where do those sugar-roasted nuts come from, anyway? His appreciation for my Southern and Cajun cooking and our many arguments over what makes a taco, based on his California experience and my Oklahoma and Texas knowledge, meant we were able to fulfill each other while remaining hungry.

After we brought our two beautiful, and voracious, children into the world it probably won’t surprise you to know that one of my most satisfying responsibilities as a mother and wife became the preparation of special birthday cakes for each member of my household. Pursuant to their personality and their preference, I make a unique birthday dessert for everyone, and insist they indulge in a piece for breakfast on the day they were brought into this earthly existence. Is there a better way to celebrate the day you were born than by smothering your gob with sugar? My husband goes for a honeybun cake made to resemble, well, a honeybun, covered in cinnamon, toasted pecans and a still-warm glaze. My son loves a rainbow cake with thick white buttercream frosting between each layer to accentuate the bright colors of the confection. And my daughter enjoys a cookie-crusted ice cream cake covered in fudge and whipped cream—the same ice cream cake my own mother made for me every year on my birthday.

Feeding my people is serious business, and I am filled with pleasure as they enjoy the culinary delights I share with them on special, and everyday occasions. Which is why raising kids as they attend a Jewish day school and start to get serious about Judaism has become a challenge to me—in the dietary sense.

As a cook who likes to expand her repertoire and broaden her children’s palates, preparing kosher meals on demand was not my (strawberry preferred) jam. I’m an add-on kind of gal who just walked into a restricted space and was not happy about having to ditch my bacon. I also like to make sure no one begins a meal hungry, so appetizers are a big part of my meal planning. When working under a traditional six-hour separation of the meat and dairy, there was no way I was bringing out my favorite roast chicken if I’d presented the epic cheese platter less than two hours prior. Something had to give. And it wasn’t going to be the cheese platter.

While doing some reconnaissance with other kosher parents, I realized that many chose the path of least resistance: going vegetarian or vegan. I am not that mom. I have celiac disease and can’t have gluten, and quite frankly I think that’s enough deprivation for one household. Also, being gluten-free means that bagels for every meal are also not an option. This is in fact, the worst.

Rather than risk offending everyone at my kid’s lunch tables, and also risk being a big old jerk, I decided my family would have to compromise. After all, if my kids were going to be raised Jewish, they were all ready to question everything. Why not lunch?

When packing a lunch I did decide that going vegetarian was the best way to respect the school guidelines and their observant classmates. Removing meat from their midday meal was going to be much easier on all of us. Especially me, since I don’t eat lunch at school and can shove all the leftover brisket into my mouth only minutes after indulging in nachos. But for my children’s sake, we pack a vegetarian lunch 99% of the time, and they can totally work with the lack of meat protein through the magic of bean and cheese burritos.

Dinnertime and the weekends are much more challenging, especially since the adults in the family do not keep kosher. Still, in support of our children’s commitment we make it work. Our daughter (the most stringent observer) has agreed to be “Dutch kosher” when at home or on vacation, meaning she can enjoy some dairy and only wait one hour to dig into the fried chicken. I compromise by experimenting with vegan and vegetarian meals that keep us kosher-style. Luckily the popularity of Paleo-style eating goes well with both kosher style (no dairy to mix with meat, just skip the pork and the shellfish recipes) and my own celiac disease, since the Paleo diet eschews all grains.

We are probably one of the few families who dine either Paleo or vegan depending on the evening, but mixing religions and food requires creativity and dedication to eating really well. I’m certainly willing to try new, delicious options—see recipe for Rice Chex chicken fingers below—to keep everyone in our house well fed and responsible to their beliefs. As long as I can keep deep-frying anything that falls in line with these dietary restrictions, it’s kosher.

Rice Chex Chicken Fingers

Kids love chicken fingers, but finding breadcrumbs that are both gluten-, egg-, and dairy-free is a huge challenge. Rice Chex (and other Chex products) are seven main allergen-free (no gluten, dairy, peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, fish or shellfish), so you can use them to crunch up your salads, or coat your fried chicken. Keep it dairy- and nut-free by using rice milk in this recipe.

Prep time: 20 minutes Cook time: 15 minutes
Makes: 12 servings

Ingredients:
2 lbs. chicken tenders
4 cups Rice Chex
1 cup rice milk
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon paprika
3 cups vegetable oil
Sauces for dipping (check allergen info on label)

1. If not already cut into fingers; slice your chicken into 6” strips, approximately 2” wide. Set aside.

2. In a food processor or blender, combine Rice Chex, salt, pepper and paprika. Pulse until texture resembles breadcrumbs. Transfer to a large plate.

3. Pour rice milk into a medium bowl and set up assembly line with chicken tenders, milk and Rice Chex mixture. Place chicken tenders in bowl with rice milk as you heat your oil.

4. Heat vegetable oil on medium-high in large skillet or use a deep fat fryer and heat on medium-high. Once water sprinkles “dance” on the surface the oil is ready. Turn heat down to medium.

5. Dredge (rice) milk soaked chicken tenders in Rice Chex crumbs, coating completely.

6. Transfer to hot oil and cook until browned, 5-7 minutes per side. Allow chicken tenders to drain on paper towel-covered plate.

7. Serve chicken tenders alone, or with desired sauces.

Recipe excerpt used by permission from Bake Sales Are My B*tch: Win the Food Allergy Wars with 60+ Recipes to Keep Kids Safe and Parents Sane.

Slash Coleman: The Rise of Gluten-Free Jews [with Recipe]
Nora Rubel: Not Kosher
Beth Warren: Kosher Style

Interview: Marjorie Ingall

Sun, 14 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

with Nat Bernstein

Jewish Book Council had the opportunity to talk with Marjorie Ingall about the importance of reading for pleasure, Mark Twain's philosemitism, the history of marketing books to Jewish women, and her parenting guide, Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children, an excellent and enjoyable resource for Jewish and non-Jewish parents alike.

Nat Bernstein: Nefertiti Austen recently wrote an essay about authoring parenting guides for women of color and how no publisher has embraced that market. Do you see the same scarcity for Jewish women, or has Judaism staked a claim on a parenting technique that has a wider appeal in the publishing world?

Marjorie Ingall: Publishing is constantly seeking the widest audience humanly possible. For Mamaleh Knows Best, there was a constant pushback from my editor, who kept asking, “Why do you want to talk about Philip Roth all the time?” For her, it was not universal; she wanted a book on how to use Jewish parenting to make a good goyish child. And I understand that: publishing is so risk-averse now that a niche market is not going to get you a book deal. I can imagine the same thing is happening if publishers assume that only black women will buy a black parenting book. But the stories of my black mother friends—especially mothers of sons—and how the kinds of worries they have are not anything like the kinds of worries I have, that would be beneficial for all Americans to read.

NLB: Since we’re talking about how to market books, can you share more about the history of marketing books and reading to Jewish women?

MI: When publishing became more scalable—when printing presses became more widespread—in the late nineteenth century, it created a colossal market—and not just within the Jewish community—of translations into Yiddish of popular books, a lot of them Romance novels. I write for the Times Book Review, and I think it’s hilarious that the Times pretends that the Romance genre doesn’t exist. Romance is a humongous part of the publishing market, and that was true in the late 1800s, too! Jewish women drove popular fiction.

We also have, in our spiritual line, tchines, these prayer books written by and for Jewish women, and that too was a huge market. They included prayers for a healthy pregnancy, prayers that your child will marry well, prayers for successful breastfeeding. All of this stuff was part of our culture, and it would be cool if more Jewish women knew about it. There were early marketing attempts to get women to buy these tchines: “Women! If you only have a few pennies, isn’t this a good way to spend them, for your own spiritual enlightenment for the whole future?” (If this is something that interests you, the index in the back of my book will give you a lot more places to go with that.)

NLB: You have a really lovely and clever chapter on spirituality, in which you observe that taking your kids to religious services is like taking your kids to a restaurant?

MI: As your kid gets older, you teach them how to behave. I don’t believe you should whisk your kid out the first time they make a peep, but you also don’t let a kid scream and disturb everyone else’s spiritual experience. The only way to acculturate a kid is by giving them the experience: no one is born knowing how to behave in shul! One thing I think the Orthodox Jewish community, in particular, has done really well is tolerating noise and chaos in shul. The first shul I went to with my baby—I wanted to join a Conservative shul that was closest to my house—I was getting such a fisheye when she made any noise that I never went back. I tried joining the family service, but I felt that it was cliquey. I found another congregation where the women in front of me kept turning around and making googly eyes at Josie out of delight, and that’s such a small thing, but it made all the difference.

NLB: In one of the early chapters of Mamaleh Knows Best, you point out that “The world is constantly telling us we’re doing parenting wrong.” Is that “we” specific to women?

MI: Yes. We’ve all seen the dudes in the playground, and everyone says, “You are so awesome for babysitting your kids.” You’re not babysitting, it’s your child! We also see the eight zillion Disney movies that all miraculously have missing mothers. It’s not just Jewish women, it’s all women who are told that however they’re doing things is wrong, which is a function of misogyny. It’s not unique to the Jewish Mother stereotype: if you troll Buzzfeed and all these other media sites now, you see Tiger Moms and black moms—it’s a mom thing, which is a problem.

NLB: It’s interesting how much this anxiety over perpetual perfection is transmitted to kids—you write that you “worry that kids today don’t want to be beginners, don’t want to be imperfect, don’t want to ever to look clueless.”

MI: We are always newly shocked when there are cheating scandals at all these fancy schools, but it happens because we have told these kids that they’re not allowed to fail. Surveys of American teenagers in general show that they see their parents as saying one thing and really thinking another when it comes to what their values are: when it is “be Number One at all costs,” you set up your kid if not to fail, then to certainly think I have to do whatever it takes to be Number One.

NLB: I love the Yiddish proverb you discovered: “The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best.” You include it in a chapter about teaching kids to distrust authority, which I imagine runs counter to a lot of the parenting advice out there?

MI: Kids are expected to know what they want to be really early, and aren’t encouraged to mess around and explore and be dreamers and figure out what they really love and value. I don’t think our culture, or the pop culture they absorb, helps them with that. One of my regular rants is about live-action TV aimed at kids, where being a quirky, weird, geeky kid is a subject of mockery. Historically, Jews have been geeks, and it’s been really good for us! We should encourage our kids to have obsessions and passions and not be embarrassed about them.

Always having a little bit of distance and viewing authority with a gimlet eye has always been a good thing for the Jews, as well. It is certainly counter to the stereotype of the Tiger Mom, where the view is that the classroom is a fiefdom in which you do what your teacher wants. For the Jews, disrespecting authority is a thread that has gone through our culture from the beginning, whether we have lived in a time when we had tension with the ruling parties or during a period in history when we were very acculturated and had powerful jobs within the ruling culture. I think it’s telling that we don’t have the equivalent of a pope, that we are a dialogic and diverse and fractured-in-a-good-way kind of people. For a parent and for a creative or scientific mind, being a little bit of an outsider is a good thing.

NLB: On the subject of distrusting authority… What do you see as the greatest challenge facing Jewish parents in the next four years?

MI: Despite the title being in present tense, the intention behind Mamaleh Knows Best was to look back through Jewish history and examine what child-rearing traits seem to have served us well. I feel like I’m not entirely qualified to talk about politics or the future, but I do think that one thing that has been essential for Jews is that we are a people who take care of others. Mark Twain wrote this great essay about why you don’t see Jewish beggars—and it’s not because there aren’t Jewish poor people, it’s because Jews take care of their community. As we are entering the age of a leader who uses Twitter to say mean things about people, we want to be sure that we are talking to our kids about being kind. There are other political figures we can point to and say, “Look at this mentschy behavior.” Making sure that our kids are aware of other people’s suffering and helping other people ameliorate that suffering will help us all: everybody feels better when they are do something good, and we can all do that as both parents and citizens.

NLB: In the book you mention the Hebrew Benevolent Societies of the mid-nineteenth century, which as you note popped up in Jewish communities across the United States—on either side of the Mason-Dixon line—really quite rapidly. These societies were founded by women! And run by women! And they were actually the first instance of American—not just Jewish, American—women mobilizing and establishing their own institutions and assuming positions of leadership in an organized way: the Hebrew Benevolent Societies were really the first independent women’s movement in American history, and this is what opened the door for women abolitionists and suffragists across faiths within the same generation. Religiously, theologically, these charitable organizations weren’t necessarily shaking up a whole lot, but the social fabric of American Judaism was suddenly and drastically being rewoven by Jewish mothers at the time that Twain was writing: the standards he saw in Jewish communities were set by its women. (And his appreciation for those standards allowed him to recognize and even confront antisemitism in other parts of the world, which you write about elsewhere.)

MI: Also, let’s talk about American Jewish education: no one really talks about it, but so much of where American Jewish education started was from Jewish women. An unfortunate thing I discovered was that the women who created Jewish education and the women who created these benevolent societies, a lot of them weren’t mothers. Just as leaders of the feminist movement were not mothers. It’s really hard to have a career and to “have it all.”

NLB: And to find time to read?

MI: A thread throughout the book is to not be a “Do as I say, not as I do” parent. It’s important that our kids see us reading, and see that we enjoy it, and see us reading for pleasure as well as betterment. I include in Mamaleh Knows Best all the statistical backup about how important reading is, how a love of books increases empathy, makes your kid do better in all aspects of school. International studies that correct for income and background still find that in houses where everybody reads, the kids do better. For Jews in general, we are the People of the Book, and literacy has often been our ticket into another class, or to not being so quickly killed. Reading is really, really important.

And reading at home should serve a very different function from reading at school: at home, you need to create a safe space for your kid to really enjoy reading. They want to read the same book a gazillion times, fine. My librarian friends have so many stories about parents coming in and saying, “She’s ready for chapter books, can you not let her take out any more picture books?” I still read picture books, I still bring home picture books for my 12-year-old, and the snobbery about graphic novels makes me want to cry: all reading is good reading.

NLB: You also emphasize the importance of humor in parenting—and in transmitting values. How do you view the current generation of Jewish comedians in popular culture?

MI: In general, acculturation is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s great to have people not killing us, but on the other hand, the distrust of authority and the gimlet eye has worked in our favor: that is a great place for comedy to come from. Comedy is a great tool for questioning authority, for making people like you even when you’re not like them, and for gaining respect. Look at studies about the use of comedy in the office: bosses who have a sense of humor, who embrace a sense of humor, are reviewed much more favorably by their staffs than bosses with no sense of humor or ones who have belittling senses of humor. I think that’s telling.

NLB: I was particularly heartened to read not only how many female comedians you named among the future of Jewish humor, but also how they are changing Jewish humor.

MI: One of the chapters in the book looks at the history of the Jewish Mother stereotype. It’s important to note that the first Jewish Mother in American culture was not this grasping, neurotic stereotype. It was Mrs. Goldberg! This is a woman who was the first recipient of the first Best Actress Emmy, who had a wildly successful radio show followed by a wildly successful TV show. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she was the executive producer of the show. She created a persona that was, yes, a meddler, but she was smart, she was competent, and she was caring.

Now, we are starting to see American Jewish women as executive producers of comedy shows once again. If you look at the Broad City girls, if you look at Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, if you look at Girls, yes, the mother characters are still flawed, but they are flawed in interesting, complicated ways. And you’re going to have flaws, because comedy requires flaws, but not this knee-jerk, dumb, schticky, mocking, disparaging kind of thing. I would like to think that as more and more Jewish women are in charge of their own storytelling, the Jewish Mother figure will become more nuanced—again.

NLB: You’ve succeeded in raising two kickass feminist daughters of your own. Do you have any advice for raising feminist sons?

MI: Nipping any kind of misogynist behavior in the bud and making sure your kid is aware of sexist language, making sure they treat all people with respect, and talking about women’s achievements despite barriers—they should know that historically it has not been a level playing field for women and men, which is something that anti-feminists will not acknowledge. And, this sounds flippant, but it’s not: the best way to raise a feminist son is to let him have an older sister. I can point to my brother as proof.

Nat Bernstein is the contributing editor and manager of digital content, media, and special programs for the Jewish Book Council.

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Interview with Miriam Libicki
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Interview: Miriam Libicki

Thu, 11 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

with Michelle Zaurov

Jewish Book Council had the pleasure of featuring Miriam Libicki as part of Ink Bleeds History: Reclaiming and Redrawing the Jewish Image, a panel of graphic stories on the representation of Jews in comics and graphic novels. We followed up with Miriam to discuss her collection of drawn essays, Toward a Hot Jew.

Michelle Zaurov: I notice you talk a lot about graphic artists who are Jewish. Do you feel like being Jewish has had any influence on your relationship with comics or being a comic artist?

Miriam Libicki: We read Marvel comics when I was young, but I think it was Peter David who put a lot of Jewish content in in his ‘80s comics and I was aware pretty early on that comics were a Jewish medium. I grew up Modern Orthodox, so it wasn’t super strict, but I felt like in my schooling and community there was a sense that visual art wasn’t really a thing that Jews do. The notion was that it’s nice for kids to have coloring books, but art is not a serious or intellectual pursuit. I was into fine arts and history of Western art, and that didn’t feel very Jewish to me, whereas comic art managed to feel Jewish somehow and have some Jewish sensibility to it.

MZ: These essays seem to be on disparate topics: you have one about art and another about Jewish identity. Did you mean for them to all go into a cohesive graphic novel?

ML: Well, I did them all separately. It was 10 years’ worth of essays, so I did them all as self-published zines. I was doing comics and going to comic cons, I had an ongoing series, jobnik!, which is about my time in the Israeli army, that morphed into a graphic novel. Whenever I had some rant or thought that I wanted to put in comic form, I would put out one of these drawn essays and sell it at a convention. Once I had two or three of them, I decided that once I had enough of these graphic essays, I would submit the full collection to publishers.

MZ: Why did you decide on these subjects?

ML: It just seems to be what I care about. I didn’t really intend to focus on Jewish subjects, and I think it was a reaction to leaving Israel and coming to Vancouver. I felt that Vancouver was not really a Jewish place after being in Israel, and I was afraid of becoming just another white person. People wouldn’t even perceive me as Jewish, and somehow that bothered me. So, my art at that time started becoming more Jewish. I found myself making excuses to have Jewish themes in my art as a way of asserting my identity that felt comfortable to me. This seemed like an authentic way to express and explore my Judaism on my own, when I didn’t have my community or my whole country reinforcing it.

MZ: How did you feel when you returned to Israel and interviewed actual Israeli citizens after being away?

ML: It was very different. I was grappling with my identity because I had made aliyah, served in the Israeli army, and the idea was to become a real Israeli and not an American tourist, and somehow earn my place in Israeli society. But I moved to Canada right after the army. So, I undermined that whole project and I felt very ambivalent about it for a long time. I still wondered how I could be a part of the Israeli conversation, and that is what the early essays were about: if I can understand the Israeli mindset, then maybe I am still partially Israeli. But, each time I go back, I get more rooted in Canada. I got married, had Canadian kids, and now when I travel with my family to Israel, I won’t even speak Hebrew most of the time. I really feel like a tourist with pretty good Hebrew. And I guess that’s ok. Now I am more interested in defining my Judaism as a Diaspora sort of Judaism rather than an Israeli one. I stopped struggling with it; I don’t feel the need to prove myself as an Israeli anymore.

MZ: On a more general note, what was the most difficult part of the artistic process with this novel?

ML: The part that takes longest is always the art. In order for me to do the art, I need something to keep me going, like a strong story that can sustain all these hours working on art. It’s difficult in the beginning to figure out what I’m writing and why I am writing it. Once I get over that, the rest comes pretty quickly, but the art is still long because I don’t draw or paint fast.

MZ: I noticed that some of your essays lack in color while others are colorful, is there a tactful reason for that?

ML: It was more practical. “Towards a Hot Jew” was meant to be a drawn essay, and it was a breakthrough in what I wanted to do in comics. It’s in black-and-white because I didn’t want to make it more complicated, and it was more about the writing and the ideas rather than the art. I felt like if I added color, I would have worried about the realism of the art. The other ones atr in watercolor because I wanted to teach myself watercolor, and the “Jewish Memoir” was commissioned for an academic anthology publication, and I couldn’t put that in color for cost reasons. The final essay is in a limited orange palette, and that was kind of for the same reason. When I was still two-thirds of the way through the art, I didn’t have a publisher for it, but the idea was that I wanted to get it published in an academic context, like a journal or an anthology. I also knew that this was the essay that would put me over the top for the essay collection in terms of page count.

MZ: In the book, you say that “comic style editorializes human appearance” and “fictionalizes it in order to bring certain aspects of humanity to light.” How have you done that with some of the characters you drew up in this book, and what aspects of humanity did you hope to bring to light?

ML: My avatar in the essays is based on the character that I drew for jobnik!. I kept drawing that character until one felt right to me. Her looks did undergo a transformation over the course of the first few issues and stories I wrote about my army experience. I gave her bigger eyes than mine, but she certainly isn’t glamorous. She’s shorter than me, which is kind of how I feel. Sometimes I feel more slight and observant, and not physically dominating. The eyes are emphasized but the rest of the face is fleshy as well because in my late teens and early twenties I didn’t like my appearance very much. It’s not that she’s hideous; the point that she’s just not glamorous and put together, and her body is sort of lumpy. After that, I didn’t pay attention to how much she looked like me. When I did the essay “Jewish Memoir Goes Pow! Zap! Oy!,” it was the first time I had that character addressing the reader and expressing thoughts on literary criticism. I picked the appearance of what I was redrawing at the time of the jobnik! stories, which was the Miriam character with the short bob cut and casually half out of the army uniform. That suited the tone I was going for with writing the essay about memoirs—it was in the authority of lecturing but in the form of someone human and vulnerable. She not only has a body, but a flawed body, and even when I’m talking about the history of race relations it’s still coming from a human.

MZ: In the “Towards a Hot Jew” essay, you touch upon the sexual stereotypes of Jewish men and women. Do you feel like Jewish stereotypes, specifically of young Israeli soldiers, differ from those of the average young Jew?

ML: Definitely! I feel like there’s a whole thing about soldiers who were the guards in the Ben Yehuda Pedestrian Mall in Jerusalem: those are the soldiers who would get all the action. Now, for the past 15 years, it’s been the armed escort on a Birthright tour. Everyone wants to have their “sex with an Israeli soldier” experience. Among Israelis, soldiers aren’t necessarily seen as sexy, but they know that they’re perceived as such in the rest of the world. I feel like Israelis have caught on that their sex appeal is one of their selling traits, and there’s definitely more of an internal fetish as well. Which is a little bit disturbing because it’s one thing when outsiders think Israelis are sexy and it’s quite another when official branches of the Israeli government are putting up sexy soldier pictures.

MZ: You also talk about how there’s an imperfection that goes with Jewish culture. Do you feel like that plays a role in the sexuality of Jews?

ML: I think so. I feel like sexuality influenced by Christian doctrine, you get the Madonna-whore complex: either the woman is ideal or totally dirty. I would hope that in Judaism, especially since we don’t have a Madonna, that we would have less of that, that someone could be human and still be desirable. Maybe we can avoid putting each other on pedestals; maybe we can acknowledge that we are all not perfect and that we all have big noses and are sexy anyways.

MZ: In one of your essays, you say that “psychoanalysis is a quintessential Jewish pursuit.” What do you mean by that?

ML: A lot of people have made the point that Freud’s middle-class Jewish upbringing was why he had his specific thoughts on familial relationships, that if it weren’t for the very specific German-Jewish family structure Freud grew up with, he wouldn’t have had all those theories about what parents and children relationships are. I definitely feel like psychoanalysis caught on among Jewish people earlier than it did with the mainstream, who were initially largely anti-psychoanalysis or found it disgusting that people went to talk to psychoanalysts about their private life—which is reminiscent of the way they found Jews to be dirty and disgusting. It’s a Jewish thing to believe that you should talk about yourself and acknowledge your flaws, and that talking or complaining about a subject endlessly is a method of taking action to solve problems.

MZ: Do you feel like these Jewish stereotypes were fading when you moved to Canada?

ML: I think people on the West Coast and in Canada had less of these stereotypes than what you might find on the East Coast and the United States. A lot of people aren’t familiar with the Jewish stereotypes out here, let alone Jews. In “Towards a Hot Jew,” I talked about the concept of the Jewish American Princess (“JAP”) being shallow and materialistic. I was doing that project in Canada that asked non-Jewish Canadians if they had a version of the JAP, like a Jewish Canadian Princess, and they uniformly claimed that there isn’t. So I would say there’s a little bit less awareness.

MZ: In the later essays, you were pointing out the downfalls of the Israeli government, like how they have alienated Ethiopian Jews and the Sudanese throughout history. As an Israeli citizen, do you feel a personal guilt on behalf of the government? Or do you feel like you removed yourself from that because you moved away?

ML: I have that guilt, but it’s not huge. Even if I tried to make things different I can’t have that much of an effect: there is no absentee voting in Israel, so I can’t vote unless I made a date to be in Israel on Election Day. I could have more of an influence, but I feel like I can’t be that much of an activist outside of Israel. I do tweet and say “Shame on Netanyahu!” but I feel like there is a real sense in Israel that the rest of the world can’t judge them. The American Jewish community does have a place in talking about Israeli policies, but insofar as to actually effect what happens inside Israel, I’m not sure I can have that much effect as an American/Canadian.

MZ: Why did you decide to end the book on the quote “How can we deliver a message about our humanity from behind the bars of quotation marks?” What does this mean?

ML: That is a quote from the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He was a World War II refugee who survived a prisoner of war camp, and a philosopher before and after the war. His core idea is empathy, and he was one of the people to really try to define it. He was also an Orthodox Jew and talks about it in spiritual terms, like the image of God. He talks about the need to look beyond categories—when he thinks about categories he thinks of the Germans walking outside of his camp who presumed they were a different kind of humanity than he was. If you have those categories then there’s no way you’ll be able to communicate, and everything you say will just become a symbol of how that person has already defined you. In the essay I was grappling with the ideas of identity politics, that you need to have identity politics because otherwise you have identities and categories and hierarchies that are left unspoken. It’s better to have them spoken, but it’s also important not to retreat so far into them that the only thing you can express is the identity you have been sorted into. It’s important to examine structures and hierarchies but it’s also important to take those and put them in their place and try to see the infinite in all of us, as well.

MZ: Identity and categories and how they shouldn’t be at the forefront of society seems to be a huge emphasis in your essays. Were you raised with this notion?

ML: I think so. My parents were Orthodox, however neither of them grew up Orthodox. My mother was a convert and my dad was more Conservative-Reform. Their attitudes towards Orthodoxy was more about how they chose to live their life and acknowledging that everyone has their own paths in life. They gave me spirituality and tradition but their moral sense was much more universal. I feel like I have the ideas of universal morality and empathy. We all believe there are many paths to the truth and ways to be a good person.

MZ: What are you working on now?

ML: I’m working on a bunch of projects right now. I just worked with the original underground comic artist and comic feminist historian, Trina Robbins. She is putting out a collection of fiction by her father that was published originally in Yiddish, which she found, translated, and adapted as a comic script, which she gave it to different artists to draw. I’m also working on another short piece about graphic -novel responses to the Holocaust. It is closer to fiction than non-fiction, so it’s more of a narrative than an essay. I’m also doing my Masters right now and working on my thesis, which is also a graphic novel.

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. She enjoys reading realistic fiction and fantasy novels, especially with a strong female lead.

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How the Moon Became Dim

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

How the Moon Became Dim by Ruth Wiseman, illustrated by Clinton G. Bowers | Jewish Book Council

The reader discovers in this sweet tale that the sun and the moon were created to reside in the sky and to light the world, but were not designed to be the same size or to cast the same glow. The moon, eager to be the brighter of the two, discusses the discrepancy with God and is told that she is to be the smaller and dimmer and will shine only at night. Disappointed at first, the moon begins to think about what serving God truly means and begins to see all the incredible blessings and joys possible in her very special role. With stars to accompany her, the power of the tides, the ability to wax and wane, a gentle light, a special connection to holidays and time, and other unique advantages, she understands that every one of God's creations has its own essential part to play and each is important and irreplaceable.

With deep, rich, jewel-toned art which seems to cast a glow of its own accompanying the text of this empowering tale, the author and illustrator present a story which will help every child see that he or she has a vital place in the scheme of life, discouraging envy and encouraging confidence and high morale.

An activity which teaches phases of the moon is appended as is a note about the ancient text on which the story is based. Recommended for ages 3-7.

Max

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Max by Sarah Cohen-Scali, translated by Penny Hueston

In chapter one of Max, we are introduced to a male fetus created through the Nazi Lebensborn program. Through the protagonist’s carefully curated blue eyes, we learn how the program breeds children to embody traits of the ideal Aryan race—“I must be blond. I must have blue eyes. I must be sharp. Lean. Hard. Tough. Made of Krupp Steel”—and quickly takes them from their birth mothers’ arms to be raised by the Reich.

Max rises to the head of his litter in physical perfection and Draufgängertum, the desired quality of “a go-getter, daredevil.” As he grows, Max is found to be singularly exceptional at helping various temporary caretakers—doctors, sisters, SS officers—lure fair-haired, blue eyed, Polish children from their families to be Germanized to bring more children into the Aryan race. Max revels in his role helping the Führer, and he wants for nothing more. When at six he meets Lukas, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jew, who is afraid of nothing, their friendship throws everything Max has believed into question.

Like so many stories to which we are asked to bear witness, this is not always a pleasant tale. It depicts childhoods filled to the brim with war, and spares no horrific detail. While the descriptions of teens plotting murders and girls forced at the hands of soldiers may not be for all, the brutality of hearing this story through the first-person narration of a child highlights the task we are asked to perform as listeners. As a rescue worker encourages Max when the war is done but the deeds are still fresh: “here the children are not punished for the sins of the father.” Recommended for ages 15 and up.

The Ship to Nowhere: On Board the Exodus

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Ship to Nowhere: On Board the Exodus | Jewish Book Council

The Ship to Nowhere: On Board the Exodus is a part true, part fictionalized story of one family’s journey aboard the Exodus. We follow eleven-year-old Rachel Landesman, her sister, and their mother as they set off aboard theSS President Warfield, the ship commissioned to take them from France to Palestine. The ship is escorted the whole way by a British warship, determined to block entry into the Holy Land at all costs. Along the way, we are introduced to other children aboard the ship. As we learn their stories, we see bits and pieces of the devastation caused by the Holocaust. We also read about the bravery of the young rebels who helped many survivors reach Israel.

As the ship nears Palestine, its true name, Haganah Ship Exodus 1947, is revealed, and the flag of Israel is flown overhead. As soon as the Exodus crosses into Palestinian waters, the warship bombards it, first with tear gas, then by ramming into its side. The passengers are taken from the damaged vessel and are sent back to Europe but no country will take in the refugees. They are finally forced to return to Europe to wait until the state of Israel is declared and they can complete their journey.

Author Rona Arato combines the facts surrounding the Exodus and Rachel’s real journey with added fictional characters to create a dramatic retelling of this courageous voyage. She has scattered many actual photographs from this time period throughout the book, helping to set the stage and allowing us to ride along with Rachel and her family. The Ship to Nowhere: On Board the Exodus is an excellent book with a compelling story for children ages 9 —14. It is highly recommended both for its reliable information and for the engaging way that the information is presented.

Adam's Animals

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Adam's Animals by Barry L. Schwartz, illustrated by Steliyana Doneva | Jewish Book Council

This new picture book builds from one line in Genesis when God decides to have Adam name the animals. The author does a clever job in a situation where content needs to be stretched and most pages consist of many names. His first trick to hold interest through a long alphabetical list is to pair every animal we recognize with a creature we never heard of or barely know. A second tool used is to devote several amusing pages to animal complaints about their name or their sound. Around these lists the author bookends first a quick but accurate recap of the steps of creation including Adam’s and then Eve’s arrival. This book embroiders Adam’s personality and feelings, but filling in silent Biblical gaps is done by the best of scholars. Eve’s arrival is vibrant and imparts the sense of a strong character. The illustrations of the animals are realistic and recognizable. Recommended for ages 4 to 6.

Flag by Shira

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Flag by Shira: A Yom Ha'Atzmaut Story by Galia Sabbag, illustrated by Erin Taylor | Jewish Book Council

Little Shira is back in teacher Galia Sabbag's series about a young girl who is eager to learn about her Jewish heritage with the enthusiastic support of her loving parents and creative teachers. This time she is learning about Yom Ha'Atzmaut, Israel's Independence Day, and her class is focusing on many facts about life in Israel and the culture of Israeli society. Shira decides to make some Israeli flags to decorate her home in honor of the holiday but has trouble drawing the Magen David, the big blue star which is the central symbol of the flag. Unsure of how to draw the complicated figure, she asks her parents for help. The simple, natural way that help is asked for and received is one of the underlying messages of the book in conjunction with the more obvious lessons about Israel which are beautifully presented. The color illustrations are appealing and integral to the story and Hebrew is included in an organic way, fully explained and appropriately placed in context.

Useful for both classroom and home, Shira continues to educate children ages 5- – 8 about Jewish life in a charming and creative way.

Front Lines

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Front Lines by Michael Grant | Jewish Book Council

In Front Lines, Michael Grant re-imagines a World War II where female soldiers are allowed to enlist in the United States army. The story features the narratives of three teenaged female soldiers which occasionally converge: Rio Richlin, a California farm girl, Frangie Marr, an African-American girl from Oklahoma, and Rainy Schulterman, a Jewish girl from New York City.

Grant succeeds in aptly portraying the time period appropriately despite a more “modern” concept. However, the fictitious premise obfuscates the reality that there were in fact female soldiers fighting for the United States in World War II. Despite this, Front Linesotherwise reads as a work of historical fiction. Grant displays the struggles of wartime and the toll it takes on the human spirit.

Although each girl has her own personal reason for enlisting, their tenacity is unparalleled. After their enlistments, the girls begin their training, but nothing will prepare them for the atrocities of the actual war. Rio, who hoped to be assigned as a driver, is appointed to fight on the front lines, Frangie works hard to become a medic, but her gender and skin color are frequently unjustly protested, and multi-lingual Rainey is assigned to work in intelligence. In addition to the turbulent experience of war and combat, the protagonists' experiences are amplified due to rampant discrimination. Grant includes abhorrent racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic epithets, unfortunately apt for the time period. In particular, Frangie is subject to vile racism and Rainy experiences anti-Semitism.

At over 500 pages, the book is lengthy and chock-full of numerous combat scenes and accompanying disturbing imagery. Although it focuses mainly on wartime experiences, Grant does touch upon more humanistic elements, many via subplots. However, several of these are left unresolved, perhaps as incentive to check out the sequel. Additionally, there are a few chapters which feature an unnamed, omniscient narrator.

An extensive bibliography and sources are listed at the end. Grant also includes a note explaining certain details of the book such as which elements were fabricated and which were factual.

The content of Front Lines is primarily dark and gritty, but ultimately it is a well-written novel. It will be of interest to readers ages 12 and up who enjoy historical fiction and action-packed reads.

Sons and Soldiers

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U. S. Army to Fight Hitler by Bruce Henderson | Jewish Book Council

For those who read or viewed the HBO production of Band of Brothers, the volume under review will be a welcome addition to the growing number of World War II books. Sons and Soldiers, however, is different from most accounts of the war in that it tells the little known story of nearly 2,000 German-born Jews who left behind their families in Nazi Germany and came to the United States in the late 1930s. Given the rigidity of the American immigration laws, the hope for many German Jews was to locate a family member in the United States who would become a benefactor for themselves or their offspring.

Henderson, a best-selling author of nonfiction, tells how these recently arrived immigrants, once Hitler declared war on the United States, enlisted in the Army and were selected to train in special interrogation techniques. Because of their knowledge of German, the expectation was that they would be sent overseas where they were to become part of a special unit (IPW) that interrogated German prisoners of war. The training took place at Fort Ritchie in Maryland and subsequently the unit came to be known as the” Ritchie Boys”.

In 1940, when President Roosevelt was attempting to warn the United States about the danger of Nazi Germany, Congress passed the Alien Registration Actin reaction to the presence of approximately one million aliens in the United States many of whom were deemed “dangerous to the public peace,” and subsequently interned in camps within the United States. Subsequently, however, a total of thirty thousand aliens were cleared and would later serve in the U. S. Army during the war, including the Ritchie Boys.

Henderson tells their story from their initial training in Maryland to their experience overseas where they interrogated captured Nazis. Their contributions to the war were invaluable as they gleaned from the prisoners vital information of Nazi strategy and troop movements. But there were also special dangers! Henderson describes how a number of the Ritchie Boys shed their dog tags labelled with an “H” for Hebrew for a “P” which indicated that they were Protestant. Others refused on principle to hide that they were Jews. All of them understood that to be captured meant that they would separated from their units and sent to a concentration camp or worse. Henderson relates how two of the Ritchie Boys were captured by the Germans only to be discovered as Jews and were murdered.

Toward the end of the war, the Ritchie Boys came across Buchenwald and other concentration camps. They were shocked by the skeletal inmates. A number of the Ritchie Boys told Henderson that they feared they would find relatives they left behind among the dead. These interviews are among the most poignant in the book. At the war’s end, the Ritchie Boys served as interrogators of captured Nazi war criminals.

Henderson is a wonderful storyteller who has written a never-before-told chapter of the Second World War. Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U. S. Army to Fight Hitler is a must-read.

Read Bruce Henderon's Visiting Scribe Posts

Obituaries as Literary Inspiration

From Journalism to Publishing

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The Genius of Judaism

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henry Levy, translated by Steven B. Kennedy | Jewish Book Council

In the last four decades Bernard-Henry Lévy has been one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals and cultural commentators on the world stage. A noted French philosopher, journalist and activist, he has also been celebrated as one of the great moral voices of our time. His critics, however, point to his pursuit of glamour, self-promotion, narcissistic display and hedonistic impulses as detracting from the seriousness of his ideas and the passion for active engagement with the causes he believes in. Whatever roll Bernard-Henry Lévy enjoys as a public intellectual is inextricable from his personal celebrity as a former “star” of the French left. His persona is his work and story and his story is his celebrity. An Algerian born Jew who first came to notice in the 1970s as one of the new French philosophers who repudiated Marxism, he has taken unpopular positions, especially on Israel, on interventionism, on the dangers of radical Islam and the “new” anti-Semitism, that have alienated many on the French and European left of which he considers himself a part.

Lévy’s latest book, The Genius of Judaism, which is both fascinating and frustrating, if not at points poorly written and constructed, claims to be a point of convergence of everything else he has written and attempted to do, and nearly everything he has experienced over the past forty years. He probably would have been better served conceiving of it as a memoir rather than a cultural treatise. Essentially what Lévy does in this book, which owes its title to Chateaubriand’s “The Genius of Christianity”, is to confront the charges made against him and turn them against his critics. Yes, he is an enemy of revolutionary violence, a strong defender of Israel and an interventionist precisely because he is a Jew. But his understanding of Judaism is not a betrayal of universalism, not mired in blind observance and ritual and not insensitive to the call of the “stranger”, as much of the European left believes. On the contrary, it is in his Jewishness that Lévy locates much of the inspiration for his progressive politics and his social and moral activism. One can read this work as part of his ongoing conversation with Judaism, influenced deeply by the texts of the Torah and the Talmud, especially the Talmudic traditions of argument and debate by the commentaries of Rashi, Malbim, Sforno and Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, and watched over by philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Benny Lévy. What he gleaned from these texts, particularly The Book of Jonah, and these masters, is the obligation to the other, the dispossessed, to the forgotten and to the non-Jewish world, an obligation that he has sought to embody in his activism from Bosnia to Africa’s forgotten wars, from Libya to the desperate fight against the Islamic State.

When it comes to elucidating the genius of Judaism, Lévy is not always satisfying or convincing. This may have something to do with how the book is structured and written—fragmented sentences, an embellished rhetorical style and incomplete arguments—as well as to idiosyncratic interpretations and readings of a Biblical story or text. But these do not fundamentally obscure the book’s virtues. These mostly take the form of powerful observations on the dangers of new and veiled anti-Semitism; an impassioned and lucid defense of Israel; the threat of Islamism; the exploitative nature of competitive victimhood, especially as it affects relations between blacks and Jews in the United States; and the underappreciated Jewish roots of Western democratic ideals.

This is an important if somewhat flawed book by a seminal thinker and activist. There is much here that is insightful and provocative, a passionate and personal book, that plumbs the Jewish intellectual and spiritual sources of one of our keenest contemporary thinkers. If only it could have been more carefully developed and presented.

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Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence

Tue, 09 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence by Paul Robert Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern | Jewish Book Council

An amazing exploration of the relationship between two marginalized peoples, Paul Robert Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s narrative is accompanied by 335 color illustrations and 29 maps in a well-designed oversized page format.

After an introduction that focuses on the stereotypes and misperceptions that Jews and Ukrainians have had about either other over the centuries, the authors of this interdisciplinary work lay out twelve chapters, at once accessible and complex, covering a wide range of topics. One explores physical and human geography, another explores history, while others examine economic life, traditional culture, religion, language and publications, material and artistic culture, and diaspora life as defined and experienced by Ukrainians and Jews. Latter chapters focus on the contemporary situation.

The structure of each chapter is such that the section featuring some aspect of the Jewish situation in Ukraine is framed by the necessarily much larger treatment of the Ukrainian experience and situation. This pattern often becomes complicated by the fact that the Jewish situation is not necessarily uniform throughout Ukraine and because the story of Ukraine is a story of flux. Jews of Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia require treatment distinct from that of Jews who live—or once lived—elsewhere in Ukraine.

Thus there are such subtopics as “Jews during Ukraine’s revolutionary era,” “Publishing industry and Jewish society,” “Economic life and interaction with Jews,” and “Jewish orchestral and operatic music.” One tantalizing subtopic, “Jewish-Ukrainian literary cross-fertilization,” is in the service of helping readers understand that “affinities between the two peoples were far from merely literary.” However, the book makes clear that for the most part the chances for sympathetic understanding were typically squandered rather than sought out and nourished.

Nevertheless, the effort made in this gorgeous, abundantly detailed, and adventurous study is heartwarming. It is an attempt for the peoples to get to know one another in a way that has never been possible before. They need to know about the contributions that each group has made, if only by proximity, to the other. For example, that Jews helped urbanize Ukraine and develop its market economy. That Ukraine was the homeland of great Jewish writers, such as Sholem Aleichem, and thinkers who shaped seminal concepts that guide Jewish life today. That Nazi Germany’s occupation led to the death of 4,000,000 Ukrainian civilians and 1.4 million Ukrainians in uniform.

Jewish readers will be tempted to do what I have done in preparing this review—which is to seek out the gems of information about Jews in Ukraine and skim over the larger, complicated story of the Ukrainians themselves. This would be a mistake. Colonized and marginalized, ethnic Ukrainians were often in a certain sense people without a country—that is, people without power. Jews and Ukrainians were often pitted against one another by those who held power as a means of retaining it.

And the Ukrainian story is an important one, now more than ever. This brave book give readers the knowledge that they need to open their minds, to move forward, and to gain respect and appreciation for “the other.”

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Deborah Lipstadt: Behind the Lies of Holocaust Denial

Mon, 08 May 2017 15:43:00 GMT

“There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies.” Watch Deborah E. Lipstadt deliver her TED Talk on Holocaust denial in the twentieth and twenty-first century:

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Parenting in Perspective

Mon, 08 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Parenting in Perspective by Barry Kislowicz | Jewish Book Council

What does it mean to be an effective parent? Barry Kislowicz’s richly-textured and highly accessible book answers this critical question with the spirit of an experienced parent and teacher. This could be considered an owner’s manual, valuable for both new and experienced parents, drawing from a winning combination of scholars in moral, educational, psychological, and faith development theory. The author integrates academic theorists in these areas from Lawrence Kohlberg to John Dewey, Alfie Kohn, Erik Erikson, Viktor Frankl and James Fowler. Not stopping with the theoretical, he refers to Jewish sources and thinkers such as Maimonides as well. Kislowicz also creates memorable and instructive lessons about parenting styles in the lives of two fictional and highly recognizable Jewish families whom he calls the Steins and the Abrams.

The Steins and the Abrams share their values in different ways, the Steins often taking a more forceful and public approach to discipline and religious observance, the Abrams taking a more flexible approach while still maintaining their moral and religious integrity. Mr. and Mrs. Stein, for example, spend time instructing their children, whether in basketball, in matters of Jewish observance, and even in planning a bat mitzvah celebration, insisting that their children adopt their values. Mr. and Mrs. Abrams, by contrast, negotiate with their children, putting their children at the center without spoiling them, reminding them that in both easy and difficult times, the family bond should stay unbroken. Whenever they are in doubt, their mother assures them, some ice cream and family time is bound to help!

On a more serious note, the two families wrestle with compelling their children to attend synagogue on Shabbat mornings, figuring out which issues and values to share out loud, which ones to keep to themselves, and how to mete out appropriate discipline. While we ask our children to attend synagogue with us, speaking to the importance of supporting the community, will they see and come to mimic our occasional boredom and impatience, eventually resenting the synagogue experience? Is it developmentally appropriate to ask a child to attend synagogue for the two or three hours that our services last and are there ways to avoid fighting a losing battle? As Kislowicz puts it, there are times when we feel as if talking to an adolescent is like handling a butterfly: if we hold the child too closely, they may collapse and feel crushed by our influence, or if we upset the child or push them aside with too much force, they may flee resentfully seeking freedom.

Kislowicz encourages readers to find ways to stay connected with our children, to tell foundational and instructive stories that demonstrate the values that guide us, that brought our families to where they are today, and that help us to be role models as we negotiate our own challenges as adults who balance work, family responsibilities, and our own interests. He encourages us to practice our values by repeating them day after day over family meals and other informal time together.

This book is uniquely valuable for observant Jewish families who are relatively new to parenting and for Jewish day school and synagogue school educators and to clergy who look to Jewish tradition and to psychology and philosophy for guidance.

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Hungry Heart

Fri, 05 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing by Jennifer Weiner | Jewish Book Council

Are you leery of books with glossy covers featuring high-heeled shoes or bubbling champagne? Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing might just force you to ask yourself why. Jennifer Weiner, author of a number of bestsellers, including In Her Shoes, Then Came You, and Best Friends Forever, is quite convincing in her argument that books labeled “chick lit” or “women’s fiction” are not just entertaining, but also have the potential to be groundbreaking. Unfortunately, this goes against conventional wisdom in the book world—there are plenty of professionals and readers who are quick to malign books that have female protagonists living regular lives in modern times. This was even more of a widespread and unexamined tendency when Weiner’s debut novel, Good in Bed, was published in 2002.

Hungry Heart is not just the story of Jennifer Weiner, though it is that as well. Hers is a story recognizable to anyone who grew up Jewish in America after the Holocaust, who didn’t face the same trials as her parents or grandparents, but whose vague sense of displacement spurred a lifetime of striving. It’s also recognizable to anyone who has felt insecure and alone, who has tried to fit in but couldn’t, who believed she could prove herself through achievement. And it’s the story of a fat girl turned fat woman who has created a full life, and found love and success and multiple happily-ever-afters. Weiner describes the moment when her first agent told her that the “lonely, pathetic” protagonist in Good in Bed needed to lose weight. Weiner pushed back. She writes, “I knew so many women who were not skinny and had wonderful, happy, fulfilling lives, with great jobs and friends and family and partners. Why couldn’t I tell a story about one of those girls?”

She has. And that’s what makes this book, and other books written by Jennifer Weiner and writers like her, groundbreaking. Just like her fictional characters, Weiner isn’t a woman who has waited around to be saved. She is who she is, imperfect and worthy of love and happiness. And she has shown through example that yesterday’s outsider can be today’s heroine.

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Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud

Fri, 05 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud by Barry W. Holtz | Jewish Book Council

If asked while standing on one foot who is the best-known rabbi, most Jews would probably answer Rabbi Akiva. Akiva abounds in the stories in the Talmud; he appears in the Haggadah; and his excruciating death is retold every year in the Yom Kippur liturgy. From such stories and sources, Barry Holtz, noted author and professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has fashioned a biography of the preeminent teacher and formative figure in rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism that has been practiced for two thousand years.

As Holtz points out, it is not possible to write a biography of Akiva in the sense that contemporary readers understand the term. With one very small exception, there are no records of Akiva other than internal Jewish sources; he left no writings, and the Romans took no note of him. What can be known, however, is the cultural and social setting in which Akiva lived and the intent of the stories about him—and the fact that Akiva has come down to us as a humble and beloved teacher, the model of how to live and die as a Jew.

Born around 50 CE, during the time of turmoil that led to the war in which the Second Temple was destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered, Akiva lived during a period in which the very survival of Judaism was in question. Holtz summarizes recent scholarship that shows the utter disarray of the Jews of Palestine after the destruction of the Temple. Into this time of overthrown beliefs, a small group of elite functionaries—not yet called rabbis—met in informal circles to study Torah and to debate topics of law, ethics, theology, and worship. This is the world in which Akiva lived.

The facts of Akiva’s life may be few, but the stories are many. Akiva emerges as an endearing, compassionate, and brilliant figure, an unlettered man of undistinguished birth who at the age of forty suddenly decides to throw himself into the study of Torah and soon has “learned everything.” Stories of the rabbis do not often dwell on their romantic lives, so it is particularly touching to learn of Akiva and his wife. (Although named Rachel only in an aggadic source, the name was later ascribed as a matter of convention.) The daughter of a well-born and wealthy man who disowns her, Akiva’s wife insists that Akiva study Torah in order to marry her; he is also devoted to her, as readers see in a charming scene of the two of them sharing a hayloft and Akiva’s wishing the straw in her hair were a crown of gold.

One of the pleasures of Rabbi Akiva is seeing the way Holtz stitches together Akiva’s life from the stories about him in the midrashim and the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud. Compiled centuries after his death, the Talmuds gather stories from earlier sources. In the rabbis’ redacting of the stories and in the differences between various versions, Holtz demonstrates Akiva’s emergence as the central figure in many rabbinic discussions and the ways in which his influence and importance grew because of his creative and sensitive interpretations of the Torah. The epithet Sage of the Torah indicates Akiva’s prominence in shaping the discourse that is the foundation from which rabbinic Judaism evolved.

Holtz writes gracefully, inviting readers into the world of the Talmud and talmudic scholarship. Given the early obscurity of the rabbis and their inauspicious beginnings, it is compelling to read how the fragments of Temple Judaism were preserved and nurtured into what most of consider Judaism today. And much of this revolves around Akiva, whose intellect and innovative interpretive methods continue to inform and inspire both students and teachers.

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New Reviews May 5, 2017

Fri, 05 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

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Featured Content

Idra Novey Wins the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
Jewish Book Council announces the winners and finalists of the largest award of its kind. Read an interview with Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear and recipient of the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Meet 2017 Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award Winner Daniel Torday
"The dream is for readers to see the world a little more clearly, in a little more detail, and a little more generously, after closing every novel they read. So if they read me, I’m just happy to know that’s what they’re doing when they do it."

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Fellow Paul Goldberg
"I learned as a kid in Moscow in the 1960s that books have power, and writers who are willing to tell the truth run the risk of getting arrested."

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Fellow Adam Ehrlich Sachs
"I want readers of my book to feel that something simple has been made needlessly complex, and to find this, for some reason, amusing."

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist Rebecca Schiff
"I was in third grade when I first decided to be a writer. Our teacher had us hand in a new short story every two weeks. I also remember revising one of my stories after school in my parents' bedroom. It was the first time I noticed that I cared about sentences."

Interview with Yaakov Katz, Author of The Weapon Wizards
The Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief discusses his new book, The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower.

Interview: Yaakov Katz

Thu, 04 May 2017 22:14:00 GMT

with Philip K. Jason

Yaakov Katz is editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. He previously served for close to a decade as the paper's military reporter and defense analyst. Katz was a 2012 – 2013 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and is currently a faculty member at Harvard's Extension School, where he teaches an advanced course in journalism. He is the co-author of two books, The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower and Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War.

Philip K. Jason: In The Weapon Wizards, you observe that Israel's enemies have not ceased building arsenals of rockets and missiles, even though Israel's Iron Dome and Arrow systems have rendered such stockpiles ineffective. Is any hope that more elaborate defensive (or offensive) weapons will change the operations of Hezbollah and Hammas?

Yaakov Katz: Originally, when Israel developed its missile defense systems, it hoped that their success would make Israel's enemies—particularly Hamas and Hezbollah—reconsider their investment in missile systems. The theory was that they would see that their missiles are ineffective and would understand that it is not worth investing in. That has not happened.

This does not mean that the missile defense systems are not effective. They are and they save Israeli lives. They have also given the government what we call “Diplomatic Maneuverability”, the ability to think before responding to rocket attacks, rather than being drawn into a conflict immediately. The systems have taken a weapon that could be of strategic consequences and turned them into a tactical issue that does not necessarily need to evolve into war.

PKJ: If there is no military solution to Israel's quest for an end to war, can resources be allocated to programs more likely to be successful?

YK: Military means are not an end to conflict but a means to be used to reach a diplomatic resolution. Although this has not yet happened for Israel when it comes to Hamas and Hezbollah, it has worked though with the two countries Israel made peace with, Egypt and Jordan. Both countries understood, after defeat on the battlefield, that war will not overcome Israel. Israel continues to invest in additional defense and offensive programs, which will help keep Israelis safe and ensure that wars are fought quicker. But they will not defeat an enemy's desire to destroy Israel.

PKJ: What are the benefits to Israel of its astounding success in weapon development, manufacture, and sales?

YK: The first clear benegit is that by developing top-tier weaponry, Israeli ensures its qualitative military edge in a very volatile region and as more potential conflicts loom on the horizon. The second benefit is economic: Israel today is one of the world's top arms exporters and brings in about $6.5 billion annually to the Israeli economy in arms sales.

PKJ: How did you and your coauthor, Amir Bohbot, "share the load" of creating this book?

Amir and I are both veteran military correspondents who have worked closely together covering Israel's different wars and operations since the early part of the 2000s. We split up the writing based on chapters: I wrote one chapter and he wrote another. The process was a bit more complicated. First, we would meet before starting to work on a new chapter. We would brainstorm for a while and the draft a chapter outline together—what stories will be there, who needs to be interviewed, etc. After spending one or two months researching and writing, when the chapter was done we’d share it with one another. Each of us would then add what was needed, make other comments, and then meet again to complete it. It was a genuine partnership.

PKJ: In the process of writing this book, did you discover any surprises? Did your research lead you to modify your views on anything, or anyone, connected with this topic?

YK: Coming into the project, both Amir and I were intimately familiar with the IDF and its different units. What we discovered while doing the research for this book was just how innovative the military was when it comes to the technology that it uses. Our research also gave us the opportunity to meet the scientists, engineers and officers who invented and came up with the ideas for some of Israel's unique weapon systems like the first drones, Iron Dome or the Ofek satellite. The stories behind each and every one of these weapons is what surprised us.

PKJ: Have any of Israel's developments in weapon technology been applied in other areas?

YK: Yes. Cameras and sensors, for example, originally developed for weapon systems like satellites or drones, can also be used for agricultural purposes. One company took a camera from a missile and integrated into a pill that a person can swallow so doctors can see what is happening inside that person's stomach.

PKJ: Who would you consider the ideal readers for your book? What are the most important ideas or pieces of information you'd like them to come away with?

We envision four different audiences: people interested in Israel, people interested in military affairs, entrepreneurs and business executives, and anyone looking to understand the future of the Middle East. We would like readers to walk away with a deeper understanding of just how important a role technology and weapons play when it comes to Israel's survival and its continued qualitative edge in a very volatile region. The stories told in this book show an amazing sense of innovation, creativity, and ingenuity in a country that was the established without any resources. When Israel was founded in 1948 there was only one resource—the Jewish brain—and that is what enabled Israel to survive. We are all familiar with the saying "Necessity is the mother of invention." But we like to stick to the dictum told to us by the IDF colonel who came up with the idea in 1977 for Israel to build its own satellite: "The shadow of the guillotine sharpens the mind."

Philip K. Jason is professor emeritus of English from the United States Naval Academy. A former editor of Poet Lore magazine, he is the author or editor of twenty books, including Acts and Shadows: The Vietnam War in American Literary Culture and Don't Wave Goodbye: The Children's Flight from Nazi Persecution to American Freedom.

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Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist Paul Goldberg

Wed, 03 May 2017 14:16:00 GMT

Jewish Book Council is proud to introduce readers to the five emerging fiction authors named as finalists for the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Today, we invite you to learn more about Paul Goldberg and his book, The Yid, a novel about the hijinks of a troupe of Russian Jews plotting to assassinate Stalin in February, 1953.

A warm congratulations to Paul and the other four finalists: Idra Novey, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Rebecca Schiff, and Daniel Torday. Join Jewish Book Council on May 3, 2017 at The Jewish Museum for a discussion with the authors and announcement of the recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature! Register for free tickets here »

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

I have a full-time job- as a reporter. It's heavy-duty investigative reporting. Plus, I run and write for The Cancer. The most challenging aspect for writing fiction is clearing the brain space to sit down and do it. Please don't mistake this for whining: having to fight to find the time and space to write, generates a sense of urgency. You can't fake that—it has to be real.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

I learned as a kid in Moscow in the 1960s that books have power, and writers who are willing to tell the truth run the risk of getting arrested. I remember Moscow being abuzz about publication of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, the arrests and trial of Daniel' and Sinyavski, the trial of Iosif Brodski, and, of course, Solzhenitsyn's battles with the authorities. Fiction allows you to tell the truth—and that's the ultimate privilege.

Who is your intended audience?

I try not to think about that. My job is to tell the story.

Are you working on anything new right now?

I have just turned in my next novel, The Chateau. It's scheduled for publication in February 2018. The Chateau is set in South Florida. It's about a building full of Trump-supporting former Soviet Jews. Would anyone be surprised to learn that the Board of Directors of the Chateau is full of crooks?

What are you reading now?

Everything Brecht. I am going through every play. This is a great time for Brecht.

Top 5 favorite books

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgokov

Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Evgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

I was a child in Moscow. My father is a journalist and a poet, so since the day I was born I knew that it's possible to write and knew many people who did. Journalism is great—my job is a privilege—but a novelist can drill deeper into the truth and its inverse.

What is the mountaintop for you—how do you define success?

I am happy where I am.

How do you write—what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

I love running away to Vermont for a month in the summer and a month in the winter. I end up telecommuting, so I am working full time in my day job. I am much more productive in Vermont. In the summer, it has something to do with picking mushrooms—a great Russian pastime. And I am a fiend on my bicycles. In the winter, it's about cross-country skiing, being alone in the woods, or watching my dogs run ahead. It's a happy place, like Russia with mountains and without kleptocracy. I finished three of my most recent books in Vermont.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

As a novelist, I write about the intelligentsia and fascism, and how the two clash. I treat fascism as a polarity rather than an isolated historical event. It's been with us for centuries, and it has not gone away. The other part of it is my obsession with people who have the nobility of the spirit to stand up for the truth. This is my material.

Paul Goldberg first heard a Moscow version of the myth about Jews using blood for religious rituals when he was ten, in 1969. By the time he emigrated to the US in 1973, he had collected the Moscow stories that underpin The Yid. As a reporter, Goldberg has written two books about the Soviet human rights movement, and has co-authored (with Otis Brawley) the book How We Do Harm, an expose of the U.S. healthcare system. He is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, a publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Meet Sami Rohr Finalist Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Tue, 02 May 2017 15:32:00 GMT

Jewish Book Council is proud to introduce readers to the five emerging fiction authors named as finalists for the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Today, we invite you to learn more about Adam Ehrlich Sachs and his book, Inherited Disorders, a hunded and seventeen vignettes addressing the complex relationship between fathers and sons.

A warm congratulations to Adam and the other four finalists: Paul Goldberg, Idra Novey, Rebecca Schiff, and Daniel Torday. Join Jewish Book Council on May 3, 2017 at The Jewish Museum for a discussion with the authors and announcement of the recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature! Register for free tickets here »

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

Finding ways to ignore the fact that I’m making people up, dressing them up, and parading them about, like a crazy person or a young child; summoning every morning the necessary state of lucid self-delusion.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

A small handful of historical neurotics, predominantly German or German-Jewish, who contrived their own private techniques for transforming their neuroses into comedy or philosophy.

Who is your intended audience?

Contemporary neurotics and the neurotics of the future. Nervous Jewish Bach enthusiasts. Obsessive-compulsive insomniac optometrists. Teenagers old enough to look a person in the eye when they shake his or her hand yet still for whatever reason incapable of doing so.

Are you working on anything new right now?

Yes, a novel.

What are you reading now?

Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason. From one perspective, it’s an inquiry into the deepest problems of existence; from another, it’s the diary of a fretful bourgeois without a productive outlet for his energy. That combination, for me, is the sweet spot.

Top 5 favorite books

At the moment:

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Walking by Thomas Bernhard

Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Molloy by Samuel Beckett

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

College, the end of senior year, in my dorm room, tearing out my hair over a thesis on hurricane dynamics, while my friends who had decided to give Hollywood a shot next year were getting outrageously drunk. I thought: I want to be that drunk.

What is the mountaintop for you—how do you define success?

Unfortunately I more or less subscribe to the Schopenhauerian view that our desires are endless, each success only creates new wants, et cetera. I think the most we can hope for is that at our death we have been more successful than our friends, in terms of books sold and awards won.

How do you write—what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

I drink two cups of coffee, move my cat from my desk chair (her favorite) to the bed, frantically flip through my favorite books looking for 8-10 good sentences to remind myself of the task, which somehow I’ve forgotten overnight, and then get started.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

I would like for them to feel that something simple has been made needlessly complex, and to find this, for some reason, amusing.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs studied atmospheric science at Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and McSweeney's, among other places. He lives with his wife in Pittsburgh.

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Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist Rebecca Schiff

Tue, 02 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Jewish Book Council is proud to introduce readers to the five emerging fiction authors named as finalists for the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Today, we invite you to learn more about Rebecca Schiff and her book, The Bed Moved, a collection of twenty-three short stories about the experiences of women.

A warm congratulations to Rebecca and the other four finalists: Paul Goldberg, Idra Novey, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, and Daniel Torday. Join Jewish Book Council on May 3, 2017 at The Jewish Museum for a discussion with the authors and announcement of the recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature! Register for free tickets here »

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

The most challenging thing about writing fiction is facing the fact that sometimes--often--you're going to write badly. The challenge is to trust that the good stuff is going to come.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

Most of my inspiration for writing fiction has been the work of authors I admire, authors who take risks, who are hilarious and strange. Their books make me want to write fiction.

Who is your intended audience?

A teacher I had told us to "Write for the smart people." I take that to mean you should trust your audience to get what you're doing. But the intended audience is a projection, a fantasy. Any person can pick up your book. Some of them are going to hate its guts.

Are you working on anything new right now?

I'm working on new stories.

What are you reading now?

I'm reading 10:04 by Ben Lerner (a previous Sami Rohr finalist) and Assisted Living by Gary Lutz.

Top 5 favorite books

Oy, I feel bad about everything I'm leaving out, but here goes:

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

I Would Have Saved Them If I Could by Leonard Michaels

Venus Drive by Sam Lipsyte

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

I was in third grade when I first decided to be a writer. Our teacher had us hand in a new short story every two weeks. Deadlines are always helpful. I also remember revising one of my stories after school in my parents' bedroom. It was the first time I noticed that I cared about sentences.

What is the mountaintop for you—how do you define success?

I first thought this was a question about my favorite mountaintop. There are so many great ones! But writing-wise, if I get to keep publishing the books I write, that is success.

How do you write —what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

I know people have hats and wristbands and coffee and routines. I don't really have any of that. I like to write when I first wake up or right before I fall asleep.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

I want them to feel. And laugh.

Rebecca Schiff is the author of the story collection The Bed Moved, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in n+1, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence, Guernica, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, and Lenny Letter, and will be anthologized in The Best Small Fictions 2017. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist Daniel Torday

Mon, 01 May 2017 23:09:00 GMT

Jewish Book Council is proud to introduce readers to the five emerging fiction authors named as finalists for the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Today, we invite you to learn more about Daniel Torday and his book, The Last Flight of Poxl West, a novel about a teenager and his relationship with his uncle, a World War II hero of the Royal Air Force.

A warm congratulations to Daniel and the other four finalists: Paul Goldberg, Idra Novey, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, and Rebecca Schiff. Join Jewish Book Council on May 3, 2017 at The Jewish Museum for a discussion with the authors and announcement of the recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature! Register for free tickets here »

What're some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

All of it! The more time you spend writing, the more you understand all the things that somehow won’t work in a novel. Flannery O’Connor said it best: “You can get away with anything you can get away with as a writer, but nobody’s ever gotten away with much.”

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

Harold Brodkey. Joan Didion. The Wire. Art Spiegelman. Marilynne Robinson, the paintings of Egon Schiele. Annie Dillard. Albert Goldbarth. Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan.

Who is your intended audience?

I’d like to think I write for the reader who loves to read as much as I do! I’m as happy re-reading Saul Bellow’s short stories, or some big thousand-page biography by Robert Caro, as I am watching a baseball game.

Are you working on anything new right now?

I’m trying to put the finishing touches on a new novel. It’s tentatively called BOOMER1. Though yesterday it was tentatively called something else so who knows. It’s about a guy in his early thirties who quits New York, moves into his parents’ basement in suburban Baltimore and tries to foment a revolution, sparking millennials to force baby boomers to quit their jobs.

What are you reading now?

Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. Vivian Gornick’s little book on Emma Goldman, Revolution as a Way of Life. Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi biography. Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life.

Top 5 favorite books

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

Oh, I always wanted to be a writer. At my bar mitzvah, a succession of cousins and uncles suggested I would make a great lawyer. Each, a lawyer himself. I spent every September in my twenties buying LSAT prep books on Amazon, and every October not reading them. Luckily this writing/teaching thing seems to be working out, but there’s always the Fall 2017 LSAT….

What is the mountaintop for you — how do you define success?

I was so excited when I found out Michiko Kakutani was reviewing The Last Flight of Poxl West in the Times. I (embarrassingly) wrote everyone I knew to tell them. My old college friend, John Green, who has sold literally tens of millions of copies of his books, wrote back to say something like, “That’s cool, but you know what the best is? Just one person, somewhere, truly engaged with your work.” So, that.

How do you write—what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

I forget who but someone smarter than me said something along the lines of “the art of writing is the meeting of the seat of the pants with the seat of the chair.” So I try to be disciplined: sitting front of the computer for three hours a day, all week long, when I’m at work. A whole lot of it’s going to get thrown out, anyway.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

I think the dream is for a reader who feels they see the world a little more clearly, in a little more detail, and a little more generously, after closing every novel they read. So if they read me, I’m just happy to know that’s what they’re doing when they do it.

Daniel Torday is the Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. An author and former editor at Esquire magazine, Torday currently serves as an editor at The Kenyon Review. His short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train, Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories, Harvard Review, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review. Torday's novella The Sensualist won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction; The Last Flight of Poxl West received the 2015 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist Idra Novey

Mon, 01 May 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Jewish Book Council is proud to introduce readers to the five emerging fiction authors named as finalists for the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Today, we invite you to learn more about Idra Novey and her book, Ways to Disappear, a novel about a Brazilian novelist who goes missing and her daughter, son, and translator's hunt to find her.

A warm congratulations to Idra and the other four finalists: Paul Goldberg, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Rebecca Schiff, and Daniel Torday. Join Jewish Book Council on May 3, 2017 at The Jewish Museum for a discussion with the authors and announcement of the recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature! Register for free tickets here »

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

Like children, works of fiction are constantly evolving. What a draft urgently needs in the morning is likely not what it will urgently need in the afternoon and the challenge it presents the following week will be something else entirely. I find once I address an aspect of a draft that feels challenging, another challenge immediately presents itself that feels even more insurmountable, but that is also the allure of writing fiction, the continual surprises each story presents.

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

I came to fiction from translation and the writers I've translated have been my teachers. It was while translating the mesmerizing sentences of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector that I began to draft the first sentences of a novel of my own.

Who is your intended audience?

Readers who are open to surprise, who enjoy the adventure of starting a novel for one reason and then, ultimately, loving the book for another reason entirely.

Are you working on anything new right now?

Yes, I'm at work on a second novel.

What are you reading now?

Charlotte, by David Foenkinos, about the young artist Charlotte Salamon who was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 26. The novel was an international bestseller but hasn't had a robust reception in the United States, as so often happens with fiction in translation here. But it's extraordinary novel. I already want to read it again.

Top 5 favorite books

I find it hard to rank books like race horses. The best books I read this week are:

Charlotte, mentioned above, by David Foenkinos

Francine Prose's masterful and mischievous Mister Monkey

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

I grew up in a backward, dying Rust Belt town where most people were as wary of Jews and other outsiders as they were of art and literature.

In high school, I wrote the first—and I think only—student-written play ever performed at my football-obsessed public school. No one but the other theater club kids in the play and their families attended, but the intimacy of the event felt subversive. There is a freeing joy in proceeding with a work of art regardless of the size of one’s audience.

It was in that empty theater in rural Pennsylvania, at 16, that I first had a strong sense that this is what I wanted to do with my life, that I would go on finding joy in writing and sharing that writing regardless of how many people living around me cared about literature or not.

What is the mountaintop for you—how do you define success?

I try, every day, to stay with the definition of success I felt at the school auditorium described above: to continue being capable of sitting down and taking new risks as a writer, and enjoying it.

How do you write—what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

A good cup of tea is essential. And a window.

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

Something they didn't expect to get out of a novel about a missing woman's adult children and her translator disagreeing about who exactly it is they are looking for. And something I didn't expect them to get out of such a novel either.

Idra Novey is the author of the novel Ways to Disappear and Exit, Civilian, selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Born in western Pennsylvania, she has since lived in Chile, Brazil and New York. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages and featured on NPR's All Things Considered and in Slate, The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, and Guernica. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

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Jewish Book Council Staff Picks for April 2017

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 20:59:00 GMT

Independent Bookstore Day is this weekend! If you're visiting your local bookstore to support your local literary anchor on Saturday—or any day of the week—let us be your guide: check out the books Jewish Book Council's staff recommends to our readers for April 2017!

Want to browse past staff picks? Scroll through our monthly lists of recommended reads or browse our staff libraries!

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Suzanne

Disobedience: A Novel by Naomi Alderman extremely interesting story of a young woman who fled her ultra-Orthodox life, only return for the first time after the death of her father, the head rabbi of a London Jewish community. This story deals with her re-connection of what was and how she deals with this past and her current life. I highly suggest this thoroughly thought-provoking book. Can't wait to see how they make this into an upcoming movie!

Carol

In Joshua Cohen’s Moving Kings, two directionless Israelis, Yoav and Uri, have just completed their army service and get jobs working in Yoav's uncle's moving company in Queens. Cohen's portrayal of the grim, gritty, often brutal world they inhabit—and the one they inhabited in the IDF—is boldly drawn in what is often insanely insightful and mordantly funny prose. Hard-hitting and entertaining, this is Cohen's most accessible novel yet.

Becca

The Tincture of Time: a Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty by Elizabeth L. Silver is one of the most poignant and thought-provoking memoirs I've read. As an infant, Silver's daughter has an unexplained brain bleed. While she relentlessly seek medical answers, Silver also looks for solace in religion, literature, history, and the law. All of these references are fascinating, but none can provide complete reassurance—much like the book itself. This memoir is a beautiful exploration of situations in which the only thing that can provide a definite answer is time.

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Miri

After the Fire by Lauren Belfer is a great read for book clubs—it even won the Book Club category in the 2016 National Jewish Book Award—as it raises all sorts of larger questions about obligation, religion, culture and art, and responsibilities.

Nat

I’m head-over-heels in love with Elan Mastai’s science fiction novel All Our Wrong Todays, the chronicles of a hapless accidental time traveler from “the world we were supposed to have,” 2016. Mastai fuses humor with poignancy, human foible with heroism in a cast of flawed, sympathetic characters hurtled toward and away from one another by the full range from passion to the pettiest of pursuits. Steered by a series of successive failures and fail-safes, the novel takes readers on a rare, captivating caper across the channels of time, deftly hinting at the inevitable without exposing the unforeseen—or relying on cheap plot twists.

I’m also in the middle of Sonora: A Novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi, a hazy yet cutting account of adolescence and displacement in the Arizona desert, where the daughter of a Palestinian father and Israeli mother discovers sex, drugs, dreams, and premonitions of death.

Naomi

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Carolyn

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Evie

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Moving Kings: A Novel

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Moving Kings: A Novel by Joshua Cohen | Jewish Book Council

Joshua Cohen’s gripping, atmospheric new novel bursts with vivid characters and action aplenty. Yet it is also a tragedy that ponders why human lives come to bad ends. How much is due to bad choices, and how much to destiny?

David King, who inherited the moving-and-storage business Kings Moving, swerves back and forth between legitimate business and corruption. His instinct is always to assess what works to his own advantage; decency and the law are just factors in his calculations.

Only one thing inspires him emotionally: Israel, the incarnation of “an ancestry, a mystery, a primitive significance.” When his cousin Yoav, whom he barely knows, finishes a stint in the Israel Defense Forces, David doesn’t think twice about providing him with a job and a home.

A sensitive man, Yoav Matzav (his last name means “situation,” “how things are”) has led a passive life, doing what he had to in the army, both in the Gaza war and later at a Palestinian checkpoint. His aggressive squad mate Uri Dugri (“no-nonsense”) joins him in New York, also working illegally for Kings Moving. On-the-job experience teaches them which customers they can take advantage of, and which ones to treat with care: a hierarchy of race and class.

Their work as movers is not very different from their service in the IDF, “swarming the houses of strangers, taking furniture apart, breaking shit by accident, and not by accident.” Both jobs traffic in possession and dispossession. The military analogy isn’t casual; each household move, we’re told, is like a mission. In case the parallels weren’t already clear enough, there are even incidents in New York involving the abuse of an Arab shopkeeper and a convert to Islam.

At first this premise might sound like a crude political analogy intended to deplore Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians. Characters do say things like “Israel’s the rogue state at this point.” But if the actions of movers are comparable to dispossession in Palestine, shouldn’t the moving and storage business inspire equal protest? The larger point is that powerful people take advantage of the powerless when they want to, regardless of the specific context.

Yet context can’t be escaped. In Israel, Uri once received advice from a wonderworking sage called the Baba Batra (named for a tractate in the Talmud that deals with inheritance). The rabbi admonished, “you can’t stop being a soldier, just like you can’t stop being a Jew.” A soldier’s destiny is to follow orders, repeating the same actions again and again, without regard to his own wishes.

David King also succumbs to repetition in the ways he treats the women in his life, his clients, and his employees, sliding ineluctably toward failure. His daughter works for a social-justice nonprofit and tries to be everything David’s not, yet she buys drugs illegally. Yoav tries to break free of his past but fails to escape it. The tragedy is that no one can choose the situation into which they’re born. Each of us can only try, again and again, to cope with what we’re given.

In terms of of craft, this novel astonishes on every page. The narrative verve, the wealth of detail about on-stage and off-stage characters, and the rich descriptions of places and events, bear comparison to Tolstoy. That alone would be enough to distinguish this book, but its engagement with perennial questions of existence—what it means to be at home, or a visitor, or to mediate between the two—raises it to an even higher level that few writers can attain. Joshua Cohen has proven himself yet again to be a major voice in contemporary fiction.

Find more works by Joshua Cohen here.

The Tincture of Time

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Tincture of Time: a Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty by Elizabeth L. Silver | Jewish Book Council

When her six-week-old daughter, Abby, develops what appear to be seizures, Elizabeth L. Silver and her physician husband bring her to the emergency room. Soon a CT scan reveals a massive bleed—a stroke—and tiny Abby enters an extended and bewildering period of medical activity. Anxiety continues to inform each moment in the couple’s lives. The mental trauma resulting from the very real possibility that a beloved baby may die is difficult to articulate. Nonetheless, Silver does so—masterfully—in her book The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty.

While other parents have experienced similar terrifying situations, their stories remain largely unknown. Silver, a writer and lawyer, copes with the stress of her family’s trauma by documenting the experience. “The only way I could make sense of anything,” she writes, “was to pull out a notepad inside my tiny room in the NICCU and write.” Readers reap the benefit of Silver’s laser-like focus on her story as she blends dialogue and description into a narrative as gripping as any thriller.

Silver muses about the tyranny of the unknowable in general, and within the medical establishment in particular. As Abby undergoes procedure after procedure, her mother continues to write, tackling the topics of blood, fever, and pain—recurring motifs in the emergency room and NICCU. Silver also explores the uncertainty of religion (“Doesn’t religion actually give people the illusion of certainty?” asks a friend), and considers the theme through literature via Hamlet and Waiting for Godot.

If a topic can be viewed through the prism of uncertainty, Silver will hold it to the light, turn it this way and that, then document her vision. Sometimes the result feels a bit forced, but there are moments of great clarity in her writing, as when she describes the comfort she derives from a group of Jewish women who gather to bake challah and pray for Abby: “When these forty people come together in a home that isn’t mine, with voices and faces I do not recognize, and settle on a single note, I begin to weep.”

The strength of Tincture is its close attention to detail, which immerses the reader in events as they unfold. We are there in the emergency room and the NICCU. We agonize with Silver and her husband over Abby’s mysterious affliction in chapter after chapter.

Ultimately, after two years of ongoing assessment, Abby is “released,” and declared completely healthy, after a final neurological evaluation. Happy as we are for the family, the inevitable downshift in pacing (the “tincture of time” taking effect) makes the second half of the book slightly less compelling. The old journalism adage “if it bleeds, it leads,” comes to mind, for blood—as it affects a helpless infant—is precisely what grabs and holds the reader’s attention when Tincture begins. With Abby’s brain bleed staunched, and eventual recovery evident, the story’s urgency slows.

Tincture will resonate for any parent who has had a desperately sick, hospitalized child—its ultimate message of hope providing a healing balm. And readers don’t have to be parents to relate to this engaging story and thoughtful, thorough consideration of uncertainty within and outside the medical establishment. As Silver asks, “Because Abby has narrowly escaped a statistic, the book ends with joy, but does it take away from any of the emotions experienced while reading it?” Readers will agree that it certainly does not.

All Our Wrong Todays

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

All Our Wrong Todays: A Novel by Elan Mastai | Jewish Book Council

It's 2016 and in Tom Barren's world, technology has solved all of humanity's problems--there's no war, no poverty, no under-ripe avocadoes. Unfortunately, Tom isn't happy. He's lost the girl of his dreams. And what do you do when you're heartbroken and have a time machine? Something stupid.

Finding himself stranded in a terrible alternate reality--which we immediately recognize as our 2016--Tom is desperate to fix his mistake and go home. Right up until the moment he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and the woman who may just be the love of his life.

Now Tom faces an impossible choice. Go back to his perfect but loveless life. Or stay in our messy reality with a soulmate by his side. His search for the answer takes him across continents and timelines in a quest to figure out, finally, who he really is and what his future--our future--is supposed to be.

Filled with humor and heart and packed with insight, intelligence, and mind-bending invention, All Our Wrong Todays is a powerful and moving story of life, loss, and love.

Excerpt

Read an excerpt from All Our Wrong Todays here.

Sonora: A Novel

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Sonora: A Novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi | Jewish Book Council

Hannah Lillith Assadi's debut novel Sonora is the story of Ahlam, a girl raised in Arizona by her Palestinian father and Jewish mother—like Assadi herself. The story is rife with surreal imagery, madness, and magic, and it's hard not to wonder why Assadi has written a novel instead of a volume of poetry or a memoir. Her lyricism and wash of sensory descriptions far outshine the action in Sonora, causing the book to sit uncomfortably in its form.

Ahlam builds a friendship with a girl named Laura, also a product of mixed parentage, whose dead mother was indigenous and whose father is white. The two young women share a history of ancestors who were violently displaced from their homelands, and try to find home in one another.

As teenagers, they meet an older man named Dylan, an artist living in New York City and they head east to start living with him as soon as they've graduated from high school. All the earth magic and alien mystery of the desert is wiped away and replaced by the bright lights of NYC. The city fills them with the liberation of anonymity and hard drugs.

There are countless books about girls spinning out of control as they teeter toward adulthood, and it's questionable whether Sonora is a necessary addition to that canon. The trope of feverish female friendship, which pits girls in competition and would have them destroy each other, is complicated. Assadi is critical enough, creating characters outside of rigid stereotypes. They are tender and protective, self-involved and reckless. But Ahlam and Laura remain unconvincing in both their vulnerability and their agency. Despite detailed descriptions of what they do, Assadi offers little insight into what they think or how they feel (besides Ahlam's visions). It's almost as if Ahlam, the only narrator, is in a constant state of dissociation, viewing everything from slightly outside herself. In some ways, this is emblematic of a person who has experienced trauma. But when Assadi spends so much time on wildly creative hallucinations and little time on the character's emotions, the entire point of the novel is obscured.

The nature of contemporary, inherited pain and Ahlam's emotional drift are linked to the wandering of her parents' ancestors. But by the time this happens, three-quarters of the way through Sonora, it's unclear whether Assadi did it intentionally. Growing up working-class in an American desert suburb made Ahlam's life far richer than her father's refugee childhood. Her second-generation-immigrant problems seem trivial compared to her ancestors' histories of being hunted. But those problems are no less real, and in some ways she is no more safe. Her parents see some freedom and opportunity in their American life. But Ahlam knows that femaleness—being “another disposable girl,” as she says—is as annihilating as the past her parents fled.

Read Hannah Lilith Assadi's Visiting Scribe Posts

Longing for New York

What to Do About the Solomons

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

What to Do About the Solomons by Bethany Ball | Jewish Book Council

Talk about salacious! In her debut novel, What to Do About the Solomons, Bethany Ball leaves no stone unturned as she gradually divulges the inner psyches, darkest secrets, and most problematic idiosyncrasies of her kibbutznik characters. Lust, drugs, money, and other excesses are no strangers to the Solomon family. Lovers of classic Jewish literature and gossip rags unite: this one’s got something for everyone.

Each member of the Solomon family is beautifully, painstakingly, and uniquely flawed. Patriarch Yakov is the kibbutz heavyweight, who snagged the most stunning woman, a Sephardi, on the commune and has no problem playing favorites with his children. Vivienne, his wife, is the only person who’s not completely enamored of her effervescent husband. Daughter Shira is an aging starlet and seductress, travelling, shopping, and smoking away her small fortune while her adolescent son, Joseph, pines for his mother. Prodigal son Marc has left behind the glory of being an ex-Navy commando for a life in LA with his enigmatic American wife, Carolyn, and their children. But things begin to look less and less glamorous for Marc when he’s accused of money laundering through his asset management firm and his riches are lost. The other adult children, Ziv, Dror, and Keren have troubles of their own. And then there’s the family’s neighbors and friends from the kibbutz, like Marc’s childhood sweetheart, Maya, engulfed in her own struggles as she yearns desperately for the love that got away.

Through her telling of the Solomon family sagas, Ball explores the dichotomies of Israeli society and, more broadly, life in general. She grapples with religion and secularism, war and peace, liberalism and conservatism, socialism and communism, wealth and poverty, and Europe, America, and Israel. Readers will find themselves easily and eagerly turning the pages of What to do About the Solomons, thanks in part to a burning desire to know what will be revealed about the various members of the Solomon family as the book progresses. That said, what’s truly striking about the novel is the substance the author conveys in her fluid and airy prose. Audiences will find themselves transfixed by certain sentences, reading them over and over, shocked to see their own internal experience reflected on the page before them.

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New Reviews April 28, 2017

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

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How Wives Pay for Their Husbands' Crimes
“She must have known,” is the first response Randy Susan Meyers hears from readers about her new novel, 'The Widow of Wall Street'—and she wants to know why.

Stories We Haven't Told: Six Neglected Holocaust Narratives to Preorder for Fall 2017
In commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Day of Holocaust Remembrance, Jewish Book Council compiled a preview of six new works of nonfiction unearthing the neglected narratives of the Shoah.

How Wives Pay for Their Husbands' Crimes

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 20:21:00 GMT

Last week, Randy Susan Meyers discussed the gender discrepancies in financial literacy and shared how the UJA-Federation saved her life. With the release of her fourth novel, The Widow of Wall Street, Randy is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

Crimes have multiple victims, including those who receive the least (or most inappropriate) attention: the family of the perpetrator. As fifty-plus accusations of sexual assault against Bill Cosby piled up, his wife of 52 years, Camille Cosby was damned for not knowing, damned for not telling (under the assumption that, of course, she knew about his… indiscretions), and damned for covering up her husband’s crimes.

With no evidence.

When Bernie Madoff’s crimes came to light, Ruth Madoff caught the rage. Again, with no evidence.

The world expected Hillary Clinton to answer for Bill Clinton’s infidelities, both by denying the charges in the aftermath and then absorbing the blame as she ran for president. Donald Trump’s infidelity was somehow equated with Hillary Clinton’s husband’s infidelity.

The rage flying at Hillary Clinton, Camille Cosby, and Ruth Madoff is encased in years of baked-in sexism, not dissimilar to the Betty Crocker school of blame-the-victim-unless-she-is-above-all-reproach (Betty Crocker representing the lovely, perfect woman). Anyone working in criminal justice recognizes this syndrome: female victims, whether of strangers or husbands, must be above reproach to merit either sympathy or empathy, and they are deemed guilty and imperfect until proven otherwise.

Even women who consider themselves victims of men will blame and assert that wives can and should control their husbands. According to theNew York Times, “accuser Juanita Broaddrick, whose claim of a 1978 sexual assault has been denied by the Clintons, thinks Hillary Clinton was too passive. ‘I always felt if she’d been a stronger person... she could have done something about his behavior,’ she said.” An article in the Philadelphia Tribune says that Camille Cosby “was no wallflower in her husband’s career, observers point out. She was his business manager and according to a February 2014 Ebony magazine story, a ‘shrewd’ one.” Andy Borowitz savagely parodied Ruth Madoff in The Huffington Post: “Just hours after her husband Bernie Madoff was sentenced … Ruth Madoff expressed shock and dismay at her husband’s behavior, telling reporters, ‘This is not the man I owned nine homes with. When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars with someone, you think you know him.… I guess I was wrong.’”

Ruth, Camille, and Hillary became the joke and the target of rage over their husband’s crimes and misdemeanors. Not a shred of sympathy was spared. Reactions to hearing the subject of my new novel, The Widow of Wall Street (based on a situation not unlike the Madoffs, from both the wife and husband’s point of view) fascinated and saddened me, as the first thing most men and women say is, “She must have known,” or “Of course she knew,” with an air of surety one usually reserves for an awareness of the closest of friends.

Why? Why must she have known?

Who does not have a friend who suddenly found out that her husband of forty years was cheating for decades, a cousin who learned her husband hid money in his business accounts? A sister who tragically finds out about her partner’s affairs when she gets tested for AIDS?

Fascinating in the umbrage is how the same people who insist that she must know don’t question how financially literature men and women were fooled by what turned out to be the most naïve of plans. After three years of researching The Widow of Wall Street, I’m shocked that anyone schooled in finance (and many of his victims were financially literate) believed in Madoff’s constantly, year-in, year-out, positive returns, the lack of up-to-date computerization, and the lack of online confirmations. And yet they did, while we insist that Ruth Madoff, who was neither an accountant—though she helped her husband with bookkeeping early in his career—nor a stockbroker, banker, money manager, or investor, must have known the details of the two arms of her husband’s convoluted business.

Perhaps we think these things because we want to believe that we, of course, are immune. That our husbands have been and will always be above board in all they do. That we can never be fooled and there is no wool to be pulled over our eyes. We are protected.

Like so many musts in this world, these stories we tell ourselves end up being a flimsy garment we wear to feel secure and safe in our lives, because the reality of our fragility is a frightening as it is omnipresent. It can’t happen to me. That is the unspoken theme that we clutch.

Randy Susan Meyers's novels are informed by her work with families impacted by emotional and family violence— and a long journey from idolizing bad boys to loving a good man. After years working in social service and criminal justice, Meyers’s works of fiction have twice been chosen by the Massachusetts Center for the Book as “Must Read Fiction.”

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Good Girls, Nasty Women: Gender and American Jewish History

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 22:39:00 GMT

Posted by Nat Bernstein

Great news for those of you who couldn't make it to "Good Girls, Nasty Women: Gender and American Jewish History" last month: a recording of the full conversation with Lynn Povich, Bonnie S. Anderson, and Rebecca Traister is now available for viewing online.

On March 28, 2017, Jewish Book Council and Jewish Women's Archive hosted a conversation with feminist writers Bonnie Anderson, Lynn Povich, and Rebecca Traister about the women behind history's great revolutions and contemporary movements—from the activists of America's Antebellum to the women's liberation stirrings of the midcentury to today's "nasty" women—as part of the third season of Jewish Book Council’s Unpacking the Book: Jewish Writers in Conversation series at The Jewish Museum, moderated by Bari Weiss of The Wall Street Journal.

You can find out more about the authors' books by clicking the book covers below—and be sure to download the BOOK CLUB GUIDE to all three titles to discuss these books with your reading group!

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Will you be in New York on May 3rd? Join Jewish Book Council for our final event in the 2017 season, a conversation with the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize Fellows: Paul Goldberg, Idra Novey, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Rebecca Schiff, and Daniel Torday. Click the button below to register for the discussion and award ceremony!

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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder | Jewish Book Council

The argument made in this cautionary book is that the election of Donald Trump has created a political challenge to our democratic form of government not dissimilar to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. Snyder argues that in our response to the threat presented by the new administration, we are no wiser than Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, and communism.

Snyder, the Housum Professor of History at Yale University, is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalinand Black Earth :The Holocaust as History and Warning, and is also a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Few scholars are better able to connect the circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler to the present divisions that face American society. Snyder views our democratic institutions under danger: “We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties control every lever of power[…] will we in retrospect see the elections of 2016[…] as the Germans viewed the election of 1932.” Elsewhere, Snyder notes that during the campaign Trump charged that the American media was dishonest and banned reporters from his rallies. “Like the leaders of authoritarian regimes,” Snyder writes of Trump, “he promises to suppress freedom of speech by laws that would prevent criticism. Like Hitler, the president uses words like lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking, and presented journalism as a campaign against himself.”

Given Trump’s dark picture of America as a nation virtually in decline as he iterated the crisis in his inaugural address, Snyder argues that a politician like Trump in invoking terrorism as a threat to our security is actually attempting to train ourselves to surrender freedom in the name of safety. People who attempt to assure you that you only gain security at the price of liberty, claims Snyder, “usually want to deny you both. When an American president and his security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy.”

Snyder recalls that a lesson of the 1933 Reichstag fire is that our natural fear of terrorism must not enable us to destroy our institutions. He concludes by citing James Madison and Hannah Arendt: Madison warned that tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency,” and Arendt wrote that following the Reichstag fire “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.

In this slim volume, Snyder warns readers of the anti-democratic tropes that distinguish the Trump administration. Obviously this is not an opinion shared by millions of Americans who voted for him. But given the many examples he draws from the period of Hitler and Stalin, his polemic should not easily be dismissed.

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The Essential Hayim Greenberg

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism and Zionism | Jewish Book Council

The Jews who arrived from Eastern Europe a century or so ago were distinctive in part because they brought their intellectuals with them. Quick to brandish a manifesto or to found a new magazine, these scholars and polemicists had no trouble finding a readership avid for analyses of socialism and Zionism, and for grasping the connections between political ideas and ethical ideals. No intellectual was more gifted at locating the humane center of public issues than Hayim Greenberg (1885-1953). Born in Kishinev, he reached the United States in 1924, the very year that Congress systematically began closing the gates to immigrants. Exactly a decade later, he began editing the Labor Zionist monthly Jewish Frontier, the journal with which he was associated until his death. Although Greenberg assigned himself the task of articulating Jewish collective demands, no one was less parochial in his curiosity. Fluent in five languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German and English), he exhibited the knack of reconciling universalism with particularism. His own cosmopolitan culture blended easily with advancing the cause of the beleaguered yishuv during the most consequential decades of modern Jewish history.

Many of Greenberg’s essays were gathered half a century ago in two volumes entitled The Inner Eye (1953, 1964), which have sunk into oblivion. Happily, the historian Mark A. Raider has retrieved the best of Greenberg’s work in a huge and handsome book. It merits the attention of any reader curious about the antecedents of the challenges that both Israel and the Diaspora face. Greenberg exemplified thoughtful engagement. He became a first responder to the unprecedented shocks of totalitarianism, and to the thrilling reemergence of Jewish statehood. He also addressed the perennial dilemmas of honoring the claims of an ancient faith while cherishing the liberties that open societies have dangled before this ethno-religious minority. Raider began this admirable project of resurrection two decades ago, and the extent of his research shows; his conscientious annotations as well as his authoritative introduction are enormously helpful.

The topics in The Essential Hayim Greenberg range from Sabbatai Zevi to David Ben-Gurion; from the concept of chosenness to Leon Trotsky. But “An Answer to Gandhi” (1939) deserves to be highlighted. Greenberg was not alone in rebutting the anti-Zionism that the hero of the Indian independence movement expressed; Martin Buber also defended Jewish claims to Palestine against Gandhi. But Greenberg had long and conspicuously wrestled with the impediment of his own pacifism, which collided with the imperatives of Jewish security and survival—and that inner struggle gives his essay its poignancy. He fully sympathized with Gandhi’s anti-imperialist project that would achieve sovereignty on the subcontinent, even as Israel would be simultaneously created thanks to its own resistance to British rule. But “An Answer to Gandhi” is as crisp a case as can be imagined for the singularity of Jewish national aspirations. In exposing the folly of Gandhi’s advice that even German Jews should continue to invoke their rights in the Third Reich, Greenberg demonstrated in this essay—among many others in this anthology—that political wisdom is needed to correct the most exalted moral proclamations, and that the fierce advocacy of Jewish interest can be rendered quite compatible with common sense.

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Set in Stone: America's Embrace of the Ten Commandments

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Set in Stone: America's Embrace of the Ten Commandments by Jenna Weissman Joselit | Jewish Book Council

When Cecil B. DeMille's epic, The Ten Commandments, came out in 1956, lines of people crowded into theaters across America to admire the movie's spectacular special effects. Thanks to DeMille, the commandments now had fans as well as adherents. But the country's fascination with the Ten Commandments goes well beyond the colossal scenes of this Hollywood classic.

In this vividly rendered narrative, Jenna Weissman Joselit situates the Ten Commandments within the fabric of American history. Her subjects range from the 1860 tale of the amateur who claimed to have discovered ancient holy stones inside a burial mound in Ohio to the San Francisco congregation of Sherith Israel, which commissioned a luminous piece of stained glass depicting Moses in Yosemite for its sanctuary; from the Kansas politician Charles Walter, who in the late nineteenth century proposed codifying each commandment into state law, to the radio commentator Laura Schlessinger, who popularized the Ten Commandments as a psychotherapeutic tool in the 1990s.

At once text and object, celestial and earthbound, Judaic and Christian, the Ten Commandments were not just a theological imperative in the New World; they also provoked heated discussions around key issues such as national identity, inclusion, and pluralism. In a country as diverse and heterogeneous as the United States, the Ten Commandments offered common ground and held out the promise of order and stability, becoming the lodestar of American identity. While archaeologists, theologians, and devotees across the world still wonder what became of the tablets that Moses received on Mount Sinai, Weissman Joselit offers a surprising answer: they landed in the United States.

Are You Anybody?

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Are You Anybody? by Jeffrey Tambor | Jewish Book Council It's rare that an actor embodies even one memorable character over the arc of a career. Jeffrey Tambor has managed to create three, beginning with Hank "Hey Now!" Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, the series created by Garry Shandling, Jeffrey’s first mentor in television. He went on to find two more show creators, Mitch Hurwitz of Arrested Development and Jill Soloway of Transparent, who shared a love of actors and taught him a lot about acting along the way.

Are You Anybody? is Tambor's chance to discuss his creative process and immense accomplishments from a life lived onscreen. Drawing from his formative childhood years, in which he describes himself as a fat Hungarian-Jewish kid with a lisp and a depressive father to how he drew inspiration from his life to create these characters, Tambor's memoir is funny, insightful, and uplifting, touching on comedy and the enduring chutzpah required to make it through life.

The Worlds We Think We Know

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Worlds We Think We Know: Stories by Dalia Rosenfeld | Jewish Book Council

In her debut collection of short stories, Dalia Rosenfeld displays a refreshing way with the raw stuff of life, taking special delight in awkward encounters, mismatched pairings, uncertain destinies, and sexy indeterminacies.

The Worlds We Think We Know contains stories that touch both the heart and mind and Rosenfeld is a skilled alchemist who does not particularly care to answer every question readers might have about her restless, maladapted, or otherwise unsatisfied characters but instead rewards us with deep and sometimes startling glimpses into the mysteries of love and human connections of all kinds. As the title itself hints, Rosenfeld’s stories move fluidly across time and borders yet each delves into the familiar, intimate spaces of difficult, sometimes wounding relationships between lovers, spouses, parents, and children. And her sophisticated mastery of a range of tonal registers, styles, and voices ensures that each of these poetically fragmented stories feels fresh and distinct. And happily that range often proffers deft touches of levity, as when the protagonist of “Flight” sardonically declares, “I threw my arms out in the most Jewish way I knew how, which is to say not at all, having grown up in Indiana.” Or when one narrator foreshadows the likelihood of a disastrous outcome of a double date set in an Indian restaurant when she casually observes that the two couples sit “within arm’s length of a statue of Kama, the Indian love god who was burned to ashes after trying to rouse the passion of the greater god Shiva.” And here is the beleaguered narrator of “Invasions”: “It was a bad habit of my mother’s to always send me old Yiddish novels in translation. She thought that if I spent enough time back in the shtetl, I would stop complaining about my life in Ohio and realize that scouring the Food Lion for organic broccoli was nothing compared to the forced conscription of ten-year-old Jewish boys into the tsarist army.”

As that moment of rueful self-awareness suggests, Rosenfeld’s characters can find themselves unmoored or caught up in pasts that stubbornly make claims on the present. In “The Next Vilonsky” an old man’s errand to the corner makolet (grocery) in Tel Aviv turns into an epic odyssey into introspective memories. Elsewhere, Rosenfeld veers into decidedly stranger realms such as in “Swan Street,” where an invisible wife abandoned in Eastern Europe haunts her husband’s every step in America. In the aftermath of a brutal mugging, the professor of “Bargabourg Remembers” struggles to commit every visceral detail of the incident to memory but instead finds himself in thrall to the phantom of a lost love. As soon as I finished it, I found myself rereading “Floating On Water” with great pleasure. It’s a deeply knowing, sensual, and often very funny paean to female friendships, without a false note of sentimentality, that interweaves love along with the petty jealousies and exasperating demands that are somehow inevitably part of the fabric of even the most sustaining relationships.

The Shoah quietly intrudes into some of these empathic, risk-taking stories in the kind of small yet indelible ways that deliver more profoundly unsettling psychological insights than they might otherwise in the hands of a less subtle writer. And though many of Rosenfeld’s beleaguered characters are quite verbose, she is equally skilled at handling the kinds of silences that take us deeper into her characters’ self-awareness and also their capacity for compassionate understanding of others (even when it is at the distance of some decades), such as the narrator of “Liliana, Years Later,” who recollects her childhood piano teacher: “Liliana never spoke of her broken heart, just as I do not speak of mine now, because when one tries to put pain into words, the words themselves become agents of new pain, like fresh paper cuts, and cannot be used again.”

Rosenfeld, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop who currently lives in Tel Aviv, proves a reliably mordant observer of imperfect and vulnerable characters struggling with unfulfilled appetites and desires, in language that consistently dazzles. Even the shorter works have lingering power, conjuring up richly immersive places inflected by whimsy and perhaps a touch of the uncanny, and are occasionally heartbreaking. In a few stories they seem to hint at more than one reality. She displays a keen awareness of loneliness as the essential human condition, yet grace notes of humor inflect even her more melancholy stories. There are moments when her portrayals of the foibles of misfits and unreliable narrators or cryptic urban encounters are appealingly suggestive of a Raymond Carver or Grace Paley sensibility (their quiet epiphanies, little notes of grace), but mostly Rosenfeld is unlike any writer you’ve ever read and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Interview

Read Adam Rovner's interview with Dalia Rosenfeld, "The Worlds of Dalia Rosenfeld," here.

The Awkward Age

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal | Jewish Book Council Julia Alden has fallen deeply, unexpectedly in love. American obstetrician James is everything she didn't know she wanted--if only her teenage daughter, Gwen, didn't hate him so much. Uniting two households is never easy, but when Gwen turns for comfort to James's seventeen-year-old son, Nathan, the consequences will test her mother's loyalty and threaten all their fragile new happiness.

This is a moving and powerful novel about the modern family: about starting over; about love, guilt, and generosity; about building something beautiful amid the mess and complexity of what came before. It is a story about standing by the ones we love, even while they make mistakes. We would give anything to make our children happy. But how much should they ask?

The Weight of Ink

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish | Jewish Book Council

In many ways a book about books, The Weight of Ink surprises with delights that are gradually revealed. At first it might seem almost necessary to take notes to follow the complex plot, but soon the reader will become absorbed in this rich opus of impressive breadth.

The beauty of this story is in the variety of its milieus and sensibilities. As we follow our female protagonists of both the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries—Ester Velasquez and Helen Watt, respectively—we also witness the goings-on of a venerable and drafty house of a rabbi in 1660s London, and glimpse the modern life of a cheeky young American man with heartrending troubles of his own. Perhaps most pivotally, we see an English girl’s time volunteering abroad on a kibbutz in Israel in the years after the war of independence. In spite of a gulf of over 300 years, these characters depend on each other each for their own reasons, any of which we in the present day can find parallel in.

The images of these different times and places, brought to life at once through painstaking detail and accessible prose, are startlingly clear, even cinematic. Supporting roles, too, are far from dull. Much more than mere foils, even minor characters are fascinating in their own right. Mary, at first unlikable in her childlike coquettish snobbery, eventually finds her way into one’s heart. Rivka, a servant and survivor of Polish pogroms, is not simply loyal, but also intrigues with a timeless intellect and will. The men in Ester Velasquez’s and Helen Watts’ lives wholly determine the courses of their universes. Indeed, perhaps too much for comfort, but believable nevertheless.

Weighty explorations of what it is to be Jewish and to enter interfaith relationships in multiple time periods are integral to each of these stories. Is there merit to keeping within the tribe? Are there, regardless of time, place, or commitment, bridges that those who would willingly enter the Jewish community from the outside can never truly cross? Crucially, what does it mean to choose survival over martyrdom? These questions play out in the characters’ personal lives concurrently with Ester’s philosophical forays into the nature of God. No stone is left unturned in either study.

Discussion Questions

Describing the impact of his blindness, the rabbi says to Ester, “I came to understand how much of the world was now banned from me — for my hands would never again turn the pages of a book, nor be stained with the sweet, grave weight of ink, a thing I had loved since first memory” (page 196). For the rabbi and for Ester, ink means many things — among them freedom, community, power, and danger. What does the written word mean to you? Is it as powerful today, amid all our forms of media, as it was to the rabbi and to Ester?

The novel opens with a quote from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71: “Nay, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it.” Which characters in the novel choose to give anonymously, or without receiving any credit? Would you be willing to have your most meaningful accomplishments remain anonymous or even be attributed to others? In today’s interconnected world, with privacy so hard to achieve, is there anything you would write or say if you knew your words would be anonymous?

In order to write, Ester betrays the rabbi’s trust. Yet in her final confession Ester says, “Yet I would choose again my very same sin, though it would mean my compunction should wrack me another lifetime and beyond” (page 529). Is Ester’s betrayal of the rabbi’s trust forgivable? When freedom of thought and loyalty argue against each other, which should a person choose?

John, Manuel, and Alvaro off er Ester very different sorts of love. What does each off er her, and what sacrifice does each require? How might you answer this question for the love between Dror and Helen?

Both Helen and Ester fear love. How do they wrestle with this fear? Could they have made choices other than the ones they made?

In what ways does Aaron mature over the course of the book?

Do the motivations of Ester, Helen, and Aaron change as the story progresses?

Ester’s life is shaped by wrenching choices between the life of the mind and the life of the body. Can a woman today freely choose to combine love, motherhood, and the life of the mind, without unacceptable sacrifices?

What story do you imagine Dror would tell about his experience with Helen?

Ester grows up in a community of Portuguese Inquisition refugees who are fiercely focused on ensuring their safety in the “New Jerusalem” of Amsterdam; they place great importance on reviving Jewish learning and they give their harshest punishment to Spinoza for his heretical pronouncements. When Helen goes to Israel, she encounters Holocaust survivors struggling with the legacy of their losses and the need to establish safety in their new home. In what ways are these communities similar, and in what ways are they different?

What clues does the author include as to the identity of the true grandfather of the female scribe? Did Lizabeta (Constantina’s mother) make the right choice in refusing to play on his pity and beg him to keep her and her daughter in London?

After months of chafing at the Patricias’ strict stewardship of the rare manuscript room, Aaron has this epiphany: “And as if his own troubles had given him new ears, Aaron understood that her terseness was love — that all of it was love: the Patricias’ world of meticulous conservation and whispering vigilance and endless policing over fucking pencils” (page 541). What sorts of love are on display in unexpected ways in The Weight of Ink? In what unexpected ways does love show itself in your own world?

The Songs

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Songs by Charles Elton | Jewish Book Council

The Songs follows Iz Herzl, famed political activist and protest singer, who has always told his children that it is the future not the past they should concentrate on. Now, at 80, an almost forgotten figure, estranged from everyone who has ever loved him, his refusal to look back on his extraordinary life leaves his teenage children, the brilliant Rose and her ailing younger brother, Huddie, adrift in myths and uncertainty that cause them to retreat into a secret world of their own.

Iz's other child, Joseph, a faltering Broadway songwriter 40 years older than Rose and Huddie, whose one disastrous meeting as a child with his father has left him lost and alone, is on a shocking and violent path to self-destruction. When the disparate members of the Herzl family begin to converge, the ambiguities at the heart of Iz Herzl's life begin to surface in a way that will change all of them.

A Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

A Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner | Jewish Book Council

To mark the 100th birthday of Will Eisner this year, Norton published a centennial edition of his milestone book, A Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories. The book, originally published in 1978, is widely considered to be the first graphic novel and should be included in any comic book collection.

Eisner was one of the comic book pioneers, working in the medium before the boom that occurred with the introduction of Superman. In the 1940s, he revolutionized visual storytelling with his own take on the superhero genre, The Spirit, using film techniques in his sequential art narratives. Even when he worked outside the business as an illustrator—for instance for the U.S. Army—he never retired from comics and always believed in the potential of the medium. He was over sixty when he published A Contract with God.

The book is not written for kids seeking the next superhero battle. Instead. it is a longform comic for more mature readers. Strictly speaking, A Contract with God is a collection of four short stories based on Eisner’s childhood memories. An intimate portrait of immigrant life in the 1930s Bronx, it is an homage to a vanished world—not a glorified past, however, but a past with all its faults and ugliness. The tragic main characters are all destined to fail, and each story presents a surprising twist at the end.

The most memorable of these short stories is the first one, “A Contract with God.” This is the tale of Frimme Hersh, a righteous man who is doing one good deed after another, and is told that “God will reward you”—but witnesses one catastrophe after another. Eisner’s modern Job moves from his shtetl in Eastern Europe to New York in the hope for a better life, but suffering continues to be the leitmotif of his life. When he finds an abandoned baby left on his doorstep, he raises her as his own daughter and finally his life seems to have a purpose. But then, all of a sudden, she dies, and Frimme loses his faith. After sitting shiva, he shaves off his beard, abandons Judaism, and starts a career as a greed-driven real estate investor. But despite his financial success, Frimme never finds happiness.

“A Contract with God” is a masterpiece that even nearly forty years after its first publication hasn’t lost its power. As we learn from an introduction written by Eisner shortly before his death in 2005, the story was the most personal, since he mourned in it the death of his own daughter—a fact that was for many years unknown in the comics community.

With this book, the pioneer of comics became the father of the graphic novel and paved the way for later works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The beautiful hardcover centennial edition, with a new introduction by Scott McCloud, invites fans to rediscover this masterpiece and new readers to explore the roots of graphic novels.

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The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Icon

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Man Who Carried Cash: Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making of an American Icon by Julie Chadwick | Jewish Book Council Before there was Johnny and June, there was Johnny and Saul. The Man Who Carried Cash chronicles a relationship that was both volatile and affectionate between Johnny Cash and his manager, Saul Holiff. From roadside taverns to the roaring crowds at Madison Square Garden, from wrecked cars and jail cells all the way to the White House, the story of Johnny and Saul is a portrait of two men from different worlds who were more alike than either cared to admit.

The Lost Letter

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Lost Letter | Jewish Book Council

Austria, 1938. Kristoff is a young apprentice to a master Jewish stamp engraver. When his teacher disappears during Kristallnacht, Kristoff is forced to engrave stamps for the Germans, and simultaneously works alongside Elena, his beloved teacher's fiery daughter, and with the Austrian resistance to send underground messages and forge papers. As he falls for Elena amidst the brutal chaos of war, Kristoff must find a way to save her, and himself.

Los Angeles, 1989. Katie Nelson is going through a divorce and while cleaning out her house and life in the aftermath, she comes across the stamp collection of her father, who recently went into a nursing home. When an appraiser, Benjamin, discovers an unusual World War II-era Austrian stamp placed on an old love letter as he goes through her dad's collection, Katie and Benjamin are sent on a journey together that will uncover a story of passion and tragedy spanning decades and continents, behind the just fallen Berlin Wall.

A romantic, poignant and addictive novel, The Lost Letter shows the lasting power of love.

Who Will Lead Us?: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Who Will Lead Us?: The Story of Five Hasidic Dynasties in America by Samuel C. Heilman | Jewish Book Council

Who Will Lead Us? is a study of Hasidic dynasties in America; it surveys the Munkács, Boyan and Kopyczynitz, Bobov, Satmar, and Chabad communities, and traces the history each group has faced in its leadership transitions. Heilman, the Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at Queens College, CUNY, is a professor of sociology who focuses on contemporary Orthodox Jewish movements.

As the author explores in his introduction, the rapid growth of Hasidim and their institutions makes succession “of great concern to Hasidim, who understand that their own collective continuity is at stake in them.” However, the path to new leadership is a tumultuous one; while rooted in divine providence, it is often influenced by politics, family dynamics, and community expectations. “As Hasidim seek a way out of this turmoil, ironically, they may lose precisely the order and stability that they have sought to preserve,” states Heilman. “These are chronicles on the making and unmaking of men, a search for charisma, leadership, and struggles for power.”

Chapters two through six each focus on a specific dynasty, first introducing the founding leader of the movement and then retelling the history that brought about the current leadership. The author also explores the impact of the Holocaust. Reestablishing roots in the United States changed the course of succession but ultimately saved these communities from extinction. No two narratives are the same, but each clearly shows how the search for new leadership challenged the community, often creating fractures that exist to the present day. The chapters are written more as a biography than dispassionate history, and reflect on the motivations of the subjects and their families.

The concluding chapter of the book seeks to outline what the previous five chapters illustrate about Hasidism as a whole. “Contemporary Hasidic successions have been affected by the mass immigration of Jewry and the relocation of Hasidism to a much smaller and more concentrated area than the one in which they first flowered,” writes Heilman, “as well as their placement in modern, open, largely democratic welfare states that serve as the cultural and social background for their current attempts to ensure their continuity.” Diagnosing how modernity has forever changed Hasidism, and following the twisting narratives of its unique cast of characters is what makes these succession narratives so interesting.

Ultimately, one marvels at the unlikely fact that succession has “occurred in a place and time when all the accepted wisdom suggested that Hasidism as a way of life would be impossible.” Heilman explains this paradox as a process of “reanimation,” when a successor is chosen and the community feels a renewed connection to both its revered past and its promising future through a larger-than-life leader.

Who Will Lead Us is an academic study but an accessible read. Anyone interested in Jewish history mixed with a bit of palace intrigue will enjoy this book.

American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience edited by Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm | Jewish Book Council

Scholarship on the American Jewish community has traditionally assumed that Europe was the dominant source of its culture and institutions. This one-way process meant that American Jew modified European ideas and practices in light of American values.

This volume represents an important shift in the paradigm of American Jewish life, a turn to a transnational conceptualization, where the direction of influence is more complex. This process has two key features. First, American Judaism had a diverse set of influences, not just European. Second, the unidirectional model overlooks the transmission of ideas and institutions from America to Europe.

The first several articles in this collection remind the reader that even before the 23 refugees from Recife landed in New York, there was a rich Jewish life throughout the Caribbean. In a reprinted article entitled “The Myth of Europe in America’s Judaism,” Susannah Heschel traces the early practices of the first Sephardic immigrants to their experiences as Marranos. They worshipped in private– the first synagogue was not built on the American continent until the 1730’s” (p. 32) – and had learned to negotiate with unjust authority, which equipped them to challenge Peter Stuyvesant’s efforts to expel them and, according to Eli Faber’s article on their quest for civic equality, negotiate ways to obtain full citizenship rights during the colonial period when it was circumscribed by British law.

A second wave of immigration led to a significant cultural and demographic shift, as the Jewish population was dominated by German speaking migrants from Western and Central Europe. This group increased the number of synagogues, mostly Reform, where German continued to be the dominant language until the 1870’s and 1880’s. As this community matured, a “Late 19^th Century American Jewish Awakening,” according to Jonathan Sarna, led to the creation of an institutional infrastructure that promoted serious scholarship, publishing, newspapers, Rabbinic training, and national organizations of congregations.

Several articles point out that the process of acculturation was complex. The continued use of German as the language of most synagogues was finally challenged by a second wave of Reform Rabbis like Gerhard Deutsch who claimed that “If therefore the Jew wants to be considered a genuine American he has to speak English.” In a rethinking of an 1983 publication which categorized Orthodox Rabbinic leaders into accommodators and resisters, Jeffrey Gurock tackles a complex question and provides a more nuanced analysis, noting that some “resisters” responded to the enormous currents promoting acculturation by adapting and modifying some of their legal positions and congregational practices yet remaining true to their traditions.

Several interesting examples illustrate the two-way process of cultural influence. B’nai B’rith, the first major secular Jewish organization established in the U.S. (1843), set an important precedent in Jewish lifeby promoting a space for active participation in communal life that excluded formal religious practice. This unique and seminal organization was adopted in Berlin forty years later. A second article, “Exporting Yiddish Socialism: New York’s Role in the Russian-Jewish Workers’ Movement,” points out that in the context of serious censorship in Russia, the dissemination of Socialist and other radical ideas involved exporting Yiddish newspapers and pamphlets from New York and London to Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Switzerland and smuggling them into major centers of Jewish radicalism like Vilna and Minsk during the early 1890’s.

The editors of this volume are to be commended for collecting a diverse set of articles that challenge the reader to rethink conventional wisdom about Jewish life and culture, noting its diverse transnational sources and the two-way transmission of ideas and practices between Europe and America.

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Interview: David Bezmozgis

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 19:39:00 GMT

with Ranen Omer-Sherman

Photo: David Franco

With the American debut of Natasha, a Canadian film based on the short story by National Jewish Book Award winner David Bezmozgis, in select theaters this week, Jewish Book Council sat down with the author to discuss the story, the film, and David Bezmozgis’s career and writing at large.

Ranen Omer-Sherman: Your short story “Natasha” contrasts a young Canadian’s stoner, suburban life with the tough exigencies of his newly arrived female relative’s earlier adolescence in Russia. What were some of the most significant challenges you encountered in trying to capture the story’s essence on film?

David Bezmozgis: To be honest, the most significant challenges were practical not creative—although the creative ones weren’t insignificant. Perhaps my primary motivation for turning "Natasha" into a film was to render a faithful account of contemporary North American Russian Jewish immigrant life on the screen. I’d seen it done in Israeli cinema, but never North American. To do it, the film needed to be mostly in Russian and cast with real Russian-speaking actors. Raising the money for such a film and finding the right actors was hard. There were just enough quality Russian-speaking actors in Canada—most of them trained in the former Soviet Union and Israel—to make the filming possible.

ROS: You vividly evoke the sharp generational contrasts dependant on when individuals emigrated from Latvia and Moscow. Are those differences still strongly felt?

DB: The film was shot in 2014, before the most heated debates about refugees and immigrants, but one aspect that rarely gets spoken about even now is the difference within immigrant communities. Most of these differences have to do with class—which today is about money—but some has to do with psychology. And so part of what accounts for the conflict in Natasha is the disparity between older and newer immigrants. It’s a distinction that diminishes over time, but in the film, we see it when it’s most acute.

ROS: After immersing yourself in shooting Natasha for many months, have your feelings about your vocation as an artist changed in any way? Do you feel a greater affinity with cinematic expression than fiction now? In your self-reflective article, “Origin, Story” you candidly describe your unease about the future of literature. Do you worry about the fate of the novel?

DB: I worry about the fate of literature and cinema pretty much equally. I’d worry less if there was some other form emerging that did what great books and films do—which is allow a reader or viewer to feel a sense of communion with another human consciousness. That kind of art is usually the product of a single authorial voice. An author. A film director. I don’t know if the readership or viewership is shrinking, only that there seems to be less money for people to write books and make movies whose objective is not primarily commercial.

ROS: Why did you choose to update “Natasha” (originally set in the 1980s) to the age of social media? Was that primarily a pragmatic choice, given the production costs of getting historical details right?

DB: I updated it for both practical and creative reasons. My previous film, Victoria Day, was set in the 1980s and I was well acquainted with the hassles of making a period picture—even one set in the recent past. I asked myself if the Natasha story was particular to the 1980s or if these characters and situations remained plausible today. I concluded they did. Once I decided that, I was glad for the cinematic and narrative opportunities that texting and the Internet provided. The way we communicate and the way we access pornography is very different today compared to the early 1990s.

However, very soon, my film will be dated. Canada is legalizing marijuana. So Mark’s sideline, biking around the northern Toronto suburbs delivering weed, is soon to be redundant.

ROS: What was it like to cast the film—to bring Mark, Natasha, and others to life?

DB: Like everyone, I had an image in my mind how the various characters should look. Once casting starts, however, you discover just how plastic that image is. A great actor will revise your sense of how a character can look—up to a point. Certainly with Mark and Natasha, the actors had to be able to credibly pass for teenagers.

As for Alex Ozerov (who plays Mark), I was aware of him from smaller roles in independent Canadian films. Once I saw his work and met him, he was the only actor I considered for the role. Natasha was the first film in which he played the lead and assumed the challenge of carrying a picture. I think he’s exceptional. And thanks in part to his role on The Americans, many other people are now discovering what a great talent he is.

ROS: The film’s final frame shows Mark gazing from the outside of his home through the window, occupying Natasha’s former position in their relationship. That profoundly evocative image is faithful to the story, but did you have any doubts about whether that choice would succeed as well as it did cinematically?

DB: I always imagined the film would end in the same way as the story. Even in the story, it is an imagistic ending. The film, however, doesn’t grant the viewer the benefit of Mark’s interior monologue, but I think what he feels is implicit in his action and informed by the audience’s experience of everything they’ve just seen. The ending is supposed allow the viewer space to infer the meaning. For viewers who like to be granted that kind of space—and I am one—I think it is satisfying. For viewers who want more explicit emotional instruction, it can be frustrating—though even most of these people, after asking for my interpretation, intuit more or less the correct meaning on their own.

ROS: Although you have written two more recent novels (The Free World and The Betrayers), not so long ago you described the stories gathered in your first book Natasha as “constituting the core of my imaginative life.” Could you say a little about why you still feel so deeply connected to those earlier works?

DB: That line from my journals refers to the curious little anecdotes and personal stories I’ve heard from my family and other Russian immigrants. That entry referred to my mother receiving the gift of a thermos from her friend, Anya. My mother and Anya are both widows and live in the same condominium building. Other Russian-Jewish widows also live in this building. My mother has known some of them for decades. They go for walks together. They meet for coffee. They know one another’s children and grandchildren. When my mother demurred about accepting the gift-thermos, Anya said: “What, I can’t even give you a thermos?” Much of my artistic sensibility can be derived from this exchange.

ROS: You have written movingly on the personal and professional impact of the great American writer Leonard Michaels (1933-2003), especially on what he taught you about embracing the inescapably personal nature of writing, not evading it. Can you say more about his influence?

DB: I recognized in Leonard Michaels a kindred spirit. His writing seemed like a more erudite and better-realized version of what I wanted to do. His sensibility had also been sufficiently informed by the class of gift-thermos stories. He’d found a means to transmute the humor and the pain of those stories though a highly condensed prose style. It set the standard to which I aspired. It still does.

ROS: There is a moment in “Minyan” when the narrator describes Shabbat morning services in an old shul: “Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences, I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews. In each case, the motivation was not tradition but history.” Is that just the narrator, or does that affinity for Jewish historic consciousness rather than traditional practice speak for you as well?

DB: Is it possible to write that line and not share the sentiment?

Ranen Omer-Sherman is the JHFE Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville. His latest book is Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature & Film.

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Six Neglected Holocaust Narratives to Preorder for Fall 2017

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 16:33:00 GMT

Posted by Nat Bernstein

The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees

“To the Nazis, Freda Wineman’s crime was simple,” Laurence Rees’s new study of the Holocaust opens. “She was Jewish.” As a writer, filmmaker, and former Creative Director of the BBC TV History series, Rees has been the driving force behind historical literature and television programs on the Holocaust in Britain. In his newest work, Rees tackles the prevailing question of contemporary Holocaust studies—how and why did the Holocaust happen?—from a deeply human perspective, balancing historical analysis with 25 years of unpublished testimony from survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and the Shoah, polished and presented in Rees’s compelling prose. Wading through the individual stories of the people he has encountered over the course of his career as a historical documentarian, Rees imbues this new chronology of the darkest period in modern European history with the personal narratives—and human empathy—that are too often missing from contemporary Holocaust research.

Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers During
the Holocaust by Mordecai Paldiel

Saved from the Holocaust with his family as a young child by Simon Galley, a Catholic priest who abetted Jews in crossing the Swiss border, Mordecai Paldiel headed Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations through the turn of the twenty-first century, adding approximately 18,000 names to the roster of non-Jewish rescuers honored by Israel’s national Holocaust monument and research center. In the process of this noble work, Paldiel discovered the stories of Jewish resistors who helped their clansmen escape Europe. Feeling that a significant narrative of heroism in the face of the Shoah and the Nazi occupation has remained neglected, upon retiring from his position at Yad Vashem Paldiel dedicated himself to chronicling the stories of Jewish rescuers who risked their own lives to remain where they could conduct operations to smuggle other Jews to safety. Focusing on different regions by chapter, Paldiel introduces a wide cast of previously unacknowledged saviors, from underground network agents to partisan fighters to a Berlin rebbetzin who facilitated the safe passage of thousands of Jewish German children to Palestine.

Stealth Altruism: Forbidden Care as Jewish
Resistance in the Holocaust by Arthur B. Shostak

Exploring another neglected narrative of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust, Arthur B. Shostak redefines the very concept of heroism to include the acts of caring for others in an environment of evil and terror. Exploring the unrecognized instances of forbidden kindness among victims of the Nazi camps—holding weak neighbors up at roll call, switching tasks with prisoners assigned to hard labor details, sharing food and clothing—Shostak reveals the largely untold history of humanity at the darkest moments of the Shoah. The author also shares some of his research findings, interviews with survivors, and Holocaust memorial and education centers at www.stealthaltruism.com.

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots
Against Hollywood and America by Steven. J. Ross

While the United States trained its law enforcement agencies’ focus on Soviets and communists, the plots and activities of Nazi operatives on American soil in the early 1930s went unnoticed but for one vigilante spy ring headed by Hollywood attorney Leon Lewis, “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles” as the Nazis would come to call him. Viewing Hollywood as the greatest propaganda machine in the world—and eying key military positions and armories along the Pacific Coast—the Nazis planned out a siege of Los Angeles, plotting to massacre the city’s Jews and hang twenty of Hollywood’s brightest stars. From 1933 through the end of World War II, Lewis and his network of military veterans—and their wives—infiltrated all Nazi and fascist activities in the City of Angels, uncovering and snuffing out the Nazi’s sinister plot to destroy Los Angeles.

Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust
by Jessica Lang

Sidestepping Theodor Adorno’s famous aphorism, “To write poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric,” Jessica Lang questions whether Holocaust literature across form and style can or even should translate the Nazi genocide to those who did not experience it themselves. Defining the expression of the limitations and barriers of language to adequately convey the horror and trauma of those who survived—blank spaces, trailing punctuation, italic, and narrative interruptions—as “textual silence,” Lang claims these critical breaks in poetry, novels, diaries, and memoirs as essential characteristics of the genre.

For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian

Originally published under his penname in 1934, Iosif Mendel Hechter’s diary of Romania’s nascent antisemitism—growing increasingly rampant together with Hitler’s popularity in Germany and his installation as chancellor the year before—highlights the violence and injustices committed against Jewish populations throughout Europe, even within intellectual circles and institutions of higher education, long before the war began. Sebastian describes scampering around his university campus in Bucharest to avoid beatings on his way to lectures and discovering that even his closest friends and comrades believed the antisemitic propaganda proliferating throughout the continent—including the beloved mentor Sebastian asked to write the preface to this very book, which Sebastian nonetheless included in the original publication out of spite:

It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian… Remember that you are Jewish!... Are you Iosif Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.

Recalling the widespread adoption and impact of such beliefs—and what they led to—seems especially important in wake of recent statements made in by the White House press secretary two weeks ago, drawing condemnation from Jewish organizations and scholars, including Deborah Lipstadt.

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The Holocaust: A New History

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees | Jewish Book Council

On June 1944, Freda Wineman and her family arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. After a cursory look from an SS doctor, Freda's life was spared and her mother was sent to the gas chambers. Freda only survived because the Allies won the war--the Nazis ultimately wanted every Jew to die. Her mother was one of millions who lost their lives because of a racist regime that believed that some human beings simply did not deserve to live--not because of what they had done, but because of who they were.

Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting the survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In this sweeping history, he combines this testimony with the latest academic research to investigate how history's greatest crime was possible. Rees argues that while hatred of the Jews was at the epicenter of Nazi thinking, we cannot fully understand the Holocaust without considering Nazi plans to kill millions of non-Jews as well. He also reveals that there was no single overarching blueprint for the Holocaust. Instead, a series of escalations compounded into the horror. Though Hitler was most responsible for what happened, the blame is widespread, Rees reminds us, and the effects are enduring.

The Holocaust: A New History is an accessible yet authoritative account of this terrible crime. A chronological, intensely readable narrative, this is a compelling exposition of humanity's darkest moment.

Saving One's Own

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Saving One’s Own: Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust by Mordecai Paldiel | Jewish Book Council

In this remarkable, historically significant book, Mordecai Paldiel recounts in vivid detail the many ways in which, at great risk to their own lives, Jews rescued other Jews during the Holocaust. In so doing he puts to rest the widely held belief that all Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe wore blinders and allowed themselves to be led like “lambs to the slaughter.” Paldiel documents how brave Jewish men and women saved thousands of their fellow Jews through efforts unprecedented in Jewish history.

Encyclopedic in scope and organized by country, Saving One’s Own tells the stories of hundreds of Jewish activists who created rescue networks, escape routes, safe havens, and partisan fighting groups to save beleaguered Jewish men, women, and children from the Nazis. The rescuers’ dramatic stories are often shared in their own words, and Paldiel provides extensive historical background and documentation.

The untold story of these Jewish heroes, who displayed inventiveness and courage in outwitting the enemy—and in saving literally thousands of Jews—is finally revealed.

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Stealth Altruism

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Stealth Altruism: Forbidden Care as Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust by Arthur B. Shostak | Jewish Book Council

Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by “Carers,” those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve everyone’s chances of survival. Their empowering acts of altruism remind us of our inherent longing to do good even in situations of extraordinary brutality.

Arthur B. Shostak explores forbidden acts of kindness, such as sharing scarce clothing and food rations, holding up weakened fellow prisoners during roll call, secretly replacing an ailing friend in an exhausting work detail, and much more. He explores the motivation behind this dangerous behavior, how it differed when in or out of sight, who provided or undermined forbidden care, the differing experiences of men and women, how and why gentiles provided aid, and, most importantly, how might the costly obscurity of stealth altruism soon be corrected.

To date, memorialization has emphasized what was done to victims and sidelined what victims tried to do for one another. “Carers” provide an inspiring model and their perilous efforts should be recognized and taught alongside the horrors of the Holocaust. Humanity needs such inspiration.

Textual Silence

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust by Jessica Lang | Jewish Book Council

There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre.

Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven. J. Ross | Jewish Book Council

In Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, historian Steven J. Ross reminds us how vulnerable American Jews were to the propaganda that emanated from Nazi Germany. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda network continually promoted the idea that American Jews were determined to push the United States into a war with Nazi Germany. But it wasn’t only groups conceived by the Nazis in Germany, such as the Friends of New Germany and the German American Bund, who agitated against Jews; there were also native anti-Semitic groups such as Pelley’s Silver Shirts. Anti-Jewish bigotry could even be found in the halls of Congress, where Theodore Bilbo, John Rankin, Martin Dies, and Louis McFadden, among others, openly spewed their hatred of Jews.

Ross’s book focuses on the activities of Leon Lewis, an attorney and communal leader who led the fight against the Nazis in 1930s Los Angeles. Earlier than most, Lewis saw the danger to American Jews from the growth of pro-Nazi groups like the Friends of New Germany. He was surprised at the indifference of law enforcement agencies like the FBI—who preferred to monitor Reds rather than Nazis. But in fact, In Los Angeles many police officers were anti-Semitic; a number of them were supporters of the Klan. To publicize the threat of these Nazi and fascist groups, Lewis, later joined by fellow activist Joseph Roos, recruited a ring of spies to infiltrate the Nazi network in L.A. His success in providing information to law enforcement agencies thwarted the sabotaging efforts of the Nazis in Navy shipyards and military bases, as well as an assassination plot directed toward Jews in the entertainment industry. Lewis and Roos’s success in awakening law enforcement to the Nazi threat—including the J. Edgar Hoover-led FBI—caused the Nazi leadership to label Lewis “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles.”

Ross has written a riveting book that will enlighten readers as to how susceptible American Jews were to the spread of anti-Semitism on the eve of World War II.

For Two Thousand Years

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian | Jewish Book Council

Mihail Sebastian died in 1945, just after the Romanian government saw fit to align themselves with the Allied Powers. Legend has it he’d been on his way to teaching his first class after a long period of institutional exclusion when he was hit by a truck, an irony—the fact that he’d survived the Romanian Holocaust only to be killed by a road accident—that the protagonist of For Two Thousand Years would surely have noted. Published in 1934, this is a novel that reads like a journal, the plot just a backdrop to the protagonist’s musings. (Sebastian did keep journals, later published posthumously under the title Journals 1935-1944: The Fascist Years.) The unnamed protagonist does do things out in the world—he goes to school where he gets beaten and shoved out of the classroom, gets a job, has love affairs, talks with his friends about Zionism and workers’ rights and women over glasses of beer. Still, most of the story is within his own head. “I’ve no desire for psychological studies,” he says at one point, and yet he cannot escape this particularly Jewish pastime. It is that penchant for analysis partnered with the hard reality of his daily life which brings him back again and again to the unfortunate chicken-or-egg dilemma: Are Jews who we are because we’ve been persecuted for two thousand years, or have Jews been persecuted for two thousand years because of who we are? Or, as he puts it, “Which came first? Antisemitism or the Jewish threat?

For Jews reading this book, much of his ruminating is uncomfortably recognizable. “Do you not know how little it takes for people to turn against you?” he thinks in response to a fellow Jewish student’s outspokenness. “Do you not see that what you call ‘intuition’ and what I call your ‘antisemitism’ selects examples that can nourish it and ignore those which can refute it?,” he asks a friend caught up in populist opinion. “Haven’t they always told us we’re a dirty people?,” he asks himself, then responds: “Maybe it’s true.” Remember, this was before 1934, and the antisemitic wave had yet to reach its most horrific crescendo, though no doubt Sebastian felt it building. After the book’s publication, many people accused him of antisemitism—that is, those who weren’t focused on solving the “Jewish problem” by any means necessary. His contemplations aren’t always easy to stomach, but perhaps that’s because he was just writing the dark thoughts most of us have learned to keep to ourselves. Yet how can we not ask these kinds of questions in the face of so much longstanding hatred? Is the world to blame, or does the fault somehow lie within us? Don’t look to For Two Thousand Years for answers, because there are none.

Reading List: CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

My name is Eva Mozes Kor. I am a survivor of Auschwitz, a survivor of human medical experimentation on twins by Dr. Josef Mengele, and now, I am trying to survive old age. As the founding director of CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, a human rights champion, internationally known author and speaker, and advocate for the power of forgiveness, I am recommending these books because they help us understand how the Nazis rose to power, what happened to many Jews and how they survived the death camps, and how the survivors coped afterwards.

As we come together on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as Auschwitz Liberation Day, this list of books is geared to help us remember, but also to further understand the circumstances around the Holocaust at that time and how survivors moved forward with their lives.

If you’re looking for a book that discusses Nazi collaborators in our midst…
1) AMERICAN SWASTIKA by Charles Higham

If you’re looking for a book that discusses The Nazi-American money plot…
2) TRADING WITH THE ENEMY by Charles Higham

If you’re looking for a book that discusses America's recruitment of Nazis and its disastrous effect…
3) BLOWBACK by Christopher Simpson

If you’re looking for a book that discusses Hitler's Alliance with Germany's great chemical companies…
4) THE CRIME & PUNISHMENT OF I.G. FARBEN (BASF) by Joseph Borkin.

If you’re looking for a book that gives you an insider’s perspective of Dr. Josef Mengele…
5) A DOCTOR'S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT by Miklos Nyiszli

If you’re looking for a book that showcases the unconditional faith in human beings' ability to heal…
6) MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Dr. Victor E. Frankl

If you’re looking for a book that provides a 10-year-old’s unfiltered perspective of Auschwitz and shows young people that we can overcome many hardships in life and even triumph over disaster….
7) SURVIVING THE ANGEL OF DEATH by Eva Mozes Kor & Lisa Rojany Buccieri

If you’re looking for a book that provides early childhood education about prejudice…
8) LITTLE EVA & MIRIAM IN FIRST GRADE by Eva Mozes Kor

If you’re looking for a book that provides information about the twins’ perspective as guinea pigs of Dr. Josef Mengele...
9) ECHOES FROM AUSCHWITZ by Eva Mozes Kor

If you’re looking for a book that shares the story of a Sunderkomando working for 3 yrs. in the gas chambers…
10) EYE WITNESS IN AUSCHWITZ by Filip Muller

If you’re looking for a book that goes into detail concerning Nazi Eugenics to create a perfect race…
11) MURDEROUS SCIENCE by Beno Muller Hill

If you’re looking for a book about a 17 year old who escaped Auschwitz to alert the world, but the world didn't believe him…
12) I CANNOT FORGIVE by Rudolf Vrba

You can learn more about Eva Mozes Kor by visiting www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org, following her on Twitter at @evamozeskor.

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Money, Me, and The Widow of Wall Street

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 15:06:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Randy Susan Meyers shared how the UJA-Federation impacted and even saved her life. With the release of her fourth novel, The Widow of Wall Street, Randy is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

Money. It’s our last taboo. People spill seamy details about their sex lives before talking about their finances, salary, or savings accounts. Yet despite this curtain of silence, money is not only (supposedly) the root of all evil, it’s at the heart of relationship battles, shattered dreams, and midnight wakefulness.

Money, sadly, is often how men measure their worth and how women measure men. We forgive dreary people their dreadfulness a lot quicker when they possess fat checkbooks—particularly when their riches are combined with a successful career. Writers laugh louder at the jokes of acclaimed fellow authors; relatives give a bit more latitude to rich aunties and uncles. All of us, whether with awareness or not, bow a bit in the face of a fat wallet.

Women—especially women of my age—grow up expecting to if not be supported by, be with a partner who pays the lion’s share of the rent. Young women today grow up with higher expectations (yes!), but they still harbor dreams of Prince Moneypants rescuing them; how could they not after watching fairy tale messages in classic movies such as Pretty Woman. These images stalk us; we buy into them, despite ourselves. When that man of ours walks out still holding the reins to the family money, we’re destroyed.

Each time a financial scandal unfolds, I wonder what was the self-told story the perpetrator believed that let him hurt so many people, and what is it like for his family?

When Bernie Madoff’s crimes made headlines, I thought about his wife Ruth and what it would be like to wake up one day and learn that one’s entire life was built on air. Every crime has multiple victims—and those victims usually include the family of the perpetrator. I know from working with criminals for ten years about the stories they told to excuse themselves—excuses that simultaneously fascinated and repulsed me. I learned how even those engaging in the most heinous behavior, manage to explain away their exploits—even if only to themselves.

Writing The Widow of Wall Street allowed me to explore my fascination with how criminal scandal affects those closest to the perpetrator—and how they applied to the family of Bernie and Ruth Madoff—by inhabiting the point of view of both my main characters, caught in a similar crime: husband, Jake Pierce, and wife, Phoebe Pierce. My lens on marriage and money sharpened.

White-collar criminals, accustomed to entitlement, commit the most outrageous schemes and crimes, always believing they’ll find a way out. Women, conditioned to second chair financially, don’t question the most unlikely of financial scenarios claimed by their partners.

So many women—many of my friends and relatives— are clueless about their finances. This added to my belief from the outset that someone like Ruth Madoff could absolutely be unaware of what her Ponzi-scheming husband had done. (He pulled the wool over the eyes of captains of industry and CEOs. Why not his wife?)

I learned the word knippel at my mother’s knee. She was so secretive about her money that I assume she even had some she hid from herself. She urged me to keep a knippel when upon the occasion of my first marriage.

At 19.

Looking back, not such bad advice. At the time, high on feminism, equality, and a cotton hippie wedding dress, I scoffed at the idea of hiding anything in marriage. However, I soon learned equality as an ideal was not equally prominent in my husband’s mind as it was in mine.

By the time my marriage ended, I longed for full purview over the checkbook.

Ten years later, divorced, I had it. Broke, I let my credit card debt pile up—ignoring the growing interest, excusing myself because I was the sole support of the house and being unable to pay bills is tiring—and buying stuff for is soothing. So, you charge one more thing, open one more credit line . . . and the road to madness continues. I pushed the problems back; they woke me at three in the morning. Worry gnawed. How did I assuage my fears? By spending more money. The cycle grew.

Avoidance brings stress. I should have listened to my mother, who always said pay yourself first. My mother, horrified at the idea of my debt, rescued me via a kind (and wealthy, thus worshipped by her) relative who gave me an interest-free loan, which I used to pay off my credit cards and I vowed to never have credit card interest again. Interest makes banks fat and turns us into twisted ropes of tension.

Since then, my husband has convinced me that avoiding the truth never makes the truth go away. What is, is. But sometimes, what we’re told is, isn’t. There were many messages I took away from writing The Widow of Wall Street, including how often people wake up learning they live in a different marriage than their spouse, and how children always end up as collateral damage in their parent’s crimes.

Most of all, I’ll never forget this: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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How the UJA Saved My Life

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 15:46:00 GMT

Randy Susan Meyers’s fourth novel, The Widow of Wall Street, came out over Passover last week! With the release of her new book, Randy is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

The acknowledgements for my first novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, begin with these words: Before offering thanks to those who helped with this book, let me say this: I wish this story were science fiction instead of realism. For ten years, I worked with men who destroyed their families—men who weren’t monsters, but who did monstrous deeds. This book is for their children, the ones who suffer unnoticed, and for all the amazing men and women who dedicate their lives to helping these children. You may never know whose life you saved. Thank you, Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Doris Bedell, and Camp Mikan.

The novel was about sisters witnessing their father murder their mother. What I didn’t add in my acknowledgments was how years earlier, my father tried to kill my mother.

Challenging childhoods take many forms. Usually it’s an amalgam of hardships—from emotion, physical, and fiscal problems to abuse to loneliness. Smacks and screams thankfully have a time limit, but neglect is the evil gift that never stops.

Even benign neglect—like being a latchkey kid—can foster loneliness.

When trouble fills a family, kids are pushed to the background. I lived in a land of my own imagining, where I believed my real parents, President Kennedy and the First Lady, had left me to fend for myself, testing a ‘cream will rise to the top’ theory. Meanwhile, my beleaguered sister, Jill, was trying her sullen best to cook us supper by nine years old.

If it hadn’t been for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, I doubt my sister and I could have ended up strong at the broken places. Our mom was a struggling single mother who did her very best. Our dad suffered in ways we’ll never understand, papering his sadness with drugs and dying at 36.

But we had the summer. Through the magical generosity of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, we spent our summers at Camp Mikan, our paradise. We entered a bus somewhere in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and came out of the bus blinking in the sunlight and breathing the sweet green air of Harriman State Park. Sunshine! Swimming! Friends!

Visibility!

In memory, it was a Wizard of Oz transition from a black-and-white life in Brooklyn to the technicolor of Camp Mikan. At camp, we went from unnoticed to the coolness of being all summer campers. My sister became a big shot, a member of an envied clique, moving up the ranks of camp hierarchy until eventually she was head of the waterfront (only the coolest job in the world). I became part of a pack of safely rebellious friends who kept me going through the lonely winters.

We got to be kids.

I starred in Guys and Dolls. Jill gathered swimming groupies. We hiked. Canoed. Short-sheeted counselors. The head counselors, Frenchy and Danny, a married couple, taught me I could be lovable, and through loving them I learned early on that interracial marriage was a non-issue; Luke Bragg taught me to get up on stage, and from being with him I learned through osmosis that gay or straight made no difference.

We got to be kids.

Women ran Camp Mikan. They taught me and Jill that women were strong and loving and firm and trustworthy. They taught us that is was possible to be protected in this world. The camp was racially, culturally and ethnically mixed. We learned to be friends across all borders.

Back home, we were once again invisible and quiet children cleaning the house, uncomplaining and obedient, waiting for the year to pass so we could again have a childhood. Summer came and once more we could swim, sing, mold clay, hit a ball, learn folkdance (I still dance the misirlou in my mind), and unclench from being coiled watchers.

Doris Bedell, the camp director, shaped our lives more than she’d ever imagine. She loved us, she scolded us, and she made us feel seen. She probably helped my sister become the best teacher in Brooklyn. Her memory stayed with me when I ran a camp and community center in Boston.

Summer can save a kid. One person can offer a child enough hope to hang on. Think about this as we get ready to slide into school vacation.

One adult can change a child’s world.

Remember this.

Think of who you can touch.

Thank you, Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Thank you for my childhood.

Randy Susan Meyers's novels are informed by her work with families impacted by emotional and family violence— and a long journey from idolizing bad boys to loving a good man. After years working in social service and criminal justice, Meyers’s works of fiction have twice been chosen by the Massachusetts Center for the Book as “Must Read Fiction.”

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Great with Child

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Great with Child by Sonia Taitz | Jewish Book Council

Brilliant, overachieving Abigail is a thirty-something associate at a New York City law firm, with partnership aspirations. Her German-Jewish mother has recently succumbed to cancer, and now her father is living in Florida with his new girlfriend.

We learn, from the first page, that Abigail is six months’ pregnant and unmarried. So, we are led to think that Tim, the good-looking stranger who helps her up after she trips in a ditch in the street will be a perfect candidate to make her an “honest woman.” Or so it seems…

While this book initially has the makings of romance fiction, it quickly becomes more complex. An assignment takes Abigail to a tropical island toward the end of her pregnancy, when most women are restricted from flying. One would think Abigail is unwise to take this trip, but it nevertheless charts the course for most of the events that follow, including the introduction of characters who end up playing major roles in her life.

Truth is, this Phi Beta Kappa forgets her pill and has unprotected sex. When Abigail realizes she packed last month’s used prescription card, will doing “fifty jumping jacks” the next morning really prevent conception? Seriously?

Will Abigail end up with Tim, the man who went from pothole helper to friend, to love interest, to labor coach? Or with Richard, the father of her little girl Chloe, who Abigail attempts to dismiss from her life because of a major misunderstanding and misinterpretation of a single phone call?

Then there’s the pressure to become partner in a corrupt law firm that poor, driven Abigail endures daily.

Abigail’s story seems nearly identical to that of Sex and the City’s Miranda Hobbes, the driven law associate toiling toward partnership, who had an “oops” moment with unitesticle Steve. Other colorful characters abound, such as crotchety Evelyn MacAdam and the mystical Arlie Rajani, Chloe’s nanny—who, although uneducated like her boss Abigail, shows wisdom with her prescient advice. How could Abigail/Miranda have survived without her clever Arlie/Magda?

Great with Child is often predictable, but do be prepared to expect the unexpected. Touches of legalese, along with gorgeous prose, entice the reader into each scene.

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Last Man Standing

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy by James Curtis | Jewish Book Council

When Mort Sahl’s fiancée first introduced him to her parents, they were horrified at the prospect of their daughter marrying an aspiring nightclub comic. As they told him later, “We never knew you’d become Mort Sahl.”

In his heyday, Mort Sahl was indeed a name to conjure with. His success stemmed from timely iconoclasm: he discarded the de rigueur tuxedo worn by all nightclub performers before him in favor of a casual sweater and slacks that befit his grad-school-dropout persona; he didn’t tell jokes, but improvised long, free-form monologues that allowed him to display his wit; brandished a newspaper to underscore the topical nature of his material; and, largely by accident, established the mainstream comedy record album as a viable medium.

James Curtis’s claim that Sahl was the father of modern comedy may be debatable, but he builds a strong case in its favor. Sahl’s eminence has since been eclipsed by the near-mythical status of his contemporary, Lenny Bruce, as well as the success of other comedians—such as Woody Allen, Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, and Dick Gregory—in television and film. But Sahl, far more than Bruce, was looked to as a model who enabled the “sick” comedians who rose to prominence after him.

Sahl was a creature of the nightclub, an entertainment institution that began to disappear as his career reached its apex. Looking back, it is hard to believe that A-list entertainers once made their livings playing multiple shows nightly in venues that could seat a couple of hundred patrons at most. But Sahl’s monologues were the verbal equivalent of jazz, and the immediate feedback of a relatively small audience of like-minded souls was essential to their vitality. Despite several forays, he found both television and films to be less than congenial mediums.

Curtis’s book is an extraordinarily granular chronicle of Sahl’s career. Curtis reports not only the where and when of Sahl’s engagements, but the how-much as well. Along the way, he provides valuable sketches of such legendary clubs as the original hungry i in San Francisco, Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, Basin Street East in New York, and the Crescendo in Los Angeles, along with their proprietors and such related figures as the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, without whom Sahl probably wouldn’t have had a career.

Curtis treatment of Sahl’s personal life is less detailed, but will provide more surprises to most readers. While cultivating the image of a left-wing nonconformist, Sahl was pretty much a straight-arrow who went through ROTC in college, never used drugs (though addiction tragically claimed the life of his only son), and easily fell into the orbit of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy philosophy. (He was a regular at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, and he twice married the iconic Playboy bunny and centerfold model China Lee.) Beyond performing, his main enthusiasms were beautiful women, fast cars, and expensive watches.

While Sahl leaned left politically—his political heroes were Henry Wallace and Adlai Stevenson—he also became a fan of the Reagans and had cordial encounters with Richard Nixon. He had a rocky relationship with the Kennedys, although he would become a serious conspiracy theorist after JFK was assassinated. He became a fierce advocate for New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison and took to reading from the Warren Report on stage, to the considerable detriment of his reputation.

Sahl was clearly a far more complex figure than most of his fans ever recognized. While Curtis does not fully account for this complexity, he does Sahl and his adherents a favor by indicating that it existed.

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A Picture’s Worth

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Haim Watzman wrote about reading Talmud as literature and producing new stories on a monthly deadline. With the release of his new book, Necessary Stories, Haim is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

Illustrations used to be standard in fiction. Can we conceive of Through the Looking Glass without John Tenniel’s illustrations or Phiz’s illustrations for Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers? That sort of partnership rarely happens today, but I’m privileged to be a throwback.

The Jerusalem Report has commissioned a drawing for each of the stories I’ve written over the last nine years. The lion’s share of them have been done by Avi Katz, one of Israel’s finest illustrators. Three of them appear in my newly-published collection of stories, and another one (which accompanied the first post in this ProsenPeople series) appears on the cover. Here I talk about three drawings Avi produced for stories that appear in my new Necessary Stories volume. Unfortunately, I was not able to include these illustrations in the book.

“Peripheral Vision” takes place in an emergency clinic not far from my home. Hanan, a young man with an infection caused by a biking injury, sits in the waiting room, before being called in for treatment. He’s got a new girlfriend and is looking at a photo of her on his phone. The photo is, well, a very personal one.

He suddenly notices that he’s sitting next to a Haredi man of about his own age. The man’s young son sits on his lap. The father is trying to interest his son in a holy book he is reading, but the boy’s eyes keep wandering to the picture on Hanan’s phone. A conversation ensues, about the book the man is studying and the picture on the phone.

What the illustrator has captured in this picture is something I see as very basic to my work. Perhaps because I began my writing career as a playwright, I almost always visualize my stories as if they were taking place on a stage. (In fact, they work very well in performance.) The placement of characters in space, in juxtaposition with their surroundings, is key to conveying mood and theme. Wherever possible, I avoid stating directly what my characters are thinking or feeling and instead convey that with a gesture, a movement, a juxtaposition with some other person or object.

Avi’s illustration for “Peripheral Vision” captures this perfectly. The scene is a large room, but the three central characters and the two objects that occupy their attention—the phone and the holy book—form a self-contained and tight assemblage that brings the characters close—perhaps too close for comfort—within this large space. Note the two triangles—that of the figures themselves, and that of their gazes. Avi shows that the eyes of each character are drawn by something other than what it intends or is expected to see—the boy eyes the phone, the boy’s father considers Hanan, and Hanan squints at the book.

Avi’s illustration for “The Plowman Meets the Reaper” augments my story. Just before the Six Day War of 1967, on the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv train, a young boy whose indigent family immigrated from Iraq encounters a woman originally from Vienna. The story follows how each character depicts the other in his or her mind, and at one point on the train ride they actually draw each other. In choosing to depict this moment, the illustration calls the reader’s attention to an underlying theme that might otherwise be missed.

Understandably, Avi generally chooses to depict the story’s central characters interacting at a key moment. Sometimes, however, I suggest to him that he take an indirect approach. A picture without a human presence can be more subtly suggestive of a story’s deeper currents. Such is the case with his illustration for “Fireflies,” the penultimate story in the book. Rather than describe the story, I’ll let you read it and then consider whether any other sort of picture would have worked as well.

Haim Watzman is a writer and translator who has worked with many of Israel’s leading authors and scholars. He is the author of Company C, A Crack in the Earth, and Necessary Stories.

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Talmud as Literature

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Haim Watzman wrote about producing new stories on a monthly deadline for The Jerusalem Report. With the release of his new book, Necessary Stories, Haim is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

Two of the tales that appear in Necessary Stories, my new collection, closely follow passages in the Babylonian Talmud. If you’ve ever studied or tried to read this central Jewish text, you might find that puzzling. The Gemara, the largest part of the Babylonian Talmud, records the discussions and arguments that several generations of rabbis living in what is now Iraq engaged in between the third and fifth centuries of the Common Era.

To the untrained eye—indeed, even to the well-versed one—the discussions can be vexingly cryptic, arcane, and difficult to understand. In fact, it is that difficulty that has made mining its wisdom and interpreting its disputations the central occupation of traditional Jewish scholarship ever since.

“In Exile, at Home” recasts a debate that appears on page 25b of the tractate Sukkah. The tractate focuses, as one might expect, on the laws and observances incumbent on Jews during the week-long holiday of Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, which occurs in the early fall, just after Yom Kippur. One of those laws is the requirement during that week to live—in particular, to have one’s meals and to sleep—in a sukkah,a ramshackle temporary home rather than in one’s apartment or house. This commandment is accompanied by another—a commandment to be joyous during the holiday.

The sugiya (a passage of Talmud devoted to discussing a specific issue) brings up a problem presented by some classes of people who might have trouble being joyous in a sukkah. Specifically, it asks about people who are mourning for a loved one and a bride and groom just after their wedding. Instead of a dialogue between rabbis, “In Exile, at Home” presents a dialogue between me and one of the participants in the Talmudic discussion, Abba Bar Zabda. Bar Zabda encounters me sitting beside the grave of my younger son in the Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery in Jerusalem. Our discussion reproduces the Talmudic dialectic and Bar Zabda leads me to an insight: “A bride and groom do not need to be commanded to rejoice … A mourner needs the commandment. Otherwise he will stay forever in exile and never be open to redemption.”

“Sin Offering” (the illustration for which, by Avi Katz, accompanies this post) combines another sugiya, from tractate Baba Batra, page 10b, with a harrowing story about African refugees trying to cross the border from Egypt into Israel. The latter story was told to me by my youngest daughter, Misgav, when she was a soldier in the Caracal Brigade, a mixed-sex infantry unit that patrols the Egyptian-Israeli border. In “Sin Offering,” a squad of soldiers reports to their commanding officer at dawn about a border incident that took place an hour or so earlier. The incident ended with one man wounded and the refugees sent back into the Sinai Desert to almost certain death. The soldiers have followed their orders, but some of them are uneasy. Each soldier presents his own perspective, but most of them are eager to justify what they have done.

Their report to their officer is interwoven with a debate over the meaning of a verse from the Bible’s Book of Proverbs (14:34). It is this debate over the verse that is the subject of the sugiya. It is led by Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai, who led the remnant of the Jewish community in Israel after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and remolded the Jewish faith so that it was centered on study and charity instead of on the Temple’s sacrificial service. Ben Zakkai asks his students the meaning of the verse in Proverbs and they all try to interpret it in a way that reflects well on the charitable actions of Jews and badly on those of non-Jews. At the end, Ben Zakkai cleverly recasts the interpretation of the last of them to say exactly the opposite—that non-Jews and Jews have equal access to God’s mercy when they give charity.

Perhaps, then, it should not be surprising that Talmudic disputations can be the basis of good fiction. They have sharply drawn characters, suspense, and even that final twist that so many good stories have. You just know have to read them properly, and imagine them in a modern context.

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Fiction on a Deadline

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Haim Watzman’s new book, Necessary Stories, is a selection of 24 stories from his monthly column in The Jerusalem Report from the past nine years. Haim is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

For the last nine years I’ve written a short story every four weeks. I haven’t yet missed a deadline yet.

Nine years ago, in 2008, I began writing a column for a biweekly news magazine, The Jerusalem Report. My column, “Necessary Stories,” has appeared in every other issue since then.

The editors invited me to write for the magazine in the wake of two non-fiction books I’d written, a memoir about my service as an IDF infantry reservist over nearly a decade and a half and a John McPhee-type travel narrative about a trip through the rift valley that runs up Israel’s eastern frontier. They thought they’d get personal essays, but after writing two first-person fact-based books, I wanted to let my imagination run free. It was more fun and required less research. I started sending in short stories.

Having to come up with a work of short fiction with convincing characters, a compelling storyline, and engaging prose once a month like clockwork might sound daunting. I have to produce a story whether inspired or not, whether in the mood or not, whether my day job as a translator leaves me time or not. Many is the time—it happened just a couple weeks ago—that I have sat myself down at my computer on the appointed day without a clue as to what my story will be about.

But the discipline is good for me. Perhaps because I worked for many years as a journalist, I seem to produce my best work when a deadline looms. I certainly would not have written upwards of 115 short stories in the last decade had I simply waited for ideas and inspiration to come (and, to be honest, without the incentive of the modest fee that the magazine pays me for each piece).

Is each one a great work of literature? No, of course not. Sometimes a story doesn’t click for me, or for readers. But I’m surprised at how seldom that happens. Last year, when I had to reread my output to choose which stories to include in the Necessary Stories book that I’ve just published, I was gratified to find that the choice was difficult. A large portion of the stories I reread had, at least for me, stood up to time and rereading. No less gratifying were the e-mails from the loyal readership I’ve built up over the years, readers who encounter the stories in the magazine or on my website, where they also appear. Readers remembered and urged me to include stories they had read years ago, and there were so many such requests I had no choice but to disappoint some of them.

Sometimes a story’s plot, characters, or situation are suggested by current events—the new collection includes, for example, “Sin Offering,” which addresses Israel’s treatment of African refugees. Or it might be a historical event: “The Devil and Theodor Herzl” imagines Herzl’s meeting with Vyacheslav von Plehve, Minister of the Interior for the Russian Czar and fomenter of the infamous Kishinev pogrom. Some, like “Bananas,” are based on family tales—in this case the experience of my wife’s family, immigrants from Baghdad who lived during Israel’s early years in an immigrant camp in Holon. Still others grow out of personal pain: “In Exile at Home,” “A Him to him” and “Fireflies” are stories of mourning for my younger son, a soldier in the Golani Brigade who died in a diving accident six years ago.

But sometimes really good stories come out of nowhere. When I sat down to write the story that became “The Dryad,” the illustration for which (by Avi Katz; our collaboration will be the subject of another post in this series) graces the cover of the new book and accompanies this post, I hadn’t a clue what I was going to write. When I’m stumped, I find that the best method is to take a few minutes to look deep into my soul to find out what is bothering it most. Often I find two or three disparate things that don’t, at first, seem to have anything to do with each other. In the case of “The Dryad,” it was the intense ankle pain I was suffering from after a long hike with friends a few days before, and the anguish I had heard in a story told to me by a schoolteacher friend. Neither my hike nor the friend’s specific story appears in “The Dryad.” Instead, they provide the scenery and the mood. Once I had that in mind, and sat down to write, the central character and narrative followed, and developed in ways I had not expected or planned.

That’s what makes meeting my deadline so much fun.

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What Is" Jewish Food"?

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Joan Nathan has a new cookbook out this week! With the release of King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking around the World, Joan is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

One of the ideas that I have wrestled with throughout my career is the question of what is “Jewish food”. Working on my latest cookbook, King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking around the World, has at last answered that question for me.

The special quality of Jewish food first came to me years ago through the cookbook author Lynn Rossetto Kasper, former host of the radio program The Splendid Table. Lynn, when talking about the food of Emilio Romagna, said that this Italian regional cuisine was rooted in the land. I immediately thought that the same could not be said for Jewish food: our cuisine may indeed be metaphorically rooted in the land of Israel but, in truth, being tied to the soil of just one land is not a component of Jewish cooking.

To my mind, Jewish food is tied more strongly to its dietary laws and many food-centered holidays. Even if Jews are not very observant, they know in the back of their minds that kosher laws exist, and that many of these rules go back Biblical times, influencing how we all eat. Indeed, these dietary laws have been a comfort to so many of us through our lives and are a very important component of what is called Jewish food.

The second component that defines Jewish cuisine is that since people first learned about seafaring vessels from the Phoenicians, as it says in the Bible, Jews have gone out in search of food, jewels, and precious stones for Solomon’s Table. Jews have always looked for new flavors and have eagerly incorporated these novel foods (provided they were kosher) into their diet.

The third component is the fact that, as a people, Jews have been displaced again and again throughout history. In moving to Spain, then being kicked out of Spain, and then moving from there throughout the Mediterranean and to the Americas, the Jewish people have had to adjust to new ingredients and new homes.

The haroset we place on our tables at Passover reflect this Diasporic legacy. In some areas we use romaine lettuce for our bitter herbs while in others we use horseradish, both red and white. In places like Maine we have haroset made out of blueberries; in Iran, this symbolic spread is infused with the flavors of almonds and cardamom. Jewish foods vary geographically with different customs, different vegetables, different main dishes, and different desserts, but always retain their connection with the symbolic and the sacred in Jewish traditions.

In a sense all three of these components are interrelated. I remember going to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. for dinner one night and there we feasted on a zakuska made of smoked salmon, blinis, chopped eggs, and scallions, a dish familiar to my husband with his Eastern European background. At this dinner, however, the Russian Ambassador served this recipe alongside beef stroganoff and other dishes that combined meat and dairy.

Treif considerations aside, my husband couldn’t help but remark on how very Jewish all the food was. He didn’t believe me when I told him that what he considered to be “Jewish food” was really just Russian food made with either dairy or meat (but not both). A wandering cuisine since it began in the Middle East, Jewish food was simply what Jews made their own in whatever part of the world in which they found themselves. The very Jewish-tasting Russian zakuska was no exception.

Joan Nathan is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and other publications. She is the author of eleven books, including Jewish Cooking in America and The New American Cooking, both of which won both James Beard Awards and IACP Awards.

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Jessica Soffer: Precious Haroset
Molly Birnbaum: The Scent of Passover
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JBC Bookshelf: 8 New Books for Passover 5777

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 16:12:00 GMT

Posted by Nat Bernstein

With Passover just around the corner, it’s time to start stocking your bookshelves for the holiday! Slip away from your seder and sink into poetry, memoirs, and new fiction about someone else’s dysfunctional Jewish family at Passover:

Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

David Samuel Levinson imagines a near-future in which antisemitism runs rampant and Israeli refugees roam the Globe after the world stood by and watched the annihilation of the Jewish State at the hands of its neighbors.

Ten years into the future, three siblings reunite in Los Angeles to “celebrate” Passover as a family and carry out an ill-conceived plot to murder their dad. There’s Jacob, visiting from Berlin with his German boyfriend and a sinister spare suitcase he intends to keep hidden; Edith, divorced, unstable, and facing sexual misconduct charges from an undergraduate student dissatisfied with his grade from her Ethics course; and Mo, husband, father to a set of twins and triplets each, and failed-actor-turned-reality-star in his forties hosting Passover in a mansion maintained by the network company that will be returning to film an encore of his family’s Passover seder—unbeknownst to any of his guests.

The Zookeeper’s Wife

by Diane Ackerman

Niki Caro’s movie adaptation of Diane Ackerman’s 2007 bestseller hit theaters just in time for the holiday—and the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which broke out, significantly, on the first night of Passover, 1943. Inspired by the Passover seder held by the Jews hidden in the Warsaw zoo—and its coincidence with the start of the revolt—Jewish Book Council’s new custom book club kit for The Zookeeper’s Wife features a special Passover haggadah supplement compiled in collaboration with humanitarian relief agencies—the International Rescue Committee (IRC), HIAS, and CARE—and leading Jewish organizations around the country to commemorate the the struggle for freedom that the holiday represents. Click here to download the free reading guide!

Moses: A Human Life

by Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg

What better time than Passover to read a biography of Moshe Rabbeinu—written by renowned scholar and lecturer Dr. Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, no less—than Passover? Accessible and illuminating, Zornberg’s recent contribution to the Yale Jewish Lives series brings her signature cross-application of Jewish texts, world literature, and psychoanalytic examination to one of Tanakh’s most complex characters.

We Were the Lucky Ones

by Georgia Hunter

Based on the true story of her family’s survival of World War II as Polish Jews, Georgia Hunter’s debut novel begins and ends with two Passover seders, eight years apart. In early March of 1939, Addy Kurc—Hunter’s maternal grandfather—meanders the streets of Paris in the wee hours of the morning, turning over a letter from his mother begging him to stay in France for the upcoming holiday rather than risk the closing borders of German-occupied Poland. He writes back to answer that he is resolved to return home to Radom, but even as his parents and siblings gather around the seder table no further word arrives—and neither does Addy.

The next eight years follow the separated factions of the Kurc family from German-occupied Radom and Toulouse to Soviet-occupied Lvov and Vichy France; across the Mediterranean to Dakar and Casablanca, across Siberia to Kazakhstan and Tehran, across the Austrian Alps to the Adriatic Coast (and Allied military camps) of Italy; on to Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Tel Aviv, Illinois, and Rio de Janeiro, where the whole family—all three generations miraculously intact—reunites for their first Passover seder together since Kristallnacht. Of the 30,000 Jews living in their hometown of Radom, Poland before the Holocaust, fewer than 300 survived—and “luckily,” every member of the Kurc family among them.

The Dinner Party

by Brenda Janowitz

Sylvia is planning the perfect Passover seder. Everything from the table settings to the menu to managing her helpless husband and hapless children—a son run off to Doctors Without Borders, a daughter who left medical school (and a Rothschild suitor) for the beach, a non-Jewish boyfriend dating the professionally successful one—has been accounted for. But guests comes with problems and intrigues of their own…

My Jewish Year

by Abigail Pogrebin

Abigail Pogrebin’s new personal exploration of the Jewish holidays is a wonderful companion year-round, but I was especially curious to read her reflections on Passover, given her family legacy around the holiday—her mother, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, convened the first feminist seder together with E. M. Broner, Phyllis Chesler, and Lilly Rivlin, and Abigail grew up attending this annual gathering as a “Seder daughter” over the subsequent years, seated among Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Bea Kreloff, Edith Isaac-Rose, and others.

Indeed, a full chapter of My Jewish Year is dedicated to "The Feminist Passover: A (Third) Seder of Her Own." In the chapter before, Pogrebin sticks to the traditional seder—and pre-holiday cleaning, gaining as much from the ritual of bedikat chametz and cooking with her children as the seder itself. She shares some favorite party tricks to spark meaningful discussions around the Passover story and how it translates to the present moment, including the homemade haggadah she has compiled over the last several years—”a collection of questions rather than readings[…] that meets all the seder requirements, while inviting constant participation.” Maybe that will be her next book…

The Book of Separation (Coming September 2017)

by Tova Mirvis

Bedikat Chametz emerges as a compass of unexpected resonance for Tova Mirvis in her forthcoming memoir, as well. Celebrating Halloween for the first time at age 40, the foreign experience of trick-or-treating with her children reminds her of searching for bread crumbs with a candle, a feather, and a wooden spoon with her father the night before Passover every year.

Mirvis’s story of leaving the Orthodox world of her upbringing and marriage cuts to the quick—with especially sharp poignancy as the Jewish holidays cycle through her life. Early in her married life, Passover stood as a symbol of the balance in her relationship, and her role within it: seders spent with her parents in Memphis, in exchange for the autumn holidays in Boston with his, “squelching” challenges to her faith with religious routines—vacuuming the the mini van for any traces of chametz before the Festival of Matzah. But it is toward the end of the book, in a chapter devoted to Passover, the holiday takes on its strongest significance: recounting the story of Exodus at a small seder with only her parents and children, Mirvis begins to think of her own liberation: her divorce. At the end of the official ceremony before a Jewish court of law, she remembers, the presiding rabbi encouraged her to embrace this new start to her life, to “become the person you need to be,” and wished her mazal tov.

Open My Lips

by Rachel Barenblat

This is a story about change.
Look: the seas are parting.
It’s happening now. Open your eyes.

We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt
but God brought us out of there.
This is a story about change.

Rachel Barenblat’s poetry on “Pesach to Shavuot” continues the literary fixation on preparing for Passover from women writers.Listing everything to be done before the holiday begins—from buying canned macaroons to calling her mother “to ask again whether she cooks / matzah balls in salted water or broth, because you can”—Barenblat combines wry humor with heartbreaking memories, adding, “Realize that no matter how many you buy / there are never quite enough eggs at Pesach,” right after a memory of her grandfather confused over the loss of his wife only weeks before another Passover years ago. Another poem eulogizes the Arab Spring, and in the interim before Shavuot Barenblat meditates on counting the Omer: “Humility and splendor in a single day, / two opposites folded into one. / Roots strengthen us as we count.”

Related Content:

Reading List: Passover Picks
Children's Passover Favorites, New and Old
Liane Kupferberg Carter: Let My People In: Setting a Place for Special Needs at the Seder Table
Internal Dialogue: What's With All the Social Justice Seders?

The Book of Separation

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Book of Separation: A Memoir by Tova Mirvis | Jewish Book Council

Tova Mirvis has spent her literary career writing from personal experience. Her novels focus on family and romantic relationships, on the Jewish Orthodox world, and on how those two things can affect a person. Tradition and responsibility hang heavily over each of her characters.

The same factors burdened Mirvis’s own life. In her recent memoir, The Book of Separation, Mirvis details her realization that Orthodoxy was not her home, even though she was convinced it was for so long. She grew up in a small town, attended an Orthodox school, participated in the Orthodox Youth Movement, and went to an Orthodox seminary in Israel; Mirvis felt like her life was laid out for her—foretold by her ancestors. She married young and followed all the strict rules that young Orthodox couples must follow. She and her husband had three children together, moved to a suburb of Boston, and created a life exactly like that of all other couples in their community. Mirvis hated it and was begging for a way out.

The questions Mirvis asks herself—about what her marriage means to her, how to deal with her kids (who still live in the community from which she has been shunned), and what led her to this juncture—are incredibly personal and yet highly relatable. As the author of such an introspective memoir, Mirvis clearly lived a surface-level existence for too many years. Her internal dilemma even affects her writing. A novel is left unfinished for years because she fears that completing it would require her to make difficult decisions in her own life.

Initially, the book may take some time to get into. Mirvis’s thoughts bombard you, the words riding on her train of thought. Soon however, you realize that she is discovering things about herself along with the reader; her thoughts are not fully formed until they hit the page. The book is a form of therapy, a catharsis. She toils through her decisions and her emotions in a way that only a student of Talmud can.

Mirvis realizes her Orthodoxy is so ingrained in her—going back generations—that shedding this skin will take a great deal of strength. While she hangs onto her old life, she desperately wants to start a new one. Mirvis longs for freedom so much that you want it for her—and then look internally and want it for yourself, too. This book is inspiring in a way it probably wasn’t meant to be; Mirvis wants everyone to live a life of truth and honesty because she didn’t. She has no agenda, no ill-will. Her resentment is towards herself and no one else. Her introspection has led to a new life of empowerment, and she isn’t looking back.

Read Tova Mirvis's Visiting Scribe Posts

Holding Each Other's Stories: Why Personal Writing Matters

A Year of Memoirs

Open My Lips: Prayers and Poems

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Open My Lips: Prayers and Poems by Rachel Barenblat | Jewish Book Council

This volume of contemporary liturgical poetry is both a poetry collection and an aid to devotional prayer. Open My Lips dips into the deep well of Jewish tradition and brings forth renewed and renewing adaptations of, and riffs on, classical Jewish liturgy. Here are poems for weekday and Shabbat, festival seasons (including the Days of Awe and Passover), and psalms of grief and praise. Open My Lips offers a clear, readable, heartfelt point of access into the Jewish tradition and into prayer in general.

Those who wish to begin a prayer practice in English but don't know where to start will find this volume offers several starting points. These poems could be used to augment an existing prayer practice, Jewish or otherwise - either on a solitary basis or for congregational use. For the reader of poetry unfamiliar with liturgical text, they can serve as an introduction to prayer in general, and Jewish prayer in particular. And for the pray-er unfamiliar with contemporary poetry, these poems can open the door in the other direction.

The Sundown Kid

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Stories about Jewish families who made the difficult ocean voyage from Europe to the big cities of America are fairly well-known, but not those of Jewish pioneers who traveled across the country to the Wild West to build new lives. In this welcome addition to stories of the immigrant experience, a young boy and his parents journey from the East by train to a remote desert town in search of a better life. Though the only Jewish family in town, they are warmly welcomed by everyone they meet. But Shabbat is especially difficult for Mama, who is homesick for her relatives. In an effort to relieve his mother’s loneliness, as well as exemplifying the spunk immigrants needed to adapt, the family’s young son invites the neighbors to the next Shabbat dinner. Showing hospitality to strangers, known as hachnasat orchim, is considered a mitzvah and, like most good deeds, benefits the giver as much as the receiver. In this case, everyone derives the joy that comes from sharing food, friendship, and a sense of community.

The artist includes many historically accurate details and his palette reflects the colors of the desert, from the adobe colored mountains and houses to the blues and greens of the cacti and lizards.

Recommended for ages 4-9.

Jewish Book Council Interview: Barbara Bietz

with Michal Hoschander Malen

Barbara Bietz, author of The Sundown Kid, talks to Michal Hoschander Malen about the pioneer Jews of the American West, their reception in the wide open spaces of their new homes, and the building of new communities.

Michal Hoschander Malen: Among the other fine values peeking out from within the text, the story personifies the Jewish concept of Hachnasat Orchim, or welcoming outsiders, and also highlights the importance of family. What gave you the idea for this particular story?

Barbara Bietz: I have read and researched a lot about the brave families who settled the Southwest. While I am particularly drawn to the stories of Jewish families, what deeply touched me was the way different groups came together in support of one another. I wanted to capture that sense of cooperation in a meaningful way. I have said before that The Sundown Kid is my love letter to all those families that came before me, who created communities that are still thriving today.

When I set out to write The Sundown Kid, my heart was really with Mama, who promises some things will never change, even in a new home far away. How hard it must have been to leave a whole life behind! I flipped the perspective to the boy who wants to help his Mama feel at home in “the wide open spaces,” so he invites their new neighbors for Shabbat dinner. The Jewish value of welcoming strangers is as important today as it was in biblical times. Our differences disappear over a shared meal.

MHM: Have you spent time in that part of the United States, yourself? Did you have a particular town in mind for the setting as you haven't specified one? Did you do any research on the time period?

BB: I was born and raised in California and went to college and grad school in Tucson, Arizona. My identity is deeply rooted in the Southwest. Many Jewish immigrant stories began at Ellis Island, but not all families stayed in New York. I did extensive research over a long period of time before I wrote The Sundown Kid. I was inspired by Pioneer Jews by Harriet and Fred Rochlin. I had the opportunity to hear Harriet speak about the lives of Jewish pioneers. When she said, “We were there, too,” my heart skipped a beat. Moving forward, I was especially interested in the strong women who maintained Jewish rituals in spite of great challenges.

I discovered an anonymous family in Tucson had commissioned a series of dolls to honor Jewish pioneer women. I wrote an article about the dolls for Doll World magazine. A wonderful artist named Andrea Kalinowski did a series of mixed media paintings of quilts to honor Jewish pioneer women, and I was deeply touched by her work, too. I love the notion of using traditionally feminine art forms to share stories of women.

MHM: Do you have a backstory for the family who made the long trek from East to West? What did they hope to find? How did they think life would unfold for themselves so far away from an established Jewish community?

BB: My backstory for the family is about hope—the universal hope that families have shared historically. The hope of being able to support their families, practice their faith in peace, and create a meaningful future for their children.

MHM: You focused on the role of Shabbat and on the role of food as two of the components in the "glue" that binds Jewish communities and here is used to create bonds with others, as well. Why do you think these and other touchstones are so important from generation to generation?

BB: Rituals connect us to one another. The smell and taste of something familiar will always evoke an emotion. Sharing food we love, or food that has a traditional significance elevates the eating experience from biological to spiritual. Shabbat gives us pause to honor a day, and each other, in a meaningful way. The greatest gift we can give our children is the tradition of rituals.

MHM: How do you think teachers, librarians, youth leaders, etc., can use this story to help children develop a sense of community and to help them further understand its value?

BB: My goal as a writer is to share a story that resonates with readers. I am also passionate about educational opportunities for children. I was very lucky to find an educational specialist who created a beautiful educational guide for The Sundown Kid, which is available on my website for any interested parents or teachers.

MHM: A good picture book is a perfect blend between the text and the art. How do you feel about the illustrator's vision of your idea?

BB: John Kanzler brought this story to life so beautifully. He created subtext that added depth and meaning in such a thoughtful way. I am in awe of his work.

MHM: What can we expect next from the pen of Barbara Bietz? Is there anything coming up in the near future for us to look forward to?

BB: I am working very hard on a few projects, including a picture book biography and a middle-grade historical novel.

Michal Hoschander Malen is the editor of Jewish Book Council's young adult and children's book reviews. She has lectured on a variety of topics relating to children and books and her greatest joy is reading to her grandchildren on both sides of the ocean.

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Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Anti-Judaism, Anti-semitism, and Delegitimizing Israel edited by Robert S. Wistrich | Jewish Book Council

The essays contained in this volume edited by the late Robert S. Wistrich, are representative of the discussions that were part of an international conference on antisemitism held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 2014. They focus primarily on the resurgence of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric and violence in Europe, the United States and the Middle East. Contributors include prominent academics, journalists, independent researchers and representatives of Jewish organizations. They all express deep concern that, less than a century after the Holocaust, Jews should once again be facing violence and widespread rhetorical attacks reminiscent of those Jews experienced prior to 1945. They document and analyze the current surge of antisemitism as an international phenomenon, appearing in countries as culturally diverse as the United States, Venezuela and Iran, yet incorporating similar thematic obsessions wherever it manifests.

The authors, including notable experts on the subject such as Ben Cohen, Robert Wistrich, Melanie Phillips, Alvin Rosenfeld, Bat Ye’or, Lesley Klaff and Stephen Norwood, examine the phenomenon from the perspectives of history, religion, politics, identity and gender. Offering a variety of viewpoints and insights into this disturbing trend worldwide, the reader is provided with a framework to evaluate what is actually occurring and why this “longest hatred” is once again becoming increasingly vocal and violent. They all agree that antisemitism exists, it is back with a vengeance, making new connections and has begun to strike and to kill—to growing indifference—in many parts of the world.

The authors identify six contemporary sources for today’s antisemitism; the persistence of this ancient prejudice that never really went away; globalization and world economic pressures; anti-Zionism that has led to a demonization of Israel and vilification of Israeli leaders; Holocaust denial; the spread of radical Islamism with its anti-Jewish and anti-Israel agendas; and State sponsored antisemitism emanating from Iran, Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

This is a valuable book that provides much useful information and perspectives on a problem that is not likely to disappear soon and some valuable suggestions on how to counter it.

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Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South by Leonard Rogoff | Jewish Book Council

Leonard Rogoff exploits a treasure trove of documentation. Gertrude Weil, her family, and their friends were all dedicated letter writers: when Gertrude went away to school (Horace Mann, followed by Smith College), she was instructed to write her mother three times a week, and there was a rota of relatives who must also receive missives. No excuse was acceptable; since family was the most important value for Gertrude’s mother, studying for a test or finishing a paper simply didn’t cut it. Weil’s political activism was later channeled into letters: letters to relatives, letters to Jewish friends, letters to members of the wider community inside and outside of North Carolina. The result is an enormously rich corpus for Rogoff to mine.

Inevitably Rogoff is the prisoner of his sources. They tell much about how one initiative led to another. Early efforts at progressive social reform left Weil believing that only if women had the vote could they make reform a reality. For her and her close associates, suffrage was not a good in itself; the benefit was instrumental. Facing disillusion when many newly enfranchised women joined their husbands in voting against reform, progressivism took new forms in the 1930s and 1940s; Rogoff steps carefully around Weil’s flirtation with eugenics.

Rogoff builds Weil’s life around three poles: progressivism, women’s suffrage, and Classical Reform Judaism. The letters enable Rogoff to trace, in almost tedious detail, the building of networks for specific goals. With regard to suffrage, family networks gave way to state organizations, including one for Jewish women and one including Christians, while all were linked to national organizations. This pattern was replicated for social reform.

Rogoff does a fine job of describing Weil’s musings, study, and credo within the context of Reform Judaism. The historian will miss treatment of the influx of East European Jews, Conservative in their denominational allegiance, who brought new energy to cities such as Greensboro and Charlotte.

It is easy to explain social change in North Carolina as based on Christian Evangelicism. What Rogoff does, very convincingly, is to demonstrate that Judaism, as exemplified by leaders like Gertrude Weil, was a crucial element in the mix. All three poles of Weil’s life contributed to this outcome. Jewish ethics, the imperative to activism based on those ethics, and the existence of family and community networks as the vehicle and model for mobilization made for a powerful combination. We stand in Rogoff’s debt for his painstaking and superbly documented exploration and assessment of the place of Classical Reform Judaism, through figures like Gertrude Weil, in North Carolina history.

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King Solomon's Table

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

King Solomon's Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World by Joan Nathan | Jewish Book Council

Joan Nathan’s King Solomon’s Table is a tribute to Jewish cooking from around the world. Not only does Nathan bring us delectable recipes to try, but also she accompanies them with their heritage and history. This book is a delicious meal and a history lesson all in one.

Nathan starts with an extensive and eclectic pantry list that includes everything from Baharat—a blend of seven spices to represent the mystical number seven—to apricot jam, for which she provides a beautifully simple recipe. Already the book hints at the vast range of ingredients and textures that are to come in the following pages. The rest of the book is separated into several categories: Morning, Starters, Salads, Soups and Their Dumplings, Bread, Grains and Such, Vegetables, Fish, Poultry, Meat, and Sweets. Each category is filled with both traditional Jewish recipes and some fusion takes, such as Chilaquiles, Mexican “Matzo” Brei and Carciofi alla Giudia, Fried Artichokes Jewish-Style. Nathan’s recipes hail from Yemen to Uzbekistan, Martha’s Vineyard to Spain, Jerusalem to Tangier, and just about everywhere in between. Nathan’s emphasis on the vast reach and influence of Jewish cooking is what stands out most about her collection.

Nathan includes a Yemenite chicken soup recipe that might inspire one to catch a cold just in order to taste it. The recipe is accompanied by the incredible history of chicken soup as a curative food. From Greece to Jerusalem, the author traces the various uses and additions to what has been lovingly referred to as “Jewish penicillin” in many families. This recipe, one of the oldest recorded, reads like a modern recipe except for the spice mixes indicated: Hilbe, zhug, and hawayij. These blends are like a trip back in time.

It’s clear that this book is the result of a lifetime of recipe story gathering. Nathan says that she “sought to discover what makes Jewish cooking unique,” and she certainly has done so. Reading King Solomon’s Table is like perusing Joan Nathan’s travel journal or a history lesson—but one that leaves the reader hungry! It will inspire learning, cooking, and adventuring.

Visiting Scribe: Joan Nathan

Finding Jewish Recipes from Around the World

How I Find Recipes from Around the World

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Joan Nathan has a new cookbook coming out this week! With the release of King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking around the World, Joan is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

One of the questions I am frequently asked by friends is how I find the cooks and stories that accompany the recipes in my books. For me, it is always one of the greatest challenges and most enjoyable tasks of cookbook writing.

It used to be that when I started writing a cookbook, an undertaking I sometimes liken to writing a long term paper or a Masters or Doctoral dissertation, I would send out letters to the editors of the Jewish Press around the country and ask their readers for their thoughts, memories, and stories. Today you don’t have to do that: in the world of the Internet, I could ask for likely stories from the Jewish group on Facebook that I started or send out a tweet searching for interesting recipes.

But I do not.

Instead, I still do it the old-fashioned way and go person to person. This is how I wrote my latest cookbook, King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking around the World, due out April 4^th from Alfred A. Knopf.

First of all, I live in Washington, D.C. a multicultural city filled with people who have come from all over the country and the world. When I meet someone and tell them what I do—great dinner party conversation—or what my latest project is, invariably, they come up with likely candidates.

I have been known to hail a cab only to ask the driver to find me a good Indian cook in Edison, New Jersey. (I hopped in the cab and had my friends follow me in my own car.) Another time two of us were in a taxi in Paris on our way to a kosher restaurant. When I discovered the cabby was a French Jew, I asked him if I could come to his home for Friday night dinner. He said yes but his wife, wondering who in the world I was, said no.

Sometimes I am just lucky. A few years ago when I was speaking for a Hadassah group in Newport, Rhode Island, a lady came up to me and asked if I would like some recipes from Jews who lived in Siberia. Would I ever! She then told me her family’s wandering story, which started with her great grandparents leaving Lithuania for Siberia and concluded with her life today in Providence, Rhode Island, with stops in Manchuria and Canada along the way. The only memories she carried with her were of her recipes including her family’s delicious Passover breakfast chrimsel, kind of a fried matzo latke covered with blueberry preserves and baked.

Another time, hearing about a chocolate dessert served by a few of the hundred or so Jews living in El Salvador from an acquaintance of my daughter, I jumped on a plane and got myself invited for Friday night dinner. As often happens in the Jewish world, I was friendly with the host’s cousins who were dear friends from my Jerusalem days. Not only did I get a delectable, no-bake Schokolade Gewurst out of the trip, a chocolate salami cookie similar to the knack knicks I used to eat when I lived in Israel, but I also got to sample local Jewish dishes brought by other guests, including a delicious yucca latke. (This recipe is also in the book!) Through these foods I was able to glimpse through the prism of history into the lives of Jews who immigrated from Germany and Alsace Lorraine to San Salvador in the nineteenth century but maintain close ties to the United States and Israel today.

One of my favorite stories in this new book is the backstory behind a recipe called a shritzlach, a pocket pastry filled with blueberries. A friend from Toronto told me that it was very popular in her hometown and that it appeared in the book 1000 Things to Eat Before You Die by the esteemed food writer Mimi Sheraton. By doing some research I found that the shritzlach was brought to Canada by an immigrant from Southwest Poland just before the end of the First World War. She eventually started a bakery and sold the sweet.

As I was trying to disentangle the true recipe from an adulterated 1950s version that substituted blueberry pie filling (a new product) for the fresh blueberries used in Poland and Canada, a young woman who often visits my family came into my kitchen. When she saw me trying to mold the oblong-shaped dough into a pocket for the blueberries, she explained excitedly that her grandmother made the same blueberry bun—but it was better. Is that bashert? I thought so. We then made them together with fresh blueberries in the spring from my favorite local farmer. The buns, as the Canadians like to call them, were delicious.

I eventually learned that the young woman’s grandmother and the baker from Toronto lived 30 miles apart in Southwest Poland. Each time that I bite into these buns now, I think that had these two cooks not left before the Holocaust, this recipe would have been lost in the Nazi decimation of the very religious Jews of the area.

Stories like this one are what makes me always interested in Jewish and makes me write my books. With all these people I get glimpses of their lives as Jews in so very different circumstances and, no matter where I am, I always get something delicious to eat.

Joan Nathan is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and other publications. She is the author of eleven books, including Jewish Cooking in America and The New American Cooking, both of which won both James Beard Awards and IACP Awards.

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Liz Alpern: Making Blueberry Pierogi in Warsaw
Katja Goldman, Judy Bernstein Bunzl, and Lisa Rotmil: How to Cook Nuck a Whaatt?
Judy Kempler and Pnina Jacobson: One Egg Is a Fortune

Jewish Book Council Staff Picks for March 2017

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 16:11:00 GMT

The Jewish Book Council staff shares what we've been reading over the last month:

Carolyn

How did the small country of Israel, with a population of only six million, become a leader in the development of new technology being deployed on the battlefield? The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Become a High-Tech Military Superpower by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot addresses this question and more about Israel's success.

Suzanne

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain traces the lives of two boys through their adulthood in Switzerland during WWII from very different lives. One is a boy who becomes a hotel owner and the other a hopeful Jewish concert pianist. Their story is about love, lost, anti-Semitism and lifetime of friendship. I found this a very moving story that I couldn't put down.

Mimi

Although Gavriel Savit’s Anna and the Swallow Man was originally touted as a YA book, it certainly appropriate for an adult. The writing is very sophisticated and the story captured my attention.

Joyce

Beautifully written by a gifted storyteller, Among the Living by Jonathan Rabb explores complex times and characters in post-Holocaust Georgia through characters you will come to love.

Miri

I really enjoyed reading Abigail Pogrebin’s My Jewish Year, as both a memoir and as an exploration of the Jewish year. Abigail has a great voice, and, even though I came in knowing a lot about the holidays, I learned new things and read some really interesting interpretations from the rabbis that she interviewed.

Carol

Daphne Merkin chronicles her lifelong battle with clinical depression in This Close to Happy, a moving, lucid, and ultimately hopeful memoir.

Evie

Reading Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is something of a rite of passage for the Jewish Book Council staff. I’m delighted to be initiated!

Becca

Schadenfreude, A Love Story is the hilarious and insightful memoir of an angsty, half-Jewish teenager who becomes obsessed with Kafka and all things German. As someone who has lived in Germany for a short time, I couldn't get enough of Schuman's loving, snarky, spot-on observations—and I think any reader would find her story just as enjoyable as I did.

Nat

Publishing George Prochnik’s Visiting Scribe essays on his new biography of Gershom Scholem, Stranger in a Strange Land, reminded me what a privilege it is to edit a series that invites authors to share deeply personal reflections on what it means to be a Jewish writer—and to be Jewish, period.

Naomi

I grabbed a copy of Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen to read over a recent trip—I couldn't put it down!

Related Content:

Schadenfreude, A Love Story

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For by Rebecca Schuman | Jewish Book Council

Rebecca Schuman’s new memoir, Schadenfreude, A Love Story, which boasts possibly the longest subtitle I have ever seen on a book cover (Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For) is a funny book. Hilarious, even: it actually made me snort with laughter, which one might expect from reading a humorist, but not necessarily a memoirist.

It is not surprising that Schuman is a columnist at Slate, the online magazine known for its witty, irreverent angle. This is her first book.

Rebecca is, as she puts it, “selectively Jewish” (by which she means that her father is Jewish, but also that she is Jewish when it is useful or interesting) and this, predictably, makes for amusing collisions with the subject of her obsession: German culture and literature (but mostly Kafka, even though, she is constantly told, Kafka himself was not German but Czech Jewish). She decides to mine her host family for guilt about the Holocaust; she wonders about her host father’s collection of Nazi coins. She is brought to this obsession, which ultimately shapes her education and her career, in the first place by another kind of obsession: a romantic fixation with a male classmate. It’s rare to read an account of high school romance that captures its intensity without an ounce of cliché or mawkishness, but Schuman has done it here.

The narrative is vivid and rollicking; Schuman brings you along for the ride. She renders her quirky teenage and then twenty-something self, and the nineties world in which she came of age, in full color, employing an energetic prose style and a blunt, self-deprecating yet confident voice that is unforgettable. Indeed, sometimes the utter voicey-ness is grating. Schuman has certain narrative tics, such as the gimmick she uses to convey the challenges of language immersion, expressing half-understood bits of German dialogue in a bare-bones format, with the parts of speech she assumes make sense in the sentence in brackets, like so: “You [adjective] want to [verb]”. At first, that was amusing; after the twentieth time, it became tiresome. Nevertheless, Schadenfreude is as accurate a take on the idiosyncrasies of academia, obsession, and academic obsession as any I have ever read. And it is certainly the funniest. Those who have fallen in love with an academic discipline, attended a liberal arts college, studied abroad, or attempted to navigate the landscape of graduate school will almost certainly find resonances of their own experiences here.

Schuman conveys with razor-sharp acuity what it is like to live in an esoteric corner of one’s own mind, while also trying to live in the world--but the result is anything but esoteric, and that is a triumph.

Related Content:

Ellen Umansky: 5 Books That Informed The Fortunate Ones
Barbara Stark-Nemon: At the Heart of It
Josh Lambert: Is "Shmuk" a Dirty Word?

Eat My Schwartz

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Eat My Schwartz by Geoff and Mitch Schwartz, with Seth Kaufman | Jewish Book Council

Try this on for size, super size that is. Two Jewish brothers, children of two Los Angeles power brokers, ascend to fame and fortune. What are they? Lawyers, doctors, Indian chiefs? Wrong. They’re pro football players.

Eat My Schwartz documents the journey of brothers Geoff and Mitch Schwartz, the first Jewish brothers to play in the National Football League in almost 80 years. The Schwartz brothers’ story offers a glimpse into the efficient pipeline of NFL player development. True to the title's description, a mouth-watering walkthrough of their discovery and love of food shadows each stage of the journey. A dead-simple and delicious latke recipe, alongside other non-kosher options such as shrimp pasta, offers readers the opportunity to eat their way through the story. Further, the brothers outline various other scale-shifting delicacies such as gourmet pizzas and flank steak. Balancing these rich recipes are more health conscious, lower calorie salads, wraps, and desserts.

From early encounters with college scouts, marveling at the Schwartz brothers’ size and natural athleticism, to the highly structured schedules of NCAA student-athletes; we learn and grow with the Schwartz boys on their journey to the NFL. Rarely is this a smooth transition. The transactional and business-first relationship between teams and players hints at the strains developing within the NFL.

This story is recommended for big fans of football. The book dives deeply into the form and physical tools of offensive lineman. The detailed focus on football tactics, outlining the punches, shifts, and schemes of successful line play may not resonate with casual fans. But for those conversant with the sport, the analysis is deep and rich.

The book does not dive deeply into the established long term health risks of NFL play, which keeps the tone light and conversational. This is an unfortunate oversight as a broader national debate continues about the risks that high school, college, and professional players are taking on a daily basis. It would be enlightening to hear a more thorough evaluation of tradeoffs that a player must make, on the path to professional play

For readers with a love of professional football and food (two interests which frequently overlap) Eat My Schwartz is a perfect pairing.

Related Content:

Interview with Marc Tracy, author of Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame
Ilana Garon: Young Jewish Athletes
Benny Leonard: The Golden Standard for the Golden Age

Jumping Over Shadows

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Jumping Over Shadows: A Memoir by Annette Gendler | Jewish Book Council

Every convert to Judaism has a story. Changing one’s religion is always a dramatic statement; stepping over the threshold of comfortable majority membership to embrace minority status in a peoplehood whose religion is rich in tradition and rife with oppression is sobering, to say the least. It is also exciting and incredibly rewarding. In Annette Gendler’s compelling memoir, Jumping Over Shadows, the author juxtaposes her journey to Judaism (primarily in Germany, though she converted in Switzerland) with the story of her Christian great-aunt, who married a Jew in a German community within Czechoslovakia before World War II and saw her family torn apart because of it.

Gendler skillfully integrates the history of her family, which she meticulously researched, with her own modern love story. Along the way, she recreates dialogue that places the reader in the middle of the unfolding events, whether in the 1930s or the 1980s. Telling her own love story is no mean feat, for it is tricky to describe a romance that ultimately prompts a Jewish conversion. A halachic conversion to Judaism is granted by an Orthodox bet din (court) whose rabbis, acting as judges, must turn away prospective converts several times before accepting them as devoted to Judaism for strictly religious reasons—not motivated by love of anything or anyone other than the religion itself. As a potential convert, Gendler must study, absorb, and accept the precepts of Judaism, and adopt religious observance. As she notes decades later, “In reality, becoming a Jew…was not accomplished by ducking in the mikvah and getting the bet din’s stamp of approval. It had to be lived many years and through the milestones of life.”

But that is getting ahead of the story. Some of the dramatic tension in Gendler’s memoir comes from initially hiding the youthful romance from her boyfriend’s parents. These Holocaust survivors living in a tightly knit Jewish community in Munich would, their son Harry knows, be deeply opposed to his “marrying out.” And so the tale unfolds, Gendler’s narrative flowing smoothly. In the few places throughout the book where a word or phrase hints that English is not Gendler’s native language, the effect is more charming that jarring. She opens a bag to search for “lip balm”; her eyes “cramp” when she cuts an onion. She deftly sets scenes, bringing them to life with details of the times.

The book’s title is enigmatic. “Jumping over shadows” conjures an image of something mysterious and dark, shape-shifting and vaguely threatening. A version of the phrase is uttered by Harry’s father and seems to allude to the dark history of the Holocaust. Gendler’s own relatives faced the fallout of the Shoah as families became linked through marriage, so the phrase thus interpreted would apply to them as well. And did Gendler and Harry not jump over the shadows of history as they sought clarity in their relationship? Ultimately, the author leaves the title’s interpretation up to the reader. It is a wise and provocative choice, as shadows gather over the United States and Europe today.

Interview

Read an interview with Annette Gendler here.

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New Reviews March 31, 2017

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

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Featured Content:

Discovering the Power of Jewish Books in Ottumwa, Iowa
"I’d like to tell you that the woman I left behind at synagogue on Yom Kippur in 1996 was reading Midrash or Talmud,” Debbie Bronstein Holinstat recalls. “I think it might have been a Danielle Steele novel."

How Does the "Justice System" Work for You?
Julia Dahl built her career in writing about crime as a journalist and novelist—but it took her twenty years to meet anyone who had been arrested.

The Father I Always Knew, the Survivor I Finally Know Better
Is there a survivor in your family? "I don't want to talk about it" isn't always a final answer.

Time. Space. Create.
Mourning the Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency, Julia Dahl bids farewell to Room 6 at the Point Way Inn.

The True Meaning of Nostalgia
Michael Chabon shares his Modern Jewish Literary Achievement remarks from the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards in The New Yorker.

The Father I Always Knew, the Survivor I Finally Know Better

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 16:36:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Survivors Club coauthor Debbie Bornstein Holinstat wrote about discovering the power of Jewish books in Ottumwa, Iowa. Debbie is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

If my father had his way, my last name would never have been Bornstein” It would have been Bourne or maybe Borns, he tells me, something far less obviously Jewish. Fortunately, like in all good Jewish marriages, my mom has final veto power. My surname didn’t change until the day I walked down the aisle and said, “I do.”

You might think it’s crazythat a man who survived the Auschwitz death camp as a four-year-old prisoner of war would decide as an adult in the safety of America, to hide his religion. Far from life in the Polish ghetto where he was born, my father insisted that my brother turn his soccer jersey inside-out for all “travel” games so that his telltale Jewish name did not draw attention. It was easy for my siblings and me to judge. “Dad! You’re absurd! No one cares if we’re Jewish! Be proud!”

I don’t want you to think my father isn’t proud of his religion. He values Judaism with his entire heart and finds immense comfort in lighting the Hanukkah candles or leading the Passover seder. But it has taken me 42 years and the process of writing a book alongside my father to really understand why he worried about the things he did and protected us with such ferocity.

To be honest, I’m embarrassed. I didn’t know half of what my father endured until we sat down to co-write Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz. Some of it, even he didn’t know. But it was all there to be found—in relatives’ audiotaped interviews, in exhumed museum documents, and in the questions the family never asked. I didn’t need to write a book to learn my father’s history and sometimes, I’m ashamed that that is what it took.

Had I known the ruthless bullying and unspeakable assault my father endured in Germany after the war, I wouldn’t have resented his helicopter parenting. If I knew he shared one helping of cold, smelly soup each day, among dozens of starving children who lapped from a bowl like kittens, I wouldn’t have laughed at his need to clear every last morsel off a restaurant plate. I know I would never have pointed an accusing finger when he stockpiled free hotel-size shampoo bottles in a cabinet, just in case supplies ran low.

Despite the five-character tattoo inked on his forearm, my dad was the stereotypical hardworking, homework-helping, soccer-coaching father to four happy kids in suburban Indianapolis. We never thought less of him for his Holocaust-inspired idiosyncrasies. But I’m sure we would have understood him more had we pushed to hear his story sooner rather than accepting “I really don’t like to talk about it” as an answer.

My siblings and I have learned a lot during the book writing process. We learned that our grandfather, my father’s father, bribed a Nazi guard (takes chutzpah, right?!) to make living conditions more bearable in the ghetto where he served as Judenrat president. We learned that a precisely-timed illness helped my father avoid the Death March at Auschwitz. We learned that of the 3,400 Jews who lived in my dad’s hometown of Zarki before the war, only about 27 returned home. Most of those survivors were my relatives.

Yet maybe the most important lesson we learned along the way is that “I don’t want to talk about it,” isn’t always a final answer. Sometimes, it’s worth asking again. I am hardly the only child of a survivor walking around today, and the Holocaust is just one of many history lessons that can’t be forgotten. If I could have a do-over, I would have dug for the true story of my father’s survival years ago. I didn’t need to write a book, and neither does anyone else. If you want your family’s history to be remembered, just ask. Ask again.

It turns out my father is glad we did. Encouraged by new findings at a museum and new fears about Holocaust deniers, at the age of 76 he is speaking openly at schools, synagogues, churches, and charity functions. He is touring the country, traveling to D.C., Illinois, Minnesota, Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Indianapolis, and Iowa to speak about Survivors Club, and standing up at a time when antisemitism is on the rise and discrimination seems newly tolerated. With the name “Bornstein” printed across the spine of our book, he is adding his story to the record. And with a new understanding of where he’s been and how far he’s come, I stand with my siblings and my mother in saying, there is closure, relief, and pride in the journey.

Debbie Bornstein Holinstat is the third of Michael Holinstat’s four children. A producer for NBC and MSNBC News, she works with her father to arrange school visits and help research and write his memoir.

Related Content:

Miranda Richmond Mouillot: How to Ask?
Menachem Z. Rosensaft: Preserving the Mystery
Reading List: Holocaust Fiction and Nonfiction

Inherited Disorders

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems by Adam Ehrlich Sachs | Jewish Book Council

Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s Inherited Disorders is a rueful, absurd, and endlessly entertaining look at a most serious subject—the eternally vexed relations between fathers and sons. In a hundred and seventeen shrewd, surreal vignettes, Sachs lays bare the petty rivalries, thwarted affection, and mutual bafflement that have characterized the filial bond since the days of Davidic kings. A philosopher’s son kills his father and explains his aphorisms to death. A father bequeaths to his son his jacket, deodorant, and political beliefs. England’s most famous medium becomes possessed by the spirit of his skeptical father—who questions, in front of the nation, his son’s choice of career. A Czech pianist amputates his fingers one by one to thwart his father, who will not stop composing concertos for him. A nineteenth-century Italian nobleman wills his ill-conceived flying contraption—incapable of actual flight—to his newborn son. In West Hollywood, an aspiring screenwriter must contend with the judgmental visage of his father, a respected public intellectual whose frozen head, clearly disappointed in him, he keeps in his freezer. Keenly inventive, but painfully familiar, these surprisingly tender stories signal the arrival of a brilliant new comic voice—and fresh hope for fathers and sons the world over.

Meet Sami Rohr Prize Finalist Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Jewish Book Council is proud to introduce readers to the five emerging fiction authors named as finalists for the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Today, we invite you to learn more about Adam Ehrlich Sachs and his book, Inherited Disorders, a hunded and seventeen vignettes addressing the complex relationship between fathers and sons.

What are some of the most challenging things about writing fiction?

What or who has been your inspiration for writing fiction?

A small handful of historical neurotics, predominantly German or German-Jewish, who contrived their own private techniques for transforming their neuroses into comedy or philosophy.

Who is your intended audience?

Are you working on anything new right now?

Yes, a novel.

What are you reading now?

Top 5 favorite books

At the moment:

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Walking by Thomas Bernhard

Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Molloy by Samuel Beckett

When did you decide to be a writer? Where were you?

What is the mountaintop for you—how do you define success?

How do you write—what is your private modus operandi? What talismans, rituals, props do you use to assist you?

What do you want readers to get out of your book?

I would like for them to feel that something simple has been made needlessly complex, and to find this, for some reason, amusing.

Related Content:

Joshua Henkin: From Grandfather to Father to Son
Richard Michelson: Like Father, Like Son

Father's Day Reading List

The Weapon Wizards

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot | Jewish Book Council

A dazzling “feel-good” book in the tradition of Start-Up Nation and Let There Be Water, Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot’s analysis of Israel’s rise to prominence as major inventor and manufacturer of sophisticated weapons and weapon systems has a dark side. It is one thing to protect your own nation, another to be fully invested exporter in the arms business. Yet the billions of dollars in income from arms deals are a protective shield for this tiny nation, and mass production lowers the costs of the weapons for Israel’s own arsenals.

The authors’ exciting and surprising narrative is loosely chronological, following the path of Israel’s advances in technology while bringing into play the political and military crises that provoked accelerated research, invention, and even improvisation. One constant theme is that Israelis cannot relax: they always need to be pushing to gain the upper hand, creating a safe distance between themselves and those that threaten them.

From early on the mantra has been that quality would prevail over quantity. The best planning, the best minds, the best manufacturing, the best training, and the highest level of civilian and military cooperation would prevail over greater numbers of weapons and enemy combatants

The chapters focus on specific weapons, detailing both offensive and defensive technologies: drones, armor, satellites, rockets and missiles, “intelligent machines,” and cyber viruses. However, while the history of Israel’s military ascent is largely technical, the methods of reaching and moving readers are quite varied.

Capsule biographies of various leaders humanize the story and underscore the aspects of Israeli—specifically IDF—culture that lead to Israel’s success. The freedom to question, support for research, leadership skills and styles, and the willingness to take enormous risks all contribute to the inspirational story. Even the freedom to fail is part of the astoundingly creative mindset. Personalities count, and the project leaders we meet are quite impressive, if largely unknown beyond Israel’s borders.

Often a chapter begins with a jolt, a serious threat or shift in fortune that must be countered. Then the situation is backgrounded, the steps to the solution are revealed, and the key players celebrated. Almost every major Israeli political leader receives attention in this book, so fully is the overarching weapons story imbedded in all facets of Israeli life and in the actions of its decision makers.

Both weapons acquisitions and weapons sales are stories with significant political dimensions. How has Israel benefitted from and been hindered by its relationship with its big brother, the United States? To what extent has its role as a supplier of weapons and systems to other countries led to durable diplomatic relationships?

The authors are fully aware of the likelihood that Israel’s emergence as a premier arms dealer is not likely to be considered a step on the road to peace. Though Israel has been “revolutionizing the modern battlefield,” one can only have mixed feelings about where the outer limits of this achievement take us. But what are the intangible costs?

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This Close to Happy

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression by Daphne Merkin | Jewish Book Council

After years of interruption and hesitation, noted literary critic and author Daphne Merkin has a new, searingly honest and intimate autobiographical memoir.

Ms. Merkin has been at risk of suicide throughout her adult life. Now, in late midlife, not a year has gone by where the thought and, at times, impulse and plan to end her life has not accompanied her. Her hopelessness and helplessness has been treated for decades by both psychopharmacologists and psychotherapists, along with periodic hospitalizations. Now more stable and in reasonably good health, Merkin continues to write review, edit, and teach. She is extremely close to Zoe, her devoted daughter and closest confidant.

But This Close to Happy remains unsettling to read. Hailed by readers for its candid and exquisitely sensitive description of her struggle with suicidal depression, This Close to Happy can also be read as a lengthy meditation or internal debate over her longstanding ambivalence about being alive, and the impulse to choose death hovers over the memoir throughout. There are just too many references to the imagined peace that self-annihilation and oblivion will bring.

How does one come to live with such a tentative and at times almost absent self-preservative drive? Even a cockroach races away when about to be crushed. Yet at times Merkin regresses into virtual inactivity with a loss of will and initiative. Efforts at self-reassurance abound with quotes from Rilke, a friend reminding her that “life is a gift,” and positive self-talk to navigate through her daily challenges. One hopes fervently that such self-care, along with medication and therapy, will allow Merkin to keep her powerful death drive at bay.

Merkin’s most life-affirming response to Camus’s fundamental question “Why not suicide?” comes through the pages of this remarkable work: she stays alive for her beloved Zoe. Surely a strong biological component plays a central role in severe depressive illness—however the devastating impact of her two hypercritical, autocratic, self-absorbed, and non-nurturing parents continues to haunt the author. Merkin depicts how utterly divorced her Orthodox parents were from Jewish values and ethics regarding the emotional needs of children. The cornerstones of menschlishkeit, human decency, along with parental compassion and empathy were rarely to be found in her childhood home.

This book is far too raw and real to be uplifting. It is thankfully free of “Oprah-esque” self-help cliches; still, the reader will be left rooting for Merkin to make it, to choose life unconditionally. Mental health professionals, both in training and long practicing, will find This Close to Happy essential reading. The memoir is a beautifully written, sophisticated, and compelling account of one person’s courageous struggle with the dark demons of a life-threatening illness.

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Time. Space. Create.

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Julia Dahl wrote about her early exposure to the American justice system. With the release of her new crime novel, Conviction, Julia is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

In early 2011, I applied for a month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center, but didn’t get in.

I’d been working on a novel for more than three years, while I worked five days a week at the New York Post, then The Crime Report, cobbling together a living with occasional fellowships and a couple big magazine features I’m really proud of. I’d written and shopped another novel about seven years earlier and gotten lots of polite declines. One agent took the time to chat with me on the phone. She told me the writing was “very strong” but that she didn’t “know how to sell it.”

This new novel, though—I had a feeling I could sell it. But first I had to finish, and I simply wasn’t getting it done with a few hours here and there. I needed a chunk of time. I needed, I decided, a residency.

So, I wasn’t going to Vermont. Maybe I could go somewhere else. One night, sitting on my couch, probably watching Bravo, I Googled “writers residency east coast.” A few results down I saw a link to the Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency. I filled out the application that night, cut and pasted 10 pages from my novel-in-progress, and paid the $10 fee.

A California native, I knew nothing about Martha’s Vineyard (did the Kennedy’s live there?) and I think I initially confused it with Cape Cod. But it didn’t matter. It was $200 a week (you bought your own food)—far less than what Vermont charged. I could afford it, I had a flexible job situation, and I was childfree.

A week or so later I got an email: I was in.

Getting there was a bit of a crucible. I boarded a bus in the bowels of Port Authority and four hours later transferred to another bus in Providence. An hour after that I transferred to another bus in a city called Byrne, Massachusetts, then finally pulled my rollerboard suitcase up the ramp of the ferry to the island, trading a cramped bus for the wild Atlantic salt wind whipping my hair into tangles I’d have to shower and condition out.

I showed up to the Point Way Inn late at night, so the other writers were already in bed. I crept up a staircase to Room 6, and turned on the light. Imagine the best B&B you’ve ever been to: cheery, spare, immaculate. I had a four-poster bed, a bathtub, and a little wicker desk that sat at a window overlooking the courtyard. For two weeks, this place was home.

I went with a clear goal: 60 pages. It was, at the time, ambitious—I’d worked almost three years to get 100 pages—but if all I had was time and I was losing money, essentially, by being there, I had to make it worthwhile. And guess what? I did it. Easily. I woke when I wanted (usually late). I ate when I wanted (usually alone, although sometimes with the other residents). I walked the streets and imagined the lives of the people who owned the stunning, but somehow not entirely ostentatious clapboard houses. I biked to the beach and sat with a notebook, scribbling dialogue and scene ideas and character notes, then sat at the bar by the Edgartown docks, slurping oysters from the same beach I’d just left.

I didn’t finish the book there, but I got close. That December, I bailed on Christmas with my in-laws and finished it alone over the New Year. I got an agent in July and sold it in a two-book deal the next February.

Over the next three years, I went back three more times. I started my second and third novels there. I encountered all kinds of people on the island: I humored a white-haired part-time resident who complained over martinis that “those people” at Occupy Wall Street shouldn’t be protesting the banks, they should be protesting Obama; I embarrassed a bartender by recognizing her from a painfully lowbrow reality show; I drank with Twyla Tharp’s sister, and I was constantly asked if I was related to Arlene Dahl, a beloved resident of the island. (I’m not.)

Over the years, the residency morphed into the Noepe Center for the Arts, and hosted artists of all kinds, including Junot Diaz, Charles Blow, and Billy Collins. It was a community center. A culinary center. An incubator and a sanctuary.

What was so wonderful about the Martha’s Vineyard residency was that it was utterly unscheduled. Justen Ahren, the local poet who created the program, held fast to the motto of the residency: Time. Space. Create. There were no command performances. He and his charming, generous wife and children came to the inn for occasional dinners and informal readings, but if you were on a roll in your room, no one felt slighted if you stayed holed up. A father and landscape architect, Justen knows intimately how precious writing time is. All he wanted was for you to be productive in whatever way you measured productivity.

For me, the goal was always pages, but some people explored the island, using the time to clear their heads. Some people got drunk every night. Some people dove into the community, creating connections that led to jobs and even permanent homes. One woman stayed in her room so entirely I didn’t even meet her until more than a week into my stay. (I imagined a whole narrative about her being murdered and no one knowing until she started to smell. What do you want from me, I’m a mystery novelist!)

I started my latest novel, Conviction, in Room 6 less than a month after finding out I was pregnant. It was a strange few weeks. I knew my life was going to change, but I didn’t know how. I also knew that it would likely be a very long time before I could come back to the Point Way Inn. Mothers of babies don’t just take two weeks off. I didn’t produce quite as many pages this time, and each walk I took, each time I sat on the dock and watched the little ferry scoot to Chappaqua, was tinged with sadness.

In November 2015, I gave birth to a beautiful, rambunctious little boy. Those first six months were so all-consuming I couldn’t imagine ever being able to extricate myself for another residency, but this February, when my boy turned 15 months, my husband and I decided we could each handle single parenthood for a week: I got a week on the Vineyard and he got a 7-day motorcycle trip.

I emailed Justen and set it up. It felt like a weight lifted. I’d written significant portions of all three of my books in Edgartown and I felt like I needed Room 6. Knowing that I’d have it, even six months away, steadied me.

And then, about two weeks later, I got an email from Justen telling me that the woman who owned the inn where the residency was housed had sold the property, and the whole decade-long experiment was over.

I’m not going to lie: I’m still in denial. I can’t imagine never biking to Katama again. I can’t imagine not sitting around the inn’s big dining table with my fellow authors (too many to name, and many you’ve heard of), drinking wine and eating local mussels and chatting about the writing life and its thrills and miseries.

But mostly, I can’t imagine never sitting at that wicker desk again, with a mug of coffee, a half-eaten plate of fruit and cheese, maybe a beer, my mind entirely on my work for as long as I want. Justen has said he will try to find another space for the residency, but for now, I’m grieving, and searching for another way to find that time and space to create.

Julia Dahl is the author of the Rebekah Roberts novels, the latest of which, Conviction, comes out this week. Julia writes about crime and criminal justice for CBSNews.com.

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Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks | Jewish Book Council

Essays on Ethics joins Lessons in Leadership in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s ongoing series of online “Covenant and Conversation” essays on the weekly Torah reading.

As in the previous essays, Rabbi Sacks displays a wide-ranging erudition with respect to Jewish and general culture, as well as an impressive ability to express complex ideas in readily-accessible presentations, citing primary and secondary Jewish sources intertwined with a broad spectrum of philosophers, theologians, psychologists, anthropologists, neurological researchers, economists, politicians, historians, painters, and musicians.

In his introduction to this book, entitled “Seven Features of Jewish Ethics,” Rabbi Sacks outlines the areas that he believes to inform Judaism’s overall approach towards the moral life, and therefore throughout the contents of the Bible: the dignity of the individual, human freedom, the sanctity of life, guilt instead of shame, loyalty and love, the ethics of covenant, and the dual covenant. Stories from Genesis—with some portions of the other Five Books of Moses—lend themselves most readily to highlighting these ethical and moral themes. Rabbi Sacks identifies manifestations of moral ideas in the legal portions of the Bible as well, reflecting his belief in the need for students of the Bible to consciously consider ta’amei hamitzvot, or the reasons that underlie the Commandments. A discussion of the Tabernacle in Parashat Teruma, for example gives rise to a meditation upon voluntary giving; the sending forth of a scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, mentioned in Acharei Mot, generates a comparison of “guilt societies” as opposed to “shame societies”; the delineation of the laws of the Nazirite in Naso serves as a context for considering how the themes of moderation and balance impact the quest to live a moral life; and the directive in Va’etchanan “to do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord” leads to consideration of how the moral life combines concern for both the universal and the particular in our dealings with our fellow man.

Essays on Ethics once again demonstrates Rabbi Sacks’s wonderful ability to explicate the core texts of Judaism in the context of not only the broader Jewish tradition, but of Western intellectual tradition overall. Each short essay can serve as a catalyst to much broader reading, learning and discussion. This is a volume that should not be missed.

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The Undoing Project

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis | Jewish Book Council

We all make mistakes. It’s an obvious statement with not-so-obvious implications. The story of these unexpected consequences is at the heart of best-selling author Michael Lewis’ (Flash Boys, The Big Short, Moneyball, The Blind Side) latest work, The Undoing Project.

The focus of this book is not a person, or even two people, but the relationship between two extraordinary Israeli minds, those of Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman. Tversky was a brilliant and brash economist with an interest in psychology. He was rude and fascinating, a Holocaust survivor and a decorated Israeli war hero. He was the guy everyone wanted to talk to at a party. Kahneman, who readers may recognize as the best-selling author of Thinking Fast and Slow, was a psychologist. A wellspring of ideas and critical thought, he was also brooding and doubtful. Like Tversky, he was a soldier, but a more intellectual one. As Lewis faithfully points out, any description would fall short of encompassing the complexity of these men. His book is an effort to do them justice.

Lewis describes the early years of the collaboration between Tversky and Khaneman as nothing short of a mind-meld. They completed each other’s ideas; neither knew where their thoughts began or ended. It was a love story of the intellect that changed the way we understand the way our minds work. Tversky and Khaneman proved, through a series of brilliant experiments, that our mind plays tricks on us just like the visual illusions that make us question whether we are looking at a vase or the profile of two faces.

This recognition led to the rise of a whole new field called behavioral economics, which doesn’t see decision making as rational, but rather influenced by the quirks of the mind. It also brought into question the entire notion of expertise, and let to the growth of algorithm-based decision making in medicine and policy. It also resulted, eventually, in a Nobel prize.

Lewis is known for bringing humanity and thrill to technical stories, and he again brings his world-class journalistic powers of research and analysis to the subject of The Undoing Project. He does an exemplary job translating somewhat arcane academic works to easily accessible pop science.

The reader should be aware that this book is not a page-turner. The plot is fairly thin and seems to lose its way in the middle, where a closer adherence to chronology would have helped build a stronger understanding of the pressures acting on Tversky and Khaneman’s relationship. However, The Undoing Project is a slow burn, one that is well worth the read because it becomes hotter and hotter as the story progresses.

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Galaxy Love

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Galaxy Love by Gerald Stern | Jewish Book Council

In a literary and popular culture that prizes youth, it is noteworthy that Lucky Life (1977), Gerald Stern’s second book—and the one that helped establish him as a voice to sit up and pay attention to—was published when Stern was 52. Forty years and more than a dozen books later, Stern holds an important place in American poetry. Stern’s poetry channels and references Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Robinson Jeffers, and many others; it both evokes and challenges narratives and nostalgia-laced American myths of the Rust Belt, World War II, Bohemian literary life, immigration, Jewishness, and the power of art.

Now in his nineties, Stern shows no signs of slowing down. In Galaxy Love, he is nostalgic, expansive, intellectual, silly, serious, homespun, highfalutin—sometimes all at once. In many of the poems in this book, Stern strikes an elegiac tone, looking back on specific days, moments, people, and communities long gone. One might assume, then, that this is a sad book. But it isn’t, particularly: there is joy in every poem in Galaxy Love. Stern has said that joy and sorrow “go together,” and the poems of Galaxy Love reinforce this.

An example of a joyful, sorrowful elegy is the poem “Larry,” most likely about the late poet Larry Levis. Levis’s name is never stated in the poem, but Stern travels from Utah to France to New Orleans in jocular quatrains that conjure Levis’s spirit and poetry. It is not until the final stanza that Stern delivers, to a woman both he and Levis had loved (and to the reader) “the bad news” of Levis’s death. Her response serves as the last line of the poem: “Now I’m going upstairs to read every word he ever wrote.” After a life—and a poem—full of action, image, friendship, excitement, love, and loss, what remains, Stern seems to be saying, is the writing.

Part of the pleasure of reading Galaxy Love is the generosity and range of its references, which move wittily from personal to popular to historical to intellectual. The poem “Bess, Zickel, Warhol, Arendt” slyly devotes a stanza to each figure mentioned in its title: Stern’s Aunt Bess, who “died from forgetting,” his “bewildered cousin” Zickel, and Stern’s friend Andy, with whom the poet

used to resort to walking across the 7^th Street Bridge
now the Warhol Bridge—the Allegheny River—
though there is no Gerald Stern Bridge anywhere
nor Michel Foucault nor Jacques Derrida.

Devoting the final stanza of the poem to Hannah Arendt doesn’t seem so strange, despite how far Stern has taken us, in just a few stanzas, from Aunt Bess’s bowls of Rice Krispies. “I’m sure you remember her,” Stern writes of Arendt, as if she, too, were a family member. Here is yet another pleasure of Galaxy Love: Stern’s easy way of collapsing seemingly impossible distances of time and space. Another way to say this is that Stern has vision. His perspective, and his way of accessing religious, political, and literary history, have earned him a place among great American poets.

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Discovering the Power of Jewish Books in Ottumwa, Iowa

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:36:00 GMT

Debbie Bornstein Holinstat is the co-author of Survivors Club, an account of her father’s early childhood at Auschwitz. Debbie is guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.

You know you’ve moved to a town where you’re in the minority when even the handful of Jewish people you meet are surprised you’re Jewish—after you’ve introduced yourself with the last name Bornstein. In Ottumwa, Iowa, there aren’t even enough Jews for anyone to recognize patterns in last names. I lived in that small Iowa hamlet for one year of my life, reporting for the local ABC affiliate; my first job out of college. I was there to hone my journalism chops, but I ended up learning just as much about Judaism and the need for connection as I did about information gathering and linear edits.

The biggest lesson came on Yom Kippur, in a moment that left me horrified and saddened, but it also woke me up.

A soft-voiced, aged Rabbi welcomed about ten congregants and me. I had hoped to return home for the holiday but my work schedule didn’t jive with the flight schedule so here I was, entering Ottumwa’s modest synagogue for the first time. “We see you on TV every morning! You’re Jewish? Really?” I signed off every news report with my name, first and last. I was floored no one guessed that a “Debbie Bornstein” was Jewish. The group was mostly seniors, their children all grown, and I was touched that they invited me to a break-fast dinner at one congregant’s home later that evening.

The morning service was longer than I’m accustomed to, but lovely. When it ended everyone filed out to their cars in the desolate parking lot. I noticed that one woman stayed back. She was sitting alone in a bench and seemed to be settling in with a book. “Do you need a ride?” I asked. She told me she stayed until mincha, the afternoon service. “That’s silly!” I said. “I’ll bring you home and pick you back up for mincha. There’s no reason to sit here all day.”

The woman, whose name I can’t remember but whose story I’ll never forget, told me that every year, on the High Holidays, her husband drops her off at the synagogue very early. Then he picks her up after sundown. He didn’t want anyone to know that she was Jewish. It embarrassed him. Even this woman’s own children didn’t know she was Jewish—or that they are Jewish, too.

I thought about opening my mouth. I thought about telling her to march proudly out of the synagogue in broad daylight, to tell her husband she’s never going to hide her religion, to call her kids and tell them they are among God’s “Chosen People”. Oh, I had plenty of thoughts running through my meddlesome mind. But I didn’t say a word. My face might have spoken for me, but my lips were zipped. At the age of 22, I didn’t feel it was my place to interfere in a person’s private family dynamic. I just sat with her a while instead. After some time, it was clear she was enjoying her book and her silence so I shuffled home, stomach growling, mind swirling.

I’d like to tell you that the woman I left behind at synagogue that fall of 1996 was reading Midrash or Talmudic analysis or even Judaism for Dummies. I think it might have been a Danielle Steele novel. My takeaway remains the same though. There are people living right here in this diverse country who still have obstacles connecting to Jewish life. Few things can change that in a town where there are more eggs in a carton, than there are Jews at High Holiday services.

But Jewish books can fix that. If someone never has the opportunity to learn how to prepare a proper Passover Seder, she can learn about it in books. If an elderly man fears that no one in his community will know to arrange shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, when he passes, he can learn more about the significance of shiva and share it with friends—through books. Jewish philosophy on life and love, parenting and passing are all available these days with a swipe of a button on mobile phones or a quick stop at the bookstore, and if someone has never had the opportunity to hear firsthand accounts of the Holocaust from a living survivor, they can still read their stories.

I am immensely proud to know that someone in Ottumwa, Iowa, or a town like it, may now be able to pick up Survivors Club andlearn about the atrocities of Auschwitz from my dad’s story, and about the faith that endured from Auschwitz to America. There is infinite value in Jewish connection, and if we have written a book that adds one more link, then I am a happy former Ottumwa resident.

Debbie Bornstein Holinstat is the third of Michael Holinstat’s four children. A producer for NBC and MSNBC News, she works with her father to arrange school visits and help research and write his memoir.

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Chicken Soup, Chicken Soup

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Sophie has two grandmas, one Jewish and one Chinese. Both make chicken soup, one with carrots and kreplach, one with green onions and wontons. Whose soup is better? This touchy subject is nicely resolved when Sophie invites both grandmas to bring over soup for lunch. As the grandmas check out each other’s pots, Sophie and her father pour the two soups together into one tureen. That’s when Bubbe confesses that she uses wonton wrappers to make her kreplach, and Nai Nai admits she buys kosher chicken because the flavor is better. “A little Jewish, a little Chinese -- a lot like me,” says Sophie.

This is a wonderful book both for multiethnic families and for developing sensitivity to multiethnic families as well as for anyone interested in cultural similarities in food. Watercolor and pencil illustrations are cheery and bright, with wonderful endpapers which enhance the book’s artistic feel.

Recipes for chicken soup, kreplach and wontons are included.

Recommended for ages 4-8.

The Flower Girl Wore Celery

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Emma’s older cousin Hannah is getting married, and she wants Emma to be the flower girl and wear a celery (colored) dress. Emma also learns that she is going to walk down the aisle with someone named Jacob who is the ring bear[er]. In the spirit of Amelia Bedelia, Emma imagines these things literally, and is surprised to find out that she’s not going to dress up like a flower, or wear a frock made out of celery, or walk down the aisle with a bear. But the biggest surprise is when she meets Hannah’s intended, a woman named Alex. The fact that there are two brides is unexpected, yet the beauty of this book is how quickly that knowledge normalizes into tradition. The wedding takes place in a synagogue under a chuppah, where the female rabbi reads the ketubah and says the seven wedding blessings. Hannah and Alex both stomp on wine glasses at the end of the ceremony and are carried around the dance floor on chairs. By framing same sex marriage as just another assumption to be disabused, the whole book maintains a light and celebratory tone as befits a book about families gathering to celebrate a simcha. Watercolor and pencil illustrations add just the right note of humor and joy.

Recommended for ages 4-7.

Hanukkah Delight!

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Award-winning children’s book author and past poet laureate of Northhampton, Massachusetts, Newman needs only a single line of text on each page to convey the rituals—and fun—of Hanukkah to the very littlest ones in this happy board book. The joy of the holiday is further enhanced by the amusingly illustrated celebrants filling the brightly-colored pages—from the smiling bunny family hosting the Hanukkah party, to the variety of the other anthropomorphized guests.

Highly recommended for the board book, preschool set.

Joseph the Dreamer

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

This colorfully illustrated retelling of the Biblical story is presented as an engaging, graphic novel featuring Joseph and his family. The classic story is brought to life with vivid colors and clearly written text. Readers will be captivated by this version of a story with which they may already be familiar. The story is told in a family friendly way without omitting important parts of the tale and feels full of detail and atmosphere. Joseph and his family are drawn as rabbits and the Egyptians are drawn as cats which adds an intriguing twist that still feels somehow authentic, although is an unusual illustrative twist.

The author/illustrator’s theatrical background is discernible and the scope and importance of this story certainly lend themselves to the author’s dramatic approach. Jewel toned colors are effectively contrasted with more muted shades highlighting the overall special look of the art. This book is a delightful addition to the growing trend of Biblically themed graphic novels appearing on the shelf.

Recommended for ages 7-10.

Life With An Accent: One Immigrant’s Quest to Belong

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

Things changed for young Frank Levy when his mother, who had read Mein Kampf and had taken it seriously, uprooted her German Jewish family and settled them in Palestine in 1936 in spite of some family ridicule. Frank adapted well into the life of his new homeland although it was harder for his parents. It was the time of Arab riots, Jewish underground fighting groups, and illegal Jewish immigrants trying to land by boat in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, in Europe, World War II was closing in on the family left behind. Frank’s parents decided to move to America but were afraid that as Frank was devoted to his new land, he would refuse to accompany them so they told him it was only for a vacation. When he learned they were there to stay, he resolved that he would never again be at the mercy of someone else’s decision making but choose his own path from that time forward.

Marilyn, the wife Frank married after the death of his first wife, tells her husband’s story here with great feeling and deep respect. She tells of his time both in Israel and America and describes both business and family events. She focuses mainly on character traits such as resilience and optimism and portrays him as a role model from whom others can learn as they navigate the intricacies of life.

Recommended for ages 12-16.

One Fine Shabbat

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 04:00:00 GMT

The twins, Sophie and Seth, along with their parents, enjoy a picnic lunch on Shabbat, their favorite day of the week. After saying the motzi over challah, drinking cider, and eating fruit and cheese, they run off to the barn where they discover twin newborn calves. Rhyming couplets introduce the simple pleasures found on this quiet day. The softly-colored illustrations in this board book show an idyllic setting, uninterrupted by the outside world.

Recommended for ages 2-5.