SPRING 2006 RECOMMENDED JEWISH BOOKS

SPRING 2006 BOOK READINGS

Mar 13, 2006: MACUALAY CULKIN, former husband of Natalie Portman, reads from JUNIOR, B&N Union Sq NYC 7 PM
Mar 14, 2006: Purim starts at sundown.
Mar 16, 2006: GERSHOM GORENBERG reads from THE ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE, NYC Cong B'nai Jeshurun in Nyc. 7 PM
Mar 20, 2006: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER reads from EXTREMELY LOUD... , B&N Union Sq NYC 7 PM
Mar 22, 2006: RABBI JOSEPH TELUSHKIN reads from A CODE OF JEWISH ETHICS, B&N UWS NYC 7 PM
Mar 27, 2006: ARTHUR KURZWEIL AND DALE L. MINTZ read from the HADASSAH JEWISH FAMILY BOOK OF HEALTH AND WELLNESS, B&N UWS NYC 7 PM
Mar 28, 2006: Israeli elections. Watch the results live, NIF Office in NYC 7PM
Mar 28, 2006: ABIGAIL POGREBIN speaks on STARS OF DAVID. JTS, NYC 6 PM
Mar 30, 2006: DAVID NIRENBERG and YOSEF HAYIM YERUSHALMI discuss ALFONSO VIII and the JEWESS OF TOLEDO: A LOVE STORY. Columbia University NYC

Apr 02, 2006: RODGE GLASS, 27, the Jewish bard of Glasgow Scotland speaks on NO FIREWORKS, KGB Bar, NYC 7pm
Apr 05, 2006: Jonathan Safran Foer interviewed by lana Newhouse, Makor NYC 7 PM
Apr 08, 2006: Idan Raichel in concert NYC www.israelatheart.org
Apr 09, 2006: The Sixth Annual Downtown Seder, live on XM Radio, NYC $135.
Apr 23, 2006: David Bergelson Tribute at Eldridge Street Synagogue, NYC 3PM.
Apr 25, 2006: HEEB MAGAZINE Money issue Release Party, Movida NYC.
Apr 25, 2006: RICH COHEN reads from SWEET AND LOW, B&N Chelsea 7 PM.

Apr 26, 2006: The 55th Annual National Jewish Book Awards. The Jewish Book Council. Featuring Ari Goldman, Samuel Freedman, Amos Oz, and others. NYC 7:30 PM.

Apr 27, 2006: Wayne Koestenbaum, (Jewish porn.. ) and Eddy Portnoy read at JCC of Manhattan.
Apr 29-30, 2006: Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, UCLA.
Apr 30, 2006: Darfur protest in Washington DC. Need bus fair from NYC? Let us know. We will subsidize you.

May 01, 2006: DAVID GROSSMAN and ETGAR KERET speak at NYC's 92nd ST Y
May 02, 2006: IRSHAD MANJI speaks at NYC's 92nd St Y
May 13, 2006: Join Alana Newhouse, Dara Horn, and T. Cooper on Jewish Writers. SAJ, NYC
May 17, 2006: ABIGAIL POGREBIN reads from STARS OF DAVID. Congregation Emanu-El NYC 6:30 pm
May 18, 2006: Janna Malamud Smith and Hugh Roth read from forthcoming memoirs about their fathers, Bernard Malamud and Henry Roth, two seminal figures of American Jewish literature. Eldridge Street Synagogue, NYC Garden Cafeteria Literary Series
May 20, 2006: Paula Marantz Cohen reads from Jane Austen in Scarssdale. Border in White Plains, NY, 2 PM
May 18-21, 2006: Book Expo America in Washington DC
May 21-23, 2006: Hillel Summit-Inspiring Values, Creating Leaders, Washington DC
May 24, 2006: REBECCA GOLDSTEIN reads from SPINOZA - YIVO INSTITUTE, NYC 7PM

Jun 01, 2006: Author BRUCE FEILER leads a session for Shavuot at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, NYC. Swfs.org 7:30 PM
Jun 01, 2006: RAMI KLEINSTIEN, JUDY GOLD, DEBBI FRIEDMAN, and more at TIKKUN LEIL SHAVUOT at the JCC UWS and 92ND ST Y, NYC TikkunNY.org
Through Jun 30, 2006: Art Show featuring fifteen contemporary Israeli artists. Horan Gallery, NYC UES
Jun 07, 2006: Beit Rabban - Manna From Heaven featuring authors Susie Fishbein, Sandee Brawarsky, and Naftali Citron. NYC
Jun 07, 2006: COMING TO AMERICA: Noted authors Akhil Sharma, Gary Shteyngart and Edgardo Vega Yunqué, born in India, Russia, and Puerto Rico, respectively, read from their work and share insights on the immigrant experience in the 21st century. Join us afterwards for drinks and conversation. Eldridge St Sysnagogue, NYC
Jun 14, 2006: Novel Jews at KGB Bar. KGB BAR, NYC
Jun 16, 2006: Wayne Hoffman reads from HARD, his novel. KGB BAR, NYC
Jun 28 - Jul 06, 2006: New Israel Fund Study Tour of Israel.
Jul 15, 2006, Wayne Hoffman reads from HARD, Now Voyager Books, Ptown Cape Cod
HEY.. NOW YOUR CAN SEARCH OUR SITE, INSTEAD OF JUST SEARCHING AMAZON. TRY IT OUT...

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LATE MARCH 2006

The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
March 2006, Knopf. Children and Adults
Grade 9 and Up
Zusak has created a work that deserves the attention of sophisticated teen and adult readers. Death himself narrates the World War II-era story of Liesel Meminger from the time she is taken, at age nine, to live in Molching, Germany, with a foster family in a working-class neighborhood of tough kids, acid-tongued mothers, and loving fathers who earn their living by the work of their hands. The child arrives having just stolen her first book-although she has not yet learned how to read-and her foster father uses it, The Gravediggers Handbook, to lull her to sleep when shes roused by regular nightmares about her younger brothers death. Across the ensuing years of the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Liesel collects more stolen books as well as a peculiar set of friends: the boy Rudy, the Jewish refugee Max, the mayors reclusive wife (who has a whole library from which she allows Liesel to steal), and especially her foster parents. Zusak not only creates a mesmerizing and original story but also writes with poetic syntax, causing readers to deliberate over phrases and lines, even as the action impels them forward. Death is not a sentimental storyteller, but he does attend to an array of satisfying details, giving Liesels story all the nuances of chance, folly, and fulfilled expectation that it deserves. An extraordinary narrative. Click the book cover above to read more.







A Code of Jewish Ethics
Volume 1: You Shall Be Holy
by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
March 2006, Bell Tower.
See also www.AcodeOfJewishEthics.com
Did you know that hatred and lying are permissable in some cases?
Read more
Code of Jewish Ethics, Volume 1: You Shall Be Holy is the initial volume of the first major code of Jewish ethics to be written in the English language. It is a monumental work on the vital topic of personal character and integrity by one of the premier Jewish scholars and thinkers of our time. With the stated purpose of restoring ethics to its central role in Judaism, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin offers hundreds of examples from the Torah, the Talmud, rabbinic commentaries, and contemporary stories to illustrate how ethical teachings can affect our daily behavior. The subjects dealt with are ones we all encounter.
They include judging other people fairly;
knowing when forgiveness is obligatory, optional, or forbidden;
balancing humility and self-esteem;
avoiding speech that shames others;
restraining our impulses of envy, hatred, and revenge;
valuing truth but knowing when lying is permitted;
understanding why God is the ultimate basis of morality; and
appreciating the great benefits of Torah study.
Basic vices and virtues takes up 257 pages. :)
Telushkin has arranged the book in the traditional style of Jewish codes, with topical chapters and numbered paragraphs. Statements of law are almost invariably followed by anecdotes illustrating how these principles have been, or can be, practiced in daily life. The book can be read straight through to provide a solid grounding in Jewish values, consulted as a reference when facing ethical dilemmas, or studied in a group. Vast in scope, this volume distills more than three thousand years of Jewish laws and suggestions on how to improve one's character and become more honest, decent, and just. It is a landmark work of scholarship that is sure to influence the lives of Jews for generations to come, rich with questions to ponder and discuss, but primarily a book to live by. Click the book cover above to read more.







THE ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE
ISRAEL AND THE BIRTH OF THE SETTLEMENTS, 1967-1977
By GERSHOM GORENBERG
March 2006, Times Books.
After Israeli troops defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in June 1967, the Jewish state seemed to have reached the pinnacle of success. But far from being a happy ending, the Six-Day War proved to be the opening act of a complex political drama, in which the central issue became: Should Jews build settlements in the territories taken in that war? The Accidental Empire is Gershom Gorenberg's masterful and gripping account of the strange birth of the settler movement, which was the child of both Labor Party socialism and religious extremism. It is a dramatic story featuring the giants of Israeli history-Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol, Yigal Allon-as well as more contemporary figures like Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. Gorenberg also shows how the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations turned a blind eye to what was happening in the territories, and reveals their strategic reasons for doing so. Drawing on newly opened archives and extensive interviews, Gorenberg reconstructs what the top officials knew and when they knew it, while weaving in the dramatic first-person accounts of the settlers themselves. Fast-moving and penetrating, The Accidental Empire casts the entire enterprise in a new and controversial light, calling into question much of what we think we know about this issue that continues to haunt the Middle East. Click the book cover above to read more. Writing in The New York Times, Jonathan D. Tepperman, an editor of Foreign Affairs, wrote, "...this the perfect time to look back at how Israel got into this mess in the first place. Generally speaking, there have been two prevailing explanations: one of Israeli innocence, the other of guilt. In the first, the tiny state was forced into war in 1967 and grabbed Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights in self-defense, planning to hold them only until they could be safely traded for peace. In the other, Israel used its victory in 1967 deliberately to expand its borders. It disenfranchised the locals, stole their land and settled the territories with religious fanatics. Now Gershom Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist, has produced a remarkably insightful third account. ... he portrays the first two decades after '67 as a melancholy story of inadvertant colonialism. It's a groundbreaking revision that deserves to reframe the entire debate. According to Gorenberg, the Israelis did not quite acquire their colonies as the British were said to, in a fit of absent-mindedness - but just about. In 1967, Israel won an unexpected victory in a war it didn't seek and found itself sitting on new territory three times its original size. But Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was paralyzed by this unhappy prize. He refused either to annex the land (since this would mean either expelling or absorbing 1.1 million Arabs) or to return it (since Israel's 1949 borders were deemed indefensible).Instead, he and his Labor Party successors (Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin) pursued a policy of no policy. The tragedy of this dodge, Gorenberg reveals, was that it ended up amounting to a policy anyway, for "stalemate was the soil in which settlements grew." As the deadlocked cabinet dithered, a decisive few - mostly young zealots dreaming of a biblical "Greater Israel" - took action....
.... Gorenberg shows Moshe Dayan, Israel's one-eyed war hero, musing that the Palestinians would end up as grateful colonial subjects like the Togolese; Henry Kissinger overlooking obvious signs of Israel's settlement construction; and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's peace offerings in the faith they'd soon crush it on the battlefield....The book works powerfully on two important levels: as a deeply informative counterhistory and as a mournful reminder of what happens when a democratic government acquiesces in the face of its own militants...by showing the root of the problem - incompetence, not ideology - Gorenberg points to the direction from which an answer may someday emerge.







The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
A True Story
by Ken Dornstein
March 2006, Random House.
Ken Dornstein uses family history, notebooks, photos, and interviews to reconstruct and rediscover the life of his brother, who was killed on Pan Am 103 over Scotland, on his way back from Israel. Ken Dornstein interweaves the moving story of his own coming-of-age with the promise of greatness his brother never lived to fulfill. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a heartbreaking but profoundly hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy and making sense of it. David Dornstein was 25, a handsome, charismatic young man on the verge of becoming an extraordinary writer, when he boarded Pan Am Flight 103 from London on the evening of December 21, 1988. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, he died, along with the 258 other passengers and crew, when a terrorist's plastic explosive ripped the plane apart over Lockerbie, Scotland. David's brother, Ken, was nineteen, a college sophomore home on winter break, when the call came. All his life Ken had looked up to David, confided in him, followed where he led. David's death left Ken with a void that both crushed and consumed him. What were his brother's plans when he died? Was David really carrying home a draft of the great novel everyone knew was in him? Was he in love with the woman he was living with overseas? Ken Dornstein needed to learn the truth about his brother's life and death. In this harrowing and affecting memoir, he records what he found out. It was years before Ken could bring himself to confront the stacks of notebooks and letters David left behind, but once he began to read he was drawn deep into his brother's world. From David's early obsession with writing down his every thought to his misadventures on the streets of New York, from an unraveling love affair in Israel to a devastating childhood secret, piece by piece Ken assembles a complex, disturbing portrait of an artist struggling to find a voice for passions that often threatened to tear him apart. Then, by chance, Ken runs into David's college girlfriend on a train and everything changes once again. He starts to question his motives and his memories, and finally sets off on a complicated journey to finish the book that his brother started. As haunting as a dream, as electrifying as the day's news, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is an incandescent and unforgettable account of one man's struggle to find inspiration in his brother's life and create a life of his own. What begins as a tragedy turns into a love story of deeply affirming power. Click the book cover above to read more.







Cobra II
The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
by Michael R. Gordon, Bernard E. Trainor
March 2006, Pantheon.
The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (HEY GUESS WHAT... IT WASN'T A JEWISH RUN CONSPRIACY RUN BY JEWISH NEO-CONS IN DC).
There have been many reports about the Iraq war and the vicissitudes of the American occupation, yet none heretofore has been informed by the inside story. Rendered fairly and documented impressively, it offers a galvanizing account of the strategy, the personalities, the actual battles, the diplomacy, the adversary, and the occupation. COBRA II is stunning work of investigative journalism by Michael Gordon, the chief military correspondent of The New York Times, winner of the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting in 1989 and the one and only correspondent embedded in Allied land command; and General Bernard E. Trainor, former military correspondent for The New York Times and current military analyst for NBC. Brimming with new and compromising disclosures, the book promises to be a singularly authoritative and comprehensive account of the planning and prosecution of the Iraq war. Michael Gordon had unparallel access to top military brass and was in the war room with Tommy Franks, Donald Rumsfeld and the field generals who were key in the formulation and execution of the war strategy. He has interviewed an extraordinary range of officials, including Franks himself, Condoleezza Rice, Steve Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman (the third ranking State Department official), Jerry Bremer, General Meyers (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), as well as virtually every general, regimental commander and brigade commander. He has had access to classified military and diplomatic documents, military archives and internal after-action reports and oral histories not meant for public consumption. This book also discusses: When and how was the war strategy formed? What were the disputes among the generals and the differences between the field commanders and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld?; How did Rumsfeld seek to monopolize war planning, and what was his relationship to the rest of the Bush administration?; What was the basic strategic assumption of the war plan, and how was it flawed?; How wide off the mark was the CIA in its assessments? What were the principal battles, and what has so far not been revealed about them?; and more, Click the book cover above to read more.







Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes
by T. Cooper ( a Koret finalist in 2004)
Dutton Adult (March 16, 2006).
NOTE: When Ms. Cooper's grandparents arrived at Ellis Island, they actually DID lose a child, and never found him. They moved on. Part of his grandparents family ended up in Amarillo, Texas, part of the Galveston Movement of sending Jews to the hinterlands.
Epic, ambitious, heartbreaking, and wholly original, T Cooper's Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes is a literary tour de force that spans the twentieth century with one family's search for a lost son. In Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, author T Cooper chronicles the unusual history of the Lipshitz family, Jewish refugees who narrowly escape the bloody Russian pogroms of 1903. Upon landing at Ellis Island, Esther and Hersh Lipshitz lose their uncharacteristically blond-haired, blue-eyed son Reuven. Circumstances eventually force them to give up their fruitless search for Reuven and to join a relative living in the Texas panhandle. However, Esther never stops pondering the fate of her lost son, and when she sees a picture of the blond, blue-eyed Charles Lindbergh after his 1927 transatlantic flight, she becomes convinced that the aviator is her grown son Reuven. Esther's obsession with Lindbergh (Reuven) slowly destroys those around her and will leave far-reaching effects on the entire Lipshitz family. In 2002 in New York City, we encounter the character T Cooper, the last living Lipshitz, who has received an unsolicited box from his estranged mother. In it, he finds clippings and letters to Charles Lindbergh and his family, all once carefully preserved by his great-grandmother Esther. When he is forced back to Texas to bury his suddenly and tragically deceased parents, T finds himself the inheritor of a family history filled with loose ends, factual errors, and maniacal behavior. An ex-literary golden boy who has quit writing to pursue a career as a bar mitzvah entertainer who impersonates the rapper Eminem, T struggles to make sense of all that came before him and-in light of his wife's desire to have a baby-what legacy he might leave behind as well. Click the book cover above to read more.




LENNY BRUCE IS DEAD
by Jonathan Goldstein
MARCH 2006, Counterpoint
From Publishers Weekly: Goldstein's woeful, funny debut novel is a series of aphorism-capped vignettes, paced at the rate of approximately one scene per paragraph. As these snapshots flash past, protagonist Josh ages rapidly from child to onanistic teen to depressive adult, mourning the death of his mother and the loss of a series of vividly described girlfriends along the way. Throughout, descriptions of Josh's suburban-anytown Jewish upbringing and job at local fast-food franchise Burger Zoo, while peppered with scatological and Portnoy's Complaint-esque sordidly sexual details, often achieve a level of nuance that's poetic and almost profound. In the latter third of the book, Josh's preoccupation with a Hasidic neighbor and the "Rebbe's Kosher-style Love Lotion" that he begins to experiment with grow repetitive and confusing. But "This American Life" contributing editor Goldstein has a knack for imagery ("He was crying on the floor, pulling toilet paper off the spool with both hands like he was climbing a rope") and ear for hyper-realistic dialogue, making him a writer to watch. Click the book cover above to read more.







The Last Jew
A Novel (Hardcover)
by Yoram Kaniuk, Barbara Harshav
Grove Press March 2006.
Innovative novelist Yoram Kaniuk takes us from the scorched earth of mid-century Europe, to the arid plains of the Holy Land, to the urban bustle of the American Diaspora, compressing the rise and fall of the Jews into the enigmatic character of one Ebenezer Schneerson. Following the ravages of World War II, Ebenezer finds that although he has no recollection of his family or childhood, he can, at will, recite Einstein's theory of relativity, the entire canon of Yiddish poetry, and the genealogical histories of any number of extinguished shtetls; he has somehow become the final repository for all of Jewish culture. Samuel Lipker, a fellow survivor and crass opportunist, makes money off of Ebenezer's macabre talents, trotting him around Europe to regale spooked cabaret audiences with his uncanny memory. Appearing in English for the first time, The Last Jew is an ingenious tapestry alive with narrative acrobatics and stylistic audacity. Alternately tragic, absurd, heartbreaking, and bitter - not unlike the Bible itself - it is a profound exploration of Jewish identity and the multitude of disparate, often contradictory shapes it has taken in the last century. Click the book cover above to read more.







The Mercy Room
A Novel
by Gilles Rozier
Little Brown, March 2006.
From Booklist: *Starred Review* This haunting and, at times, harrowing novel, set in France during the German occupation of the 1940s, is a variation of the Anne Frank story. The narrator lives in a small town, in the family house, where the mother and sister also live; the father is a prisoner of war in Germany. The narrator teaches German at the local school and regards the literature in that language to be the supreme passion of life. That is, until one day when the narrator, awaiting a translation assignment from the local Gestapo agency, lays eyes on an attractive young man--Jewish--who obviously is being taken off. The narrator whisks the young man away and stashes him in the wine cellar of the family home. There the young man lives, hidden away, for more than two years--during which the narrator and he fall in love and have a torrid sexual relationship. But as the end of the war approaches, the young man loses patience with his captivity, and an escape is planned, but things don't go as he and the narrator had outlined. Adding allure to the drama is that the gender of the narrator is never revealed; is this a heterosexual or homosexual affair? We never need to know, for this gripping story transcends such specifics. Click the book cover above to read more.







Seven Days to the Sea :
An Epic Novel of the Exodus
by Rebecca Kohn
Rugged Land (March 21, 2006)
As a child, Miryam foretells the birth of a leader who will save their people from oppression-a vision so vivid that she dedicates her life to seeing it fulfilled in her brother, Moses. But after many years, she wonders in the deepest confines of her heart if her sacrifices mean anything, if her calling is real. Tzipporah, a desert shepherdess who knows nothing of her husband's divine purpose, suffers as he is torn from her by a strange god, a foreign people, and an unforgiving sister. In her heart, she harbors terrible secrets that haunt the love she shares with Moses and threaten her tenuous peace with Miryam. Together, Miryam and Tzipporah weave a narrative that gives voice to the women of Exodus-their lives, their community, and ultimately, their sisterhood. Click the book cover above to read more.







Dying for Jerusalem
by Walter Laqueur
Sourcebooks. March 2006.
From Booklist: *Starred Review* Laqueur, a veteran historian and journalist, offers a fascinating look at Israel that is part memoir, part history, part commentary. As a 17-year-old in 1938, Laqueur fled Germany and found himself in Israel. Although he has lived elsewhere for much of his adult life, he has regularly traveled to Israel, sometimes spending a few weeks, sometimes working there for years. Perhaps because of this history of coming and going, he is able to look at Israel both objectively and intimately, as visitor and resident. He writes as if he's having a conversation with his reader, and the conversation is wide-ranging: the country's archaeological underpinnings, the evolution of kibbutz life, the lives of the ultraOrthodox, the influence of the Sephardic Jews. Because Laqueur talks with such familiarity on so many topics, readers get both facts and opinions. In the chapter on Jerusalem tourism, for example, Laqueur begins with what the first Baedeker guide (published in 1876) had to say about visiting the city (bring bribes) and goes on to write intriguingly about how tourism has evolved and how visitors react to the city's history, interweaving tensions between the locals and the tourists and examining the fervor that religiosity can evoke, including the Jerusalem syndrome, in which visitors imagine themselves to be people from the Bible. Readers interested in Israel and its history won't want to miss this one (Ilene Cooper).
Shlomo Avineri, in The Washington Post, writes: Walter Laqueur's Dying for Jerusalem ... Its title is a misnomer: While trying to explain why Jerusalem remains such a contentious issue, Laqueur -- with his usual panache as a historian and political analyst -- paints on a much wider canvas.... Laqueur's detailed knowledge of Jerusalem's quarters -- Rechavia and Talbiya, Mea Shearim and Machane Yehuda -- evokes the very aroma of each disparate area. Laqueur starts with his arrival in Jerusalem on Nov. 15, 1938, and the date says it all: His train left Germany just as Kristallnacht descended on German Jewry. Laqueur spent the war years in Palestine (he left in 1955 but has been continually coming back), and he is ever thankful to Zionism and Jerusalem for saving him from the Holocaust. Still, he is ambivalent about some basic tenets of the Zionist movement founded by Theodor Herzl. " 'We are a people, one people,' Herzl had exclaimed in a famous speech in an early Zionist Congress to stormy acclaim, but was it still true?" Laqueur asks, with a bluntness that would make every Zionist uncomfortable. The strengthening of the right wing in post-1967 Israeli politics has made him even more ambivalent, and he obviously has a visceral dislike of the ultra-Orthodox.But for all this, Dying for Jerusalem is a plea for a liberal, open vision of a Jewish state: Its compassion applies equally to Jews and Arabs, and Laqueur's humanism gives the book a bit of an elegiac quality. Hence some of his nostalgia for pre-1948 Jerusalem, when, under the British Mandate, Jews and Arabs did not live exactly peacefully but still lived together, albeit uneasily, under imperial custody.... ... [it ] is fascinating in its erudition and appealing in its humanism. Yet ultimately, like everyone else, Laqueur is flummoxed by the inscrutability of history. Click the book cover above to read more.







Seinology
The Sociology of Seinfeld
by Tim Delaney, SUNY Oswego
Prometheus. March 2006.
No one was better at turning everyday social interactions into memorable comedy sketches than Seinfeld creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. The show, still very current in syndication, is filled with astute social observations delivered with great comic effect. Sociologist, and avid Seinfeld fan, Tim Delaney explores the sociological implications of the famous comedy show in Seinology. Part sociology primer and part Seinfeld tribute, Delaney's book uses excerpts from many of the now-classic episodes to illustrate key facets of sociology. Along the way, readers are treated to an entertaining and educational tour of the whole Seinfeld series. In fifteen chapters, amusingly titled after some of the shows famous incidents, Delaney reviews the major contributions of sociology. Examples include: · "Tub is love." (socialization and personal relationships) · "Not that there is anything wrong with that." (sex and gender issues) · "You double-dipped the chip!" (social deviance) · "Happy Festivus: a festival for the rest of us." (religion) · "Look to the cookie, Elaine." (race and ethnicity) · "You don't have to help anybody. That's what this country's all about." (crime and social control) · "Yada, yada, yada." (and much, much more) .Click the book cover above to read more.




HOW TO CURE A FANATIC
By AMOS OZ
Princeton University Press. March 2006.
Internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed firsthand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In two concise, powerful essays, the award-winning author offers unique insight into the true nature of fanaticism and proposes a reasoned and respectful approach to resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict. As an added feature, he comments on contemporary issues--the Gaza pullout, Yasser Arafat's death, and the war in Iraq--in an extended interview at the end of the book. Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute--one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. As he writes, "The seeds of fanaticism always lie in uncompromising righteousness, the plague of many centuries." The brilliant clarity of these essays, coupled with Oz's ironic sense of humor in illuminating the serious, breathes new life into this centuries-old debate. He emphasizes the importance of imagination in learning to define and respect other's space, and analyzes the twisted historical roots that have led to Middle East violence. In his interview, Oz sends a message to Americans. Why not, he proposes, advocate for a twenty-first-century equivalent of the Marshall Plan aimed at preventing poverty and despair in the region? "What is necessary is to work on the ground, for example, building homes for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who have been rotting in camps for almost sixty years now." Fresh, insightful, and inspiring, How to Cure a Fanatic brings a new voice of sanity to the cacophony on Israeli-Palestinian relations--a voice no one can afford to ignore. .Click the book cover above to read more.







THE PRICE OF WHITENESS:
JEWS, RACE, AND AMERICAN IDENTITY
By ERIC L. GOLDSTEIN (Emory University)
Princeton University Press. March 2006.
What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms. American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them. Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart. Click the book cover above to read more.






PEACE IS POSSIBLE
CONVERSATIONS WITH ARAB AND ISRAELI LEADERS FROM 1988 TO THE PRESENT
by S. DANIEL ABRAHAM
Foreword by former President Bill Clinton
Newmarket. March 2006.
A first-hand personal account of American businessman and Slim Fast founder Danny Abraham's more than 15 years of peacemaking efforts in the Middle East and the reasons he believes peace is possible. For more than fifteen years, entrepreneur Danny Abraham, founder and former chairman of Slim Fast, chose to utilize his considerable resources to facilitate Mideast peace. Together with Utah Congressman Wayne Owens, Abraham made more than sixty trips to the Middle East between 1988 to 2002, meeting with Arab leaders Hosni Mubarak, Hafez Assad, Crown Prince Abdullah, and Yasser Arafat, and Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon. Using his business experience with difficult negotiations, Abraham took an active behind-the-scenes role, setting up critical one-on-one meetings between key figures. He urged these leaders to articulate not what they wanted, but what they needed, to make peace, fostering significant advances in the peace process. Since Owens' untimely death in 2002, Abraham has continued to arrange peacemaking meetings on his own. Drawing from meeting transcripts, diary entries, and extensive handwritten notes, Abraham writes in the first person about these extraordinary, often private meetings, giving us rare "you are there" insight into historically significant events. In his pragmatic and hopeful book, he writes, "I am a great optimist, particularly about a region of the world that usually brings out people's most pessimistic inclinations-Israel and its neighbors." Foreword by President Bill Clinton. Click the book cover above to read more.






THE HEART HAS REASONS:
HOLOCAUST RESCUERS AND THEIR STORIES OF COURAGE
BY MARK KLEMPNER
Pilgrim Press. March 2006.
PW writes: Asked why she helped save Jewish children during Germany's occupation of Holland in WWII while so many others stood by, Clara Dijkstra replies, "The heart has reasons." Klempner, a folklorist and oral historian, attempts to explore some of those reasons through interviews with 10 Dutch resisters who rescued Jews from the Nazis. Each of the chapters includes a short introduction, a first-person narrative from the rescuer, followed by a question and answer format and historical information. The result is often choppy; a straight and more integrated narrative throughout each chapter would serve these powerful stories better. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, the author uses the book to come to terms with his family's past and figure out what to do with his life. The dual objectives of profiling rescuers and wrestling with personal issues don't always work well together; the narrative often shifts uncomfortably between a focus on the rescuers and the author's focus on himself. But the summary chapter, which explores the lessons learned from the resisters and the application of those lessons for today's world is a highlight. Click the book cover above to read more.







My Parents Went Through the Holocaust and All I Got Was This Lousy Tshirt
by S. Hanala Stadner
Spring 2006.
See www.MyParentsWent.com
When I met the author, sorry everybody, I sort of thought of Tammy Faye or Charo or a publicist on speed or someone who experienced tremendous pain.
Tortured by a past filled with Nazis and the parents who fled them, Hanala escaped from Montreal, headed for Hollywood and changed her name to something not Jewish. She became Suzan Stadner, the creator and star of the number one show in the history of L.A.'s public access TV, The Suzan Stadner Show. But not right away. When she first arrived, instead of getting into acting, she got into drugs, alcohol and limos with strange men. After several overdoses, she became sober and an aerobics instructor. Now she is a spin instructor. This autobiography is a Traumedy (Tragedy+Time=Comedy). A little bit Auschwitz, a little bit Brady Bunch... Roots- with a smaller family. The book is filled with anecdotes of growing up to the present day. From getting to Hollywood and scoring drugs, having sex and over eating and drinking, ... During the 1980s, she appeared in a number of films including Return of the Living Dead Part II and Ruthless People where she appeared in both films as an aerobics instructor. Her writing and story telling is compelling. She mixes her life with a good sense of humor that has helped her overcome all her downs in life and shows how she bounced back with vigor and confidence.
She says : "Being raised by Holocaust parents, I learned that my silly feelings should be ignored. I had no right to feel bad, "Is a Nazis chasing you?" As I said in the book, Hitler spoiled my parents for regular suffering. So, in therapy I learned that my feelings WERE important, therefore I was important. After all, if we're not our feelings, what are we here for, to be money-making robots?" Click the book cover above to read more.







Becoming Eichmann
by David Cesarani
March 2006. Perseus
A monumental and groundbreaking biography-the first one in more than forty years-of Adolf Eichmann, Germany's architect of the Final Solution. In charge of the logistical apparatus of mass deportation and extinction, Adolf Eichmann was at the center of the Nazi genocide against the Jews. He was personally responsible for transporting over two million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps. This is the first account of Eichmann's life to appear since the aftermath of his famous trial in 1961 and his subsequent execution in Jerusalem a year later. It reveals that the depiction of Eichmann as a loser who drifted into the ranks of the SS is a fabrication that conceals Eichmann's considerable abilities and his early political development. Drawing on recently unearthed documents, David Cesarani shows how Eichmann became the Reich's "expert" on Jewish matters and reveals his initially cordial working relationship with Zionist Jews in Germany, despite his intense anti-Semitism. Cesarani explains how the massive ethnic cleansing Eichmann conducted in Poland in 1939-40 was the crucial bridge to his later role in the mass deportation of the Jews. And Cesarani argues controversially that Eichmann was not necessarily predisposed to mass murder, exploring the remarkable, largely unknown period in Eichmann's early career when he first learned how to become an administrator of genocide. This challenging work deepens our understanding of Adolf Eichmann and offers fresh insights both into the operation of the Final Solution and the making of its most notorious perpetrator. Click the book cover above to read more.





I Am My Mother's Daughter
Making Peace With Mom-before It's Too Late
by Iris Krasnow
March 2006. Basic
From Publishers Weekly: "-At 50, American University communications professor Krasnow (Surrendering to Marriage) reconciled with her difficult mother, a Holocaust survivor and former saleswoman. Here she gathers insights from other adult women with diverse backgrounds and experiences but similar life wisdom: "Ditching old baggage and learning to love our mothers must come before we learn to love, and know, ourselves." A private investigator becomes caretaker to her highly competent mother, a former nurse, and discovers that the Superwoman is merely human; a Trinidadian immigrant and victim of spousal abuse accepts her lawyer daughter's lesbianism and gains her respect. A therapist and survivor of eating disorders shares a marital problem with her "historically non-empathetic" mother and is gratified by her response; a social services professional pushing 70 learns to cope with the 96-year-old family matriarch who still treats her like a child. Celebrities get to vent, too: singer Chynna Phillips reconnects with her neglectful rock star mother, Michelle, of the Mamas and the Papas, as they bond over Chynna's children and a passion for music. Although it doesn't pack the punch that Nancy Friday's revolutionary My Mother/My Self did in its day, Krasnow's worthy effort will resonate with introspective baby boomers." Click the book cover above to read more.







Moscow Stories
by Loren R. Graham
March 2006. Indiana
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. On his first trip into the Soviet Union, in 1960, Graham had to walk through the Finnish woods with his luggage after he was kicked off a train because his papers weren't in order. That's par for the course in this fascinating book recapping more than 40 years of visiting the Soviet Union and, later, post-Soviet Russia. Graham introduces a host of eccentric characters: the widow of a top Soviet official killed by Stalin; an American who fit into Soviet society because of his rumpled clothes and love of Russian dumplings; and a Georgian who cuts open a can of fish with his teeth as he and Graham share vodka. But the characters Graham encountered as a student and academic (he's a professor of the history of science at MIT) are only part of the story. These essays also depict the absurdities, both humorous and painful, of life in the Soviet Union. He recounts having to sneak back into the residence of the American ambassador in Moscow during one visit, how he was visited by the FBI and recruited by the KGB. Not only are the stories captivating but they are also well told: Graham's that rare academic who knows how to write for a popular audience. Click the book cover above to read more.









LODZ GHETTO
A HISTORY
By Isaiah Trunk, Israel Gutman (Introduction), Robert Moses Shapiro (Translator)
2006. Indiana
In his comprehensive examination of the Lódz Ghetto, originally published in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explain the tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in 1939. Lódz had been home to nearly a quarter million Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945, they found 877 living Jews and the remains of a vast industrial enterprise that had employed masses of enslaved Jewish laborers. Based on an exhaustive study of primary sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian, Isaiah Trunk, a former resident of Lódz, reconstructs the organization of the ghetto and discusses its provisioning; forced labor; diseases and mortality; crime and deportations; living conditions; political, social, and cultural life; and resistance. Included are translations of the 141 documents that Trunk reproduced in his volume. Isaiah Trunk (1905-1982) was Senior Research Associate and Chief Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is author of Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. Robert Moses Shapiro is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is editor of Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts. Click the book cover above to read more.









American Artists, Jewish Images
(Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art)
by Matthew Baigell, Professor Emeritus, Rutgers
In the first extended work tracing the Jewish influences of fifteen major American artists, this landmark book chronicles the enormous contribution of Jewish artists to twentieth-century American art. Born over a fifty-year period, the artists in this volume represent several generations of twentieth-century artists. Examining the work of such influential artists as Mark Rothko, Max Weber, and Ruth Weisberg, Baigell directly confronts their Jewish identity-as a religious, cultural, and psychological component of their lives-and explores the way in which this influence is reflected in their art. Drawing upon their common heritage, Baigell reveals the different ways these artists responded to the Great Immigration, the Depression, the Holocaust, the founding of the state of Israel, and the rise of feminism. Each artist's varied Jewish experiences have contributed to the creation of a visual language and subject matter that reflect both Jewish assimilation and Jewish continuity in ways that inform modern Jewish history and changes in present-day America. Offering a fresh examination of well-known artists as well as long overdue attention to lesser-known artists, Baigell's incisive observations are indispensable to our understanding of the Jewish themes in these artists' work. Written in a lively and spirited prose, this book is compulsory reading for those interested in modern American art and Jewish studies. Click the book cover above to read more.









APRIL 2006

BEST-SELLING JEWISH PORN FILMS
POEMS (yes POEMS)
By Wayne Koestenbaum April 2006. Turtle point.
Guess what?
There aren't any best selling Jewish porn films.
Wayne would like to make some
Jewish law helps to contain behaviors. It can be strict, but also comforting and homey. The same is true about syntax. His thoughts are exposed and can also hide within poetic syntax.
From Publishers Weekly: Acclaimed for work in queer studies and queer theory that includes books on opera divas, Andy Warhol and Jackie Onassis, the New York-based Koestenbaum is first and foremost a poet (as well as an accomplished pianist). His fifth book of verse ranges widely, entertainingly, sometimes bizarrely through fears, loves, tastes and obsessions: movie stars, middle age, cats, social theory, the meaning of cool and the significance of the poet's mother (the poet Phyllis Koestenbaum), who often appears in his dreams ("Sometimes I call my mother 'Bob' "). Koestenbaum's many short poems and shorter stanzas pivot between the quizzical and the chatty, between the simply fabulous and the merely strange, achieving, at best, a campy bravura with an undertone of dismay:
I love art
History
if only
I were
not exploding.
Admirers of Koestenbaum's early excursions may have a hard time putting these smaller, spikier pieces together; those who like their verse both cryptic and charming might consider them just the ticket.
Click the book cover above to read more.






SWEET AND LOW
A Family Story
by Rich Cohen
April 2006. FSG.
We read and enjoyed 3 of Cohen's previous books that plumbed his family connections, so we are loving this new book and highly recommend it (Tough Jews, The Avengers, and Lake Effect)
From Publishers Weekly: "Disinherited from the family fortune built by his maternal grandfather, Ben Eisenstadt, who invented the artificial sweetener Sweet'N Low, Cohen mines a wealth of family history in this funny, angry, digressive memoir. Ben worked as a short-order cook during the Depression and conceived of but failed to patent the sugar packet before he and his son Marvin hit pay dirt in the 1950s with the saccharin formula for Sweet'N Low.

Today a distant third to Equal and Splenda, Sweet'N Low is run by Marvin's son Jeff, who took over after Marvin and several other chief officers were charged with tax evasion and criminal conspiracy in 1993. This story of the family-owned, Brooklyn-based company is, at its heart, a tale of immigrant strife and Cohen's fractious Jewish clan, including his grandmother Betty, for whom "love is finite," and his hypochondriac, housebound Aunt Gladys ("a tongue probing a sore"), who connived to eliminate her sister (Cohen's mother) from Betty's will. Though Cohen often dollies back in a self-conscious if breezy effort to pad his memoir with big ideas-the history of artificial sweeteners, the post-WWII weight-watching craze, etc.-the real grace of his writing (seen in Tough Jews) lies in the merciless, comic characterizations of his relatives." Click the book cover above to read more.
THE NYT adds: "How decadent... to indulge in Rich Cohen's rollicking account of his family and the business it built, a book that aims mostly to settle old scores, air dirty laundry and answer decades of petty insults from relatives. This is the family that invented first the sugar packet and then Sweet'N Low, capitalizing on Americans' diet madness to build a company that by 1996 was producing 50 million packets of artificial sweetener a day at a factory in Brooklyn. Corruption set in, scandal erupted, and in the ensuing battles Cohen's mother and her "issue," as lawyers dispassionately referred to his branch of the family, were written out of the wills, for reasons still in dispute. Set deliriously free by disinheritance, Cohen resolved to tell of the rise of the Cumberland Packing Company - and, as he calls it, "the fortune that would be the cause of all the trouble" - and sort out how things went so horribly awry. He paints vividly, and not flatteringly. There is Uncle Marvin, "as peppy as a camp counselor," who takes over the company from Cohen's grandfather and insists on being called Uncle Marvelous. A shut-in aunt who stage-manages the family drama from her bed in Flatbush. ("Her tongue is thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable.") A grandmother so determined to shape destiny that she changes her name twice (Pessie to Bessie to Betty), "the kind of woman," as her daughter describes her, "who wanted you to think she never went to the bathroom." And on the other side, Grandma Esther, "the loudmouthed immigrant who suddenly becomes a member of your family," who takes an afternoon to tell a story better told in five minutes, then winds it up by saying, "That's it in a nutshell," who takes her grandchildren to a movie and attempts to get a children's discount - even though they are ages 22 and 30. Cohen's grandfather Benjamin Eisenstadt, a lawyer turned short-order cook who started the whole enterprise, transformed his cafeteria near the Brooklyn Navy Yard into a tea bag factory after the end of World War II sapped his business, and had the idea to put sugar in little bags after being frustrated by the congealed sugar clogging a glass dispenser on a tabletop. Ben took his invention, unpatented, to a sugar company, which apparently stole it, rendering him forever suspicious. He got his revenge in the mid-50's, however, when he and Uncle Marvelous came up with the idea for Sweet'N Low. They positioned it first as an aid to diabetics, but dieters began swiping it from hospitals and restaurants, and soon the little pink packets had largely replaced not only the sugar dispenser but sugar itself. "Ben and Marvin had tapped into the zeitgeist," Cohen writes; "they had boarded a bullet train called Fat but Still Hungry."... Click the book cover above to read more.
The audio book:










MAN IN THE SHADOWS
INSIDE THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS WITH A MAN WHO LED THE MOSSAD
BY EFRAIM HALEVY
April 2006. ST MARTIN'S PRESS.
Israel's Mossad is thought by many to be one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world. In Man in the Shadows, Efraim Halevy-a Mossad officer since 1961 and its chief between 1998 and 2002-provides an unprecedented portrait of the Middle East crisis. Having served as the secret envoy of prime ministers Rabin, Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon, Halevy was privy to many of the top-level negotiations that determined the progress of the region's struggle for peace during the years when the threat of Islamic terror became increasingly powerful. Informed by his extraordinary access, he writes candidly about the workings of the Mossad, the prime ministers he served under, and the other major players on the international stage: Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Hafiz al-Assad, Mu'amar Gadhafi, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. From the vantage point of a chief in charge of a large organization, he frankly describes the difficulty of running an intelligence agency in a time when heads of state are immersed, as never before, in using intelligence to protect their nations while, at the same time, acting to protect themselves politically. Most important, he writes fiercely and without hesitation about how the world might achieve peace in the face of the growing threat from Islamic terrorist organizations.
In this gripping inside look, Halevy opens his private dossier on events past and present: the assassination attempt by the Mossad on the life of Khaled Mashal, now the leader of Khammas; the negotiations surrounding the Israeli-Jordan Peace Accord and its importance for the stability of the region; figures in the CIA, like Jim Angleton and George Tenet, with whom he worked (Halevy even shares his feelings about Tenet's abrupt resignation). He tells the truth about what the Mossad really knew before 9/11. He writes candidly about assessing the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the region and beyond, and what this spells for the future of international stability and survival. He touches on the increasing visibility of the CIA in the Middle East and openly shares his misgivings about both the report of the 9/11 Commission and the Middle East road map to peace that was pressed on all sides of the conflict by the U.S. government. He looks at the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London and their far-reaching effects, and states the unthinkable: We have yet to see the worst of what the radical Islamic terrorists are capable of. Click the book cover above to read more.






Crown Heights
Blacks, Jews, And the 1991 Brooklyn Riot
(The Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life)
by Edward S. Shapiro
April 28, 2006. Brandeis.
From Publishers Weekly: Perhaps no single event shook the notion of a black-Jewish alliance like the 1991 unrest in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which began after a Hasidic Jewish motorcade accidentally killed a black child. As Shapiro shows in this comprehensive, dispassionate account, the accident and what followed touched off a political firestorm in New York City: both black and Jewish activists exploited the death and the ensuing black unrest-during which a Jewish student was killed-for their own purposes. Shapiro deconstructs the simplistic readings of the event given at the time: some thought the Hasidic community received favored treatment, others that then Mayor David Dinkins was unwilling to use force against the black community. Historian Shapiro (A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II) writes with detachment but is willing to make judgments: a guilty verdict in the first of four trials in the death of the Jewish student "would have dissipated much of the anger of Jews over the mayor's handling of the riot." A myriad of factors-sociological, personal, religious and economic-had to be in place for the unrest to occur, says Shapiro, and he goes a long way toward providing the context necessary to understand them. Click the book cover above to read more.






Half/Life
Jew-ish Tales from Almost, Not Quite, and In-between
by Laurel Snyder
April 2006. Soft Skull Press.
Written by authors born into the so-called "dilemma of intermarriage," the stories in Half/Life explore the experience of being raised in a half-Jewish home. Though each essay is distinct, and the experiences are vastly different, each describes growing up without a streamlined identity, unsure of community or religious direction. From Jenny Traig, whose experiences led her to extreme devotion in the form of religious-obsessive compulsion (scrupulosity) to Thisbe Nissen, who finally felt Jewish after discovering a rosary in her boyfriend's sock drawer, these authors examine the complicated relationships they felt with the Jewish community and the world at large. By turns tragic and funny, religious and heartbreaking, angry and surprisingly familiar, Half/Life represents the altogether diverse memories and reflections of a handful of men and women who have spent a lifetime grappling with how to define themselves, or not. What results from that struggle is a complex exploration, and some truly brilliant prose. Click the book cover above to read more.






The Spirituality of Welcoming
How to Transform Your Congregation Into a Sacred Community
By Ron Wolfson, PhD
Spring 2006, Jewish Lights.
An empowering guide to creating the kind of spiritual community that reaches, teaches and inspires. Synagogues are the single best opportunity we have to support the Jewish people, spiritually and physically. But synagogues must be communities where relationships, not programs, matter most and where membership is not simply about reaching in, but also about reaching out to welcome and involve the unaffiliated. In this empowering, practical guide, Dr. Ron Wolfson explores how to transform your synagogue into a sacred community by creating a culture founded on the spirituality of welcome. Wolfson explores how to create an "ambience of welcome" in the congregation, analyzes why the emergence of welcoming "seeker" worship services provide spiritual uplift to those with little or no knowledge of the liturgy, and shows how to connect and deepen membership. Tapping into his experiences as cofounder of Synagogue 2000 (now Synagogue 3000), the transdenominational institute for envisioning the synagogue of the twenty-first century, this book is ideal for synagogue leadership and boards who work to create sacred communities infused with the spirituality of welcoming. Dr. Ron Wolfson is Fingerhut Professor of Education and founding director of the Whizin Center for the Jewish Future at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He is president/CEO of Synagogue 2000, and the author of Hanukkah, Passover and Shabbat, all family guides to spiritual celebrations; and A Time to Mourn, A Time to Comfort: A Guide to Jewish Bereavement and Comfort. Click the book cover above to read more.









Rethinking Synagogues
A New Vocabulary for Congregational Life
By Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD
Spring 2006, Jewish Lights.
A critical and challenging look at reinventing the synagogue and what that means for the survival of religious Judaism. Synagogues are under attack, and for good reasons. But they remain the religious backbone of Jewish continuity, especially in America, the sole western industrial or post-industrial nation where religion and spirituality are rapidly growing in importance. To fulfill their mandate for the American future, synagogues need to replace old and tired conversation with a new way of talking about themselves. Based on ten years of research with Synagogue 2000 (now Synagogue 3000), a pioneering experiment in synagogue transformation that dealt with some one hundred synagogues across all denominations, Rabbi Hoffman provides a fresh way for synagogues to think as they undertake the exciting task of transformation for success in the twenty-first century. Central to the challenge is his theological (not ethnic) rationale for the synagogue; his call for transformative, not just additive, change; and his exploration of what it would take for the synagogue to become a k'hilah k'doshah, a "sacred community," the moral and spiritual center that is needed for the twenty-first century. Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD, is cofounder of Synagogue 2000 and professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College. He has written or edited over twenty-four books, including The Way Into Jewish Prayer, the multi-volume My People's Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries series, and The Art of Public Prayer: Not for Clergy Only . Click the book cover above to read more.







The Healthy Jewish Cookbook
100 Delicious Recipes from Around the World
by Michael Van Straten, Bunny Grossinger
Spring 2006.
Traditionally associated with the heavy, fat-laden foods of Europe - deep-fried latkes, chicken fat, and achingly sweet desserts - Jewish food is, in fact, far more varied. Jews who migrated to other parts of the world developed cuisines unique to their new countries, yet still flavored with the tastes of the Middle East and the strict requirements of Jewish dietary laws. This beautifully illustrated book takes readers on a fascinating journey around the world, showing how Jewish cookery adapted and why it offers so many health benefits. There is the light, flavorful Mediterranean diet of Greek Jews and the Moorish-influenced food of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, both of which are rich in natural antioxidants, as well as the grain-based dishes of North Africa and the fragrant salads of the Middle East. With recipes like Egg and Onion with Cilantro, Nutty Spinach with Raisins, Schmaltz Herrings, Roast Duck with Cherries, and Ginger Hazelnut Cookies, this cookbook is a treasure trove of delicious, nutritious recipes for meat-eaters and vegetarians alike. . Click the book cover to read more.






YELLoW STAR
by JENNiFER ROY
April 2006. Cavendish.
Ages 10 and up
Autobiographical poems from a survivor. Syvia Perlmutter, the Aunt of author Jennifer Roy, was one of 12 children who survived her Lodz ghetto. 800 people survived out of 250,000. This is her story of survival written in free verse. Click the book cover above to read more.






DINOSAUR ON PASSOVER
by DIANE LEVIN RACHWERGER
Illustrated by Jason Wolff
April 2006. Karben.com
Ages 2 - 6
An eager playful dinosaur comes to a young boy's house to join him in celebrating Passover, causing havoc at the seder. Click the book cover above to read more.






THE NIMROD FLIPOUT
by ETGAR KERET. Translated from Hebrew
April 2006. FSG.
Already featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts and in Zoetrope: All Story and L.A. Weekly, these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish. A bestseller in Israel, The Nimrod Flipout is an extraordinary collection from the preeminent Israeli writer of his generation. Click the book cover above to read more.






Abraham
The 1st Historical Biography
by David Rosenberg, (former editor of JPS)
April 2006. Basic Books.
From the co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Book of J, the first modern history of the Biblical Abraham and his world (WELL, that is hyperbole... cuz don't forget that Bruce Feiler wrote ABRAHAM two years ago, and there was also THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD from Doubleday)..... The world's major religions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-find a common root in one man: Abraham. Yet Abraham looms so large in the realm of world religions that he has remained a ward of the Divine rather than a flesh-and-blood citizen of Humanity. In his new book, David Rosenberg provides a long-overdue history of the patriarch; while revealing that the original story embedded in the Bible is actually our oldest historical biography. We also discover that the wandering ascetic of tradition cannot explain our deep-seated feelings for Abraham and his God. The road that Abraham traveled was marked by signs of civilization that we still recognize: libraries, museums, hotels, and houses of worship. He is a sophisticated, educated Sumerian; an artisan who became the first Jew. Moreover, through Rosenberg's audacious translation of the Abraham story from Genesis, we learn that many of the core tenets of the monotheistic tradition-the idea of God's covenant and the soul-are Sumerian in origin. Rosenberg first finds Abraham at his father's workshop in the cosmopolitan city of ancient Ur and follows his journey through what is today the Middle East. What kind of baggage-emotional, material, and spiritual-would Abraham have taken with him on his migration to a new land? Abraham does more than present a founding spiritual figure and his dynamic relationships with father, wife, and son. We witness this man as he transforms his heritage into an anxious embrace of religion with secular culture-the human condition in which we are still enfolded today. Click the book cover above to read more.






GRANDPA'S LITTLE ONE
BY BILLY CRYSTAL
ILLUSTRATED BY GUY PORFIRIO
Ages 9 - 12
April 2006. HarperCollins .
Tony Award-winning comedian, director, actor, and bestselling author Billy Crystal is, above all things, a devoted grandfather. Drawn from his own experience, Grandpa's Little One tells the story of the first year in his grandbaby's life. It's a year filled with tender memories of every first-time event: first smile, first swim, first giggle and laugh, first piece of cake. Seen from a grandfather's point of view, each reverberates with love, tenderness, and a sense of humor. Grandparents everywhere will recognize themselves in the words and pictures of this book. Click the book cover above to read more.








Storm from the East
The Struggle Between the Arab World and the Christian West
(Modern Library Chronicles)
by Milton Viorst
April 2006. Random House.
America's engagement with the Arab world stretches back far beyond the Iraq wars. According to Milton Viorst, the current conflict is simply the latest round in a 1,400-year struggle between Christianity and Islam, in which the United States became a participant only in the last century. Today, the Bush Doctrine aims to free the Arab peoples from political oppression and create a democratic Iraq. So why are Arabs, and Iraqis in particular, so suspicious of our efforts? The explanation, Viorst says, is simple: "What the American leadership has miscalculated, or simply dismissed, is Arab nationalism." In Storm from the East, Viorst offers a balanced, lucid, and vital history of America's uneasy relationship with the Arab world and argues that brutal conflict in the region will continue until the West, with the United States taking the lead, honors the Arabs' insistence on deciding their own destiny. Viorst examines the long struggle of the Arab world to overthrow Western hegemony. He explores the Arab experiences with democracy and military despotism; Nasserite socialism in Egypt and Ba'athism in Syria and Iraq; tribal monarchy in Saudi Arabia and Jordan; guerrilla warfare waged by the Palestinians; and, finally, Islamic rebellion culminating in Osama bin Laden's extremist al-Qaeda. All have the same goal: the liberation of the Arabs from foreign domination. Storm from the East is a powerful work that, like no other, limns the political, religious, and social roots of Arab nationalism and the present-day unrest in the Middle East. Click the book cover above to read more.






TUNJUR! TUNJUR! TUNjUR!
A Palestinian Folktale
Retold by Margaret Read MacDonald
Collected by Ibrahim Muhawi (University of Munich) and Sharif Kanaana (Bir Zeit University, Ramallah)
April 2006. Cavendish.
Ages 3 - 8
A mischievous pot rolls in to trouble. It is a naughty pot. It must learn that there are consequences for stealing and other naughty actions. Click the book cover above to read more.






HONEST ANSWERS TO YOUR CHILD'S JEWISH QUESTIONS
By Sharon Forman
April 2006. Union of Reform Judaism Press.
What do you say when your five-year-old asks, "What does God look like?" or "Why am I Jewish?" By middle school, the questions are tougher: "Is the Torah true?" "Why do I have to learn Hebrew?" This helpful new book suggests successful response to these questions and many more, summarizing liberal Jewish thought in an accessible, easy-to-use format. The author, a rabbi and a mother, covers a broad array of topics, including God, holidays, ethics, history, Israel, prayer, Jewish diversity, practices, and identity. This is a must-have for Jewish educators and parents. Click the book cover above to read more.






Swords and Plowshares
Jewish Views of War and Peace
by Edwin Goldberg
April 2006. Union of Reform Judaism Press.
With terrorism and violence pervasive worldwide and much of the Middle East in a state of war, the age-old concerns about war and peace have fresh relevance. What does Judaism say on the subject? Is war ever justified, and under what circumstances? This timely new book presents relevant texts-biblical, rabbinic, and medieval-along with examples from modern history, and suggests questions for discussion and contemplation. This work is vital for anyone who follows news coverage from Israel or around the world. Rabbi Goldberg also provides brief essays to help guide the reader through the texts. In vocalized Hebrew and English with glossary and bibliography. Appropriate for teen and adult audiences. Click the book cover above to read more.






Defending the Holy Land
A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy
by Zeev Maoz
April 2006. University of Michigan Press.
Defending the Holy Land is the most comprehensive analysis to date of Israel's national security and foreign policy, from the inception of the State of Israel to the present. Author Zeev Maoz's unique double perspective, as both an expert on the Israeli security establishment and esteemed scholar of Mideast politics, enables him to describe in harrowing detail the tragic recklessness and self-made traps that pervade the history of Israeli security operations and foreign policy. Most of the wars in which Israel was involved, Maoz shows, were entirely avoidable, the result of deliberate Israeli aggression, flawed decision-making, and misguided conflict management strategies. None, with the possible exception of the 1948 War of Independence, were what Israelis call "wars of necessity." They were all wars of choice-or, worse, folly. Demonstrating that Israel's national security policy rested on the shaky pairing of a trigger-happy approach to the use of force with a hesitant and reactive peace diplomacy, Defending the Holy Land recounts in minute-by-minute detail how the ascendancy of Israel's security establishment over its foreign policy apparatus led to unnecessary wars and missed opportunites for peace. A scathing and brilliant revisionist history, Defending the Holy Land calls for sweeping reform of Israel's foreign policy and national security establishments. This book will fundamentally transform the way readers think about Israel's troubled history.
Zeev Maoz is a professor of Political Science, and former head of the Graduate School of Government and Policy at Tel-Aviv University. He also served as the Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (1994-1997), as the Academic Director of the M.A. program of the National Defense College of the IDF (1990-1994), and as Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Haifa (1991-1994). Prof. Maoz received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Click the book cover above to read more.






Yellow Star
by Jennifer Roy
April 2006. Marshall Cavendish.
Syvia is four years old in 1939, when the Germans invade Poland and start World War II. A few months later, her family is forced into the crowded Lodz ghetto, with more than a quarter of a million other Jews. At the end of the war, when Syvia is 10, only about 800 Jews remain-only 12 of them are children. Syvia remembers daily life: yellow stars, illness, starvation, freezing cold, and brutal abuse, with puddles of red blood everywhere, and the terrifying arbitrariness of events ("like the story of a boy / who went out for bread / and was shot by a guard / who didn't like the way the boy / looked at him"). When the soldiers first go from door to door, "ripping children from their parents' arms" and dragging them away, her father hides her in the cemetery. For years thereafter, she's not allowed to go outside. In 1944 the ghetto is emptied, except for a few Jews kept back to clean up, including Syvia's father, who keeps his family with him through courage, cunning, and luck. As the Nazis face defeat, Syvia discovers a few others hidden like her, "children of the cellar." When the Russians liberate the ghetto, she hears one soldier speak Yiddish, and the family hears of the genocide, the trains that went to death camps. At last they learn of the enormity of the tragedy: neighbors, friends, and cousins-all dead. There's much to think t and talk about as the words bring the history right into the present





One Who Came Back
The Diary of a Jewish Survivor
by Josef Katz, Hilda Reach (Translator)
April 2006. University of Wisconsin Press.
In December 1941, the SS deported twenty-three-year old Josef Katz from his home in Lübeck, Germany, to the Riga ghetto. Over the next four years, he and thousands of other Jews were subjected to unrelenting brutality in internment ghettos and concentration camps. One Who Came Back is an unflinching account of Katz's coming through each day's terror and its constant threat of death. Liberated in 1945, and surviving a death march back to Germany, he began this diary in 1946, finishing it a year later in New York where he arrived with his wife Irene, also a survivor of Riga. One Who Came Back has been acknowledged by historians, including Martin Gilbert and Leni Yahil, as a significant contribution to our understanding of what slave laborers endured in Nazi camps during the war.





1111 Days in My Life Plus Four
by Ephraim Sten, Moshe Dor (Translator)
2006. University of Wisconsin Press.
In 1941, in Zlochow, Poland, where Ephraim Sten lived with his family, the SS rounded up Jews into ghettoes. Thirteen-year old Sten, who had started a diary, fled with his mother to the countryside where a Catholic-Ukrainian couple hid them and several relatives. Sten's account of those years was harrowing. Fifty years later he had the diary translated into Hebrew for his children and responded to each of his own youthful entries. "For decades," he writes, "I was not conscious of the load crushing my soul. This damned writing has newly rediscovered everything." 1111 Days in My Life Plus Four is a double testimony of the boy and the man he became-an extraordinary record and, in itself, a distinctive work of literature. As Myra Sklarew writes, "the boy and the man he became finally stand side by side in an attempt to free themselves from the voices, faces, images of their shared past."





THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
THE BEGINNING OF OUR RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS
BY KAREN ARMSTRONG
April 2006. Knopf.
In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision. Now, in The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal "Axial Age" can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the contributions of such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. All of the Axial Age faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. With regard to dealing with fear, despair, hatred, rage, and violence, the Axial sages gave their people and give us, Armstrong says, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action. In her introduction and concluding chapter, Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today. In our various institutions, we sometimes seem to be attempting to create exactly the kind of religion that Axial sages and prophets had hoped to eliminate. We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change. Click the book cover above to read more.






A JEWISH BOOK? HE HE
DOES THIS MEAN THE CHURCH CAN'T BLAME THE JEWS?
The Gospel of Judas
Commentary by Bart D. Ehrman, Edited by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst
April 2006. National Geographic Society
This volume is the first publication of what is known as the Gospel of Judas, condemned as heresy by early Church leaders, most notably by St. Irenaeus, in 180 CE. Hidden away in a cavern in Middle Egypt, the codex (or book) containing the gospel was discovered by farmers in the 1970s. In the intervening years the Coptic papyrus codex was bought and sold by antiquities traders, hidden away, and damaged into fragments. In 2001, it finally found its way into the hands of a team of experts who would painstakingly reassemble and restore it. The Gospel of Judas has been translated from its original Coptic in clear prose, and is accompanied by commentary that explains its fascinating history in the context of the early Church. Click the book cover above to read more.






GIRL STORIES
A graphic novel by Lauren Weinstein
APRIL 2006. Henry Holt Books for Young Readers.
Ages 12-19.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Weinstein's short, bitterly hilarious stories of teenage-girl angst were a popular feature on gURL.com; this book collects them, along with new material that turns them into a loose narrative of her semiautobiographical protagonist's eighth- and ninth-grade years. "Lauren" is obsessively concerned with her social standing and weight, guilty about still playing with Barbies, fixated on Morrissey, annoyed by being Jewish at Christmas, tormented by a navel piercing gone awry and perplexed by the mystery of boys and why they like her or don't. (It doesn't help that everyone in her school is as cruel as, well, teenagers.) Fortunately, her imagination, her sense of humor and her knack for woe-is-me exaggeration are her escape routes. Weinstein draws her stories with frantic, scraggly lines and eye-scalding neon colors straight off the teenage cosmetics rack. Everything looks crude and distorted on the surface, but her artwork is a lot cleverer and subtler than it initially appears. Weinstein understands the painful immediacy of everything in teenagers' lives-how every success, even in egging a tree, feels like a monumental victory, and every moment of social or academic awkwardness feels like the end of the world-and these anecdotes and images both sympathize with and mock this revelation. Click the book cover above to read more.






The Notebook Girls
by Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen, Courtney Toombs
APRIL 2006. Warner.
Four young students from NYC's Stuyvesant High School shared a notebook diary. If you ever wanted to be a voyeur, or know what teens actually think about sex or Jewish identity or school or life... this is a must
Julia, Lindsey, Sophie, and Courtney enter Stuyvesant, New York City's most prestigious public high school, in September of 2001, just days before they watch the Twin Towers crumble outside their classroom window. A bond of friendship is struck, and yet demanding class schedules, extracurricular activities, and busy social lives make it hard for them to stay in touch. This prompts the four girls to start "The Notebook," a collective journal'ing project that allows them to express their frustrations, triumphs, and everyday encounters inside an ordinary composition book. Their experiences are not unusual: They get cut from teams, get bad grades, win debates, get rebuffed by boyfriends, plan surprise parties, smoke, drink, experiment with sex, and argue with their parents. But it is the raw honesty of these page-turning exchanges that will captivate readers, involving them in both their individual and group stories, and laying bare what it is really like to be a teenager today. Click the book cover above to read more.






Every Mother Is a Daughter
The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen
(Recipes and Knitting Patterns Included)
by Perri Klass, Sheila Solomon Klass
APRIL 2006. Random House
These authors avoid the pitfalls of the often saccharine mother-daughter memoir by interspersing humorous anecdotes within a solid framework of stories of mom Sheila's dark upbringing during the 1940s and daughter Perri's current struggle to keep her own life as a mother, doctor, writer and avid knitter under control. The two exchange ideas, conflicting memories of past events and even gentle criticisms in chapters such as "There Are No Old Babies" and "Milking Reindeer." Readers will appreciate the honesty between the pair as Sheila writes about growing up with abusive and distant parents and her experience as a working mother in New Jersey during the 1960s, while Perri struggles to "have it all" in 2005, consistently feeling as though something, or someone, has been forgotten along the way. The mother-daughter duo triumph over hectic schedules and physical distance through their love of writing and travel, ending with reminiscences of their trip to India to visit the Taj Mahal. This is a treasure for any generation. Click the book cover above to read more.






BLUE NUDE
A novel by Elizabeth Rosner
APRIL 2006. Ballantine Books.
In this sensual, intimate novel, prizewinning poet and bestselling author Elizabeth Rosner tells the engrossing and timely story of an artist and his model, and the moral and political implications of their relationship. Born in the shadow of postwar Germany, Danzig is a once-prominent painter who now teaches at an art institute in San Francisco. But while Danzig shares wisdom and technique with students, his own canvases remain mysteriously empty. When a compelling new model named Merav poses for his class, Danzig, unsettled by her beauty, senses that she may be the muse he has been waiting for. The Israeli-born granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, Merav is a former art student who discovered her abilities as a model while studying in Tel Aviv. To escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, she moved to California, where she found work posing for artists around the Bay Area. Now challenged by Danzig's German accent and the menace it suggests, Merav must decide how to overcome her fears. Before they can create anything new together, both artist and model are forced to examine the history they carry. Like a paintbrush in motion, Blue Nude moves back and forth through time, recounting the events that have brought Danzig and Merav together: their disparate upbringings, their creative awakenings, and their similarly painful, often catastrophic, love lives. The novel ultimately unites them in the present and, through the transcendent power of artistic expression, moves them forward to the point of reconciliation, redemption, and revival. Using words to paint the landscapes of body and soul, Elizabeth Rosner conveys the art of survival, the complexity of history, the form of exile, the shape of desire, and the color of intimacy. Blue Nude is the narrative equivalent of a masterpiece of fine art. Click the book cover above to read more.






A Woman of Uncertain Character
The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie
(Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom)
by Her Bastard Son
by Clancy Sigal
APRIL 2006. Carroll and Graf.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Screenwriter Sigal (Frida), a Renaissance man blacklisted in Hollywood and active in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, draws from his tempestuous childhood in the 1930s in gangland/union-busting Chicago. This vivid, poignant and political memoir depicts his complicated, beloved mother, a "crazy bohemian" Russian Jewish émigré immersed in the politics and mores of her time (she is now deceased). Jobless but never manless, Jennie Persily, youngest of 10, settled on Manhattan's Lower East Side, attended lectures given by John Reed and Emma Goldman, and fashioned her politics after theirs. An organizer for unions, she called her first strike at 13. An unwed mother at 31, she brought Clancy with her as she traveled the country by train, organizing. Along the way there were many men (and some women), and close calls with police and gangland hoods over her union activities. Clancy's childhood was peppered with characters like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and the "abusive Swede," his favorite of his mother's lovers. Gritty prose worthy of any classic noir film propels this engaging, often tender memoir of a larger-than-life woman and her self-deprecating but accomplished son, who still misses their shared adventures. Click the book cover above to read more.






Memoirs of a Muse
A Novel
by Lara Vapnyar
APRIL 2006. PANTHEON.
Lara Vapnyar, author of the prizewinning story collection There Are Jews in My House, brings us a poignant and comic first novel about a delightfully sincere modern-day muse. We meet Tanya as a typical Russian girl, living with her bookish professor mother in a drab Soviet apartment. As a teenager, Tanya becomes obsessed with Dostoevsky and settles on her life's calling: she will be the companion to a great writer. Her memoirs tell of her immigration to New York after college, the stifling expectations of her Brighton Beach cousins, and the crucial moment in a bookshop on the Upper West Side, where Tanya attends a reading by Mark Schneider, a Significant New York Novelist. Tanya soon moves in with Mark, ready to dazzle in bed, to serve and inspire . . . if only he would spend a little more time writing and a little less time at the gym, the shrink, and the literary soirees where she feels hopelessly unglamorous and out of place. But as she gradually learns to read English-struggling to better understand Mark's work and her true role as Muse-Tanya also learns more than she expected about the destiny she has imagined for herself. Animated by Vapnyar's beguiling grace and vividness-with a narrative richness reflecting the great tradition of Russian realism to which she is a natural heir-Memoirs of a Muse is an altogether wonderful novel. It is a lively meditation on female capabilities and happiness, on the mysteries of artistic inspiration (and the absurdities of artistic life), and, perhaps most movingly, on the pain and wonder of the immigrant experience in New York City. Click the book cover above to read more.






Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi
John Selden
by Jason P. Rosenblatt
APRIL 2006. OXFORD.
In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden's immense, neglected rabbinical works contain magnificent Hebrew scholarship that respects, to an extent remarkable for the times, the self-understanding of Judaism. Scholars celebrated for their own broad and deep learning gladly conceded Selden's superiority and conferred on him titles such as "the glory of the English nation" (Hugo Grotius), "Monarch in letters" (Ben Jonson), "the chief of learned men reputed in this land" (John Milton). Although scholars have examined Selden (1584-1654) as a political theorist, legal and constitutional historian, and parliamentarian, Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi is the first book-length study of his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets and intellectuals, including Jonson, Milton, Andrew Marvell, James Harrington, Henry Stubbe, Nathanael Culverwel, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton. It also explores some of the post-biblical Hebraic ideas that served as the foundation of Selden's own thought, including his identification of natural law with a set of universal divine laws of perpetual obligation pronounced by God to our first parents in paradise and after the flood to the children of Noah. Selden's discovery in the Talmud and in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah of shared moral rules in the natural, pre-civil state of humankind provides a basis for relationships among human beings anywhere in the world. The history of the religious toleration of Jews in England is incomplete without acknowledgment of the impact of Selden's uncommonly generous Hebrew scholarship. Click the book cover above to read more.






The Water Door
A Novel (Paperback)
by Rosetta Loy, Gregory Conti (Translator)
2006. OTHER PRESS.
A Garcia Lorca poem gives this book its title, "not even the smallest hand can open the water door," and this epigraph begins a story of unrequited love. A five-year-old girl, the daughter of a bourgeois Roman family in the late 1930s, finds the object of her desire in her German-speaking governess: blond, blue-eyed, milky-white Anne Marie. The story of their relationship spans a single season, as the family moves through its obligatory social rituals. Their customs and manners are all absorbed through the wide-eyed gaze of their little girl making her first contact with the outside world. She encounters kindergarten, the nuns and their baroque Catholicism, and most importantly, a fascinating Jewish girl who lives across the street. Their friendship will change her relationship with her governess forever, especially once the Jewish girl disappears. Loy's rhythmic, sensual prose animates a kaleidoscopic narrative, combining the intimacy of childhood emotions with nightmare glimpses of Fascist Italy during World War II . Click the book cover above to read more.






Jew Gangster
A Father's Admonition
by Joe Kubert
Veteran comics artist Kubert took a major leap out of genre comics with Yossel (2003), the tragic story of a teenager trapped with his family in the Warsaw ghetto. The venture invigorated him, and now he offers another departure from his usual war and superhero work. Jew Gangster is about young Ruby, who rejects his immigrant parents' aspirations to respectability and falls in with a brutal mob. The story shares the milieu of Will Eisner's graphic novels, Jewish New York in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike Eisner, who seems to draw directly from real life, Kubert appears to be inspired by 1930s Warner Brothers crime films. Even so, Kubert is one of the few comics artists alive who lived through the Depression, and his way with Brooklyn street scenes and Ruby's family's tenement apartment conjures an aura of authenticity. His full-bodied drawing style has always made most other comics artists look pallid, and he works with even greater vigor here. Admirers of Eisner's graphic novels should like Kubert's recent works, too. Click the book cover above to read more.






Brownsville
by Neil Kleid, Jake Allen
April 2006
Conventional wisdom says that poverty produces gangsters, but Kleid and Allen focus on a thug whose family was making it. Allie Tanennbaum is first glimpsed peeking through the bushes around his father's Catskills resort at some famous customers: rising mobster Louise "Lepke" Buchalter and a couple henchmen. His brother yanks him away, and his father talks to him, then and later, but Allie's fascination with tough guys who are Jews like him is too strong. He becomes a member of Murder, Inc., which Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano's crime syndicate employed to enforce, uh, discipline. Eventually, when New York D.A.s Thomas Dewey and William O'Dwyer got on Murder, Inc.'s case, Allie turned canary and sang about the hit on Dutch Schultz, among other matters. Kleid fills out the main characters psychologically and sociologically, and Allen aims for verisimilitude in portraying persons and places while pulling out the crime-movie stops in terms of lighting and angle of vision. They contribute compellingly to true-crime literature in this smart, absorbing nonfiction graphic novel. Click the book cover above to read more.






TWO UNIQUE BOOKS:
Dumplings are Delicious
By Deborah Capone
And Freaky Foods from Around the World
Platillos Sorprendentes de Todo el Mundo
by Ramona Moreno Winner, Luis Borsan
Ages 4 - 8
Lucas' abuela (grandmother) invites his class over for lunch and the menu is all but common. Before she puts the platter down, abuela says: When food is strange and quite unknown and not familiar like our own, don't squirm around making funny faces, because foods comes from different places. That's why it's different! A natural history section provides information on the animals used in this book as a food source. Falafel not included.. but she serves chicken feet, cricket, tongue, moose heart and more. It reminds me of eating in a Tel Aviv Yemeni diner, where I ate spinal chord, cow's udder, and more. The lesson here is to respect other cultures and to be open to new experiences. Click the book cover above to read more.






IN HONOR OR ARTHUR HERTZBERG, an intellectual leader who passed away on Monday, April 17, 2006, we highlight a few of his works:









MAY 2006


EVERYMAN
A NOVEL
BY PHILIP ROTH
MAY 2006. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN.
One day your body will die, and take your mind with it. It is a very depersonalizing process.
The book opens with the burial of this unnamed everyman (Everyman, the title, comes from a Christian morality play in which Death pays a visit), a burial in a Jewish cemetery that should be maintained better. It is as rundown as a decaying body. It is in New Jersey. Roth was inspired by the death of his friends, including Saul Bellow; after Bellow's funeral, Roth went home and began to write.
From Publishers Weekly: What is it about Philip Roth? He has published 27 books, almost all of which deal with the same topics-Jewishness, Americanness, sex, aging, family-and yet each is simultaneously familiar and new. His latest novel is a slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70s, just as he always said he would. (I'm not giving anything away here; the story begins with the hero's funeral.) It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: "I told you I was sick." And yet, despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. (In most of his books, whether written in the third person or the first, a main character is a tortured Jewish guy from Newark-like Roth.) The unnamed hero here is a thrice-married adman, a father, and a philanderer. He is a 70-something who spends his last days lamenting his lost prowess (physical and sexual), envying his healthy and beloved older brother, and refusing to apologize for his many years of bad behavior, although he palpably regrets them. Surely some wiseacre critic will note that he is Portnoy all grown up, an amalgamation of all the womanizing, sex- and death-obsessed characters Roth has written about (and been?) throughout his career.But to obsess about the parallels between author and character is to miss the point: like all of Roth's works, even the lesser ones, this is an artful yet surprisingly readable treatise on... well, on being human and struggling and aging at the beginning of the new century. It also borrows devices from his previous works-there's a sequence about a gravedigger that's reminiscent of the glove-making passages in American Pastoral, and many observations will remind careful readers of both Patrimony and The Dying Animal-and through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness. "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work," he has his adman-turned-art-teacher opine about an annoying student. Obviously, Roth himself is a professional. Click the book cover above to read more.






Remembering Voices of the Holocaust
A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived
by Lynn Smith
MAY 2006. CARROLL AND GRAF.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Elie Wiesel's Night may be topping bestseller lists, thanks to Oprah's book club, but there is still a need for other testimonies to the horrors of the Holocaust. Smith, who has recorded the experiences of survivors for London's Imperial War Museum, weaves together more than 100 accounts to construct a narrative of Nazi persecutions from the first anti-Semitic measures in 1933 through the liberation of the concentration camps. Atrocities, cruelties and random acts of kindness are recounted, fueled by a fierce need to preserve the truth for future generations. The strength of this collection is deepened by the inclusion of the experiences of Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, members of German police battalions, and resistance fighters. The most horrific anecdotes evoke the suffering of German, Polish and Czech Jews in overcrowded ghettos and extermination centers, somehow managing to outwit and, against all odds, overcome the final solution by luck and their persistent will to live. This is an extraordinary work of scholarship and a reminder of the power of individual stories, which can bring home the horrors of WWII more forcefully than abstract numbers.
Book description: A landmark achievement in Holocaust scholarship, Remembering Voices of the Holocaust is culled from hours of first person accounts from survivors recorded for inclusion in the sound archives of both the Imperial War Museum in London, and the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. In their own words, Jewish survivors as well as Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and both perpetrators and ordinary observers recount the entire horrific arc of the Holocaust from the ominous rise of the Nazi party during the Weimar days through the liquidation of the ghettos and the institution of Hitler's "final solution," continuing on to the liberation of the camps and the harrowing aftermath of the War.