SPRING 2007 RECOMMENDED JEWISH BOOKS

SPRING 2007 BOOK READINGS


Mar 19, 2007: Happy 74th Birthday to Philip Roth
Mar 27, 2007: Iris Bahr reads from DORK WHORE. B&N Chelsea, NYC
Mar 27, 2007: Ambassador Dennis Ross lectures. 92Y.org NYC

Apr 02, 2007: First seder for Passover begins tonight
Apr 13, 2007: Letty Pogrebin and her daughter at Ansche Chesed in NYC. Might even talk about her version of Newsweek's top 50 rabbi's, but with more the 5 women on the list
Apr 18 ,2007: New Writers on the Holocaust. With Daniel Mendelsohn, Shira Nayman and Bernice Eisenstein. Makor NYC
Apr 19 ,2007: Elie Wiesel on The Maiden of Ludmir. 92Y.org NYC
Apr 21-22: NextBook.ORG festival of ideas. Acting Jewish with David Mamet, Laura Silverman, Adam Gopnik, Kenneth Turan and Others. UCLA.
April 22, 2007: HaZamir High School Choir performs in NYC, Central Syangogue. 7:15pm
April 22, 2007: ?Did Herzl Really Say That? A film program at YIVO
April 23, 2007: Sari Nusseibeh in conversation at the 92nd St Y in NYC
April 23: For the benefit of Darfur and AJWS. Knitting Factory in NYC. Featuring broadway stars and Bobby Lopez (Co-author of Avenue Q)
Apr 23-25, 2007: NJDC WASH DC CONFERENCE. American Jews and the 2008 Election: Israel and Domestic Issues
Apr 24, 2007: www.AmericaEatsForIsrael.Org
Apr 24, 2007: Sephardic Folktales with Gerald Fierst and Peninnah Schram. 92nd St Y NYC 8:15PM
Apr 25, 2007: Nathan Englander and Jonathan Lethem and their new books. 92nd St Y, NYC 8PM
Apr 26, 2007: Elie Wiesel on memory and ethics. 92nd St Y NYC 8PM
Apr 28-29, 2007: LA TIMES Festival of Books, Los Angeles
Apr 29 ,2007: NEXTBOOK.ORG Festival. What is He Doing Here? Jesus in Jewish Culture. Featuring Leon Wieseltier, James Carroll, Jonathan Wilson, Robin Cembalest, Stephen Greenblatt, Robert Pinsky, Ruth Franklin, Ivan Marcus, Judith Shulevitz, Susannah Heschel, Rome's Chief Rabbi, Riccardo Di Degni, Osvaldo Colijov, Alan Segal and more. Center for Jewish History 12 Noon - 7PM NYC
Apr 30, 2007: Amy Dockser Marcus reads from JERUSALEM 1913 , Politics and Prose, Washington DC

May 01, 2007: Michael Chabon reads from "THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION," 92ndSt Y, NYC
May 02, 2007: Michael Chabon reads from "THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION," B&N Union Sq, NYC
May 03, 2007: Michael Chabon reads, Harvard Book Store, Cambridge 6:30 PM
May 03, 2007: Tova Reich reads from MY HOLOCASUT, Politics and Prose, Washington DC
May 06, 2007: Lag b'Omer. Parade in NYC. Idan Raichel at J&R NYC at 4PM
May 09, 2007: Michael Chabon reads at The Los Angeles Public Library
May 19, 2007: Robert Dallek reads from NIXON AND KISSINGER, Politics and Prose, Washington DC
May 21, 2007: Michael Chabon reads at The Chicago Public Library w/ Nextbook
May 21, 2007: SAMI RHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE. Jewish Book Council. Pierre Hotel.
May 23, 2007: Michael Chabon reads from THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION, Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, 600 I Street NW, DC
May 29, 2007: Michael Chabon reads at Title Wave Books, Anchorage, Alaska
May 30, 2007: Michael Chabon reads at Hearthside Books at the Nugget Mall Juneau, Alaska
May 14, 2007: Alan Morinis on EVERYDAY HOLINESS: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar. HUC JIR, NYC 7 PM
May 22, 2007: Tikkun Leil Shavuot.
May 27, 2007: Thane Rosenbaum with Daniel Goldhagen, John K. Roth and Michael Berebaum on "Holocaust Fatigue." 92Y.org NYC

Jun 01-03, 2007: Book Expo America in NYC
Jun 05, 2007: John Updike reads from The Terrorist, BN Union Square, NYC
Jun 06, 2007: Josh Wolk reads from Cabin Pressure. BN Park Slope NYC
Jun 07, 2007: Sylvain Cypel reads from WALLED: Israeli Society at an Impasse. BN UWS NYC











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YOU'VE SEEN ALL THOSE ISRAELI'S IN BKK
NOW READ WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO ON KAOSAHN ROAD...
I LAUGHED OUT LOUD MANY TIMES ON THE SUBWAY READING IT
DORK WHORE
My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin
by Iris Bahr
March 2007. Bloomsbury
Move over David Sedaris, the Greco American who writes of Paris. We now have a Jewish American who writes of Asia. Fresh out of the Israeli Army, twenty-year-old Iris Bahr decides to follow the footsteps of many before her and backpack through Asia. Only unlike the average traveler, she has more in mind than just seeing the sights: she is on a desperate mission to lose her virginity. Dork Whore is a fresh and funny memoir about a young woman whose quirky personality and embarrassing neuroses always seem to get in the way of her getting what she wants. As Iris lands in hotel rooms in Bangkok, rides scooters out of opium-fogged compounds hidden in the jungle, and antagonizes an impromptu tour group in Vietnam, she begins to realize that the greatest obstacle she'll have to overcome isn't losing her virginity, but coming to terms with the reasons for her need to be accepted. Poignant, hilarious, and always original, Dork Whore is a remarkable mix of bawdy humor and heartbreaking moments, witty intelligence and touching personal discoveries. Iris Bahr has given us an unforgettable coming-of-age tale about how a young woman finally learns how to trust others-and her own judgment. Click the book cover to read more.








Tourist Season
Stories
by Enid Shomer
March 2007, Random House
A collection of short stories about women charting unfamiliar territory, whether in Brooklyn or the Cayman trench. In one, a Jewish woman travels to Tibet where she accepts, with hesitation, her birthright as the reincarnation of a saint. In another, a Radcliffe student, home for the summer, is attracted to her cousin. Click the book cover to read more.








How Doctors Think
by Jerome Groopman
March 2007, Houghton Mifflin Company
Jerome Groopman, M.D., holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has published more than 150 scientific articles.
When he received his honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 2002, he told how as an oncologist he had to tell a patient that he had no more drugs that could save her. But she told him that his friendship was a healing drug. In our dazzling hi-tech clinical world, with surgical instruments guided by robots that achieve superhuman precision, it is all too easy to overlook the type of medicine that is eternal, powerful, and can be administered by us all. The medicine of friendship is deeply grounded in Judaism, embodied in an ancient mitzvah, the mitzvah of bikur cholim, visiting the sick.
He contnued to relate that in the Talmud it is said that when you visit a sick person, you alleviate one sixtieth of the burden of their illness. And the rabbis further interpret the mitzvah of bikur cholim as being performed not only by men and by women but by God. Verses in Genesis indicate that Hashem appeared on a bikur cholim visit to Avraham after Avraham, 99 years old, circumcised himself and then took Ishmael, his son, and all the males in his household and circumcised them. In Genesis Chapter 18, Verse 1: "The Lord appeared to him by the terebinths of Mamre..."
But this is not the book.. this is just some background. Now here is info on the great book:
On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong -- with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can -- with our help -- avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses.
How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country's best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together. . Click the book cover to read more.








National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel
A Guide to Eastern Europe
by Ruth Ellen Gruber
March 2007, National Geographic
Journalist, author, and travel expert Ruth Ellen Gruber presents a new edition of her acclaimed 1992 guide to Jewish heritage sites in Eastern Europe. Widely acknowledged as the best and most comprehensive book of its kind, this is the only Jewish travel guidebook that takes visitors to hundreds of fascinating sites in small villages and remote hamlets as well as major cities. This expanded and updated edition includes new coverage of Austria, Ukraine, and Lithuania in addition to Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and all of the former Yugoslavia, areas that are the ancestral home to the great majority of North American Jews. Gruber provides specific historical and cultural information about these Central and Eastern European nations. Then she journeys across each country, exploring Jewish roots in major cities and small shtetls, describing the vestiges of each Jewish community and offering personal insights and reflections on the various people she meets. Readers will find a wealth of practical travel information throughout, including a language guide, listings of useful local addresses, and up-to-date details on sites that have only recently become accessible to visitors. From exploring the massive 16th-century synagogue in the historic Polish town of Pincrow to strolling among the 12,000 headstones crowded into the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, to meeting resident Jews proudly embracing their ancient culture in Slovenia, this volume takes you on a very special and memorable tour. Click the book cover to read more.








Count Us In
Growing Up with Down Syndrome
by Jason Kingsley and Mitchell Levitz
March 2007, Harvest
Kingsley and Levitz write about education, employment, ambitions, families, sex and marriage, and their disability--Down syndrome--in a dialogue format. At Jason's birth, the obstetrician said that he'd never learn anything and should be institutionalized. Fortunately, the Kingsleys ignored this advice, and their son has since attended school, written poetry, registered to vote, and memorized scripts for appearances on "Sesame Street" and "The Fall Guy." Mitchell is an equally successful young man whose mother was one of the founders of the Parent Assistance Committee on Down Syndrome. Hearing about Down syndrome directly from these young men has a good deal more impact than reading any guide from a professional or even a parent. Their comments are eye-opening and heartening. Click the book cover to read more.








SHALOM IN THE HOME
SAVVY ADVICE FOR A PEACEFUL HOME
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
March 2007. Meredith paperback
Feeling overwhelmed by your family life? Whether you're in crisis or just wish you were closer, family and relationship counselor Rabbi Shmuley Boteach can help. Influenced by his own experience as a child of divorce, the host of the TLC series Shalom in the Home gets to the heart of family dynamics and individual personalities to help families build deeper, more loving relationships. His insights and encouragements help you cope with all the most common domestic issues: relationships, parenting, in-laws, neighbors and more. "I'm here to inspire people to be good people first, a good couple second, and good parents third," says Shmuley. He illustrates how families can strengthen their bonds with unforgettable stories of families in crisis who undergo intensive counseling to improve their relationships and bring peace, or "shalom," to their homes . Click the book cover to read more.








UNCOVERING THE HOLOCAUST
THE INTERNATIONAL RECEPTION of NIGHT AND FOG
EDITED BY EWOUT VAN DER KNAAP, Utrecht
March 2007. Columbia
Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) was released in France in 1956 by Alain Resnais. Now, 50 years later, this book examines how it represented the Holocaust and how it was received worldwide. Click the book cover to read more.








Hey Luftmenschen!

She loved Chagall
and wasn't ashamed of that. -T Carmi

MARC CHAGALL
by Jonathan Wilson
March 2007. Schocken Books
From Publishers Weekly: Born Moishe Shagal in 1887, the son of a poor Orthodox Jewish laborer drew lifelong inspiration from his native Vitebsk, Belorussia. Chagall became famous for painting explosively colorful rooftop fiddlers, airborne cows and lovers floating above onion-domed churches, and a tallith-wrapped crucified Jesus. A victim of anti-Semitism who was ambivalent about his role as a Jewish artist, Chagall adorned churches and synagogues with stained-glass windows and often chose Christ as his symbol of martyrdom when depicting Jewish tragedies. Chagall's road to fame is mapped out by Wilson: his exposure, as a St. Petersburg student, to Matisse's dazzling palette; feverishly productive early years in Paris, where he absorbed an array of artistic influences; his immersion in politics in postrevolution Vitebsk, where he founded an art school; his return to Paris, where the legendary Vollard became his art dealer; and his New York exile during the Holocaust, where his beloved wife, Bella, died (he lived on for four more decades). Wilson's critiques (particularly of Chagall's "slippery" identity and his work's supposed sentimentality) are familiar, and this is less a fresh biography than a synthesis of writings by Benjamin Harshav, Chagall and his intimates. But Wilson (A Palestine Affair) is an incisive, lively writer. Domestic photos are included, but the omission of color reproductions of Chagall's oeuvre in this entry in the Jewish Encounters series is frustrating. Click the book cover to read more.








BABY LOVE
by Rebecca Walker
March 2007. Riverhead
From Publishers Weekly: The author of Black, White and Jewish gives voice to the uncertainty of her generation in a powerful new memoir. In journal format, beginning with the day her pregnancy is confirmed and ending as she and her partner bring their son home, Walker tells of her physical and emotional journey toward motherhood, poignantly reflecting on the ambivalence that has delayed her dream of having a child for years. Like many 20- and 30-somethings, she was raised to view partnership and parenthood as the least empowering choices in an infinite array of options. This tension comes to the fore as Walker's mother, Alice Walker, opposes her decision to have a baby and challenges her account of their relationship in Black, White and Jewish. Alice ends their relationship and removes Rebecca from her will, and Rebecca endures a tumultuous pregnancy, estranged from her mother as she prepares to become one herself. Elusive health complications arise, and she hops from doctor to doctor, ever wary of Western medicine. Through a lengthy litany of decisions (midwife versus M.D., stroller versus "travel system"), she Googles her way to information overload. At the end of this nine-month mental tug-of-war, she emerges changed: a meat eater, a committed partner with a renewed faith in intimacy, a new woman plus-one. Walker's story is accessible and richly textured, told with humor, wit and warmth. Click the book cover to read more.








TO BE AN ARAB IN ISRAEL
BY LAURENCE LOUER, Ceri-Paris
March 2007. Columbia
MS. LOUER is an Arabist and specializes in Middle East studies. From the cover... To Be an Arab in Israel fills a long-neglected gap in the study of Israel and the contemporary Arab world. Whether for ideological reasons or otherwise, both Israeli and Arab writers have yet to seriously consider Israel's significant minority of non-Jewish citizens, whose existence challenges common assumptions regarding Israel's exclusively Jewish character. Arabs have been a presence at all levels of the Israeli government since the foundation of the state. Laurence Louër begins her history in the 1980s when the Israeli political system began to take the Arab nationalist parties into account for the political negotiations over coalition building. Political parties-especially Labour-sought the votes of Arab citizens by making unusual promises such as ownership and access to land. The continuing rise of nationalist sentiments among Palestinians, however, threw the relationship between the Jewish state and the Arab minority into chaos. But as Louër demonstrates, "Palestinization" did not prompt the Arab citizens of Israel to set aside their Israeli citizenship. Rather, Israel's Arabs have sought to insert themselves into Israeli society while simultaneously celebrating their difference, and these efforts have led to a confrontation between two conceptions of society and two visions of Israel. Louër's fascinating book embraces the complexity of this history, revealing the surprising collusions and compromises that have led to alliances between Arab nationalists and Israeli authorities. She also addresses the current role of Israel's Arab elites, who have been educated at Hebrew-speaking universities, and the continuing absorption of militant Islamists into Israel's bureaucracy. Click the book cover to read more.








MENDEL'S ACCORDION
THE STORY OF THE KLEZMORIM
BY HEIDI SMITH HYDE
ILLUS BY JOHANNA VAN DER STERRE
March 2007. Kar-Ben
Ages 5 - 9. Mendel, a musician comes to America. Years later, Mendel's great grandson finds the dusty accordion in an attic and starts a klezmer band, too. Click the book cover to read more.








The Secret of Priest's Grotto
A Holocaust Survival Story
by Peter Lane Taylor and Christos Nicola
2007. Kar-Ben
Ages 10 and up, Grades 5 and up. From Booklist *Starred Review* Part survival adventure, part searing history, and part discovery story, this amazing account describes how three Ukrainian Jewish families survived the Holocaust by hiding in a cave near their village for 344 days. Sixty years later, in 2003, Nicola explored the cave and found signs of human habitation. His Internet searches eventually connected him with some of the survivors, now living in Canada and the U.S., from whom he learned how 38 people, including toddlers and a 75-year-old grandmother, fled the Nazis and lived in four underground rooms, sealed off from the outside world. Color photos take readers to the site and show some of the people now, while black-and-white historical ones give an idea of the past. Particularly moving are the images of the relics found at the site--a shoe, a mug, a key to a house left forever. Readers will want more about the Ukrainian peasant who helped the families, but there's no denying the power of the story; when they came outside after nearly a year underground, some of the people had forgotten the sun. Click the book cover to read more.








A Political Education
Coming of Age in Paris and New York
by Andre Schiffrin
March 21, 2007. Melville House
Andre Schiffrin's father was one of France's most important publishers, discovering Andre Gide and others. But the family had to flee Nazi-occupied Paris. They landed in New York, along with friends including Hannah Arendt and visitors such as Sartre. By the time Andre went to college, he felt more American than French. But family history left him unable to idly watch the rise of the American Right under Senator Joseph McCarthy. At Yale, he became a radicalized leftist, joining a student political group he -renamed Students for a Democratic Society-the SDS. Continuing his education at Cambridge, he befriended some of England's greatest publishers and discovered ways to channel his political interests through publishing. This absorbing saga about a tumultuous period is told from a unique perspective, encompassing both sides of the Atlantic and some of the leading figures of the day. It is also a fascinating glimpse into the development of a celebrated publisher and a passionate testament to the importance of books as a force for betterment. Click the book cover to read more.








Twenty-Six Reasons Why Jews Don't Believe In Jesus
by Asher Norman
Spring 2007. Feldheim
Rabbi Parry writes: This book is a Jewish answer to why Jews don't believe in Jesus. It is readable, well organized, and sometimes quite surprising. The author is candid yet very polite in his polemics. "Twenty-Six Reasons" shines the light of Torah on the theological issues. The author has found a creative way to present otherwise complex material in a simple manner that allows even a beginner to answer missionary challenges to Judaism. Click the book cover to read more.








Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible
by Karel van der Toorn
Spring 2007. Harvard University Press
Book Cover: We think of the Hebrew Bible as the Book--and yet it was produced by a largely nonliterate culture in which writing, editing, copying, interpretation, and public reading were the work of a professional elite. The scribes of ancient Israel are indeed the main figures behind the Hebrew Bible, and in this book Karel van der Toorn tells their story for the first time. His book considers the Bible in very specific historical terms, as the output of the scribal workshop of the Second Temple active in the period 500-200 BCE. Drawing comparisons with the scribal practices of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, van der Toorn clearly details the methods, the assumptions, and the material means of production that gave rise to biblical texts; then he brings his observations to bear on two important texts, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah. Traditionally seen as the copycats of antiquity, the scribes emerge here as the literate elite who held the key to the production as well as the transmission of texts. Van der Toorn's account of scribal culture opens a new perspective on the origins of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how the individual books of the Bible and the authors associated with them were products of the social and intellectual world of the scribes. By taking us inside that world, this book yields a new and arresting appreciation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Click the book cover to read more.








Schmucks!
Our Favorite Fakes, Frauds, Lowlifes, Liars, the Armed and Dangerous, and Good Guys Gone Bad
by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder
March 2007. Collins
Jackie Mason, one of the true kings of comedy, and his partner in crime, federal prosecutor and celebrity attorney Raoul Felder, go after America's lowlifes, scumbags, and everything else that really gets on their nerves. This book spares no one. Politicians, sports stars, celebrities, corporations, publishers, crossing guards-they're all fair game. If you are a scumbag, or just someone who Jackie and Raoul find annoying, there is a fair chance you are on the list. Schmucks! combines Mason's and Felder's nails-to-the-wall political satire with insightful observations on the foibles of modern life to create material that will leave you crying with laughter. Just a few of the Schmucks included are: Bill Clinton, Mel Gibson, Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, Barry Bonds, And a cast of hundreds. Click the book cover to read more.








MUST READ ALERT!!
Knowing the Enemy
Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror
by Mary Habeck
March 2007. Yale
After September 11, Americans agonized over why nineteen men hated the United States enough to kill three thousand civilians in an unprovoked assault. Analysts have offered a wide variety of explanations for the attack, but the one voice missing is that of the terrorists themselves. This penetrating book is the first to present the inner logic of al-Qa'ida and like-minded extremist groups by which they justify September 11 and other terrorist attacks. Mary Habeck explains that these extremist groups belong to a new movement-known as jihadism-with a specific ideology based on the thought of Muhammad ibn Abd al- Wahhab, Hasan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb. Jihadist ideology contains new definitions of the unity of God and of jihad, which allow members to call for the destruction of democracy and the United States and to murder innocent men, women, and children. Habeck also suggests how the United States might defeat the jihadis, using their own ideology against them.
From Booklist: *Starred Review* Yale historian Habeck takes Muslim terrorists at their word. They aren't envious of liberal democracy or the consumer society. Religion drives them--specifically, an exclusivist, triumphalist vision of Islam that Habeck calls jihadism to point up its holy-war-like character rather than its orthodoxy. The latter is problematic, for while jihadism is based on universally accepted Muslim principles and traditions, what it has forged out of them is highly controversial, not least because jihadists consider Muslims who disagree with them to be unbelievers as worthy of destruction as non-Muslims. Habeck traces the current of Islamic thought that eventuated in jihadism from an early-fourteenth-century scholar and the eighteenth-century founder of the harshly restrictive Islam predominant in Saudi Arabia to four twentieth--century figures who inspired a host of radical reactionary organizations, including Hamas and al-Qaeda. Habeck repeatedly reminds us that jihadists constitute a small minority, but she doesn't expound moderate Islam, much less Christianity or Judaism, to answer or refute jihadism. Her purpose is to reveal jihadism. So doing, in considerable detail and with admirable clarity, she contributes one of the most valuable books on the ongoing Middle East--and world--crisis. Click the book cover to read more.






Hamas
Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad
by Matthew Levitt, with a foreword by Dennis Ross
March 2007. Yale
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Levitt, formerly a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and now a deputy assistant secretary in the Treasury Department, has completed a timely assessment of one of the world's most prolific terrorist organizations. As Hamas wields increasing power within the Palestinian Authority, Levitt offers a sobering analysis of the group's likely priorities and of the quickly dimming prospects for peace in this most intractable of conflicts. Probably the most comprehensive study of the tactics, finances and structures of the Islamic resistance movement ever published, many of the details will primarily interest the specialist. In nine heavily annotated chapters, Levitt explores Hamas's infrastructure, laying out detailed blueprints for indoctrination, money laundering, public outreach and militant activities, charting the anatomy of a typical attack down to the cost of each bullet. Levitt's well-documented assertion that there is essentially no separation between Hamas's military wing and its myriad charitable activities leaves him less sanguine than many commentators in the wake of the recent legislative elections. Levitt is likely to gain some enemies with evidence that, for instance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is implicated in fund-raising for Hamas, but all his information is impeccably researched and compellingly presented. Click the book cover to read more.
Wash Post adds... In the spring of 1995 in Gaza City, I met Musa Ziyada, a 15-year-old boy with huge almond eyes. He had apparently been recruited by Hamas, the radical Islamist group, to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel -- a plot foiled at the last moment by Ziyada's alert uncle, an intelligence officer in the Palestinian Authority police force. Attracted to his local mosque from the age of 10, Ziyada was considered something of a prodigy in Koranic studies. He also played soccer on the mosque's Hamas-affiliated team, which refused to wear shorts. He was lured to his near-death -- or "martyrdom" -- with the promises that he would be rewarded with 70 virgins in Paradise and a free pass there for 70 relatives and friends. In those days, the Palestinian Authority was on to Hamas, eager to prove to Israel that it was fighting terror. But after the Islamists' surprise victory in the Palestinians' January 2006 parliamentary elections, Hamas is the Palestinian Authority -- a development that makes Matthew Levitt's revealing study both incredibly relevant and somewhat behind the times. Click book cover to read more of the review.





I DIDN'T KNOW THAT
By Joe Bobker
Spring 2007. Gefen
A humorous look at Jewish life. Is there a blessing for George Bush? Click the book cover to read more.








My Father's Secret War
A Memoir
by Lucinda Franks
March 2007. Mir a Max Books
From Publishers Weekly: One day, while trying to straighten up her elderly father's apartment, Franks discovered Nazi military paraphernalia, inspiring the Pulitzer-winning reporter and novelist (Wild Apples) to investigate what he really did during the Second World War. The painstaking inquiries are hampered by his reluctance to discuss his work in military intelligence, attached to the navy's Bureau of Ordnance. Some of that reluctance may have to do with the onset of dementia tearing away his memories, but he's also profoundly traumatized by some of his missions. In one moving passage, he is persuaded to describe his experience as one of the first American observers at a liberated concentration camp, every sentence still painful to get out even 50 years later. As Franks perseveres with her questions, she begins to understand how those experiences shaped their disintegrating postwar family life, but she acknowledges how difficult it is to achieve closure with this past, especially when she's afraid to confront the reality of his present condition. Even the most painful moments-as when she throws a particularly harrowing revelation back in her father's face to score revenge for adolescent resentments-are recounted with unflinching honesty as the military history takes a backseat to the powerful family drama.
The author is the wife of Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau. Book Description: In this moving and compelling memoir about parent and child, father and daughter, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, nearly impassive man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy behind enemy lines in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he began revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life as he became afflicted with Alzheimer's. His exploits revealed a man of remarkable bravado -- posing as a Nazi guard, slipping behind enemy lines to blow up ammunition dumps, and being flown to one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies to report on the atrocities found there.
My Father's Secret War is an intimate account of Franks coming to know her own father after years of estrangement. Looking back at letters he had written her mother in the early days of WWII, Franks glimpses a loving man full of warmth. But after the grimmest assignments of the war his tone shifts, settling into an all-too-familiar distance. Franks learns about him -- beyond the alcoholism and adultery -- and comes to know the man he once was. Her story is haunting, and beautifully told, even as the tragedy becomes clear: Franks finally comes to know her father, but only as he is slipping further into his illness. Lucinda Franks understands her father as the disease claims him. My Father's Secret War is a triumph of love over secrets, and a tribute to the power of the connection of family Click the book cover to read more.








WHY DO GOOD MEMBERS GO BAD? WHY DO GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS?
THE LUCIFER EFFECT
UNDERSTANDING HOW GOOD PEOPLE TURN EVIL
BY PHILIP ZIMBARDO
March 2007. Random House
What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it? Renowned social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the answers, and in The Lucifer Effect he explains how-and the myriad reasons why-we are all susceptible to the lure of "the dark side." Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. Zimbardo is perhaps best known as the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Here, for the first time and in detail, he tells the full story of this landmark study, in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into "guards" and "inmates" and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners. By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the "bad apple" with that of the "bad barrel"-the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around. This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically. Like Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, The Lucifer Effect is a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior. Click the book cover to read more.






SWEET AND LOW
BY RICH COHEN
March 2007. FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX
Now in paperback. 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 to read more.






APRIL 2007 BOOKS
HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE MONTH
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

One day I observed a grey hair in my head;
I plucked it right out, when it thus to me said:
"You may smile, if you wish, at your treatment of me,
But a score of my friends soon will make of you a mockery."
- Yehuda ha-Levi, Circa 1130 CE


Oh good... move over Mel Brooks.. a comic novel on the Holocaust... But seriously, this is a great book which is a satire on those who abuse the Holocaust and "Shoah Business" and the cult of competitive one up-man-ship of victimization
My Holocaust
A Novel
by Tova Reich
April 2007. HarperCollins
Maurice and Norman Messer, father-and-son business partners, know a good product when they see it. That product is the Holocaust, and Maurice, a Holocaust survivor with an inflated personal history, and Norman, enjoying vicarious victimhood as a participant in the second-generation movement, proceed to market it enthusiastically. Not even the disappearance of Nechama, Norman's daughter and Maurice's granddaughter, into the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, where she is transformed into a nun, Sister Consolatia of the Cross, deters them from pushing their agenda. Father and son embark on a tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which Maurice-now the driving force behind the most powerful Holocaust memorialization institution in America-organizes to soften up a potential major donor, and which Norman takes advantage of to embark on a surrealistic search for his daughter. At the death camp they run into assorted groups and individuals all clamoring for a piece of the Holocaust, including Buddhist New Agers on a retreat, Israeli schoolchildren on a required heritage pilgrimage, a Holocaust artifact hustler, filmmakers, and an astonishing collection of others. All hell breaks loose when Maurice's museum is taken over by a coalition of self-styled victims seeking Holocaust status, bringing together a vivid cast of all-too-human characters, from Holocaust professionals to Holocaust wannabees of every persuasion, in the fevered competition to win the grand prize of owning the Holocaust. An inspiringly courageous and shockingly original tour-de-force, My Holocaust dares to penetrate territory until now considered sacrosanct in its brilliantly provocative and darkly comic exploration of the uses and abuses of memory and the meaning of human suffering. Click on the book cover to read more.








THE PARIS PRESS LOVES THIS BOOK SO MUCH, IT IS THE ONLY BOOK THEY WILL PUBLISH THIS SEASON, so that they can focus solely on it Let's help them out!
By the way, this book's cover art is by Charlotte Solomon who was murdered in Auschwitz.
Tell Me Another Morning
An Autobiographical Novel
by Zdena Berger
April 1, 2007. Paris Press
WHEN THIS WAS first published in 1961, it was a sensation. But was overshadowed by Elie Wiesel's NIGHT. BUT WITH THE success of SUITE FRANCAISE, NIGHT, THE BOOK THIEF, and more, it is time for a reisssue of this classic
This autobiographical novel depicts a 14 year old teenage girl's experience in the Nazi concentration camps. As in The Diary of Anne Frank, Tania's youthful concerns are interwoven among accounts of extremity: her brother's murder, her mother's choice to stay with her father and die in the gas chamber rather than be transported to another camp, the saving friendships Tania develops, her relationships with young men and the guards. Throughout the novel we see claustrophobic uncertainty, grief, terror, exhaustion, and Tania's sustaining hope. Her return to Prague after the war is unforgettable and devastating, as she observes people wearing "normal" clothes, eating ice cream, and traveling on buses between work and home. There is no judgment, only the reality of two worlds existing simultaneously. Zdena Berger was born in 1925 in Prague, where she lived until the Nazi occupation. She spent the war years as a prisoner of Terezin, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. She was imprisoned at 16 and freed at 20. After the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Berger returned to Prague to complete her education, and then lived in Paris for nearly a decade. She immigrated to San Francisco in 1955 and now lives with her husband in the Bay Area. Tell Me Another Morning is her only book. Click the book cover to read more.








The Years of Extermination
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
By Saul Friedlander (UCLA)
April 10, 2007. HarperCollins
848 Pages
With The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer completes his major historical work on Nazi Germany and the Jews. The book describes and interprets the persecution and murder of the Jews throughout occupied Europe. The enactment of German extermination policies and measures depended on the cooperation of local authorities, the assistance of police forces, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. This implementation depended as well on the victims' readiness to submit to orders, often with the hope of attenuating them or of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. This multifaceted study-at all levels and in different places-enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity, and interrelatedness of the many components of this history. Based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices-mainly from diaries, letters, and memoirs-Saul Friedländer avoids domesticating the memory of these unprecedented and horrific events. The convergence of these various aspects gives a unique quality to The Years of Extermination. In this work, the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. In the second volume of his essential history of Nazi Germany and the Jews, one of the great historians of the Holocaust provides a rich, vivid depiction of Jewish life from France to Ukraine, Greece to Norway, in its most tragic period, drawing especially on hundreds of diaries written by Jews during their ordeal, depicting a world collapsing on its inhabitants, along with the thousands of humiliating persecutions that Jews suffered on their way to extermination. Friedländer also provides insightful discussions of the many interpretive controversies that still surround the history of Nazi Germany. He has been party to many of the debates, and he remains attuned to the most recent historical research. Friedländer knows the bureaucratic workings of the Third Reich as well as anyone, but refuses to see in that alone the explanation for the Holocaust. Instead, he focuses largely on cultural and ideological factors. He considers other factors, such as "the crisis of liberalism," but these were not the essential motives for the Holocaust, which, Friedländer says, was driven by sheer hatred of Jews, by "a redemptive anti-Semitism" espoused by Hitler, a belief that Germans could thrive only through the utter destruction of Jews. This is a masterful synthesis that draws on a lifetime of learning and research.
Click the book cover to read more.

Also... see his first volume:
Nazi Germany and the Jews
Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939
by Saul Friedlander
July 2007, paperback edition
Weidenfeld & Nicholson







A LIVING LENS
Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward
by Alana Newhouse
April 2007. WW Norton
This extraordinary volume features classic photographs of the history one has learned to associate with the Forward-Lower East Side pushcarts, Yiddish theater, labor rallies-along with gems no one would expect. The premiere national Jewish newspaper has opened up its never-before-seen archives, revealing a photographic landscape of Jews in the twentieth century and beyond. From shtetl beauty contests and matchmakers caught mid-deal to the streets of the New World; from diaspora communities and mandate Palestine to the Holocaust, the Soviet Jewry movement, and the emergence of Jewish suburbia; from Paul Muni and Barbra Streisand to Woody Allen and Madonna-this book is a kaleidoscopic array of modern Jewish life. Original essays are included by leading intellectuals and historians, including Leon Wieseltier, J. Hoberman, Roger Kahn, and Deborah E. Lipstadt, plus an introduction by Pete Hamill. A great gift book in the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World and Frederic Brenner's Diaspora: Homelands in Exile. 531 duotone photographs. Click the book cover to read more.








Einstein: His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson
April 2007. Simon and Schuster
From Publishers Weekly: Acclaimed biographer Isaacson examines the remarkable life of "science's preeminent poster boy" in this lucid account (after 2003's Benjamin Franklin and 1992's Kissinger). Contrary to popular myth, the German-Jewish schoolboy Albert Einstein not only excelled in math, he mastered calculus before he was 15. Young Albert's dislike for rote learning, however, led him to compare his teachers to "drill sergeants." That antipathy was symptomatic of Einstein's love of individual and intellectual freedom, beliefs the author revisits as he relates his subject's life and work in the context of world and political events that shaped both, from WWI and II and their aftermath through the Cold War. Isaacson presents Einstein's research-his efforts to understand space and time, resulting in four extraordinary papers in 1905 that introduced the world to special relativity, and his later work on unified field theory-without equations and for the general reader. Isaacson focuses more on Einstein the man: charismatic and passionate, often careless about personal affairs; outspoken and unapologetic about his belief that no one should have to give up personal freedoms to support a state. Fifty years after his death, Isaacson reminds us why Einstein (1879-1955) remains one of the most celebrated figures of the 20th century. Click the book cover to read more.





For those more into the DARK SIDE of Einstein's traits...
Einstein
A Biography
by Jurgen Neffe, Translated by Shelley Frisch
Spring 2007. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Albert Einstein is an icon of the twentieth century. Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, he is most famous for his theory of relativity. He also made enormous contributions to quantum mechanics and cosmology, and for his work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. A self-pronounced pacifist, humanist, and, late in his life, democratic socialist, Einstein was also deeply concerned with the social impact of his discoveries. Much of Einstein's life is shrouded in legend. From popular images and advertisements to various works of theater and fiction, he has come to signify so many things. In Einstein: A Biography, Jürgen Neffe presents a clear and probing portrait of the man behind the myth. Unearthing new documents, including a series of previously unknown letters from Einstein to his sons, which shed new light on his role as a father, Neffe paints a rich portrait of the tumultuous years in which Einstein lived and worked. And with a background in the sciences, he describes and contextualizes Einstein's enormous contributions to our scientific legacy.



MUHAMMAD'S GRAVE
DEATH RITES AND THE MAKING OF ISLAMIC SOCIETY
By Leor Helaevi, Texas A&M
April 2007. Columbia
In his probing study of the role of death rites in the making of Islamic society, Leor Halevi imaginatively plays prescriptive texts against material culture and advances new ways of interpreting highly contested sources. His original research reveals that religious scholars of the early Islamic period produced codes of funerary law not only to define the handling of a Muslim corpse but also to transform everyday urban practices. Relying on oral traditions, these scholars established new social patterns in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. They distinguished Islamic rites from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian rites and changed the way men and women interacted publicly and privately. In each chapter Halevi explores a different layer of human interaction, following the movement of the corpse from the deathbed to the grave. In the process he analyzes the real and imaginary relationships between husbands and wives, prayer leaders and mourners, and even dreamers and the dead. He describes how Muslims wailed for the deceased, prepared corpses for burial, marched in funerary processions, and prayed for the dead, highlighting the specific economic and political factors involved in these rituals as well as key religious and sexual divisions. Offering a unique perspective on the making of Islamic social and religious ideals during this early period, Halevi forges a fascinating link between the development of funerary rites and the efforts of an emerging religion to carve out its own, distinct identity. Muhammad's Grave is a groundbreaking history of the rise of Islam and the roots of contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the body and society. Click the book cover to read more.








FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES
BY NATHAN ENGLANDER
Reissue Spring 2007 paperback, Vintage
"I suffer greatly under the urges with which I have been blessed," says Dov Binyamin, an orthodox Jew agonizing over his wife Chava's self-imposed celibacy, and one of several protagonists in Englander's stellar first collection who seek often ill-fitting rabbinical answers to thorny modern problems. When Dov's rebbe grants him authorization to see a prostitute, the consequences (not least of which is a case of VD) offer a moral fable of pathos and hilarity that is the signature key of these nine graceful and remarkably self-assured stories. Ranging expertly from contemporary Israel to New York and to isolated Yiddish communities in Russia and Europe, they spin a vision of 20th-century orthodox Judaism under siege from both political tyranny and the rapid pace of modern life. Englander's prose is spare and crystalline, capturing the singsong rhythms and sometimes contorted English of a primarily Yiddish cast, often striking a deliberately archaic tone, as in "The 27th Man," the Chekhovian tale of Pinchas Pelovits, a dreamy, unpublished writer in midcentury Russia. Not unlike Englander, Pinchas has "constructed his own world with a compassionate God and a diverse group of worshipers. In it, he tested these people with moral dilemmas and tragedies." Abducted by Stalin's henchmen, Pinchas composes a miniature masterpiece, a parable of faith in spite of an absent God, which he recites to his cell mates only minutes before being gunned down by a firing squad. Despite their surface mixture of humor and horror, these are stories of ideas, offering complex meditations on Judaism through the eyes of an astonishing range of characters: a disconsolate middle-age orthodox woman imprisoned in limbo by a husband who won't grant a divorce; a Cheeveresque Park Avenue financial analyst with a taxi-cab epiphany that he's Jewish; an American navigating the streets of contemporary Jerusalem during a terrorist campaign. Englander's reported $350,000 advance for this collection has made it one of the most bruited literary debuts of the year. Such brouhaha shouldn't cloud the achievement of these unpretentious and powerful stories. Click the book cover to read more.






The Ministry of Special Cases
by Nathan Englander
Spring 2007 Knopf
From Publishers Weekly: Reviewed by Allegra Goodman
Young writers are often told to write about what they know. In his 1999 collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander spun the material of his orthodox Jewish background into marvelous fiction. But the real trick to writing about what you know is to make sure you know more as you mature. Englander's first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, conjures a world far removed from "The Gilgul of Second Avenue." The novel is set in 1976 in Buenos Aires during Argentina's "dirty war." Kaddish Poznan, hijo de puta, son of a whore, earns a meager living defacing gravestones of Jewish whores and pimps whose more respectable children want to erase their immigrant parents' names and forget their shameful activities. Kaddish labors in the Jewish cemetery at night. His hardworking wife, Lillian, toils in an insurance agency by day, and their idealistic son, Pato, attends college, goes to concerts and smokes pot with his friends. When Pato is taken from home, Kaddish learns what it really means to erase identity, because no one in authority will admit Pato has been arrested. No one will even acknowledge that Pato existed. As Lillian and Kaddish attempt to penetrate the Ministry of Special Cases, Englander's novel takes on an epic quality in which Jewish parents descend into the underworld and journey through circles of hell. Gogol, I.B. Singer and Orwell all come to mind, but Englander's book is unique in its layering of Jewish tradition and totalitarian obliteration. At times Englander's motifs seem forced. Kaddish, whose very name evokes the memory of the dead, chisels out the name of a plastic surgeon's disreputable father, and in lieu of cash receives nose jobs for himself and his wife. Lillian's nose job is at first unsuccessful, and her nose slides off her face. One form of defacement pays for another. Kaddish fights with his son in the cemetery and accidentally slices off the tip of Pato's finger. Attempting to erase a letter, Kaddish blights a digit. But the fight seems staged, Pato's presence unwarranted except for Englander's schema. Other scenes are haunting: Lillian confronting bureaucrats; Kaddish appealing to a rabbi to learn if it is possible for a Jew to have a funeral without a body; Kaddish picking an embarrassing embroidered name off the velvet curtain in front of the ark in the synagogue. When he picks off the gold thread, the name stands out even more prominently because the velvet underneath the embroidery is unfaded, darker than the rest of the fabric. Englander writes with increasing power and authority in the second half of his book; he probes deeper and deeper, looking at what absence means, reading the shadow letters on history's curtain. Click the book cover to read more.






Have you ever sampled the work of Britain's Philip Roth??
Give this novel of his a try... :
KALOOKI NIGHTS
A novel
By HOWARD JACOBSON
Spring 2007 Simon and Schuster
From Booklist: *Starred Review* Cartoonist Max Glickman's Jewishness, never far from mind, is his continuing subject. Raised in a nonobservant household outside Manchester, England, in the 1950s--where his atheist father sought to make Jewishness less of a burden and his mother played kalooki, a rummylike game favored by Jews--he was educated on the Holocaust by childhood friends. It was meek Manny Washinsky who first shared the Scourge of the Swastica, leading the two of them to develop the comic-book-history Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, later published by Max. And it was Manny who would murder his parents, gassing them in their beds, a deed that Max at midlife seeks to understand, initially in the interest of making a film. Jacobson's work has been described as seriously funny, and this fits that bill, ranging from theological debate (where was Elohim during Jewish persecutions?) to Max's accounts of his three marriages (to two shiksas and one Jewess, all with umlauts or diaereses in their names) to the descriptions of his cartoons. Jacobson's prose is pure pleasure--concise, markedly insightful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny--and his message, ultimately, is a heartbreaker. An exceptional novel.





Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky
Paperback release April 2007, Vintage
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing-with compassion and clarity-on individual human dramas.. Click the book cover to read more.








David and Solomon
In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition
by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
Now in Paperback. April 2007. Free Press
Read a full excerpt here: http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=526035&agid=2

The historical reality of ancient Judah gave rise both to a dynasty and to a legend that was transformed and expanded in a process of historical reinterpretation that continues even today. This books shows how the images of David and Solomon evolved through the ages in response to pressures from the clergy and politics. Contexts got garbled, details to the story were added, and meanings changed. The book also examines why these two kings grew in importance in the Western tradition until they became the cornerstones of the Jewish tradition and powerful Christian metaphors for the church.
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Lacking clear archeological evidence or extrabiblical testimony, biblical scholars are often challenged in persuading a skeptical world that the Bible's characters really existed and that their stories are actual historical records. The task of separating myth from history can be a daunting one. Finkelstein and Silberman, both renowned archaeologists (Finkelstein chairs the archaeology department [at Tel Aviv University; Silberman is a contributing editor to Archaeology magazine), take a different approach: integrating ancient heroic and warrior archetypes into the lives of the kings of Israel, thus synthesizing history and myth in support of the religious endeavor. The authors are careful to note that the absence of contemporary confirmation outside the Bible is no reason to believe that the characters did not actually exist. Rather, the biblical stories form the basis for a legend tradition in which the Davidic legacy gradually transforms "from a down-to-earth political program into the symbols of a transcendent religious faith that would spread throughout the world." Finkelstein and Silberman, who also had a winner with The Bible Unearthed, tell their story in a clear and easily understood manner, never boring but always challenging.
Click the book cover to read more.








The Diary of Petr Ginz
Edited by Chava Pressburger, Translated by Elena Lappin
APRIL 2007. Atlantic Monthly Press
Ages 9-12
Lost for sixty years in a Prague attic, this secret diary of a teenage prodigy killed at Auschwitz is an extraordinary literary discovery, an intimately candid, deeply affecting account of a childhood compromised by Nazi tyranny. As a fourteen-year old Jewish boy living in Prague in the early 1940s, Petr Ginz dutifully records the increasingly precarious texture of daily life. With a child's keen eye for the absurd and the tragic, he muses on the prank he played on his science class and then just pages later, reveals that his cousins have been called to relinquish all their possessions, having been summoned east in the next transport. The diary ends with Petr's own summons to Thereisenstadt, where he would become the driving force behind the secret newspaper Vedem, and where he would continue to draw, paint, write, and read, furiously educating himself for a future he would never see. Fortunately, Petr's voice lives on in his diary, a fresh, startling, and invaluable historical document and a testament to one remarkable child's insuppressible hunger for life. Click the book cover to read more.








I Can't Believe I'm Still Single
Sane, Slightly Neurotic (but in a Sane Way) Filmmaker into Good Yoga, Bad Reality TV, Too Much Chocolate, and a Little ... Point Anyone Who'll Let Me Watch Football
by Eric Schaeffer
APRIL 2007. Thunders Bay
Eric Schaeffer has always believed that when the time was right and he was ready that he would find the Big One (an intelligent, sexy, loving wife). But his last girlfriend said no to his proposal, and since then he hasn't met anyone he wanted to have a second date with. This is a wild, sometimes raunchy, sometimes poignant, and always honest account of a semi-famous man's attempts at love. See also: icantbelieveimstillsingle.com Click the book cover to read more.








NAKBA
PALESTINE, 1948, AND THE CLAIMS OF MEMORY
EDITYED BY AHMAD H. SA'DI and LILA ABU LUGHOD
April 2007. Columbia
For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past. By focusing on memories of the Nakba, or "catastrophe," of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress. The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost. Nakba brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present. Click the book cover to read more.








KAFKA AND CULTURAL ZIONISM
DATES IN PALESTINE
BY IRIS BRUCE, McMaster University
April 2007. University of Wisconsin Press
A portrait of the life of Kafka by a top Kafka schaolr. This is an analysis of his Jewish identity. His interest in Zionism demonstrates the presence of Jewish themes and motifs in his literary works. Kafka was engaged with his cultural identity and his works must be read in light of this. Click the book cover to read more.








Behind The scenes...
The Power of the Vote
Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators, and Promoting Democracy Around the World
by Douglas E. Schoen
April 2007. Morrow
Do you remember how two years into Clinton's administration, after Don't Ask Don't Tell, and the healthcare debacle, his administration was losing support, and the Republicans swept into Congress in 1994? Do you think Clinton won in 1996 by magic? It was the polling research by Schoen and his firm that helped Clinton recraft his image. Douglas E. Schoen is a founding partner and principal strategist of Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc., a leading political consulting firm. While David Garth, Pat Caddell, Sawyer/Miller, Weber Shandwick, Napolitan, and others were household names in polling, political messaging, and prime voter analysis, Penn & Schoen have flown under the popular radar for over two decades. Over the past twenty years, Schoen and his firm have provided advice to clients including President Bill Clinton; Senators Hillary Clinton, Jon Corzine, John D. Rockefeller IV, and Mark Dayton; Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel; President Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic; Ed Koch and many other national and international figures. They even told Koch he would lose a primary for NY State governor. He fired them and then apologized after their analysis was shown to be accurate. IN this book, Schoen provides an inside look at campaigns and elections. Of course, not even all the polling in the world could have helped Schoen win a Congressional seat in Queens against the popular Gary Ackerman, but nevertheless, this book is chock full of stories in which polling helped change campaign strategies and win elections. Click the book cover to read more.








Still need a another political book... ?
No Excuses
Concessions of a Serial Campaigner
by Robert Shrum
June 2007. Simon and Schuster
He was named by The Atlantic Monthly as "the most sought-after strategist in the Democratic party." He was targeted by National Review as the Democratic Party's "poet goon." From his unique perspective, Robert Shrum gives us an epic and personal story of the struggle for power in America during the past four decades. With wit and humor, rare candor, and a wealth of detail, he vividly recounts the real personalities and real forces that shaped the outcome of the closest and most important elections of our time. We are there with Shrum in the back rooms, on the planes, and in the motorcades with Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Shrum reveals the manipulations and limitations of old and new forms of political persuasion, from the historic and sometimes controversial speeches he wrote to the negative ads he created for national and statewide candidates, from prepping presidential nominees for critical debates to the deployment of the new political weapon, the Internet. He lifts the curtain on decisive moments. Did John Kerry and John Edwards actually believe in the Iraq war they voted for? What was the real reason the Kerry campaign didn't respond faster to the Swift Boat attacks? Why didn't Al Gore let Bill Clinton campaign all-out in 2000? How did Clinton get through the first perilous week of the Lewinsky scandal? This is a provocative journey through recent history: George McGovern's antiwar campaign of 1972, the improbable rise of Jimmy Carter, Senate campaigns that made historic breakthroughs and shaped the presidential contests of the future, the gifts that made Bill Clinton a great politician -- and the circumstances and calculations that kept him from being a great president. As strategist, adviser, and often friend to the leaders he enlisted with, Shrum shows them as they are, with their strengths and human weaknesses -- as well as his own. Assailed as a populist who pushed the Democratic Party, in a phrase he coined, "to stand for the people, not the powerful," Shrum argues that unlike Republicans from Reagan on, Democrats fall short, politically or in office, when they trim their convictions and walk away from fundamental issues -- like universal health coverage. This is one of the most fascinating books ever written about the victories and defeats, the causes and candidates, the "flawed heroes" that drive the high drama of American politics. Click the book cover to read more.








ONCE UPON A COUNTRY
A PALESTINIAN LIFE
By SARI NUSSEIBEH WITH ANTHONY DAVID
April 2007. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
A prominent Palestinian's searching, anguished, deeply affecting autobiography, in which his life story comes to be the story of the recent history of his country. Sari Nusseibeh's autobiography is a remarkable book-one in which his dramatic life story and that of his embattled country converge in a work of great passion, depth, and emotional power.
Nusseibeh was raised to represent his country. His family's roots in Palestine traced back to the Middle Ages, and his father was the governor of Jerusalem. Educated at Oxford, he was trained to build upon his father's support for coexistence and a negotiated solution to the problems of the region. But the wars of 1967 and 1973 spelled the beginning of the end for the vision of a unified Palestine-and Nusseibeh's response to these events, and to those that followed, gives us the recent history from a Palestinian point of view as no book has done. From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at Hebrew University through his appointment by Yassir Arafat to administer Arab Jerusalem, he holds fast to a two-state solution, even as the powers around him insist that it is impossible. As Palestine is torn apart by settlements and barricades, corruption and violence, Nusseibeh remains true to the ideals of his youth, determined to keep hold of some faint hope for the life of his country. Once Upon a Country is a book with the scope and vitality of an old-fashioned novel-one whose ending is still uncertain. Click the book cover to read more.








When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad
by Mona Yahia
April 2007. Braziller
Winner of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Fiction. In this vivid story of growing up in Baghdad, Mona Yahia tells a very personal story set against the backdrop of political upheaval and an increasingly fractured society. Lina clings to childhood and the security of her youth during the last peaceful period for the 2500-year-old Jewish community in Iraq. When that peace begins to crumble, the usual uncertainties of adolescence are augmented by growing fear following the increasingly anti-Semitic rhetoric from the government and outbreaks of violence which ultimately drive out nearly all of the remaining 150,000 Jews in Baghdad. As Lina struggles to understand these dark changes in Iraq, her first love is forced to flee, her father loses his job, her brother is arrested, and her young friend must search among the bodies of hanged Jews for his imprisoned father. As violent coups, arrests, and executions become everyday occurrences, Lina's family must leave the country they have called home for generations. In the dangerous flight to the border, they must evade the security police, traverse perilous mountains, and entrust their lives and safety to strangers. The book will resonate with audiences of all ages. Click the book cover to read more.








The Diary of Mary Berg
Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto
by Mary Berg
Edited by S L Schneiderman
Intro by Susan Lee Pentlin, trans by Norbert Gutterman and Sylvia Glass
April 2007. Oneworld-Publications.com
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Today I am fifteen years old. I feel very old and lonely.... Everyone is afraid to go out. The Germans are here." So begins this extraordinary memoir of Jewish life in Lodz, Poland, and the Warsaw ghetto as the Nazis began to liquidate its starving and disease-ridden inmates. In 1940 Berg fled Lodz with her parents and sister. They lived in the Warsaw ghetto, and in July 1942 were transferred to Pawiak prison within the ghetto. Originally published in the U.S. in February 1945, the memoir is based on notebooks that Mary Berg (née Wattenberg) smuggled out of Europe when she and her interned family were traded for German prisoners and sailed to America. This powerful testament documents Nazi brutalities, and the difference between those without means, who starved and died of typhus, and the more privileged, like Berg's family (her mother was American and her father relatively wealthy), who, for a time, were able to patronize ghetto cafes and attend the theater. Berg is a remarkably clear-eyed, skillful and heart-breaking recorder of those terrible years. Click the book cover to read more.








ISRAEL AND PALESTINE:
PEACE PLANS FROM OSLO TO DISENGAGEMENT
BY GALIA GOLAN, Herzliya and Darwin Professor Emerita of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
April 2007. Markus Wiener
The Oslo Accords, inaugurated with the historic Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, marked a promising breakthrough for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These Accords, however, turned out to be but the first in a series of numerous proposals and plans over the next ten years, all designed to cope with repeated failures and disappointments as well as the major issues of the conflict itself. Golan explores these plans and proposals, concentrating on the key issues addressed by the parties directly involved, along with the contributions of the Americans, the Quartet as a whole, and the Arab League. This book is a valuable resource for understanding the conflict, the issues involved and the prospects for peaceful resolution. Click the book cover to read more.








The Godfile
Ten Approaches to Personalizing Prayer
by Aryeh Ben David
April 2007. Devora Press
Do you ever feel disconnected from God? Do you ever experience the stirrings of spirituality, only to get stuck as you move onward? Do you wonder if there is more than one approach to prayer? That's why we need a Godfile. The Godfile encompasses our relationship with God. It consists of times when we are in dialogue with God and our belief is intact, and times when we sorely feel an absence. The ten approaches to prayer in this book are based on the writings of great thinkers, rabbis and personalities of the past 200 years. Each possesses a different aspect of truth. And each approach possesses an element of truth that may be helpful at different times. Several minutes of focus on any one of these ideas will transform your entire experience of prayer in the synagogue, at home, and in your heart. Rabbi Aryeh Ben David is the Founder and Director of Ayeka: Center for Jewish Spiritual Education. He serves as the Rabbinical Educational Consultant for Hillel International, lecturing throughout the USA and internationally, and is the Director of Spiritual Education and Senior Faculty member of Pardes Institute in Jerusalem. Rabbi Ben David also served as the Educational Director of the Jerusalem campus of Livnot Click the book cover to read more.








Understanding the Afterlife in this Life
By Bernie Kastner
April 2007. Devora Press
Imagine you were told that you could glimpse the "other side," would you dare look? Could you hold yourself back from not looking? In this unique compendium of knowledge from modern science, the Torah and from human experience, the author helps us take the dare and exposes us to ideas and images of the afterlife as we know them. He brings together a variety of sources, stories and anecdotal evidence that will give the reader the courage to taste what awaits us next. In so doing, he shows us, in a most convincing way, that our lives don't end at death - in fact, we live on in a continuum of life. The basic premise of this eye-opening book is that we need to study the afterlife as early as possible and not wait until one reaches their golden years or becomes seriously ill. There is much value in the reading of eye-witness accounts of near-death experiences, becoming aware of what kabbalah has to teach, and by learning the powerful words of the Talmud. The sooner we can internalize these concepts, the faster we will get on course toward living a happier and more fulfilling life here in this world. Dr. Bernie D. Kastner's research has focused on new therapeutic approaches in dealing with death anxiety, end-of-life issues, and bereavement with particular emphasis on personal growth and healing. Click the book cover to read more.








A SHOUT IN THE SUNSHINE
By MARA W. COHEN IOANNIDES (Missouri State Univ)
April 2007. JPS Jewish Publication Society
Ages 10 and up.
Set in 15th-century Greece, this young adult novel tells the story of an extraordinary friendship between two boys from different cultural backgrounds. On the surface, Miguel, a refugee from post-Inquisition Spain, and David, the son of a wealthy Greek Jewish fabric merchant, have little in common. As they work together in David's family shop, they find they share a special connection that goes beyond the divide of rich and poor, Spanish and Greek. Will an argument over David's sister be more than their friendship can bear? A Shout in the Sunshine sheds light on an often forgotten part of Jewish history - the Greek Jewish experience. Set in tumultuous times for the Greek Jewish community, the book explores what happens when two distinct Jewish communities must learn to live together. In 1492 King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Jewish community of Spain. Sultan Beyazit II invited these refugees to Thessalonika, a community already home to a diverse Jewish population with deep roots in Greece. The melding of these different Jewish groups created a vibrant Jewish community that was, tragically, almost entirely destroyed during World War II. This book is a testimony to the remarkable nature of this once thriving world. Click the book cover to read more.








SAVING THE JEWS
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE HOLOCAUST
By ROBERT n. ROSEN,
Foreword by Gerhard Weinberg, Afterword by Alan M. Dershowitz
Now in PAPERBACK
April 2007. Thunders Mouth
From Publishers Weekly: Was FDR an indifferent or possibly anti-Semitic president who abandoned European Jews, or was he a pragmatic leader who understood that the key to saving the Jews was winning WWII as swiftly as possible? This bloated, repetitious volume reads like one long apology as it takes on the so-called "revisionist" historians who question FDR's good will; it concludes that he should be "honored for [his] actions during World War II, not defamed." According to Rosen (The Jewish Confederates), FDR may have told ethnic jokes about Jews, but he also surrounded himself with Jewish friends and advisers like Henry Morgenthau Jr. FDR didn't have the political clout to change American immigration laws, and two-thirds of the refugees on the SS St. Louis, who were refused entry to the U.S. in 1939, are believed to have survived the war. Roosevelt probably didn't know about requests by various Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz, an action that, Rosen says would have killed Anne Frank and other innocents. Although Rosen is able to debunk some of the more overheated claims put forth four decades ago by Arthur Morse in While Six Million Died, his often simplistic arguments don't undo landmark works like David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews. Click the book cover to read more.








COMEDY BY THE NUMBER
Edited By Eric Hoffman and Gary Rudoren
April 2007. McSweeney's
Being funny is hard work: just ask Gary Rudoren and Eric Hoffman. Like many people, they once believed that comedy was simply a matter of coming up with "zingers" and "jokes." After countless hours of painstaking research, they've discovered that true creativity is derived from simple formulas and the memorization of data. Their groundbreaking new book makes the secrets of comedy accessible to all, not only to the naturally funny, but to those who lack the intrinsic ability or talent to be funny. With Comedy By The Numbers, readers no longer need worry about originality. They simply choose from the book's comedic blueprints - and hilarity ensues! A comprehensive list of comedy characters, bits, scenarios, sketches, skits, shtick, and more helps readers build a memory bank of funny material. Special hints, tips, comedy history, hilariously funny comedy facts, and inside secrets from Bob Odenkirk and other seriously funny people provide additional aid and amusement. Click the book cover to read more.








The Occupation of Iraq
Winning the War, Losing the Peace
by Ali A. Allawi
April 2007. Yale
From Publishers Weekly: Allawi, until recently a senior minister in the Iraqi government, provides an insider's account of the nascent Iraqi government following the American invasion. His scholarly yet immensely readable exposition of Iraqi society and politics will likely become the standard reference on post-9/11 Iraq. It convincingly blasts the Coalition Provisional Authority for failing to understand the simmering sectarian animosity and conflicting loyalties that led Iraq into chaos. Beginning during Saddam's reign, among the motley gang of liberal democrats, Islamists and Kurdish nationalists that formed the opposition-in-exile, of which Allawi was a prominent member, he chronicles the fortunes and aspirations of the political parties, personalities and interest groups that now are tearing Iraq apart. In one representative episode, after the siege of Fallujah in 2004, the Marines initiated an ill-fated attempt to create a Fallujah Brigade of local men who would be loyal to the CPA. "[Head of the CPA L. Paul] Bremer... learned about it from newspaper reports.... The defense minister [Allawi himself] went on television, denouncing the Fallujah Brigade.... The 'Fallujah Brigade,' after a few weeks of apparent cooperation with the Marines, began to act as the core of a national liberation army. Any pretense that they were rooting out insurgents was dropped." Click the book cover to read more.








The Lady Upstairs
Dorothy Schiff and the New York Post
by Marilyn Nissenson
April 2007. St Martin's Press
From Booklist: *Starred Review* Unlike the better-known Katharine Graham, Schiff did not inherit the control and operation of a national newspaper. Instead, she bought it. In 1939, Schiff bought the New York Post, to this day the longest continually published newspaper in the U.S. In this tantalizing biography, Nissenson reveals a fascinating woman who managed the Post from 1939 until 1976, when she sold it to Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch, ending the paper's career as an important voice of American liberal thought. Nissenson offers an intertwined look at the life of Schiff and the Post during the major social and political developments of American life, including the decline of postwar American liberalism. Schiff, the daughter of a prominent German-Jewish banking family, eschewed the life of a socialite and took up the newspaper business and liberal causes. The Post helped bring down Joseph McCarthy, broke the story of President Nixon's slush fund, and fostered the careers of renowned reporters Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill. Schiff's personal life was aglitter with romances with prominent men, including Franklin Roosevelt, and she was not averse to using her social status and personal charm to advance the Post. A thrilling biography. Click the book cover to read more.








The Inheritance of Exile
Stories from South Philly
by Susan Muaddi Darraj
April 2007. Notre Dame
In The Inheritance of Exile, Susan Muaddi Darraj expertly weaves a tapestry of the events and struggles in the lives of four Arab-American women. Hanan, Nadia, Reema, and Aliyah search for a meaningful sense of home, caught in the cultural gap that exists between the Middle East and the United States. Daughters of Palestinian immigrants who have settled into South Philly, each struggles to reconcile her Arab identity with her American one. Muaddi Darraj adds the perspectives of the girls' mothers, presented in separate stories, which illuminate the often troubled relationship between first and second generations of immigrants. Click the book cover to read more.








The Last Tycoons
The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
by William D. Cohan
2007, Doubleday
grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street's most storied investment bank Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built. William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company. Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds between Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society, and between the man who controlled Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his chosen successor, Bruce Wasserstein. Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s, saves New York City from bankruptcy, and positions himself in New York society and in Washington. Felix's dreams are dashed after the arrival of Steve, a formidable and ambitious former newspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its 150th anniversary, Steve and Felix were feuding openly. The internal strife caused by their arguments could not be solved by the imperious Michel, whose manipulative tendencies served only to exacerbate the trouble within the firm. Increasingly desperate, Michel took the unprecedented step of relinquishing operational control of Lazard to one of the few Great Men still around, Bruce Wasserstein, then fresh from selling his own M&A boutique, for $1.4 billion. Bruce's take: more than $600 million. But it turned out Great Man Bruce had snookered Great Man Michel when the Frenchman was at his most vulnerable.








Threshold Resistance
The Extraordinary Career of a Luxury Retailing Pioneer
by A. Alfred Taubman
2007, Doubleday
In this candid memoir, A. Alfred Taubman explains how a dyslexic Jewish kid from Detroit grew up to be a billionaire retailing pioneer, an intimate of European aristocrats and Palm Beach socialites, a respected philanthropist and, at age 78, a federal prisoner. With a unique blend of humor and genius, Taubman shows how selling fine art and antiques really isn't that different from marketing root beer or football, and offers penetrating insights into that quintessential palace of commerce, the luxury shopping mall. Alfred Taubman may not have invented the modern shopping center but, in the words of The New Yorker, "he perfected it." Taubman's life has been a storybook success, with its share of unique challenges. A pioneer builder and innovative real estate developer, he was also a brilliant land speculator, operator of a quick-serve restaurant chain, and owner of a major department store company. But what seemed like the pinnacle of his career, buying and reinventing the venerable art auction house Sotheby's, would lead to his conviction in an international price fixing scandal. Despite the twists and turns, Taubman's life and business philosophy can be summed up in one evocative phrase: Threshold Resistance. Understanding and defeating that force-breaking down the barriers between art and commerce, between shoppers and merchandise, between high culture and popular taste-has been his life's work.








SIMPLE WISDOM
MODERN TALES FROM CHELM
BY LEO SHATIN, PhD
SYREN BOOK COMPANY, APRIL 2007
In Simple Wisdom: Modern Tales from Chelm, storyteller Leo Shatin captures the flavor of life in the Eastern European Jewish community of Chelm (where there are no thieves, because there is little to steal), interweaving current social and psychological concepts through the escapades of the Three Tamen : Lazer, Coilee, and Moishe. These uncomplicated (many might mistakenly say foolish), but always kindhearted, men follow in the comic tradition of their renowned Hollywood kinsmen, Larry, Curly, and Moe. In one escapade after another, Lazer, Coilee, and Moishe display an uncanny knack of approaching life s ordinary dilemmas with convoluted and frequently outlandish solutions that all too often go awry. However, despite being repeatedly scoffed at and taken advantage of, these lovable, and loving characters never fail to see the good in their fellow human beings. Shatin s witty and thought-provoking stories are rooted in Jewish and Yiddish traditions and touch on themes that affect everyone Jew and non-Jew in our contemporary world of uncertainties and miscommunications. All of us, no matter how sophisticated and enlightened we might think we are, have much to learn from the philosophical ponderings and head-scratching logic of the Three Tamen from Chelm.
Leo Shatin received his Ph.D. in the Department of Social Relations of Harvard University. He was professor of clinical psychiatry at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City prior to his retirement and is the author of numerous scientific articles. He lives in Boca Raton, Florida.





Lust in Translation
The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
by Pamela Druckerman
April 2007, Penguin Press
An irreverent and hilarious journey around the world to examine how and why people cheat on their spouses; this global look at infidelity reveals that Americans are uniquely mixed up about being faithful. It's an adulterous world out there. Russian husbands and wives don't believe that beach-resort flings violate their marital vows. Japanese businessmen, armed with the aphorism "If you pay, it's not cheating," flock to sex clubs where the extramarital services on offer include "getting oral sex without showering first." South Africans may be the masters of creative accounting: Pollsters there had to create separate categories for men who cheat, and men who only cheat while drunk. Pamela Druckerman, a former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, decided to delve into this incredibly taboo topic. She interviews people all over the world, from retirees in South Florida to Muslim polygamists in Indonesia; from Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn to the men who keep their mistresses in a "concubine village" outside Hong Kong. Druckerman talks to psychologists, sex researchers, marriage counselors, and most of all, cheaters and the people they've cheated on, and concludes that Americans are the least adept at having affairs, have the most trouble enjoying them, and suffer the most in their aftermath. WHO ARE THE MOST WILD? WHO DO YOU THINK? JEWS and HASIDS (and not the FRENCH). Don't believe me? Read it for yourself. Hehe




STACKED
A 32DDD Reports from the Front
by Susan Seligson
Spring 2007, Bloomsbury
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Like an artful comedienne, journalist Seligson (Going with the Grain), a self-avowedly well-endowed woman, wittily recounts her experiences as she anecdotally examines "what breasts mean to their bearers as well as their beholders." Assessing an abundant lexicon of breast slang, Seligson ponders the role of breasts as the marker of femininity, conversing with women of all ages about how their breast size affects their daily life and self-image. Quizzing experts on the evolutionary role of breasts for human sexual attraction, she surveys the history of the brassiere before purchasing "the perfect bra" at a renowned Manhattan retailer. Seligson's candid observations are hilarious as she visits a workaholic editor for Busty Beauties magazine and searches for the Guinness-record-holder for breast size, one Maxi Mounds, at an exotic dancing event. Questioning the global phenomenon of breast augmentation, Seligson reveals industry scams and discusses the psychology, ethics and cultural implications of implant consumerism with leading plastic surgeons and media scholars. Concluding with cross-dressers and their removable breasts, the author proclaims herself at peace with herself as "a person who happens to be stacked." Seligson's earthy merriment and compassionate humor triumph as she surefootedly tours a subject bound to elicit strong feelings ranging from adulation to derision. (Feb.)




Nazi Games
The Olympics of 1936
by David Clay Large
April 2007, Norton
From Booklist: Perhaps Hitler's most conspicuous attempt to appropriate the iconography of classical Greece, the eleventh Olympiad was also the Third Reich's most successful public-relations coup. Through pageantry emphasizing German athleticism and cultural superiority, Hitler convinced skeptics abroad that his emergent Weltmacht could be both militaristic and peaceful. Stoking the flames of nationalism, Germany's preparations for the Olympics would also mask Hitler's more nefarious ambitions while priming Germans to mobilize for war. The author of several books on Nazi Germany and a celebrated "biography" (Berlin, 2001), Large here vividly describes how the Olympics catalyzed Nazi Germany's rise to power and how the controversies of 1936 would resonate though future Olympics. Approaching his topic with broad historical insight and an acute grasp of the political climate of the day, Large makes a strong case that international sports then, as now, should be considered politics by other means. Refreshingly, Large also dedicates significant space to the Olympic events themselves, which were often as dramatic as the political background.






MAY 2007 BOOKS

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION
A NOVEL
BY MICHAEL CHABON
May 2007. HarperCollins
With 250,000 copies in its first printing... it is an instant bestseller.
In his fourth novel, Mr. Chabon creates Sitka Alaska as a Jewish homeland for 3 million landsmen. It was the Alaska Territory welcomed European Jews marked for extermination in 1940. But first, let's start with the kernel of truth on which this novel is based. In 1939, Harold Ickes, FDR's Secretary of Interior, proposed in the Slattery Report that Sitka, in the Alaska territory, be made a refuge for European "refugees." The King-Havenner bill was developed in Congress, but the bill was CRUSHED in committee by Anthony J. Dimond, the Democratic Party non voting representative from Alaska to Congress. They knew that "refugees" was a codeword for Jews, and many did not want a Jew-Laska.
In Mr. Chabon's novel, Dimond is killed in a Washington DC freak accident. The bill passes, and Sitka becomes a temporary homeland for Yiddish speaking Jews. They fill in the water, create usable landfill, and become successful. In 1941, Pearl Harbor is attacked, the US goes to war, and 2 million Jews (not 6 million) are killed by the Nazis. In 1948, Israel is founded, but it is quickly destroyed by its Arab neighbors. The Israeli Jews are thrown into the Sea and massacred. Sitka Alaska prospers. Like salmon who fight to return home, only to become weary swimming upstream and eventually expire, one wonders if the sea