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Welcome to our pages of Summer 2011, Spring 2011, Winter 2011, Fall 2010, and oh so many more Book Suggestions. For our Home Page, Please visit MyJewishBooks.com
SOME WINTER 2012 BOOK READINGS
December 04, 2011: Dr. Neil Gillman speaks on the Biblical Jacob, The Dubious Patriarch - Skirball Center Seminar, NYC
December 07, 2011: Arthur Magoda reads from Nazi Séance: The Strange Story of the Jewish Psychic in Hitler's Circle. B&N Baltimore Pikesville
December 07, 2011: Stephen Sondheim reads from his newest book, B&N, Union Square NYC 7PM (get there 2 hours before if u expect a seat)
January 08, 2012: Rabbi Sid Schwartz on Reaching the Jewish Community of the 21st Century, NYC 92StY
January 10, 2012: Michael Freund and Jan Kirschenbaum on the Hidden Jews of the Holocaust, NYC 92StY
January 11, 2012: Jodi Kantor (NYT) reads from THE OBAMAS. B&N UWS NYC
January 18, 2012: Shalom Auslander reads from HOPE: A TRAGEDY. B&N UWS NYC
January 19, 2012: YA author Barnabas Miller reads from Rock God The Legend of BJ Levine (a 13 yr old voted mopst likely to be an accountant who goes for rock) B&N UES 86th and Lexington NYC
January 23, 2012: Famed Broadway actor singer triple threat, piano player, Sirius radio celebrity, youtube star, Broadway Musicals game show host / savant, and MTV “Made” specialist Seth Rudetsky reads from his newest book, My Awesome/Awful Popularity Plan. B&N UES 86th and Lexington NYC
January 23, 2012: TEDxBroadway at New World Stages, NYC
January 23, 2012: Shalom Hartman Institute Webinar. http://www.iengage.org.il 1 PM USA EST with Dr. Tal Becker and Yossi Klein Halevi. What The ‘Goyim’ Say
January 24, 2012: Jews Writing Jews - Henry Goldschmidt (Race and Religion Among the Chosen Peoples), Theodore Ross (Am I a Jew?), and Matthew Shaer (Among Righteous Men) NYU - Carter Journalism Institute 20 Cooper Square, New York New York 6 PM
January 29, 2012: Tiger Mom Amy Chua speaks with Dr. Gail Saltz, NYC 92StY
January 30, 2012: Actress Piper Laurie (aka Rosetta Jacobs) reads from Learning to Live Out Loud: A Memoir by Piper Laurie and Foster Hirsch. B&N UWS NYC
February 02, 2012: Lawrence Summers speaks with Thane Rosenbaum about the Economy, life, and tennis players, NYC 92StY
February 05, 2012: Using Skype, a conversation with Haaretz editor Aluf Benn and Miri Eisen and Eyal Naveh, NYC 92StY
February 08, 2012: Kosher Jesus (Gefeen). Shmuley Boteach discusses his newest book with Corey Booker (Jesus scholar and Mayor of Newark NJ), Noah Feldman (Harvard professor of International Law and author of Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Justices, and expert on US Church State relations); and Bret Stephens (WSJ columnist, op-ed editor, and Eruopean specialist) Parish Hall, NYC $25 8PM
February 12, 2012: UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. Looking for Judaism in (UN)conventional Places. Trans and Post Denomiationalism in American Judaism with Sylvia Barack Fishman (Brandeis), Rabbi Naomi Levy (Nashuva), Stephen Warner (Illinois), and Steven Cohen (HUC, From Peoplehood to Purposefulness, Generational Shifts). Royce Hall LA CA
February 12, 2012: UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. Looking for Judaism in (UN)conventional Places. Are Jews Still In The pews. Jack Wertheimer moderates Rabbis Ed Feinstein (Valley Beth Shalom), Daniel Bouskila (Sephardic Ed Center), Laura geller (Temple EmanuEl of Beverly Hills), and David Eliezrie (Cong, Beth Meir haCohen. Royce Hall LA CA
February 13, 2012: UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. Looking for Judaism in (UN)conventional Places. Judaism in Los Angeles. Sarah Benor (HUC LA; Guardians, Rebooters, and JConnecters); Gerardo Marti (Davidson; Spiritual Entrepreneuship), Shawn Landres (Jumpstart LA; Cactus Flowers and Innovations in LA vs Future of Organized Jewish Life); and Ari Kelman (Stanford, Pre-History of the Independent Minyan Movement). Royce Hall LA CA
February 13, 2012: UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. Looking for Judaism in (UN)conventional Places. New Trends in Jewish Religious Life with Shaul Magid (Indiana; (re)constructing jewish Identity in Postethnic America), Jack Wertheimer (JTS; The Impact of Orthodox Outreach), Bruce Phillips (HUC-LA, Over The Rainbow and Under The Radar, non Formal Jewish Engagement in California), and David N. Myers (UCLA; Kiryas Joel, NY, A Shtetl at Home in America) Royce Hall LA CA
February 13, 2012: UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. Looking for Judaism in (UN)conventional Places. Carol Bakhos (UCLA) with Jonathan Sarna (Brandeis), William McKinney (Pacific School of Religion), Diane Winston (USC), and Dana Evan Kaplan. UNiv of West Indies) Royce Hall LA CA
February 21, 2012: Former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold reads from While America Sleeps A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era. B&N NYC UWS 82nd Street
February 22, 2012: Famed cardiologist, plaque specialist and shortlisted for the FDA Dr Steven Nissen reads from Heart 411: The Only Guide to Heart Health You'll Ever Need by Dr. Marc Gillinov and Dr. Steven Nissen. B&N Woodmere Ohio (Cleveland Clinic)
March 06, 2012: Actesss, Author, and former Hillel leader Mayim Bialik reads from Beyond the Sling: A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident, Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way B&N TriBeCa, NYC
March 14, 2012: Andrew Nagorski reads from HITLERLAND. American Eyewitnesses to the rise of Nazi Power. B&N UES 86th and Lexington NYC
March 15, 2012: Concert – Noa & Mira. Abraham Fund Initiatives NYC
March 19, 2012: Former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold reads from While America Sleeps A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era. B&N Madison Wisconsin West Towne Mall
March 24-27, 2012: J Street Conference, Washington DC
April 23, 2012: World Books Night and World Book Night US – Distribution of 30 free titles in the USA. Anna Quindlen is Honorary Chair in the US. One of the thirty titles is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
JANUARY 2012 BOOKS
FOR JEWISH FANS OF DOWNTON ABBEY
THE JEWISH ASPECTS OF THE CASTLE USED IN THE SHOW
AND THE ILLEGITIMATE DUAGHTER OF ALFRED DE ROTHSCHILD who was “Lady Cora”
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0770435629.jpg) Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey
The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle
(Downton Abbey)
By The Countess of Carnarvon
January 2012, Broadway Books
Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration and setting for Julian Fellowes’s Emmy Award-winning PBS show, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the 5th Countess of Carnarvon. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war.
Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart Lady Cora Crawley, Lady Almina was the biological daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de Rothschild, who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon's ancestral home. Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman.
This rich tale contrasts the splendor of Edwardian life in a great house against the backdrop of the First World War and offers an inspiring and revealing picture of the woman at the center of the history of Highclere Castle.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/B0067LY4WG.jpg) OLD IDEAS
MUSIC
BY LEONARD COHEN
January 31, 2012, Columbia Music
From our master Canadian Jewish singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, here are ten new songs that mine the heart, shake the body and break the boundaries as everybody knows only Leonard can do. A signature of our time, Leonard's baritone holds us like the voices of Hank, Frank and Ray. These are songs that nobody knows and everyone will treasure.
Fans were given a hint of what to expect when Cohen made remarks as the recipient of the Principe de Asturias Prize for literature in Spain in October 2011.
"As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. And the instructions were these...Never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity & beauty."
The album was produced with Patrick Leonard, Anjani Thomas, Ed Sanders and Dino Soldo. Complementing Cohen's signature baritone on Old Ideas are the exceptional vocalists Dana Glover, Sharon Robinson, The Webb Sisters (Hattie and Charley Webb) and Jennifer Warnes. The album's cover design and drawings are Cohen's own.
The cut, AMEN, a slow shuffle with a hint of banjo, includes “Tell me again/ When I’ve been to the river/ And I’ve taken the edge off my thirst/ Tell me Again/ We’re alone and I’m listening/ I’m listening so hard that it hurts.” A lot of biblical references. Click the album cover to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1934730351.jpg) ESAU’S BLESSING
How the Bible embraces those with Special Needs
By Ora Horn Prouser, PhD
January 1, 2012, Ben Yehuda Press
A fresh look at Biblical characters through the lens of disability. Ora Horn Prouser of the Academy of Jewish Religion in Riverdale, The Bronx, NY, shows how the symptoms of ADHD, depression, mental retardation, speech impediments, gifted learning, and physical disabilities appear in the Bible, and shows how the Bible teaches us how to respond with acceptance and compassion, but NOT give a blank check forgiveness of bad actions blamed on pathology
Did Esau have ADHD? What if you read the story of Esau through the lens of ADHD? What if I told you that Esau had Diabetes and needed to eat badly after his hunting, and that it was Jacob who was withholding food from his ill brother for the sake of the birthright? Did Jonah have a learning disability? Why was he unable, after repeated teachings, to learn what god was doing in the world? Dr. Pprouser presents a very serious analysis of biblical text, using a clear methodological reading. The readings are peshat, or contextual readings of the biblical text, but at the same time, the book provides a level of meaning and inspiration for those dealing with, or who think about, issues of special needs.
It takes a sensitivity to both the words of Torah and the lives of its major characters to describe familiar figures like Isaac and Joseph, Moses and Samson, in current clinical terms, as people with disabilities and personality disorders. That’s what Ora Horn Prouser does in “Esau’s Blessing: How the Bible Embraces Those with Special Needs” (Ben Yehuda Press). The executive vice president of The Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, Prouser, who has served as an educational consultant on Bible curricula for more than 20 years, writes of attention disorders, mental retardation and depression in an ancient setting, descriptions that are certain to upset some readers of the Torah. Focusing on “individuals who somehow did not seem to fit the mold,” she explains the acts of the Torah’s major characters “through the lens of disability awareness.” – Steve Lipman, The NY Jewish Week
"Few books make one a significantly more sensitive reader of the Bible. Few books on the Bible make one a more sensitive person. Ora Horn Prouser's book does both, with the insight and grace of a scholar, a teacher, and a parent. Prouser's interpretations of Biblical stories and characters draw on what professionals have learned about special needs and challenges and provide new and humanizing perspectives on mostly familiar Biblical stories. Readers will be moved by the book and moved as they never were before by the Bible. They will never read the Bible-or anything else-the same way again. The book is essential reading for educators, parents, and students of Bible. -Edward L. Greenstein, director of the Institute for Jewish Biblical Interpretation of Bar-Ilan University
"There is infinite wisdom and abiding compassion in the Bible when approached with a wise heart. Ora Horn Prouser is that sage-resilient, loving, courageous. She opens our eyes to the special needs figures of old whom we come to know and love in the Bible, helping us to embrace and to see with clearer vision the special needs children and adults who deserve our respect and our attention today." - Bradley Shavit Artson, author, The Everyday Torah
"A well-researched, respectful, fresh perspective on disabilities in Biblical narratives." - Judith Z. Abrams, author, Judaism and Disability: Portrayals in Ancient Texts from the Tanach through the Bavli
Click the book cover to read more or to purchase the book
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1935633287.jpg) OUT OF PALESTINE
THE MAKING OF MODERN ISRAEL
By HADARA LAZAR
Winter 2012, Atlas and Company Press
At first I was struck by the title. Did OUT OF PALESTINE, mean how Israel was carved out of the British Mandate in Palestine, or was it an imperative to get OUT OF PALESTINE.
It is the former.
Lazar, who was born and raised in Haifa, is the author of five novels and two non fiction books about British Mandate era Palestine. A resident of Tel Aviv, she is a lauded French to Hebrew translator. This book is a series of interviews with Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, and English political figures who were central to the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948.
Hadara Lazar has been interviewing witnesses to the historic events of 1948 for a quarter of a century in an effort to understand the sources of this intractable enmity. Her book, a series of in-depth conversations with Israelis, Arabs, and British political figures who lived through the end of the British Mandate and the founding of the Jewish state is less a work of history than a chorus of distinctive voices: among Hadara's subjects are lawyers, policemen, intellectuals, soldiers, teachers, and housewives. She visits her subjects in their offices and homes, evokes their personalities, and brings them alive as characters in a drama with no last act. She ushers the reader into hotels, clubs, and homes in London, Zurich, and Tel Aviv, and describes them in detail to set the scenes. Out of Palestine is a vivid, comprehensive account of how Israel became Israel.
Click the book cover to read more or to purchase the book
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0316183318.jpg) AMERICAN DERVISH
A NOVEL
BY AYAD AKHTAR
January 2012, Little Brown
Hayat Shah was captivated by Mina long before he met her: his mother's beautiful, brilliant, and soulfully devout friend is a family legend. When he learns that Mina is leaving Pakistan to live with the Shahs in America, Hayat is thrilled. Hayat's father is less enthusiastic. He left the fundamentalist world behind with reason. What no one expects is that when Mina shows Hayat the beauty and power of the Quran, it will utterly transform the boy. Mina's real magic may be that the Shah household, always contentious and sad, becomes a happy one. It an interesting twist, Hayat, a pretween stays home from school on Yom Kippur. Is he Jewish? Or are Muslims akin to Jews, asks his school techer. No, it is because his mother keeps him home from school since she has a great affection for Jews and Judaism. So, when Mina finds her own path to happiness blocked, the ember of jealousy in Hayat's heart is enflamed by the community's anti-Semitism, and he acts with catastrophic consequences for those he loves most.
Ayad Akhtar is an American-born, first generation Pakistani-American from Milwaukee. He holds degrees in Theater from Brown University and in Directing from the Columbia University, where he won multiple awards for his work. American Dervish is his first novel. Maybe it will be a film and win a Spirit Award??
PW adds: “Poor Hayat Shah: his father drinks and sleeps around; his mother constantly tells him how awful Muslim men are (especially his father, with his “white prostitutes”); he doesn’t seem to have any friends; and he’s in love with his mother’s best friend, the beautiful Mina who’s his mother’s age and something of an aunt to him. Unlike his parents, Mina, who came to Milwaukee from a bad marriage in Pakistan, is devout, which makes sexual stirrings and the Qur’an go hand in hand for the young Hayat (aside from a framing device, the story mostly takes place when he’s between 10 and 12). His rival for Mina’s love isn’t just a grown man, he’s Jewish, so along with the roil of conflicting ideas about gender, sexuality, and Islamic constraint vs. Western looseness, first-time novelist Akhtar also takes on anti-Semitism. Though set well before 9/11, the book is clearly affected by it, with Akhtar determined to traffic in big themes and illustrate the range of Muslim thought and practice. This would be fine if the book didn’t so often feel contrived, stocked with caricatures rather than people. Ultimately, Akhtar’s debut reads like a melodramatic YA novel, not because of the age of its narrator but because of the abundance of lessons to be learned.”
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1580234615.jpg) Masking and Unmasking Ourselves
Interpreting Biblical Texts on Clothing & Identity
Dr. Norman J. Cohen
January 2012 Jewish Lights
Whatever the context in which it is worn, our clothing is often our most powerful form of communication. As in any great literature, the language of putting on and taking off clothing in the Bible--especially the narratives that turn on the symbolic use of clothes--can provide us with a sense of the overarching worldview of the biblical writers. Yet, by immersing ourselves in the symbolic language and stories of the Bible, we can also gain insight into ourselves and our own lives.
In this engaging look at interpretations of clothing in the Bible, renowned Torah scholar and midrashist Norman Cohen presents ten paradigmatic Bible stories that involve clothing in an essential way, as a means of learning about the text, its characters and their interactions. But he also shows us how these stories help us confront our own life dramas, our own stories. In doing so, he presents Torah as a mirror, reflecting back to us our own personalities, ambivalences, struggles and potential for growth. By helping us uncover the "garments of Torah," Cohen shows us how to shed our own layers of insulation to reveal our authentic selves.
Dr. Norman J. Cohen, renowned for his expertise in Torah study and midrash, lectures frequently to audiences of many faiths. He is a rabbi, former provost of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and professor of midrash. He is the author of Self, Struggle & Change: Family Conflict Stories in Genesis and Their Healing Insights for Our Lives; Moses and the Journey to Leadership: Timeless Lessons of Effective Management from the Bible and Today's Leaders
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/9652295787.jpg) KOSHER JESUS
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (rhymes with Rokeach)
January 2012 Gefen
You’ve seen him on tv, You’ve seen him on the book circuit, you heard him shouting at Libyans in NJ, you saw him years ago at Oxford, and you’ve seen him with his buddy, the late Michael Jackson. Now he is taking a look at another savior, Rabbi Jesus.
Kosher Jesus is a project of more than six years research and writing. The book seeks to offer to Jews and Christians Boteach’s “real story” of Jesus, a wholly observant, Pharisaic Rabbi who fought Roman paganism and oppression and was killed for it.
The book asserts that Jesus never claimed divinity and not only did not abrogate the Torah but observed every letter of the Law. Boteach traces Jesus’ teachings back to Jewish sources; and he states that later writers of the Testaments stripped Jesus of his Jewishness.
A sampling: Jesus: (Matt 5:5) Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 37) The meek shall inherit the earth, and delight themselves in the abundance of peace.
Jesus: (Matt 5:8) Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see G-d. Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 24) Who shall ascend the mount of the Lord the pure-hearted.
Jesus: (Matt 5:39) But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Hebrew Bible: (Lamentations 3:30) Let him offer his cheek to him who smites him....
Jesus: (Matt 6:33) But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 37:4) Delight yourself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.
Jesus: (Matt 7:7) Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. Hebrew Bible: (Jer 29:13) When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.
Jesus: (Matt 7:23) Then I will declare to them, I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers. Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 6:9) Depart from me, all you workers of evil.
Boteach writes that this book is for all readers and for Jews who remain deeply uncomfortable with Jesus because of the Church s long history of anti-Semitism, the deification of Jesus, and the Jewish rejection of any Messiah who has not fulfilled the Messianic prophecies.
He adds that as Christians and Jews come together to love and support the majestic and humane State of Israel as a Jewish state, it is goodly that Christians rediscover the deep Jewishness and religious Jewish commitment of Jesus, while Jews reexamine a lost son who was murdered by a brutal Roman state who sought to impose Roman culture and rule upon a tiny yet stubborn nation who will never be severed from their eternal covenant with the G-d of Israel.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1442213167.jpg) Nazis after Hitler
How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated
Justice and Truth
By Donald M. McKale, Prof Emeritus, Clemson
January 2012, Rowman and Littlefield
This deeply researched and informative book traces the biographies of thirty "typical" perpetrators of the Holocaust—some well known, some obscure—who survived World War II. Donald M. McKale reveals the shocking reality that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators were only rarely, if ever, tried or punished for their crimes, and nearly all alleged their innocence in Germany's extermination during the war of nearly six million European Jews. He highlights the bitter contrasts between the comfortable postwar lives of many war criminals with the enduring suffering of their victims.
The author shows how immediately after the war's end in 1945, Hitler's minions, whether the few placed on trial or the many living in freedom, carried on what amounted to a massive and relentless postwar ideological, even propaganda, campaign against Jews. To be sure, the perpetrators didn't challenge the fact that the Holocaust happened. But in the face of massive evidence showing their culpability, nearly all declared they had done nothing wrong, they had not known about the Jewish persecution until the war's end, and they had little or no responsibility or guilt for what had happened. But in making these and other claims denying their involvement in the Holocaust, they defended the Nazi atrocities and anti-Semitism. Nearly every fabrication of these war criminals found its way into the mythology of postwar Holocaust deniers, who have used, in one form or another, the numerous falsehoods of the perpetrators to buttress the deniers' biggest lie—that the Holocaust did not happen. The perpetrators, therefore, helped advance Holocaust denial without having denied the Holocaust happened.
Written in a compelling narrative style, this book is the first to provide an overview of the lives of Nazis who escaped justice. The author provides a unique and accessible synthesis of the massive research on the Holocaust and Nazi war criminals that will be invaluable for all readers interested in World War II.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0812243714.jpg) Kafka's Jewish Languages
The Hidden Openness of Tradition
Haney Foundation Series
By David Suchoff Colby College
December 2011, Columbia
After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both his roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to the writer's legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish author into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. Reading The Trial Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, Suchoff uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk," and considers the recent law case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0815609892.jpg) SHADOWS IN WINTER
A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND LOSS
BY EITAN FISHBANE
December 2011, Syracuse
In late February 2007, Leah Fishbane's life was flourishing. A promising young graduate student in Jewish history, she was an adoring mother to her nearly four-year-old daughter and two months into a new pregnancy. In an instant, all this was gone: Leah was struck down suddenly with a previously undiagnosed brain tumor--her life ended quickly in the ICU, her family was left in despair.
In this deeply evocative memoir, written during the dark time of the first year following Leah's death, her husband Eitan gives voice to the overwhelming nature of mourning, and to the uplifting power of memory. He tells the story of his efforts to be a good father to his grieving child and of his self-discovery as a parent in ways he had not known before. Along this path, Fishbane asks fundamental questions about the meaning of death and life, about the place of God and faith in the experience of tragedy, about what it means to live with loss. The result is a poetic testament that will resonate with anyone who has known the depths of grief, anyone who seeks to console a loved one in pain. In giving honest expression to emotions that are at once particular and universal, Shadows in Winter offers a luminous window of comfort and hope to those battling the devastation of loss.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0253356849.jpg) A Prophetic Peace
Judaism, Religion, and Politics
By Alick Isaacs
2011, Indiana
Challenging deeply held convictions about Judaism, Zionism, war, and peace, Alick Isaacs's combat experience in the second Lebanon war provoked him to search for a way of reconciling the belligerence of religion with its messages of peace. In his insightful readings of the texts of Biblical prophecy and rabbinic law, Isaacs draws on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Martin Buber, among others, to propose an ambitious vision of religiously inspired peace. Rejecting the notion of Jewish theology as partial to war and vengeance, this eloquent and moving work points to the ways in which Judaism can be a path to peace. A Prophetic Peace describes an educational project called Talking Peace whose aim is to bring individuals of different views together to share varying understandings of peace.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/142211502X.jpg) WINNING INVESTORS OVER
Surprising Truths About Honesty, Earnings Guidance,
and Other Ways To Boost Your Stock Price
By Baruch Lev, NYU Stern
December 2011, HBR
Pleasing Wall Street used to be easy for executives. Not anymore. The stock market is an uncertain place, and every day executives have to figure out what investors really want. There are right ways and wrong ways to do this. Get it wrong, and you risk alienating investors as well as employees, consumers, and suppliers—which can erode your earnings and stock price. In Winning Investors Over, Baruch Lev draws on his own and other finance scholars’ research to present authoritative, often surprising instructions for dealing intelligently with Wall Street—and boosting your company’s earnings and stock price. Through rigorous data analysis and real-life cases, Lev shows how to:
Understand and address investors’ concerns to secure ongoing funding and support from the capital markets; Deliver disappointing news effectively to investors; Build, rebuild, and maintain credibility on Wall Street; Buy time for your company’s recovery from activist shareholders and hedge fund raiders; and Structure your compensation to win shareholders’ support
Winning Investors Over demonstrates that despite the uncertainty that characterizes Wall Street today, you can still craft a mutually beneficial, long-term partnership with investors.
IS IT TRUE THAT THE ROOF LEAKS??
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0226761401.jpg) BETH SHOLOM SYNAGOGUE
FRANK LLOYD WIRGHT AND MODERN RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE
Joseph M. Siry
December 2011, University of Chicago Press
The tent that carries the Torah should radiate light, an eternal flame
In a suburb just north of Philadelphia stands Beth Sholom Synagogue, Frank Lloyd Wright’s only synagogue and among his finest religious buildings. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007, Beth Sholom was one of Wright’s last completed projects, and for years it has been considered one of his greatest masterpieces.
But its full story has never been told. Beth Sholom Synagogue provides the first in-depth look at the synagogue’s conception and realization in relation to Wright’s other religious architecture. Beginning with his early career at Adler and Sullivan’s architectural firm in Chicago and his design for Unity Temple and ending with the larger works completed just before or soon after his death, Joseph M. Siry skillfully depicts Wright’s exploration of geometric forms and structural techniques in creating architecture for worshipping communities. Siry also examines Wright’s engagement with his clients, whose priorities stemmed from their denominational identity, and the effect this had on his designs—his client for Beth Sholom, Rabbi Mortimer Cohen, worked with Wright to anchor the building in the traditions of Judaism even as it symbolized the faith’s continuing life in postwar America. With each of his religious projects, Wright considered questions of social history and cultural identity as he advanced his program for an expressive, modern American architecture. His search to combine these agendas culminated in Beth Sholom, where the interplay of light, form, and space create a stunning and inspiring place of worship.
Filled with over 300, yes, three hundred, illustrations, this remarkable book takes us deep inside the synagogue’s design, construction, and reception to bring us an illuminating portrait of the crowning achievement of this important aspect of Wright’s career.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/140225962X.jpg) Rock God
The Legend of BJ Levine
By Barnabas Miller
January 2012, Sourcebooks
Ages 10 and up
ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?
Dear Sammy,
The truth is that the first 13 years of my lif ebefore I met you-have been SUPER BORING. My life didn't really start until two Weeks ago. That Was the day I decided to become a full-on, fire-breathing MEGALORD OF RRRRROCK.
I mean, just because I have absolutely no musical ability is no reason to give up on my destiny. You see, I found this book that's going to turn me into a ROCK GOD-no talent required! Now all I have to do is survive long enough to read it.
Yours in Rock,
B.J. Levine
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1580234631.jpg) The Other Talmud
The Yerushalmi
Unlocking the Secrets of "The Talmud of Israel for Judaism Today"
By Rabbi Judith Z. Abrams, PhD
January 2012 Jewish Lights
Today's Judaism is based on the Babylonian Talmud, the Bavli. All the law codes we have are based on this Talmud. But what if the other Talmud, the Yerushalmi-- the "Talmud of the Land of Israel"--had won? What would that mean for the practice of Judaism today?
This engaging look at the Judaism that might have been breaks open the Talmud of the Land of Israel, which is growing in popularity. It examines what the Yerushalmi is, how it differs from the Bavli, and how and why the Bavli is used today. It reveals how the Yerushalmi's vision of Jewish practice resembles today's liberal Judaism. You'll explore the many ways this Talmud would have influenced all aspects of Jewish life:
* What kind of mysticism would you practice?
* How would you meditate?
* How would holiday celebrations differ from those we have today?
* How would you pray?
* What would be your greatest virtues? Your most terrible sins?
* What kind of karma would you believe in?
Like Barry W. Holtz's Back to the Sources, The Other Talmud--The Yerushalmi provides a broad but accessible overview of all the essential aspects of the Talmud of Israel, equipping you for further study and exploration.
Did PROHIBITION help to acculturate American Jews to America? Did t make them more American?
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0814720285.jpg) JEWS AND BOOZE
Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition
By Marni Davis, Phd
January 2012, NYU Press
If you can’t wait til 2012, you can read Professor Davis’ earlier paper on Jews and Whisky: at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_jewish_history/summary/v094/94.3.davis.html (No Whisky Amazons in the Tents of Israel": American Jews and the Gilded Age Temperance Movement (September 2008))
At the turn of the century, American Jews and prohibitionists viewed one another with growing suspicion. Jews believed that all Americans had the right to sell and consume alcohol, while prohibitionists insisted that alcohol commerce and consumption posed a threat to the nation’s morality and security. The two groups possessed incompatible visions of what it meant to be a productive and patriotic American--and in 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made alcohol commerce illegal, Jews discovered that anti-Semitic sentiments had mixed with anti-alcohol ideology, threatening their reputation and their standing in American society.
In Jews and Booze, Marni Davis (teaches at Georgia State, doctorate from Emory) examines American Jews’ long and complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement’s rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity--the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer--and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition’s triumph cast a pall on American Jews’ history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1611681995.jpg) The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema
By Lawrence Baron
Winter 2012, Brandies University Press
Most people have seen Exodus, Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, and Schindler's List--well-known films with obvious Jewish subjects. But the Jewish experience in film is far richer than this. Over the past century, Jewish-themed films have emerged from the Americas, Europe, Israel, and North Africa. This remarkable anthology brings together 54 new and classic essays by 49 scholars in 8 countries to analyze the Jewish presence in world cinema.
Opening with a survey of the approaches employed to study historical films and how they have been applied to Jewish cinema, the book then moves on to several thematic sections containing essays on films grouped by period and region or organized around a central event or issue. These include European Jewry's acculturation; responses to oppression and belated emancipation; the American Jewish immigrant experience; the Zionist experiment; the Holocaust; postwar American Jewish life; Jewish international films; and contemporary Israeli and American Jewish cinema. An appendix offers a supplementary listing of films. Designed for classroom use, as well as for programming at film festivals, JCCs, and synagogues, the volume provides resources to help teachers and program organizers select from a broad range of movies. It includes chapter-based bibliographies of additional readings and links to appropriate web resources.
Show Less
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0691135991.jpg) Beyond Our Means
Why America Spends While the World Saves
By Sheldon Garon
Princeton University Press
Jesus Saves?
Moses Invests?
But Americans Spend
Across the world, saving is a virtue; in America, Spending is a holy virtue
If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that Americans save too little, spend too much, and borrow excessively. What can we learn from East Asian and European countries that have fostered enduring cultures of thrift over the past two centuries? Beyond Our Means tells for the first time how other nations aggressively encouraged their citizens to save by means of special savings institutions and savings campaigns. The U.S. government, meanwhile, promoted mass consumption and reliance on credit, culminating in the global financial meltdown.
Many economists believe people save according to universally rational calculations, saving the most in their middle years as they plan for retirement, and saving the least in welfare states. In reality, Europeans save at high rates despite generous welfare programs and aging populations. Americans save little, despite weaker social safety nets and a younger population. Tracing the development of such behaviors across three continents from the nineteenth century to today, this book highlights the role of institutions and moral suasion in shaping habits of saving and spending. It shows how the encouragement of thrift was not a relic of indigenous traditions but a modern movement to confront rising consumption. Around the world, messages to save and spend wisely confronted citizens everywhere--in schools, magazines, and novels. At the same time, in America, businesses and government normalized practices of living beyond one's means.
Transnational history at its most compelling, Beyond Our Means reveals why some nations save so much and others so little.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0375869158.jpg) My Awesome/Awful Popularity Plan
By Seth Rudetsky
January 2012, Random House
Ages 12 and up
Justin is Jewish, a biology genius, unpopular, bullied, has a Jew-Fro, has a 35 inch waist, and is gay. In Chemistry, a classmate calls him Fag-nesium. When he answers questions, the same bully coughs “Feg” in his hand so that the class hears, but not the teacher. Justin has two goals for sophomore year in high school: to date Chuck, the hottest boy in school, and to become the king of Cool U, the table in the cafeteria where the "in" crowd sits.
Unfortunately, he has the wrong look (short, plump, Brillo-pad jew-fro), he has the wrong interests (Broadway, chorus violin), and he has the wrong friends (Spencer, into Eastern religions, and Mary Ann, who doesn't shave her armpits). Spencer tells Justin that he should not let himself be called FAG, it is as bad as being called KIKE> Justin tries to understand this concept. Justin believes that the morning of the Tony Award nominations should be a school holiday. And Chuck the football star who has moved to town? Well, he's definitely not gay; and he's dating Becky, a girl in chorus with whom Justin is friendly. (Justin and Becky are both the children of physicians)
But Justin is determined. He wants to be popular, yet seriously, he isn’t that nice to the school nerds, but he does calculate that he has to make 8.3 friends a day and he can become popular. (He can strive for maybe even 8.6)
After detention one day (because he saw Chuck get it first), having just eaves “dropped” on Chuck and Becky, Justin comes up with a perfect plan: to allow Becky to continue dating Chuck, whom Becky's dad hates. They will pretend that Becky is dating Justin (they both practice stage kisses from drama club), whom Becky's dad loves (cuz he is smat and the son of a doctor). And when Becky and Justin go out on a fake date, Chuck will meet up with them for a real date with Becky. Chuck's bound to find Justin irresistable, right? Right? RIGHT? What could go wrong?
Seth Rudetsky's first novel for young adults is endearingly human, and laugh-out-loud funny, and any kid who ever aspired to Cool U will find Justin a welcome ally in the fight for popularity.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0812976037.jpg) THE BALFOUR DECLARATION
THE ORIGINS OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT
BY JONATHAN SCHNEER
January 2012, Random House Paperback edition
Issued in London in 1917, the Balfour Declaration was one of the key documents of the twentieth century. It committed Britain to supporting the establishment in Palestine of “a National Home for the Jewish people,” and its reverberations continue to be felt to this day. Now the entire fascinating story of the document is revealed in this impressive work of modern history. With new material retrieved from historical archives, Jonathan Schneer recounts in dramatic detail the public and private fight for a small strip of land in the Middle East, a battle that started when the Ottoman Empire took Germany’s side in World War I. The key players in this conflict are rendered in nuanced and detailed relief: Sharif Hussein, the Arab leader who secretly sought British support; Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist folks-mensch who charmed British high society; T. E. Lawrence, the legendary British officer who “set the desert on fire” for the Arabs; and the other generals and prime ministers, soldiers and negotiators, who shed blood and cut deals to grab or give away the precious land. A book crucial to understanding the Middle East as it is today, The Balfour Declaration is a riveting volume about the ancient faiths and timeless treacheries that continue to drive global events.
Click the book cover to read more or to purchase the book
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300144318.jpg) WALTER RATHENAU
THE LIMITS oF SUCCESS
Jewish Lives Series
By SHULAMIT VOLKOV
January 2012, Yale
This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) tells of a man who—both thoroughly German and unabashedly Jewish—rose to leadership in the German War-Ministry Department during the First World War, and later to the exalted position of foreign minister in the early days of the Weimar Republic. His achievement was unprecedented—no Jew in Germany had ever attained such high political rank. But Rathenau’s success was marked by tragedy: within months he was assassinated by right-wing extremists seeking to destroy the newly formed Republic. Drawing on Rathenau’s papers and on a depth of knowledge of both modern German and German-Jewish history, Shulamit Volkov creates a finely drawn portrait of this complex man who struggled with his Jewish identity yet treasured his “otherness.” Volkov also places Rathenau in the dual context of Weimar Germany and of Berlin’s financial and intellectual elite. Above all, she illuminates the complex social and psychological milieu of German Jewry in the period before Hitler’s rise to power
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/046502954X.jpg) STRATEGIC VISION
AMERICA AND THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL POWER
BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI
January 2012, basic
By 1991, following the disintegration first of the Soviet bloc and then of the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing tall as the only global super-power. Not only the 20th but even the 21st century seemed destined to be the American centuries. But that super-optimism did not last long. During the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the stock market bubble and the costly foreign unilateralism of the younger Bush presidency, as well as the financial catastrophe of 2008 jolted America – and much of the West – into a sudden recognition of its systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, the East was demonstrating a surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. That prompted new anxiety about the future, including even about America’s status as the leading world power. This book is a response to a challenge. It argues that without an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, and capable of sustaining an intelligent foreign engagement, the geopolitical prospects for the West could become increasingly grave. The ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more essential that America does not retreat into an ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in cultural hedonism but rather becomes more strategically deliberate and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. This book seeks to answer four major questions:
1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from West to East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity?
2. Why is America’s global appeal waning, how ominous are the symptoms of America’s domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War?
3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequences if America did decline by 2025, and could China then assume America’s central role in world affairs?
4. What ought to be a resurgent America’s major long-term geopolitical goals in order to shape a more vital and larger West and to engage cooperatively the emerging and dynamic new East?
5. If America declines and the Israeli-Palestine conflict remains unresolved, there will be no resolution. Regional animosity to Israel will intensify. Iran and Israel will attack each other directly or through proxies and civilian deaths will grow in the region, Palestine and Lebanon. The US participation in attacks on Iran and probably Pakistan will inflame hatred of America and its interests. Israel will be isolated and seen as an apartheid state and American support of Israel will decline
America, Brzezinski argues, must define and pursue a comprehensive and long-term a geopolitical vision, a vision that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. This book seeks to provide the strategic blueprint for that vision.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0738214833.jpg) FREEING YOURSELF FROM ANXIETY
4 SIMPLE STEPS TO OVERCOME WORRY
AND CREATE THE LIFE YOU WANT
BY TAMAR CHANSKY, PhD
January 2012, Da Capo
We all know what is healthy to think and what is not, much like we know that eating an apple is better than gorging on donuts. But once we start thinking anxious thoughts, it is tough to move from disaster to reality. Our brain can ruin our day. The roadmap to happiness can be found in Freeing Yourself from Anxiety. Unlike most guides, Dr. Tamar Chansky’s book explains that the solution is not positive thinking, but possible thinking. Armed with her strategies, readers can achieve accurate perceptions of their lives that can liberate them from fear and perfectionism. For the 25 percent of Americans who have an anxiety problem, Freeing Yourself from Anxiety provides the step-by-step tools for living stress free, without medications.
Chansky came across this quote while writing the book that said, “It’s not that the news has gotten worse; it’s that the reporting has gotten so much better.” Our general anxiety level has risen as a culture, in part due to recent events in history. For example, the recession, the events of 9/11, and the news- and media-saturated lives we lead keep our pulse running a little higher as we practice imagining disaster on a daily basis. Therefore, it is important to learn how to reduce our baseline stress
We tend to focus all of our attention on the most extreme or unlikely scenarios, leaving us feeling helpless to take any steps to help ourselves. So especially when readers are facing actual challenges, they need these strategies more so that they can stop wasting precious time and emotional energy rehearsing some future disaster that won’t likely occur. Dr. Chansky distinguishes between the “worry story” and the “story of your life.” The WORRY STORY is the story we create, the narrative, of our lives, triumphs, struggles, conditions, deadends. So just as you dont buy the first car a dealer offers you, you should not accept the first version of your narrative, or the first gut reaction, the first “worry story” version of the situation. The Four Steps are (1) Using Your Caller ID, means relabeling or stamping the thought with the appropriate tag — determining if it’s 1-800-Worry-Me talking to you or your trusted Voice of Reason. (2) Step two, Getting Specific, means taking the overwhelming first impression of the problem and narrowing it down to the real risk or matter at hand. (3) Step three, Optimizing, means not giving up but backing up and getting perspective; now that you’ve narrowed down the problem, call in experts or other perspectives to give their take on the situation. And (4) Step four, Mobilizing, means getting moving; you’ve defined the problem and see your options—and now you can go from theory to practice and start making changes in your life.
Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0767928261.jpg) Money and Power
How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
By William D. Cohan
January 2012, Anchor paperback
The bestselling author of the acclaimed House of Cards and The Last Tycoons turns his spotlight on to Goldman Sachs and the controversy behind its success. From the outside, Goldman Sachs is a perfect company. The Goldman PR machine loudly declares it to be smarter, more ethical, and more profitable than all of its competitors. Behind closed doors, however, the firm constantly straddles the line between conflict of interest and legitimate deal making, wields significant influence over all levels of government, and upholds a culture of power struggles and toxic paranoia. And its clever bet against the mortgage market in 2007—unknown to its clients—may have made the financial ruin of the Great Recession worse. Money and Power reveals the internal schemes that have guided the bank from its founding through its remarkable windfall during the 2008 financial crisis. Through extensive research and interviews with the inside players, including current CEO Lloyd Blankfein, William Cohan constructs a nuanced, timely portrait of Goldman Sachs, the company that was too big—and too ruthless—to fail.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0393060640.jpg) Joseph Roth
A Life in Letters
By Joseph Roth
Translated by Michael Hofmann
January 2012, Norton
The monumentality of this biographical work further establishes Joseph Roth—with Kafka, Mann, and Musil—in the twentieth-century literary canon. Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth’s lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth’s calamitous life—his father’s madness, his wife’s schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris. Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth’s life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the Weimar Republic and 1930s France. Displaying Roth’s ceaselessly inventive powers, it finally charts his descent into despair at a time when “the word had died, [and] men bark like dogs.”
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/081121950X.jpg) Conversations with Kafka
(Second Edition)
By the late Gustav Janouch (1903 – 1968)
Translated by Goronwy Rees, Francine Prose (Introduction), Maira Kalman (cover)
January 2012, New Directions
A literary gem – a portrait from life of Franz Kafka – now with an ardent preface by Francine Prose, avowed “fan of Janouch’s odd and beautiful book.”
Gustav Janouch met Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of The Metamorphosis, as a seventeen-year-old fledgling poet. As Francine Prose notes in her wonderful preface, “they fell into the habit of taking long strolls through the city, strolls on which Kafka seems to have said many amazing, incisive, literary, and per- things to his companion and interlocutor, the teenage Boswell of Prague. Crossing a windswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch, ‘Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.’”
They talk about writing (Kafka’s own, but also that of his favorite writers: Poe, Kleist, and Rimbaud, who “transforms vowels into colors”) as well as technology, film, crime, Darwinism, Chinese philosophy, carpentry, insomnia, street fights, Hindu scripture, art, suicide, and prayer. “Prayer,” Kafka notes, brings “its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one’s own existence.”
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1555976034.jpg) Everyday People
Poems [Paperback]
By Albert Goldbarth
January 2012, Graywolf Press
Golddbarth finds “pain” in a “piano”
The not-at-all-everyday new poetry collection by Albert Goldbarth, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
I brought a book of many words
to an emptiness in my heart,
and I shook them out in there, to fill it.
In my time I wrote this very thing.
In your time you read it.
—from “What We Were Like”
Virtuoso poet Albert Goldbarth returns with a new collection that describes the wonders of everyday people—overprotective parents, online gamblers, newlyweds, Hercules, and Jesus. In Goldbarth’s poetry—expansive, wild, and hilarious—he argues that our ordinary failures, heroics, joy, and grief are worth giving voice to, giving thanks for. Everyday People is an extraordinary new book by a poet who “in thirty-five years of writing has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation” (William Doreski, The Harvard Review).
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0691147140.jpg) Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future
The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
By John MacCormick with Foreword by Chris Bishop
January 2012, Princeton
Every day, we use our computers to perform remarkable feats. A simple web search picks out a handful of relevant needles from the world's biggest haystack: the billions of pages on the World Wide Web. Uploading a photo to Facebook transmits millions of pieces of information over numerous error-prone network links, yet somehow a perfect copy of the photo arrives intact. Without even knowing it, we use public-key cryptography to transmit secret information like credit card numbers; and we use digital signatures to verify the identity of the websites we visit. How do our computers perform these tasks with such ease? This is the first book to answer that question in language anyone can understand, revealing the extraordinary ideas that power our PCs, laptops, and smartphones. Using vivid examples, John MacCormick explains the fundamental "tricks" behind nine types of computer algorithms, including artificial intelligence (where we learn about the "nearest neighbor trick" and "twenty questions trick"), Google's famous PageRank algorithm (which uses the "random surfer trick"), data compression, error correction, and much more.
These revolutionary algorithms have changed our world: this book unlocks their secrets, and lays bare the incredible ideas that our computers use every day.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1408128829.jpg)
Launching a Successful Fashion Line
A Trendsetters Guide Launching a Successful Fashion Line
A Trendsetters Guide
By Ralinda Harvey
If only Isaac Mizrahi, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein had this book, they could have scored it big in fashion
This innovative book on setting up your own fashion business contains everything you need to know, from finances to websites, branding to pattern makers - this book has it all! It is written in a blog-post style, making it direct and straightforward in its message which will resonate with the modern reader. The book is remarkably comprehensive and is a great tool for either the fashion student or fashion enthusiast to assemble all the knowledge they need for setting up a successful business, whether it is an ebay store or a fashion boutique.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1595584684.jpg) THE JEwISH GOSPELS
THE STORY OF THE JEWISH CHRIST
BY DANIEL BOYARIN (Berkeley)
January 2012, The New Press
In July 2008 a front-page story in the New York Times reported on the discovery of an ancient Hebrew tablet, dating from before the birth of Jesus, which predicted a Messiah who would rise from the dead after three days. Commenting on this startling discovery at the time, noted Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin argued that “some Christians will find it shocking—a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology.”
Guiding us through a rich tapestry of new discoveries and ancient scriptures, The Jewish Gospels makes the powerful case that our conventional understandings of Jesus and of the origins of Christianity are wrong. In Boyarin’s scrupulously illustrated account, the coming of the Messiah was fully imagined in the ancient Jewish texts. Jesus, moreover, was embraced by many Jews as this person, and his core teachings were not at all a break from Jewish beliefs and teachings. Jesus and his followers, Boyarin shows, were simply Jewish. What came to be known as Christianity came much later, as religious and political leaders sought to impose a new religious orthodoxy that was not present at the time of Jesus’s life. In the vein of Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, here is a brilliant new work that will break open some of our culture’s most cherished assumptions.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0814748171.jpg) TOURS THAT BIND
DIASPORA, PILGRIMAGE, AND ISRAELI BIRTHRIGHT TOURISM
Now in Papaerback
By Shaul Kelner, Vanderbilt University
2012, NYU Press
Since 1999 hundreds of thousands of young American Jews have visited Israel on an all-expense-paid 10-day pilgrimage-tour known as Birthright Israel. The most elaborate of the state-supported homeland tours that are cropping up all over the world, this tour seeks to foster in the American Jewish diaspora a lifelong sense of attachment to Israel based on ethnic and political solidarity. Over a half-billion dollars (and counting) has been spent cultivating this attachment, and despite 9/11 and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict the tours are still going strong. Based on over seven years of first-hand observation in modern day Israel, Shaul Kelner provides an on-the-ground look at this hotly debated and widely emulated use of tourism to forge transnational ties. We ride the bus, attend speeches with the Prime Minister, hang out in the hotel bar, and get a fresh feel for young American Jewish identity and contemporary Israel. We see how tourism's dynamism coupled with the vibrant human agency of the individual tourists inevitably complicate tour leaders' efforts to rein tourism in and bring it under control. By looking at the broader meaning of tourism, Kelner brings to light the contradictions inherent in the tours and the ways that people understandtheir relationship to place both materially and symbolically. Rich in detail, engagingly written, and sensitive to the complexities of modern travel and modern diaspora Jewishness, Tours that Bind offers a new way of thinking about tourism as a way through which people develop understandings of place, society, and self.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0814725198.jpg) SEPHARDIC JEWS IN AMERICA
A DISPORIC HISTORY
BY AVIVA BEN-UR, Umass Amherst
January 2012, NYU Press
Now in Paperback
A significant number of Sephardic Jews, who trace their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties. The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to acknowledge Sephardim and Mizrahim continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration. Aviva Ben-Ur is Associate Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor in the History Department and the Department of Language, Literatures, and Cultures. She is the co-author of Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs and Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries and Synagogues of Suriname: Essays.
THE RESCUER’S PATH
A Novel BY PAULA FRIEDMAN
January 2012
Paperback, Plain View Press
Forthcoming
When Malca Bernovski rides a horse offtrail in Nixon-era Washington DC, she discovers the wounded antiwar leader Gavin Hareen, prime suspect in the lethal bombing of an army truck. The budding love between the sheltered Malca, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and the anguished, half-Syrian fugitive becomes a desperate struggle against injustice. From the White House to the Rockies, from the Warsaw Ghetto to the post-9/11 search of the lovers’ child for her origins, this tale spans generations to delve urgent, timeless questions.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0814764347.jpg) STILL JEWISH
A HISTORY OF WOMEN AND INTERMARRIAGE IN AMERICA
BY KAREN R. McGINITY, Brandeis
2012, NYU Press
Now In Paperback
Over the last century, American Jews married outside their religion at increasing rates. By closely examining the intersection of intermarriage and gender across the twentieth century, Keren R. McGinity describes the lives of Jewish women who intermarried while placing their decisions in historical context. The first comprehensive history of these intermarried women, Still Jewish is a multigenerational study combining in-depth personal interviews and an astute analysis of how interfaith relationships and intermarriage were portrayed in the mass media, advice manuals, and religious community-generated literature.
Still Jewish dismantles assumptions that once a Jew intermarries, she becomes fully assimilated into the majority Christian population, religion, and culture. Rather than becoming "lost" to the Jewish community, women who intermarried later in the century were more likely to raise their children with strong ties to Judaism than women who intermarried earlier in the century. Bringing perennially controversial questions of Jewish identity, continuity, and survival to the forefront of the discussion, Still Jewish addresses topics of great resonance in the modern Jewish community and beyond.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0231158947.jpg) ISLAM THROUGH WESTERN EYES
FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE WAR ON TERRORISM
BY JONATHAN LYONS
January 2012, Columbia
Despite the West's growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens to curb any prospect of East-West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics that it cannot afford in a rapidly globalizing world.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/9655240746.jpg) The Torah Commentary of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
Genesis, Part I
By Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
Edited by Rabbi Shlomo Katz
January 2012, urim
The Torah Commentary of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach provides a glimpse into the unusual way in which the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach received and transmitted Torah. It also aids the reader in bridging Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach the great composer/singer and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach the great scholar/teacher. Those who sing his songs, but do not learn his Torah, only sing half a song. When Reb Shlomo speaks of Abraham and Sara, you are sure he is speaking about his own grandparents. When delving into the lives of Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel and Leah, it is as if he is speaking of his own parents. The teachings in this book of commentary are not just meant to be read they are intended to be enjoyed and experienced as holy music. Ultimately, they are intended as a lesson in living a holy life. Wherever Reb Shlomo traveled in the world, he brought several suitcases of holy books with him. This book makes Reb Shlomo's teachings accessible to help us carry on our journey through life.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1566568633.jpg) We Are All Equally Far from Love
By Adania Shibli
Translated from the Arabic by Paul Starkey
January 2012, Interlink
A new award-winning novel from the acclaimed author of Touch. A young woman, asked at work to write a letter to an older man, does as she is told. So begins an enigmatic but passionate love affair conducted entirely in letters. A love affair? Maybe. Until his letters stop coming. Or... maybe the letters do not reach their intended recipient? Only the teenage Afaf, who works at the local post office, would know. Her favorite duty is to open the mail and inform her collaborator father of the contents until she finds a mysterious set of love letters, apparently returned to their sender. In the hands of Adania Shibli, the discovery of these letters makes for a wrenching meditation on lives lived ensnared within the dictates of others.
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The Boston Globe called it “Shoah: the Comedy”
What if Anne Frank survived Bergen Belsen and was an elderly woman living in an attic in upstate New York?
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/159448838X.jpg) Hope
A Tragedy
A Novel
By Shalom Auslander
January 2012,
The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife, Bree, and young son, Jonah, there. To begin again. To start anew. But it isn't quite working out that way.
His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won't stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. She is a survivor wannabee. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one he bought. And when, one night, Kugel discovers history - a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history - hiding upstairs in his attic, bad quickly becomes worse. She is foul mouthed, vomits, and demands daily deliveries of matzo. She is also working on a novel
It is a novel inspired by Kafka, by Beckett, and by the Book of Job (biblical Job, not Steve Job(s)). Sometimes HOPE makes things worse. Things are bad, you pray, and they get worse. There is also a thread of Holocaust humor in the novel, its use by some people, and its misuse by others.
The critically acclaimed writer Shalom Auslander's debut novel is a hilarious and disquieting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/156549511X.jpg) Tectonic Shifts
Haiti Since the Earthquake
Edited by Mark Schuller aand Pablo Morales
January 2012, Kumarian
So many Jewishp eople and Israelis are involved with Haitian relief.
They texted money there. Do you think it ended up doing good
Here is a book that tells an inside story of the aftermath and relief
Schuller, a NY anthropologist and professor at University of Haiti tells that the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti’s capital on January 12, 2010 will be remembered as one of the world’s deadliest disasters. It killed and also magnified the social ills that have beset this island nation. The quake exposed centuries of underdevelopment, misguided economic policies, and foreign aid interventions that have contributed to rampant inequality and social exclusion in Haiti.
Tectonic Shifts offers a diverse on-the-ground set of perspectives about Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquake and the aftermath that left 250,000 dead and more than 1.5 million homeless. Following a critical analysis of Haiti’s heightened vulnerability as a result of centuries of foreign policy and most recently neoliberal economic policies, this book addresses a range of contemporary realities, foreign impositions, and political changes that occurred during the relief and reconstruction periods.
Half of the 46 chapters are written by Haitians in Haiti and translated into English.
Analysis of these realities offers tools for engaged, principled reflection and action. Essays by scholars, journalists, activists, and Haitians still on the island and those in the Diaspora highlight the many struggles that the Haitian people face today, providing lessons not only for those impacted and involved in relief, but for people engaged in struggles for justice and transformation in other parts of the world. Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/031609997X.jpg) Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?
Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles
and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You
Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
By William Poundstone
January 2012, Little Brown
FROM THE AUTHOR OF HOW WOULD YOU MOVE MOUNT FUJI (Microsoft interview questions)..
You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? If you want to work at Google, or any of America's best companies, you need to have an answer to this and other puzzling questions. ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO WORK AT GOOGLE? guides readers through the surprising solutions to dozens of the most challenging interview questions. The book covers the importance of creative thinking, ways to get a leg up on the competition, what your Facebook page says about you, and much more. ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO WORK AT GOOGLE? is a must read for anyone who wants to succeed in today's job market.
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IF YOU LIKED THE FILM, PI…
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/030737937X.jpg) THE FLAME ALPHABET
A novel
By Ben Marcus
January 2012, Knopf
In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families. A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children’s speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents’ sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.
The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307265641.jpg) The Lady in Gold
The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece,
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
By Anne-Marie O'Connor (Washington Post)
January 2012, Knopf
The spellbinding story, part fairy tale, part suspense, of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of the most emblematic portraits of its time; of the beautiful, seductive Viennese Jewish salon hostess who sat for it; the notorious artist who painted it; the now vanished turn-of-the-century Vienna that shaped it; and the strange twisted fate that befell it.
The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait.
Anne-Marie O’Connor, writer for The Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure; daughter of the head of one of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, head of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to Constantinople; wife of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron.
The Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be educated, a notion considered “degenerate” in a society that believed women being out in the world went against their feminine “nature”). The author describes how Adele inspired the portrait and how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches of her—simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper. And O’Connor writes of Klimt himself, son of a failed gold engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an artistic heretic in his time, a genius in ours.
She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers’ grand palais; of the Austrian government putting the painting on display, stripping Adele’s Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, The Lady in Gold and proudly exhibited it in Vienna’s Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution. We see how, sixty years after it was stolen by the Nazis, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, and how the Court’s decision had profound ramifications in the art world.
A riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense. And at the heart of it, the Lady in Gold—the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each forever intertwined.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300169361.jpg) A Single Roll of the Dice
Obama's Diplomacy with Iran
By Trita Parsi
JANUARY 2012, YALE
Iranian activist and scholar, Parsi, writes that Obama made an effort with Iran but failed. And he explains why he think the U.S. failed. If you are going to go around saying the Iran is a problem and that the U.S. should bomb Iran, you should read this book first so that at least you can discuss the issue with some intelligence. Paris lays out the issues and explains why the nuclear issue is only a SYMPTOM of the deeper dysfunction.
Have the diplomatic efforts of the Obama administration toward Iran failed? Was the Bush administration's emphasis on military intervention, refusal to negotiate, and pursuit of regime change a better approach? How can the United States best address the ongoing turmoil in Tehran? This book provides a definitive and comprehensive analysis of the Obama administration's early diplomatic outreach to Iran and discusses the best way to move toward more positive relations between the two discordant states.
Trita Parsi, a Middle East foreign policy expert with extensive Capitol Hill and United Nations experience, interviewed 70 high-ranking officials from the U.S., Iran, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Brazil—including the top American and Iranian negotiators—for this book. Parsi uncovers the previously unknown story of American and Iranian negotiations during Obama's early years as president, the calculations behind the two nations' dealings, and the real reasons for their current stalemate. Contrary to prevailing opinion, Parsi contends that diplomacy has not been fully tried. For various reasons, Obama's diplomacy ended up being a single roll of the dice. It had to work either immediately—or not at all. Persistence and perseverance are keys to any negotiation. Neither Iran nor the U.S. had them in 2009.
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DON’T FORGET THESE “SELECTED” DECEMBER BOOKS
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0446539473.jpg) MAN SEEKS GOD
My Flirtations with the Divine
By Eric Weiner
December 2011 Hachette
After a health scare leaves him reeling, Eric Weiner-an atheist by default-sets out on a worldwide search for an experience of the divine. Propelled by the confrontation with his own mortality and questions about the best way to raise his daughter, Weiner travels to Nepal, where he meditates with Tibetan lamas and a guy named Wayne; to Turkey, where he whirls (poorly) with Sufi dervishes; to China where he attempts to unblock his chi; to Israel where he studies Kabbalah, sans Madonna; and to Las Vegas, where he has a close encounter with Raelians (followers of the world's largest UFO-based religion). Weiner's journey takes place at a time when more Americans than ever-nearly one in three-are choosing a new faith. At each stop along the way, Weiner tackles our most pressing spiritual questions: Where do we come from? What happens when we die? How should we live our lives? Why do socks abscond? With his trademark wit and warmth, Weiner leaves no stone unturned.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/159473299X.jpg) Fly Fishing--The Sacred Art
Casting a Fly, a Spiritual Practice
By Rabbi Eric Eisenkramer and Rev Michael Attas MD
December 2011 Jewish Lights
We go fly fishing to catch fish, to experience the rush of adrenaline when a trout rises to the surface, grabs the fly, and the line goes taut. But the fly line is more than a way to connect human beings to fish. Each cast of the fly line connects us to nature, to others and to the Divine Presence.
In this unique exploration of fly fishing as a spiritual practice, a rabbi and an Episcopal priest illuminate what each step on a fly-fishing trip has to teach us about reflection, awe and wonder of the natural world, the benefits of solitude, the blessing of community and the search for the Divine. Tapping the wisdom in the Christian and Jewish traditions, they outline seven steps of a typical fly-fishing trip and the lessons found within: The Off-Season and Fly Tying: Anticipation and Preparation; The Drive to the River: Unplugging from the World; Wading into the Stream: Finding Our Place in Nature; Fly Casting: Searching for God at the End of the Line; Setting the Hook: Life and Death on the Stream; The Drive Home: Contemplation and Reflection, "It Was This Big": Sharing Our Stories
Rabbi Eric Eisenkramer is creator of The Fly Fishing Rabbi: A Blog about Trout,God and Religion, and a contributor to Trout magazine and Reform Judaism magazine. He is the spiritual leader of Temple Shearith Israel in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Rev. Michael Attas, MD, an avid fly fisher for over forty years, is assisting priest at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas, a practicing cardiologist, professor of medical humanities at Baylor University and columnist for the Waco Tribune Herald. During the summer months, he works as a volunteer fly-fishing guide in Colorado.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1934781908.jpg) I Found This Funny
My Favorite Pieces of Humor and Some That May Not Be Funny At All
Edited By Judd Apatow
Fall 2011 McSweeneys paperback edition
I Found This Funny is a compilation of work by some of Judd Apatow's favorite authors. The book showcases many different styles of writing, from fiction to short humor to essays to comedy sketches to poetry. Featured writers include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Conan O'Brien, Lorrie Moore, Paul Feig, Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munro, and many more. Proceeds from the book will go to 826 National, a nonprofit tutoring, writing, and publishing organization with locations in eight cities across the country.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1554692997.jpg)
Kishka for Koppel
By Aubrey Davis and Sheldon Cohen
Ages 4 – 8
Orca Books
In this fresh take on a classic tale, a magic meat grinder helps a poor Jewish couple learn a little gratitude after the three wishes it grants them go awry. A cautionary story that questions today's consumerism and excessiveness, Kishka for Koppel, like the best folktales, can help children and adults alike to look both beyond and within.
Excerpt:
Koppel plunked the meat grinder down on the table.
"Tell her what you told me," he said.
Yetta rolled her eyes. "Oy vey, he's talking to a meat grinder."
"Tell her!" shouted Koppel.
The meat grinder was silent.
"Does it know any chicken jokes?" Yetta giggled. "It sings 'My Yiddishe Mama' maybe?"
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0761459049.jpg)
The Golem's Latkes
By Eric A. Kimmel and Aaron Jasinski
Cavendish
Ages 4 – 8
On the first night of Hanukkah, Rabbi Judah has too much to do and too little time to do it. Before the rabbi leaves to visit the emperor, he tells his housemaid Basha that she can ask the golem to help. While the golem makes latkes, Basha decides to visit a friend. Basha is having so much fun with her friend, she doesn't realize that latkes are pouring out of the rabbi's house, sending people running! Will Rabbi Judah come up with a solution to control the golem before it's too late? Illustrated with lively acrylic on wood, the book includes an Author's Note about the tale's origins.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0316127256.jpg) Why We Broke Up
By Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman
December 2011. Little, Brown
Young Adult (or adults)
I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened.
Min Green and Ed Slaterton are breaking up, so Min is writing Ed a letter and giving him a box. Inside the box is why they broke up. Two bottle caps, a movie ticket, a folded note, a box of matches, a protractor, books, a toy truck, a pair of ugly earrings, a comb from a motel room, and every other item collected over the course of a giddy, intimate, heartbreaking relationship. Item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.
DANIEL HANDLER eats latkas and writes under the name of Lemony Snicket for some books. He was dumped at least three times in high school. MAIRA KALMAN has her emotional-heart broken in high school by a boy who looked like Bob Dylan (the young Bob Dylan, not the old version).
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1451672462.jpg) WE ARE BROTHERS
(Beck’s trip to Israel – A Coffeetable book)
BY GLENN BECK
December 2011 Mercury Ink
Glenn Beck writes, “I went to Israel not as a tourist, but as a seeker. I went to seek an example of courage in the face of unspeakable evil. I went because I knew that Israel is a place where the largest daily struggle is just to live normally without fear, without rockets, without terror. In Israel, you see what it really means to choose life, to choose goodness, to choose to follow the light against incredible odds.
That's why the title of this book is WE ARE BROTHERS; Every free man and woman on the planet today is a brother or a sister of Israel; it's a single family of freedom and life. Israel, and all that she stands for, has a place in all of our lives. Evil is not based on geography and cannot be contained by borders or religion. Moral choices come at us every day. No one is perfect. But some of us have set a wise and noble example for making moral choices and we must learn from them. I came to Israel because I wanted to learn from her example of courage in building a prosperous and joyous nation in a tiny strip of land surrounded by enemies. Because, in this world, at this time, our future a future of freedom, prosperity and life itself can never be taken for granted. Unless we are willing to do the hard work of choosing right over wrong, no matter the consequences, we are assured nothing but the fact that, when put to the test, man s depravity knows no bounds. It's time for all of us to decide which side we are on; to know what we really stand for and what we believe in before we are put to the ultimate test. I know where I stand: with freedom, with goodness, with courage. I stand with Israel. I hope you will join me.”
Click the cover above to read more about the book
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0762763787.jpg) Almost President
The Men Who Lost the Race but Changed the Nation
Scott Farris
December 2011
As the 2012 presidential campaign begins, Almost President profiles a dozen men who have run for the American presidency and lost—but who, even in defeat, have had a greater impact on American history than many of those who have served as president. Scott Farris tells us the stories of legendary figures from Henry Clay to Stephen Douglas, William Jennings Bryan to Thomas Dewey. He also includes mini-profiles on every major candidate nominated for president who never reached the White House but who helped ensure the success of American democracy. Farris explains how Barry Goldwater achieved the party realignment that had eluded FDR, how George McGovern paved the way for Barack Obama, and how Ross Perot changed the way all presidential candidates campaign. There is Al Smith, the first Catholic nominee for president; and Adlai Stevenson, the candidate of the “eggheads” who remains the beau ideal of a liberal statesman. Others covered by this book include Al Gore, John Kerry, and John McCain. The mini profiles also include evocative portraits of such men as John C. Fremont, the first Republican Party presidential candidate; and General Winfield Scott, whose loss helped guarantee the Union victory in the Civil War.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1438439512.jpg) Dark Mirrors
Azazel and Satanael in Early Jewish Demonology
By Andrei A. Orlov
December 2011, State University of New York Press
Dark Mirrors is a wide-ranging study of two central figures in early Jewish demonology--the fallen angels Azazel and Satanael. Andrei A. Orlov, an Assoicate Professor at Marquette, explores the mediating role of these paradigmatic celestial rebels in the development of Jewish demonological traditions from Second Temple apocalypticism to later Jewish mysticism, such as that of the Hekhalot and Shi`ur Qomah materials. Throughout, Orlov makes use of Jewish pseudepigraphical materials in Slavonic that are not widely known. Orlov traces the origins of Azazel and Satanael to different and competing mythologies of evil, one to the Fall in the Garden of Eden, the other to the revolt of angels in the antediluvian period. Although Azazel and Satanael are initially representatives of rival etiologies of corruption, in later Jewish and Christian demonological lore each is able to enter the other's stories in new conceptual capacities. Dark Mirrors also examines the symmetrical patterns of early Jewish demonology that are often manifested in these fallen angels' imitation of the attributes of various heavenly beings, including principal angels and even God himself.
AND NOW FOR, FEBRUARY 2012 BOOKS
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1439187002.jpg) UNORTHODOX
THE SCANDALOUS REJECTION OF MY HASIDIC ROOT
BY DEBORAH FELDMAN
February 2012, S&S
Deborah grew up in Williamsburg as a member of the Satmar Hasidic movement. At the age of 23, she left the community with her son. Her mother also left many years ago, but did not take Deborah with her. Deborah's mother grew up in England in a religious, but not Hasidic, family. She married a Satmar and came to America. Feldman writes that her father had a personality disorder and, after several years, her mother and father divorced. Deborah was placed with her paternal grandparents and sent to the matchmaker at 17. This is her story of life in Williamsburg and her rejection of its rules and expectations.
Married at age 17 to a man she had only met for thirty minutes, and denied a traditional education — sexual or otherwise — she was unable to consummate the relationship for an entire year. Her resultant debilitating anxiety went undiagnosed and was exacerbated by the public shame of having failed to serve her husband. In exceptional prose, Feldman recalls how stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to see an alternative way of life — one she knew she had to seize when, at the age of nineteen, she gave birth to a son and realized that more than just her own future was at stake.
Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307952525.jpg) While America Sleeps
A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era
Russ Feingold, Former U.S. Senator (D, Wisconsin)
February 2012, Crown
Former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold represented Wisconsin in the United States Senate from 1993 to 2011. A graduate of Wisconsin, Harvard Law, and Oxford, he was Rhodes Scholar and a successful attorney prior to being elected to the Senate. Since leaving the Senate, he has been teaching Law and the Senate at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, visiting Stanford University, and being a grandfather to his daughter’s son, Izzy. He has also been writing this book, updating it after Osama bin Laden’s assassination, and founding “Progressives United,” an organization devoted to challenging the dominance of corporate money in the political decision making process.
In this book, Feingold looks at institutional failures, both domestic and abroad, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and proposes steps to be taken—by the government and by individuals—to ensure that the next ten years are focused on solving the international problems that threaten America. He rejects Peter Beinart’s notion that terror is not an issue, and that complacency is America’s fallback comfort position.
Feingold details our nation’s collective failure to respond properly to the challenges posed by the post-9/11 era. Oversimplification of complicated new problems as well as the cynical exploitation of the fears generated by 9/11 have undermined our ability to adjust effectively to America’s new place in the world. Feingold writes that this has weakened our efforts to protect American lives, our national security, and our constitutional values. Ranging from institutional failures to “get it right” by Congress, the executive branch, and the media to the way we have spoken of the war on terror, the nature of Islam, and American exceptionalism, too often we have not made the best choices in confronting, in Churchill’s words, the “new conditions under which we now have to dwell.”
Feingold explores the way in which the American public has been fed inadequate information or mere slogans to explain 9/11, Al Qaeda, and related events. This compares unfavorably with the candor often associated with, for example, FDR’s fireside chats during World War II. Lumping Al Qaeda into a catch-all category known as “bad guys,” failing to make it clear that Islam itself is not a threat to our way of life, and underestimating the extreme difficulty of fully invading individual countries as a way to root out international terrorism are examples of this misdirection. Moreover, our general inability to keep our eyes on the international ball seems to have grown even worse in the years following 9/11.
More than ten years after one of the greatest wake-up calls in human history, our nation seems to have again grown complacent about the issues that suddenly seemed so urgent immediately after 9/11. While America Sleeps suggests ways in which we can awaken a new national commitment to engage with the rest of the world and one another in a less simplistic and more thoughtful way. Feingold’s hope is that when the history of this era is written, it will be said that our country was taken off guard at the height of its power at the turn of the century and stumbled for a decade in an unfamiliar environment, but in the following decade America found a new national commitment of unity and resolve to adapt to its new status and leadership in the world.
Click to book cover to read more
Too Big to Fail?
Too Big to Mail?
Too Big to Sail?
Or too big to know..
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0465021425.jpg) Too Big to Know
Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
David Weinberger
February 2012, Basic
We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We’d nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There’s more knowledge than ever, of course, but it’s different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.
Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker . . . if you know how. In Too Big to Know, Internet philosopher David Weinberger shows how business, science, education, and the government are learning to use networked knowledge to understand more than ever and to make smarter decisions than they could when they had to rely on mere books and experts. This groundbreaking book shakes the foundations of our concept of knowledge—from the role of facts to the value of books and the authority of experts—providing a compelling vision of the future of knowledge in a connected world.
Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300165013.jpg) The Daily You
How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth
By Joseph Turow
Winter 2012, YALE
The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, with his hypothetical online newspaper The Daily Me—and it is one we experience now in daily ways. But, as media expert Joseph Turow shows, the customized media environment we inhabit today reflects diminished consumer power. Not only ads and discounts but even news and entertainment are being customized by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don’t know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don’t know we have. Little is known about this new industry: how is this data being collected and analyzed? And how are our profiles created and used? How do you know if you have been identified as a “target” or “waste” or placed in one of the industry’s finer-grained marketing niches? Are you, for example, a Socially Liberal Organic Eater, a Diabetic Individual in the Household, or Single City Struggler? And, if so, how does that affect what you see and do online? Drawing on groundbreaking research, including interviews with industry insiders, this important book shows how advertisers have come to wield such power over individuals and media outlets—and what can be done to stop it.Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0761345140.jpg) Barnyard Purim
By Kelly Terwilliger and Barbara Johansen Newman
Winter 2012, Kar Ben
Ages 5 – 9
When Farmer Max bids his barnyard animals goodnight as he heads off to a Purim play, the animals gets moving on a plan: they’ll put on their own Purim play. Horse won’t say nay to his role as King Ahashuerus, and sheep is set to play bad Haman, until another animal sneaks into the barnyard, and Esther doesn’t duck an opportunity for barnyard heroism. Youngest readers who don’t know the story may be slightly confused, but those familiar with the holiday tale will enjoy its barnyard reimagining. The story by Terwilliger (Bubbe Isabella and the Sukkot Cake) economically endows its characters with distinctive personalities. Johansen Newman renders a Purim-lively setting crowded with animals in her full-bleed spreads.
Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1594487944.jpg) No One is Here Except All of Us
A novel
By Ramona Ausubel
February 2012, Riverhead
In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307958701.jpg) What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
Stories
By Nathan Englander
February 7, 2012, Knopf
Deeply felt and presses all the buttons you do not want pressed
These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.
The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril.
And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.
Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0312601913.jpg) Children of Wrath
A novel
By Paul Grossman
February 2012, St. Martin’s Press
Willi Kraus, the celebrated WWI and detective, returns in this prequel story about how he became the most famous Jewish Detective in Germany in the days of the Weimar Republic.
In Children of Wrath Willi Kraus tackles the case of the Kinderfresser, the vicious Child-Eater of Berlin. Turning the clock back two years from The Sleepwalkers, the story starts out in the fall of 1929, the last days of prosperity. Berlin is deep in the throes of a giddy rush to forget its troubled past. But the same day the stock market crashes in New York, the dark underside of the German capital flushes to the surface in the form of a burlap sack spewed by floodwaters from the city sewer system. When Willi is called to investigate and discovers the sack is full of children’s bones with teeth marks on them--and a bible with a single phrase circled in red: children of wrath--he fears he’s run into “something darker than he’s ever known.”
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307272214.jpg) BRAVE DRAGONS
A Chinese Basketball Team, An American Coach,
And Two Cultures Passing in the Night
By Jim Yardley (NYT)
February 2012, Knopf
The wonderfully original story of a struggling Chinese basketball team and its quixotic, often comical attempt to right its fortunes by copying the American stars of the NBA—a season of cultural misunderstanding that transcends sports and reveals China’s ambivalent relationship with the West.
When the Shanxi Brave Dragons, one of China’s worst professional basketball teams, hired former NBA coach Bob Weiss, the team’s owner, Boss Wang, promised that Weiss would be allowed to Americanize his players by teaching them “advanced basketball culture.” That promise would be broken from the moment Weiss landed in China. Desperate for his team to play like Americans, Wang—a peasant turned steel tycoon—nevertheless refused to allow his players the freedom and individual expression necessary to truly change their games.
Former New York Times Beijing bureau chief Jim Yardley tells the story of the resulting culture clash with sensitivity and a keen comic sensibility. Readers meet the Brave Dragons, a cast of colorful, sometimes heartbreaking oddballs from around the world: the ambitious Chinese assistant coach, Liu Tie, who believes that Chinese players are genetically inferior and can improve only through the repetitious drilling once advocated by ancient kung fu masters; the moody and selfish American import, Bonzi Wells, a former NBA star so unnerved by China that initially he locks himself in his apartment; the Taiwanese point guard, Little Sun, who is demonized by his mainland Chinese coaches; and the other Chinese players, whose lives sometimes seem little different from those of factory workers.
As readers follow the team on a fascinating road trip through modern China—from glamorous Shanghai and bureaucratic Beijing to the booming port city Tianjin and the polluted coal capital of Taiyuan—we see Weiss learn firsthand what so many other foreigners in China have discovered: China changes only when and how it wants to change.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1439168229.jpg) No Cheating, No Dying
I Had a Good Marriage.
Then I Tried To Make It Better.
By Elizabeth Weil
February 2012, Scribner
Liz and Dan did not have a perfect marriage. Who does? So what if he saws a pigs head off in the basement? SO what if she never mentioned her ex bf’s prior to the wedding? Their marriage was GOOD. Really Good. Then, ten years after the wedding, Liz tried to make it better. And her story of what happened was one of the most discussed stories after it appeared in the NYT Sunday magazine. What does a BETTER marriage mean anyway?
Written with charm and wit, No Cheating, No Dying investigates one of the most universal human institutions--marriage. Elizabeth Weil believes that you don’t get married in a white dress, in front of all your future in-laws and ex-boyfriends but gradually, over time, through all the road rage incidents and pre-colonoscopy enemas, good and bad dinners, and all the small moments you never expected to happen or much less endure.
In this book, Weil examines the major universal marriage issues — sex, money, mental health, in-laws, religion, children, fidelity (no cheating) — through bravely recounting her own hilarious, messy, and sometimes difficult relationship. She seeks out the advice of financial planners, psychoanalysts, therapists, household management consultants, priests, rabbis, and the United States government. How much should one give up? What is faithfulness? How much of one’s personalities should one keep private ? Woven into this funny and forthright narrative is Weil's extensive research on marriage and marriage improvement. The result is an illuminating and entertaining read that is a fresh addition to the body of literature about marriage
Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0618507558.jpg) His Name Was Raoul Wallenberg
By Louise Borden
Winter 2012, Houghton Mifflin Books for Children
Ages 12 and up
Louise Borden is the highly regarded author of many books, including Good Luck, Mrs. K!, Sleds on Boston Common, Good-bye, Charles Lindbergh and The Little Ships: The Heroic Rescue at Dunkirk in WW II--all published by Margaret McElderry Books. Across the Blue Pacific is based on the true story of her uncle, Theodore Taylor Walker, who served aboard the USS Albacore (SS-218) during World War II. She lives with her husband, Pete, in Terrace Park, Ohio, and has three grown children. Her website can be found at www.louiseborden.com.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0967759056.jpg) THE EIGHTH VEIL
A JERUSALEM MYSTERY
By FREDERICK RAMSEY
February 2012, Poisoned Pen Press
A mystery by a retired Episcopal priest that is set in Jerusalem
The Eighth Veil is a mystery set in the year 28 CE in Jerusalem during the feast of Tabernacles. A murdered servant girl is found in the palace of King Herod Antipas. The Prefect, Pontius Pilate is in attendance. The populace is still buzzing over the brutal death of one of their Prophets, John, known familiarly as the Baptizer, and scandal is in the air.
Pilate does wants no trouble and insists an independent investigation into the murder be made. Antipas will have none of Pilate’s men in the palace and Pilate doesn’t trust Antipas. Gamaliel, the chief rabbi and head of the Sanhedrin is coerced by Pilate to do the detective work.
Gamaliel is a Talmudic scholar, not a sleuth and at first struggles. But as he learns more of the dead girl’s background and that of the other major players in the drama, particularly Menahem, Antipas’ foster brother, he soon becomes eon over to the process and, Sherlockian-like, begins to fit the pieces together. Or, as his “Watson” Loukas says, strips the veils from his personal Salome.
The girl turns out not to be the mere servant everyone assumed, in spite of his impatience with the pace and direction of the investigation Pilate is rewarded and the fascinating, little told but critically entwined, histories of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Herod the Great, Anthony and Augustus Caesar, and the Battle of Actium suddenly seems more relevant to the Gospel narratives than anyone might have previously imagined.
Meanwhile, the figure of Jesus, the rabbi from Nazareth, with his ragged band of enthusiasts and his habit of annoying Caiaphas, the High Priest, moves enigmatically in the background.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307359565.jpg) BOSTON CREAM
A MYSTERY
BY HOWARD SHRIER
Winter 2012, Vintage Canada
Publisher’s Weekly gives it a starred review
Canada's top private eye is back as Jonah Geller resumes his vagabond ways in Boston Cream, the Vintage World of Crime trade paperback original and sequel to the Arthur Ellis-winning novels Buffalo Jump and High Chicago.
David Fine is not the kind of guy to go missing. Or so his father tells Toronto PI Jonah Geller. A brilliant young surgeon-in-training, devoutly Jewish, devoted to his parents--last seen 2 weeks ago leaving the Boston Sinai hospital where he worked. Still recovering from a concussion, Jonah and partner Jenn Raudsepp soon find out that David fled for his life after a vicious Irish crime boss tried to abduct him. And that he's more likely dead than alive. Then Jenn joins the ranks of the missing, and Jonah needs help from former hit man Dante Ryan and two local wise guys as he races the clock to save her life, one step ahead of the Boston law.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0393081311.jpg) LIEBESTOD
OPERA BUFFA WITH LEIB GOLDDKORN
A novel by Mr. Leslie Epstein
February 2012, Norton
A multilayered masterpiece of fevered imagination and eroticism, Liebestod soars as the consummate work by one of America's greatest comic geniuses. As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, Liebestod returns us to Leslie Epstein’s most compelling literary character, that European émigré and meagerly successful musician, Leib Goldkorn, whose final years as a randy centenarian in New York City end in one of the most memorable swan songs in recent fiction. Invited back to his hometown in Moravia, Leib discovers that his father is not a hops magnate but actually one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers, Gustav Mahler. Returning to New York with a bevy of rabbinical cousins, Leib, now besotted by a world-famed diva, is determined to bring to the Metropolitan Opera Rubezahl, the only opera his real father ever wrote. Yet the much-heralded premiere turns into a fiasco of unimaginable proportions, all breathtakingly relayed by a stunned newspaper correspondent who survives to report on this monumental disaster. With Liebestod, Epstein once again “illuminates the mystery of our common humanity and mortality”
Epstein is director of the Creative Writing Program, at BU
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/145647068X.jpg) Looking Up
A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
By Linda Pressman
2011 – Self Published
Written by a child of two Holocaust Survivors, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, tells the story of growing up with parents who have survived the unsurvivable, who land in an idyllic northern suburb of Chicago, Skokie, where they're suddenly free to live their lives, yet find their past has arrived with them. In a book that's both funny and somber, and a story universal in its scope, Linda Pressman creates an unforgettable world of adolescent angst and traumatized parents amid the suburban world of the 60s and 70s, ultimately finding that her parents' stories are her own.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1594203334.jpg) Bringing Up Bebe
One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
By Pamela Druckerman
Also known as “French Children Don’t Throw Food.”
Pamela Druckerman has written for many publications including The Wall Street Journal. She knows a lot about sex, worldwide lust, standup comedy, Argentina, Brazil, Japanese and some Hebrew. But when she had a child in Paris, France, she saw that French babies acted differently from those of English speaking families. The French children Druckerman knows sleep through the night at two or three months old while those of her American friends take a year or more. French kids eat well-rounded meals that are more likely to include braised leeks than chicken nuggets. And while her American friends spend their visits resolving spats between their kids, her French friends sip coffee while the kids play. What was the secret?
Are they putting wine in the bottles of babies and cups of mothers?
Motherhood itself is a whole different experience in France. There's no role model, as there is in America, for the harried new mom with no life of her own. French mothers assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children and that there's no need to feel guilty about this. They have an easy, calm authority with their kids that Druckerman can only envy.
Of course, French parenting wouldn't be worth talking about if it produced robotic, joyless children. In fact, French kids are just as boisterous, curious, and creative as Americans. They're just far better behaved and more in command of themselves. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and pre-literacy training, French kids are- by design-toddling around and discovering the world at their own pace.
With a notebook stashed in her diaper bag, Druckerman sets out to learn the secrets to raising a society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents. She discovers that French parents are extremely strict about some things and strikingly permissive about others. And she realizes that to be a different kind of parent, you don't just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.
MARCH 2012 BOOK SELECTIONS
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0983934002.jpg) For Better or For Work
A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families
By Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, Stonyfield Farms
March 2012, Inc.
Discover how to build a successful business and follow your passions without sacrificing healthy family relationships to the financial and emotional rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship.
How does someone who is obsessed live peacefully with others who are not? That question summarizes the quandary faced by company founders and their families. To answer it, author Meg Cadoux Hirshberg examines the impact for better and for worse of entrepreneurial businesses on families and relationships, and vice versa.
Practically, this is a vital guide to navigating the emotional and logistical terrain of business-building while simultaneously enjoying a fulfilling family life. From the trials of co-habiting with a home-based business to the queasy necessity of borrowing money from family and friends to the complexities of intergenerational succession, no topic is taboo.
Psychologically, this book is a reminder that no entrepreneurial family trudges the hard trail of company-building alone. If you have embarked on such an enterprise, you and your spouse will find comfort and guidance in the experiences of others like you. Meg draws on the struggles and triumphs she and husband Gary Hirshberg experienced as he built Stonyfield Yogurt, and also shares powerful stories and insights from other families, gathered through hundreds of interviews.
For Better or For Work will remind you that the long hours and late nights spent on the business or with the family are worth the effort and will give you tools for making both endeavors successful.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0761375651.jpg) Lights Out Shabbat
By Sarene Shulimson and Jeff Ebbeler
March 2012, Kar Ben
A little boy spends Shabbat with his grandparents in Georgia and gets a snowy surprise.
Click the cover to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0714863483.jpg) Damn Good Advice
(For People with Talent!)
How To Unleash Your Creative Potential by
America's Master Communicator, George Lois
By George Lois
March 2012, Phaidon Paperback
A look into the mind of one of America's most legendary creative thinkers, George Lois. Offering indispensible lessons, practical advice, facts, anecdotes and inspiration, this book is a timeless creative bible for all those looking to succeed in life, business and creativity. These are key lessons derived from the incomparable life of 'Master Communicator' George Lois, the original Mad Man of Madison Avenue. Written and compiled by the man The Wall Street Journal called "prodigy, enfant terrible, founder of agencies, creator of legends," each step is borne from a passion to succeed and a disdain for the status quo.
Organized into inspirational, bite-sized pointers, each page offers fresh insight into the sources of success, from identifying your heroes to identifying yourself. The ideas, images and illustrations presented in this book are fresh, witty and in-your-face. Whether it's communicating your point in nanosecond, creating an explosive portfolio or making your presence felt, no one is better placed than George Lois to teach you the process of creativity.
Poignant, punchy and to-the-point, Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent!) is a must have for anyone on a quest for success.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307719340.jpg) THE SCIENCE OF SIN
The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies
And Why They Are So Good For You
The Joy of Sin (title in the UK)
By Simon M. Laham, Phd (Melbourne)
March 2012, ThreeRiversPress.com
Pride, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Sloth, and Anger
They’re considered “deadly” because of their capacity to generate other evils. The truth is, we all sin and we do it all the time—in fact, usually several times over before breakfast! But human behavior, argues social psychologist Simon Laham, is more complex than “good” or “evil.” In psychology, these sins aren’t considered morally wrong or even uniformly bad, but are treated rather as complex and interesting psychological states that if, indulged wisely, can be functional, adaptive, and lead to a range of positive effects.
The Science of Sin takes on these so-called sins one by one and through psychological research shows that being bad can be oh-so-good for you. Did you know that: Being slow and lazy can help you win the race?; Anger makes you more open-minded?; Coveting what others have not only makes you more creative but bolsters self- esteem?
So go ahead, eat that last cookie and kick back on the couch for a day of TV with your neighbor’s boyfriend—from gluttony to greed, envy to lust, Laham shows how even the deadliest, most decadent of vices can make you smart, successful, and happy.
Dr. Laham writes: One might not be tempted to call anger the most open-minded of the deadly sins; it strikes one more as the most pig-headed and self-righteous of the seven. However, recent work by Maia Young of UCLA, presents anger in a much more complimentary light. In one study, Young explored what psychologists call the confirmation bias – the tendency we all have to search for information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. Much research shows that when given a choice between reading arguments that firm-up their most cherished beliefs versus those that challenges them, people often opt for the latter; this is why Democrats watch The Daily Show and Republicans watch Fox News. Young was interested in what anger would do to the confirmation bias. Although, at first glance, anger may strike you as likely to amplify the confirmation bias – guiding the self-righteous, anger-fuelled individual to selectively process belief-consistent information – Young speculated that this complex emotion might actually have the opposite effect.
To test this hypothesis, Young had participants recall an event that had made them angry and then make a choice between belief-confirming and belief- undermining information. What she found was that anger reversed the conformation bias – making people more likely to seek out disconfirming information. Moreover, she found that angry people were subsequently more likely to be persuaded to change their beliefs than controls. This reversal is likely linked to the confrontational mindset often associated with anger. Anger tends to trigger an antagonistic frame of mind, which may put one in the position of seeking out information that stands in opposition to the status quo.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/039306476X.jpg) The Spanish Holocaust
Inquisition and Extermination in TWENTIETH-Century Spain
By Paul Preston
March 2012, Norton
Long neglected by European historians, the unspeakable atrocities of Franco’s Spain are finally brought to tragic light in this definitive work. The remains of General Francisco Franco lie in an immense mausoleum near Madrid, built with the blood and sweat of twenty thousand slave laborers. His enemies, however, met less-exalted fates. Besides those killed on the battlefield, tens of thousands were officially executed between 1936 and 1945, and as many again became "non-persons." As Spain finally reclaims its historical memory, a full picture can now be given of the Spanish Holocaust-ranging from judicial murders to the abuse of women and children. The story of the victims of Franco's reign of terror is framed by the activities of four key men-General Mola, Quiepo de Llano, Major Vallejo Najera, and Captain Don Gonzalo Aguilera-whose dogma of eugenics, terrorization, domination, and mind control horrifyingly mirror the fascism of Italy and Germany. Evoking such classics as Gulag and The Great Terror, The Spanish Holocaust sheds crucial light on one of the darkest and most unexamined eras of modern European history. 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805242791.jpg) When General Grant Expelled the Jews
By Jonathan D. Sarna, PhD
March 2012, Schocken / Nextbook
A riveting account of General Ulysses S. Grant's decision, in the middle of the Civil War, to order the expulsion of all Jews from the territory under his command, and the reverberations of that decision on Grant's political career, on the nascent American Jewish community, and on the American political process.
In December 1862, Genneral Ulysses Grant suspected that Jews were smuggling goods into Confederate areas. On December 17, 1862, just weeks before Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, General Grant issued General Orders Number 11, the most notorious anti-Jewish order by a U.S. government official in American history. His attempt to eliminate “black marketers” by targeting for expulsion all Jews "as a class" from Tennessee (Memphis) unleashed a firestorm of controversy that made newspaper headlines and terrified and enraged the approximately 150,000 Jews then living in the United States, who feared the importation of European anti-Semitism onto American soil.
Although the order was quickly rescinded by a horrified Abraham Lincoln (at the request of Cesar Kaskel, a Jewish merchant, and others), the scandal came back to haunt Grant when he ran for president in 1868. Never before had Jews become an issue in a presidential contest, and never before had they been confronted so publicly with the question of how to balance their "American" and "Jewish" interests.
Award-winning historian Jonathan D. Sarna gives us the first complete account of this episode — including Grant's subsequent apology, his philo-Semitism, his groundbreaking appointment of over four dozen Jews to prominent positions in his administration (including Benjamin Franklin Peixotto), and his unprecedented visit to the Land of Israel. The book sheds new light on one of our most enigmatic presidents, on the Jews of his day, and on America itself.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805094121.jpg) The Crisis of Zionism
By Peter Beinart
March 2012
Times Books
Based on Beinart's famed piece in June 10 issue of The NY Review of Books, the book will examine the growing gap between liberal American Jews and the State of Israel. The book will lay bare the fissures in the American Jewish community, trace the history of this divide with Israel, and how it will manifest itself in American as well as Israeli politics.
Israel's next great crisis may come not with the Palestinians or Iran but with young American Jews
A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream—the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals—may die.
In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the center of the crisis: Barack Obama, America's first "Jewish president," a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people's special curse. These two men embody fundamentally different visions not just of American and Israeli national interests but of the mission of the Jewish people itself.
Beinart concludes with provocative proposals for how the relationship between American Jews and Israel must change
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1459701275.jpg) HALBMAN STEALS HOME
By B. GLEN ROTCHIN
March 2012, Durdin
Rotchin's debut novel, The Rent Collector (Vehicule, 2005), was a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award. The novel has a Mordecai Richler feel to it, a la Barney's Version (Montreal-centric, featuring a crusty protagonist and his loopy family). Rotchin has won two national Jewish Book Awards for co-editing two poetry anthologies, and is a well-respected literary figure. MORT HALBMAN, 65, is the prime suspect in an arson investigation when his family home, which he built 35 years ago, burns down. Juggling complicated family matters, like his ex-wife, Mona, whom he divorced after 7 years of marriage; or Jacob, his gay son in search of a rabbi who can officiate at his same sex wedding, he feels compelled to continually return to the ruin of his former home, and to the memories the place still holds for him (which therefore makes him a suspect in the arson investigation). This is the story of Mort's daring attempt to risk everything for a last shot at redemption.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0299287300.jpg) Through the Door of Life
A Jewish Journey between Genders
Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies
By Joy Ladin
March 2012, Wisconsin
Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real. Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1605982903.jpg) Judgment Before Nuremberg
The Holocaust in the Ukraine
and the First Nazi War Crimes Trial
The story of the forgotten Kharkov Trials
By Greg Dawson (The Orlando Sentinel)
March 2012, Pegasus
The story of the forgotten Kharkov Trials, which sought justice for the thousands of Jews killed in the Ukraine two years prior to the infamous Nuremberg Trails. When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz, Dachau; and when they think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, they think of Nuremberg. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not of a city called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this idyllic, peaceful Ukrainian city, which is fitting, because it is also where the Holocaust actually began.
Revealing a lost chapter in Holocaust historiography, Judgment Before Nuremberg tells the story of Dawson’s journey to this place, to the scene of the crime, and the discovery of the trial which began the tortuous process of avenging the murder of his grandparents, his great-grandparents, and tens of thousands of fellow Ukrainians consumed at the dawn of the Shoah, a moment and crime now largely cloaked in darkness.
Eighteen months before the end of World War II — two full years before the opening statement by the prosecution at Nuremberg — three Nazi officers and a Ukrainian collaborator were tried and convicted of war crimes and hanged in Kharkov’s public square.
The trial is symbolic of the larger omission of the Ukraine from the popular history of the Holocaust—another deep irony, as most of the first of the six million perished in the Ukraine long before Hitler and his lieutenants even decided on the formalities of the Final Solution.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0312552262.jpg) Fat, Drunk, and Stupid
The Inside Story Behind the Making of Animal House
By Matty Simmons
April 2012, St Martin’s Press
A wild, uncensored, behind-the-scenes account of America's favorite film comedy. In 1976, National Lampoon, the nation’s most popular humor magazine, decided to create a movie under the Lampoon banner. It would be set on a college campus in the 60s, very loosely based on the fraternity experiences of Lampoon contributor Chris Miller, and it would be called “Animal House.” A cast of mostly unknowns was hired, and for four weeks in late 1977, the actors and crew invaded the town of Eugene, Oregon. Reluctantly produced by Universal Studios on a budget of less than $3 million, the film wound up with revenues of over $600 million. Drawing from exclusive new interviews with director John Landis, fellow producer Ivan Reitman, Karen Allen, Kevin Bacon and other key players, as well as never-before-seen photos, this book traces the film’s outrageous history, from its birth in the offices of the National Lampoon, to scripting, casting, filming, and, ultimately, the film’s mega success. This is a hilarious romp through one of the biggest grossing, most memorable, most frequently quoted, and most celebrated comedies of all time.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0674059948.jpg) THE FIRST CRUSADE
THE CALL FROM THE EAST
BY PETER FRANKOPAN (Oxford)
April 2012, Harvard University Press / Belknap
According to tradition, the First Crusade began at Pope Urban II’s instigation and culminated in July 1099, when western European knights liberated Jerusalem. But what if the First Crusade’s real catalyst lay far to the east of Rome? Countering nearly a millennium of scholarship, Peter Frankopan reveals the First Crusade’s untold history. What if the First Crusade’s real catalyst lay far to the east of Rome? Countering nearly a millennium of scholarship, Peter Frankopan reveals the First Crusade’s untold history.
Professor Frankopan shows that the standard history that Pope Urban II gave a speech in 1095 at Clermont might not be the whole story. While Pope Urban had tests and oaths, Peter the Hermit recruited what one contemporary called the feces of Europe to take up arms. Constantinople is where we should look. The Byzantine Empire and its ruler Alexios (I Komnenos) is central to the story of the First Crusade. The Crusade began with Alexios and not Urban II. Alexios was no fool. He had taken power in a coup and saw that the pope was weakened after the Great Schism of 1054. The Turks were threatening Alexios' rule, and he thought that by linking his rule to the freeing of Jerusalem would get him the military support he needed to fend off the Turks. Thus he was the architect of the First Crusade
As for the Jews... Towards the end of the 11th century, there were reports in Europe of atrocities by Muslims in the Holy Land. O 1077, a synagogue was burned in Jerusalem, and in the 1090's pilgrims were reportedly kidnapped and tortured. The Crusaders in the German lands practiced killing Jews on their way to Jerusalem. The Jewish population of Cologne and Mainz were violently attacked; some committed suicide rather than face the mobs. In Regensburg, Jews were pushed into the Danube to be forcibly baptised. Godfrey and Bouillon vowed to eradicate the Jews in 1096, but was stopped by Henry IV. Even the threat of excommunication did not stop the crusaders from killing Jews in Europe. When sacking Jerusalem, the Crusaders cut open Muslims and Jews, thinking that they had swallowed gold and treasures. Click the book cover to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0802120199.jpg) Second Person Singular
By Sayed Kashua
Translated from Hebrew by Mitch
April 2012, Grove Press
Fascinating and satirical... addresses the split identity of the Arab Israeli
Acclaimed novelist Sayed Kashua, the creator of the groundbreaking Israeli sitcom, “Arab Labor,” has been widely praised for his literary eye and deadpan wit. His new novel is considered internationally to be his most accomplished and entertaining work yet.
Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Award, Second Person Singular centers on an ambitious lawyer who is considered one of the best Arab criminal attorneys in Jerusalem. He has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of town, a large house, speaks perfect Hebrew, and is in love with his wife and two young children. One day at a used bookstore, he picks up a copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, and inside finds a love letter, in Arabic, in his wife’s handwriting. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer hunts for the book’s previous owner—a man named Yonatan—pulling at the strings that hold all their lives together.
With enormous emotional power, and a keen sense of the absurd, Kashua spins a tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, and questions whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves. Second Person Singular is a deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.
Click the book cover to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1608322939.jpg) America's Soul In the Balance
The Holocaust, FDR's State Department, And The Moral Disgrace Of An American Aristocracy
By Attorney Gregory J. Wallance
April 2012, Green Leaf
Documentary producer, author, tv host, and Kaye Scholer partner Wallance, reports on the often forgotten story of the 70,000 Romanian Jews who were deported to death camps during WWII and the US State Department’s reactions, failure to act, and suppression of facts
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307273474.jpg) Conversations at the American Film Institute with the Great Moviemakers
The Next Generation
By George Stevens Jr.
April 2012, Knopf
The Next Generation brings together AFI's conversations with moviemakers at work from the 1950s--during the studios' decline--to today's Hollywood. Directors, producers, writers, actors, cinematographers, composers, film editors, and independent filmmakers. Among them: Steven Spielberg, Nora Ephron, George Lucas, Sidney Poitier, and Darren Aronofsky.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805242597.jpg) Unterzakhn
By Leela Corman
April 2012, Schocken
A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths.
For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York’s Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life’s lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for "Underthings") tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the "golden land," where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0547134665.jpg) House of Stone
A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
By Anthony Shadid
March 2012
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Last spring, when Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went home. Not to Boston, Beirut, or Oklahoma where he was raised by his Lebanese-American family, but to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures. For two years previous, Shadid had worked to reconstruct the house and restore his spirit after both had weathered war. Now the author of the award-winning Night Draws Near (National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize) tells the story of the house’s re-creation, revealing its mysteries and recovering the lives that have passed through it. Shadid juxtaposes past and present as he traces the house’s renewal along with his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. House of Stone is an unforgettable memoir of the world’s most volatile landscape and the universal yearning for home.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0446584266.jpg) KASHER IN THE RYE
The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16
BY MOSHE KASHER
March 2012
Grand Central Publishing
A Delightful Romp Through Childhood Tragedy, Institutional Living, and Teenage Drug Addiction
Moshe Kasher is a stand up comedian and lives in Los Angeles. He has been featured on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Comedy Central's Live at Gotham, and Chelsea Lately. He has performed at many international comedy festivals including the prestigious "Just For Laughs" festival in Montreal, Jamie Foxx's "Laffapalooza" festival and "South By Southwest." Moshe just finished shooting an MTV show, and he recently sold a show to Comedy Central, which he wrote and will star in.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0062030310.jpg) PRAGUE WINTER
Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
By Madeleine Albright, Former U.S. Secretary of State
April 2012, Harper
Before she turned twelve, Madeleine Albright's life was shaken by the Nazi invasion of her native Prague, the Battle of Britain, the attempted destruction of European Jewry, the allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. Albright's experiences, and those of her family, provide a lens through which to view the most tumultuous dozen years in modern history. Drawing on her memory, her parents' written reflections, interviews with contemporaries, and newly-available documents, she recounts a tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring. "Prague Winter" is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind, a journey with universal lessons that is, simultaneously, intensely personal. The book takes readers from the Bohemian capital's thousand-year-old castle to the bomb shelters of London, from the desolate prison ghetto of Terezin to the highest councils of European and American government.
Albright reflects on her discovery of her family's Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland's tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exile leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are nevertheless shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong. At once a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history, "Prague Winter" serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past - as seen through the eyes of one of the international community's most respected and fascinating figures.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300159986.jpg) Islamism and Islam
By Bassam Tibi
Koret Foundation Senior Fellow, Stanford University
April 2012, YALE
Professor Emeritus Tibi (University of Gottingen) writes that despite the intense media focus on Muslims and their religion since the tragedy of 9/11, few Western scholars or policymakers today have a clear idea of the distinctions between Islam and the politically based fundamentalist movement known as Islamism. In this important and illuminating book, Bassam Tibi, a senior scholar of Islamic politics, provides a corrective to this dangerous gap in our understanding. He explores the true nature of contemporary Islamism and the essential ways in which it differs from the religious faith of Islam. Drawing on research in twenty Islamic countries over three decades, Tibi describes Islamism as a political ideology based on a reinvented version of Islamic law. In separate chapters devoted to the major features of Islamism, he discusses the Islamist vision of state order, the centrality of antisemitism in Islamist ideology, Islamism's incompatibility with democracy, the reinvention of jihadism as terrorism, the invented tradition of shari'a law as constitutional order, and the Islamists' confusion of the concepts of authenticity and cultural purity. Tibi's concluding chapter applies elements of Hannah Arendt's theory to identify Islamism as a totalitarian ideology.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/030015190X.jpg) Promiscuous
"Portnoy's Complaint" and Our Doomed
Pursuit of Happiness
By Bernard Avishai (Hebrew University)
April 2012, YALE
Avishai, a resident of Jerusalem and New Hampshire, and author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic, take a look at the classic work of Roth. The publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969 provoked instant, powerful reactions. It blasted Philip Roth into international fame, subjected him to unrelenting personal scrutiny and conjecture, and shocked legions of readers — some delighted, others appalled.
Portnoy and other main characters became instant archetypes, and Roth himself became a touchstone for conflicting attitudes toward sexual liberation, Jewish power, political correctness, Freudian language, and bourgeois disgust.
Bernard Avishai explores Roth’s satiric masterpiece, based on the prolific novelist's own writings, teaching notes, and personal interviews. In addition to discussing the book’s timing, rhetorical gambit, and sheer virtuosity, Avishai includes a chapter on the Jewish community’s outrage over the book and how Roth survived it, and another on the author’s scorching treatment of psychoanalysis.
Avishai shows that Roth’s irreverent novel left us questioning who, or what, was the object of the satire. Hilariously, it proved the serious ways we construct fictions about ourselves and others.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300169167.jpg) The Poetry of Kabbalah
Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition
(The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
Edited by Peter Cole
Afterword by Aminadav Dykman
April 2012, YALE
"A groundbreaking work. Cole reveals and explores a subject that has hardly been noticed in previous scholarship or popular writing: the poetic aspect of Jewish mysticism. His translations are superb, his introductions to each section are clear and stimulating, and his notes are learned yet not intimidating, clarifying what would otherwise remain obscure. In short, he brings this material alive for a contemporary reader. This is a marvelous book."—Daniel Matt, author of The Essential Kabbalah and translator of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition
A collection of poetry that emerges directly from Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem’s call to plumb the “tremendous poetic potential” concealed in the Kabbalistic tradition, Peter Cole provides dazzling renderings of work composed on three continents over a period of some fifteen hundred years. In addition to the translations and the texts in their original languages, Cole supplies a lively and insightful introduction, along with accessible commentaries to the poems. Aminadav Dykman adds an elegant afterword that places the work in the context of world literature. As a whole, the collection brings readers into the fascinating force field of Kabbalistic verse, where the building blocks of both language and existence itself are unveiled. Excerpts from The Poetry of Kabbalah have been featured in the Paris Review, Poetry, and Conjunctions.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0312611781.jpg) Naked Dating
Five Steps to Finding the Love of Your Life
(While Fully Clothed & Totally Sober)
By Harlan Cohen
April 2012, St Martins
From Harlan Cohen, the bestselling author of THE NAKED ROOMMATE: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run into in College, comes NAKED DATING, an honest, hopeful guide to getting a date, falling in love—or lust—and finding happiness in love (and in life). With a simple 5-step approach to finding the love of your life, Harlan answers the most commonly asked questions from his syndicated advice column, his college tours, his website, and his newest book for Gen Y. He helped a generation make the most of college life, now he’ll help them find the love of their lives.
Harlan's writing career began at Indiana University's school newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student. He shifted his path toward advice after interning at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in the summer of 1995. Harlan was inspired to begin writing his column after meeting a writer who had penned a similar column while in college. When he returned to campus, Harlan immediately launched his "Help Me, Harlan!" advice column. At first he wrote questions and answers to himself. When he started to help himself, he knew he was good. Then real letters started rolling in. Harlan's balance of honest advice, helpful resources, and sharp humor turned the column into an instant success on and off campus. As the column
spread, Harlan began writing books, speaking on college campuses, and creating original music to bring the topics addressed in his writing to life.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1400069343.jpg) LOTS OF CANDLES
PLENTY OF CAKE
(Life in the 50's (your fifties))
By Anna Qwindlen
April 2012, Random House
I admit that over two decades agom when I saw her column in the NYT, titled Life in the 30's, I thought it meant the 1930's.
LIFE MUST BE LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD (Kierkegaard)
She's back. Her daughter is over 21 now.
She writes: It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone, and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented. And finally I was what I was again. It turned out I wasn’t alone in that particular progression.
From Anna Quindlen, #1 New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, comes this irresistible memoir about her life and the lives of women today. Candid, funny, moving, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is filled with the sharp insights and revealing observations that have long confirmed Quindlen’s status as America’s laureate of real life. As she did in her beloved New York Times columns, and in A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen says for us here what we may wish we could have said ourselves. Using her past, present, and future to explore what matters most to women at different ages, Quindlen talks about Marriage: “A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn’t believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation.”
Girlfriends: “Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it’s sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.” Our bodies: “I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is, a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come. It’s like a car, and while I like a red convertible or even a Bentley as well as the next person, what I really need are four tires and an engine.” Parenting: “Being a parent is not transactional. We do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward: We are good parents, not so they will be loving enough to stay with us, but so they will be strong enough to leave us.” From childhood memories to manic motherhood to middle age, Quindlen uses the events of her own life to illuminate our own. Along with the downsides of age, she says, can come wisdom, a perspective on life that makes it both satisfying and even joyful. So here’s to lots of candles, plenty of cake.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307984737.jpg)
I Am Forbidden
A Novel
By Anouk Markovits
May 2012
Hogarth/Crown
A family saga set among a group of Satmar Hasidic Jews, spanning from pre-WWII Transylvania to Paris in the 1960s and contemporary Brooklyn. Tradition, love, commitment, and Torah law collide.
Josef Lichtenstein, 5, survives the murders of his family at the hand of the Romanian Iron Guard in 1939. She is saved by Florina, the family’s non-Jewish maid. He is taken and raised by her. Five year’s later, at age 10, Hosef rescues a young girl, Mila Heller, after her parents are killed while running to the Satmar Rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum, who is aboard the Kasztner train. Josef helps Mila reach the home of Zalman Stern, a community leader and scholar, where Mila is taken in and raised like a sister to Zalman’s daughter, Atara. After WWII, Zalman, Mila, and Atara flee to Paris, and Josef is sent to America to the newly planted Satmar community. As you would expect, Mila moves to Brooklyn to marry Josef, while Atara seeks independence. Alas, after a decade of marriage, Mila and Josef are childless and Mila, who is fervently pious, must try to get pregnant using another method. Hopefully her choice will remain a secret. This is just a taste, an appetizer of chopped liver, to the saga. The author, Anouk, is one of 15 children borne to a Hassidic Jewish family in France. She fled an arranged marriage and moved to NYC where she received a degree from Columbia, and then graduate degrees from Harvard and Cornell. Her first novel was in French, and this is her first novel in English
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0393081028.jpg)
DIFFICULT MOTHERS
Understanding and Overcoming Their Power
By Dr. Terri Apter (Cambridge)
May 2012, Norton
Apter, famous for her work on Mothers-in-Law (she rejected hers at first), turns her attention to difficult mothers. Apter is married to David Newbery, professor of applied economics at Cambridge University and research director of the Electricity Policy Research Group. They have two daughters, aged 30 and 26. Their backgrounds couldn't be more different. She grew up in Chicago and is the daughter of two Jewish doctors. "Everything was discussed in graphic detail and a spade was called a spade – very demonstrative, both in terms of excitement and sadness."
An essential work for readers seeking compassionate, wise guidance about the powerful relationship between mothers and their sons and daughters.
Mother love is often seen as sacred, but for many children the relationship is a painful struggle. Using the newest research on human attachment and brain development, Terri Apter, an internationally acclaimed psychologist and writer, unlocks the mysteries of this complicated bond. She showcases the five different types of difficult mother—the angry mother, the controlling mother, the narcissistic mother, the envious mother, and the emotionally neglectful mother—and explains the patterns of behavior seen in each type. Apter also explores the dilemma at the heart of a difficult relationship: why a mother has such a powerful impact on us and why we continue to care about her responses long after we have outgrown our dependence. She then shows how we can conduct an “emotional audit” on ourselves to overcome the power of the complex feelings a difficult mother inflicts. In the end this book celebrates the great resilience of sons and daughters of difficult mothers as well as acknowledging their special challenges.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1616200405.jpg)
The Aleppo Codex
The True Story of Obesession, Faith, and the International Pursuit of an Ancient Bible
By Matti Friedman
May 2012 Algonquin
This true-life detective story unveils the journey of a sacred text-the tenth-century annotated bible know as the Aleppo Codex-from its hiding place in a Syrian synagogue to the newly founded state of Israel. Based on Matti Friedman's independent research, documents kept secret for fifty years, and personal interviews with key players, the book proposes a new theory of what happened when the codex left Aleppo, Syria, in the late 1940s and eventually surfaced in Jerusalem, mysteriously incomplete.
The closest thing Jews have to the Word of God, the codex provides vital keys to reading biblical texts. By recounting its history, Friedman explores the once vibrant Jewish communities in Islamic lands and follows the thread into the present, uncovering difficult truths about how the manuscript was taken to Israel and how its most important pages went missing. Along the way, he raises critical questions about who owns historical treasures and the role of myth and legend in the creation of a nation.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805212345.jpg) Blooms of Darkness
A Novel
By Aharon Appelfeld
Translated by Jeffrey M. Green
May 2012, Schocken paperback edition
The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and eleven-year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly unhappy woman who hates what she has done to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go. When she’s not mired in self-loathing, Mariana is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective of Mariana, too, trying to make her laugh when she is depressed, soothing her physical and mental agony with cold compresses. As the memories of his family and friends grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana. And as her life spirals downward, Mariana reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy who is on the cusp of manhood. The arrival of the Russian army sends the prostitutes fleeing. But Mariana is too well known, and she is arrested as a Nazi collaborator for having slept with the Germans. As the novel moves toward its heartrending conclusion, Aharon Appelfeld once again crafts out of the depths of unfathomable tragedy a renewal of life and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/161145414X.jpg) BAD ANIMALS
A FATHER’S ACIDENTAL EDUCATION IN AUTISM
BY JOEL YANOFSKY
May 2012, Skyhorse
Joel Yanofsky gives us the funny, heartwrenching account of a year in the life of a father who struggles to enter his son’s world, the world of autism, using the materials he knows best, including self-help books, literary classics, and old movies. Joel Yanofsky tried for years to start this memoir. “It’s not just going to be about autism,” he told his wife, Cynthia. “It’s going to be about parenthood and marriage, about hope and despair, and storytelling, too.”
“Marriage?” Cynthia said. “What about marriage?”
A veteran book reviewer, Yanofsky has spent a lifetime immersed in literature (not to mention old movies and old jokes), which he calls shtick. This account of a year in the life of a family describes a father’s struggle to enter his son’s world, the world of autism, using the materials he knows best: self-help books, feel-good memoirs, literary classics from the Bible to Dr. Seuss, old movies, and, yes, shtick. Funny, wrenching, and unfailingly candid, Bad Animals is both an exploration of a baffling condition and a quirky love story told by a gifted writer.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805212493.jpg) TZILI
The Story of a Life
A Novel
By Aharon Appelfeld
Translated by Dalya Bilu
Spring 2012, Schocken paperback edition
Back in print, Aharon Appelfeld's acclaimed novel about an abandoned child who miraculously survives the Holocaust on her own. The youngest, least-favored member of an Eastern European Jewish family, Tzili is considered an embarrassment by her parents and older siblings. Her schooling has been a failure, she is simple and meek, and she seems more at home with the animals in the field than with people. And so when her panic-stricken family flees the encroaching Nazi armies, Tzili is left behind to fend for herself. At first seeking refuge with the local peasants, she is eventually forced to escape from them as well, and she takes to the forest, living a solitary existence until she is discovered by another Jewish refugee, a man who is as alone in the world as she is. As she matures into womanhood, they fall in love. And though their time together is tragically brief, their love for each other imbues Tzili with the strength to survive the war and begin a new life, together with other survivors, in Palestine. Aharon Appelfeld imbues Tzili's story with a harrowing beauty that is emblematic of the fate of an entire people.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300180446.jpg) In God's Shadow
Politics in the Hebrew Bible
By Michael Walzer (Princeton, IAS)
May 2012, YALE
The Bible cries out for reader to be engaged with its politics and anti politics. Walzer explores it. Were the editors of the Bible actually pluralists and inclusive in outlook; were they radical pluralists?
The Bible has a doctrine on religion and on justice… but with regard to politics, with god as a monarch, what does the Bible think about human politics?
In this eagerly awaited book, political theorist Michael Walzer reports his findings after decades of thinking about the politics of the Hebrew Bible. Attentive to nuance while engagingly straightforward, Walzer examines the laws, the histories, the prophecies, and the wisdom of the ancient biblical writers and discusses their views on such central political questions as justice, hierarchy, war, the authority of kings and priests, and the experience of exile.
Because there are many biblical writers with differing views, pluralism is a central feature of biblical politics. Yet pluralism, Walzer observes, is never explicitly defended in the Bible; indeed, it couldn’t be defended since God’s word had to be as singular as God himself. Yet different political regimes are described in the biblical texts, and there are conflicting political arguments—and also a recurrent anti-political argument: if you have faith in God, you have no need for strong institutions, prudent leaders, or reformist policies. At the same time, however, in the books of law and prophecy, the people of Israel are called upon to overcome oppression and “let justice well up like water, righteousness like an unfailing stream.”
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1592537669.jpg) Stop, Think, Go, Do
How Typography and Graphic Design Influence Behavior
By Steven Heller and Mirko Ilic
May 2012, Rockport
This revolutionary guide is not only the first to look at how typography in design creates a call to action, but it also explores type and image as language. Stop, Think, Go, Do is packed with arresting imagery from around the world that influences human behavior. Page after page, you’ll find innovative messages that advocate, advise caution, educate, entertain, express, inform, play, and transform.
Steven Heller is the co-chair of MFA Design (Designer as Author + Entrepreneur) at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the co-founder of MFA Design Criticism, MFA Interaction Design, MPS Branding and MFA Products of Design. He is the author or editor of over 135 books, including I Heart Design, and coauthor of The Design Entrepreneur and Anatomy of Design. http://www.hellerbooks.com
Mirko Ilic is founder of Mirko Ilic Corp., in New York City. He has received medals from Society of Illustrators, Society of Publication Designers, Art Directors Club, I.D. Magazine, and Society of Newspaper Design. Ilic is co-author of The Anatomy of Design with Steven Heller and co-author of The Design of Dissent with Milton Glaser.
http://www.mirkoilic.com
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0465020488.jpg) Moral Origins
The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame
By Dr. Christopher Boehm, USC
May 2012, Basic Books
I am so embarrassed to admit that prior to reading this book, I did not realize that Darwin's “Natural selection” was referring to the opposite of interventional selection done by humans when domesticating plants and animals. Which shows how well Professor Boehm explains evolutionary concepts
Are we a selfish species, or are we altruistic? Do we help our neighbors when they are in trouble, or do we steal from them and prey on their weaknesses? For three decades, genetic altruism has been cited as the dominant theory to explain the paradox of human generosity; experts claim our altruism is limited to close kin. But Moral Origins tells a different story. While most scientists continue to apply static evolutionary game theory models to the question of human morality, ethologist and anthropologist Christopher Boehm carefully traces our social evolution over time. By studying the social and natural environments of primates, Boehm has devised a convincing new hypothesis: as autonomy-loving humans became large game hunters, severe group punishment began to genetically favor individuals with superior self-control. Essentially, bullies and free-loader types were killed or expelled from social bands because they interfered with the survival of others in the group.
This social bias singled out highly altruistic individuals as preferable marriage partners, political allies, and group leaders—what Boehm calls “social selection.” The result was the first stirrings of conscience and the genetic effects eventually led to a fully-developed sense of shame. Rigorously researched and expertly argued, Moral Origins offers a new evolutionary paradigm of human generosity and cooperation. With its new perspective on the forces that shaped human morality, it offers insight into some of the toughest problems of our time—dealing humanely with those who transgress, and, perhaps, realizing how to prevent them from going bad to begin with.
My question after reading the book is... can Jewish people shun those of child bearing ability who cut in line at a shul kiddush so that they cannot reproduce. This will create more altruistic kiddush eaters over several generations of breeding.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0525952810.jpg) The Moral Molecule
The Source of Love and Prosperity
By Paul J. Zak, Phd
May 2012, Dutton Books
A Revolution in the Science of Good and Evil. Why do some people give freely while others are cold hearted? Why do some people cheat and steal while others you can trust with your life? Why are some husbands more faithful than others—and why do women tend to be more generous than men?
Could they key to moral behavior lie with a single molecule? From the bucolic English countryside to the highlands of Papua New Guinea, from labs in Switzerland to his campus in Souther California, Dr. Paul Zak recounts his extraordinary stories and sets out, for the first time, his revolutionary theory of moral behavior. Accessible and electrifying, The Moral Molecule reveals nothing less than the origins of our most human qualities—empathy, happiness, and the kindness of strangers.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300149417.jpg) MOSHE DAYAN
Israel's Controversial Hero
A Jewish Lives Biography
By Mordechai Bar-On, MK
June 2012, YALE
Instantly recognizable with his iconic eye patch, Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) was one of Israel's most charismatic—and controversial—personalities. As a youth he earned the reputation of a fearless warrior, and in later years as a leading military tactician, admired by peers and enemies alike. (He lost his eye with the British, not fighting for Israel) As chief of staff during the 1956 Sinai Campaign and as minister of defense during the 1967 Six Day War, Dayan led the Israel Defense Forces to stunning military victories. But in the aftermath of the bungled 1973 Yom Kippur War, he shared the blame for operational mistakes and retired from the government. He later proved himself a principled and talented diplomat, playing an integral role in peace negotiations with Egypt.
In this biography, Mordechai Bar-On, a Minister in the Israeli Knesset, and Dayan's IDF bureau chief during the Sinai campaign, offers an intimate view of Dayan's private life, public career, and political controversies, set against an original analysis of Israel's political environment from pre-British Mandate Palestine through the early 1980s.
Drawing on a wealth of Israeli archives, accounts by Dayan and members of his circle, and firsthand experiences, Bar-On reveals Dayan as a man unwavering in his devotion to Zionism and the Land of Israel. Moshe Dayan makes a unique contribution to the history of Israel and the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0375424369.jpg) The World Without You
A Novel
By Joshua Henkin
June 2012, Pantheon
From the author of the widely acclaimed novel Matrimony (a New York Times Notable Book)--a moving, deeply engaging new novel about love, loss, and the aftermath of a family tragedy. It's July 4th, 2005, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday: the family is gathering for a memorial. Leo, the youngest of the four Frankel siblings and an intrepid journalist and adventurer, was killed one year earlier while on assignment in Iraq. His parents, Marilyn and David, are adrift in grief, and it's tearing apart their forty-year marriage. Clarissa, the eldest, is struggling at thirty-nine with infertility. Lily, a fiery-tempered lawyer, is angry about everything. Noelle, a born-again Orthodox Jew (and the last person to see Leo alive), has come in from Israel with her husband and four children and feels entirely out of place. And Thisbe--Leo's widow and mother of their three-year-old son--has arrived from California bearing her own secret. Over the course of three days, the Frankels will contend with sibling rivalries and marital feuds, volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, with the true meaning of family.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0300171943.jpg) The Bride and the Dowry
Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War
By Avi Raz (Oxford)
June 2012, YALE
Israel’s victory in the June 1967 Six Day War provided a unique opportunity for resolving the decades-old Arab-Zionist conflict. Having seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, Israel for the first time in its history had something concrete to offer its Arab neighbors: it could trade land for peace. Yet the political deadlock persisted after the guns fell silent. This book asks why.
Avi Raz places Israel’s conduct under an uncompromising lens. His penetrating book examines the critical two years following the June war and substantially revises our understanding of how and why Israeli-Arab secret contacts came to naught. Mining newly declassified records in Israeli, American, British, and United Nations archives, as well as private papers of individual participants, Raz dispels the myth of overall Arab intransigence and arrives at new and unexpected conclusions. In short, he concludes that Israel’s postwar diplomacy was deliberately ineffective because its leaders preferred land over peace with its neighbors. The book throws a great deal of light not only on the post-1967 period but also on the problems and pitfalls of peacemaking in the Middle East today. Click to read more
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0385536100.jpg) Harry Lipkin
Private Eye
A Novel
By Barry Fantoni
July 2012, Doubleday
Meet Harry Lipkin, the world's oldest private detective: part Sam Spade, part Woody Allen, all mensch. Harry Lipkin is a tough-talking, soft-chewing, rough-around-the-edges, slow-around-the-corners private investigator who carries a .38 along with a spare set of dentures. Harry specializes in the sort of cases that cops can't be bothered with, but knows where to find good chopped liver for a fair price. He might not be the best P.I. in Miami, but at 87, he's certainly the oldest. His latest client, Mrs. Norma Weinberger, has a problem. Someone in her home is stealing sentimental trinkets and the occasional priceless jewel from her; someone she employs, trusts, cares for, and treats like family. With the stakes so low and blood pressure that's a little too high, Harry Lipkin must figure out whodunit before the thief strikes again. Sure to appeal to fans of Alexander McCall Smith, Harry Lipkin, Private Eye is sharp, funny and irresistible.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0307599582.jpg) HOSTAGE
A NOVEL
BY ELIE WIESEL
Catherine Temerson (Translator)
August 2012, Knopf
The acclaimed novelist and 1986 Nobel laureate in Literature returns to the subjects that have brought him the widest critical and commercial success, in an impassioned and deeply moving new novel about the legacy of the Holocaust and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the power of memory, and the desire for resolution.
It's 1975, and Shaltiel Feigenberg--beloved husband, and professional storyteller and writer--has been taken hostage: abducted from his home in Brooklyn, blindfolded, and tied to a chair in a dark basement. His captors, an Arab and an Italian, don't explain why the innocent Shaltiel has been chosen--just that his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. As his days of waiting commence, Shaltiel resorts to what he does best, telling stories to himself and to the men who hold his fate in their hands. A Communist brother, a childhood spent hiding from the Nazis in a cellar, the kindness of liberating Russian soldiers, the unrest of the 1960s--these are the memories that unfold in Shaltiel's captivity, as the outside world breathlessly follows his disappearance and the police move toward a final confrontation with his captors..
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805242864.jpg) The Loves of Judith
A Novel
By Meir Shalev
Barbara Harshav (Translator)
August 28, 2012, Schocken paperback edition
A woman with three loves and a son with three fathers: this universal story of passion and personal destiny could only have been written by the delightfully inventive author of A Pigeon and a Boy. When the mysterious Judith arrives in a small agricultural village in Palestine in the 1930s, she attracts the attention of three men: Moshe, a widowed farmer; Globerman, a wealthy cattle dealer; and Jacob, who loses his wife--the most beautiful woman in the village--because of his obsession with Judith, who insists on living in a cowshed rather than settling down with any of her admirers. When she gives birth to Zayde, all three suitors consider him their son, and all help father him when Judith dies. Zayde, who narrates the story as an adult, carries a legacy from each man, but it is Jacob, who invites Zayde to a special meal once every decade, who helps him piece together the beguiling story of the singular woman who was his mother. Meir Shalev combines magical realism with the joys and secrets of village life in this novel of an unconventional family and the unexpected fruits of love.
![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805212299.jpg) Future Tense
Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-first Century
By Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the UK
Translated by.. oh wait.. British English is understandable)
August 7, 2012, Schocken paperback edition
One of the most admired religious thinkers of our time issues a call for world Jewry to reject the self-fulfilling image of “a people alone in the world, surrounded by enemies” and to reclaim Judaism’s original sense of purpose: as a partner with God and with those of other faiths in the never-ending struggle for freedom and social justice for all.
We are in danger, says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of forgetting what Judaism’s place is within the global project of humankind. During the last two thousand years, Jews have lived through persecutions that would have spelled the end of most nations, but they did not see anti-Semitism written into the fabric of the universe. They knew they existed for a purpose, and it was not for themselves alone. Rabbi Sacks believes that the Jewish people have lost their way, that they need to recommit themselves to the task of creating a just world in which the divine presence can dwell among us. Without compromising one iota of Jewish faith, Rabbi Sacks declares, Jews must stand alongside their friends—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and secular humanist—in defense of freedom against the enemies of freedom, in affirmation of life against those who desecrate life. And they should do this not to win friends or the admiration of others but because it is what a people of God is supposed to do.
Rabbi Sacks’s powerful message of tikkun olam—using Judaism as a blueprint for repairing an imperfect world—will resonate with people of all faiths.
JEWISH JOCKS
Edited by
Fall 2012, Hachette Twelve
White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers is taking on tennis star Harold Solomon (a top ten tennis player in the Seventies). Best-selling author Steven Pinker’s subject is basketball coach Red Auerbach. Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson has picked ping pong legend Marty Reisman. “Jewish Jocks” will be a collection of essays about Jews in the world of sports. Other contributors will include New Yorker editor David Remnick on Howard (Cohen) Cosell, “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger on boxer Barney Ross (born Beryl David Rosofsky), and “Freakonomics” co-author Stephen Dubner on a baseball player who was hit in the head in his only major league at-bat.
![[book]](http://www.myjewishbooks.com/mad7_version1.JPG)
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