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Welcome to our pages of Sprin 2010 and Winter 2010 and oh so many more Book Suggestions. For our Home Page, Please visit MyJewishBooks.com

SOME LATE SUMMER/FALL 2010 BOOK READINGS

August 26, 2010: Alexandra Lebenthal reads from The Recessionistas. A romp on wealth power and maybe muni bonds, Books and Books, Westhampton Beach NY
September 8, 2010: Erev Rosh Hashana
September 9-10, 2010: Rosh Hashana
September 17, 2010: Yom Kippur begins in the evening
September 25, 2010: National Book Fair in Washington DC

The Story of AIPAC’s older Arab Cousins
I said PETROdiplomacy.. not PedoDiplomacy…

The Arab Lobby
The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America's Interests in the Middle East
By Mitchell Bard. PhD
Summer 2010, Harper
The point of the book is to tell American readers and opinion leaders that there is an Arab Lobby, and it is bigger and older, but much more discreet, than AIPAC. The book is being dismissed by critics since the author is a former AIPAC employee. They say it was written to counter Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s, “The Israel Lobby.” Bard is the executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, He PhD thesis at UCLA was on the limits to domestic influence on U.S. Middle East Policy.
From the cover: In this authoritative history—the first in over twenty-five years to investigate the scope and activities of the Arab Lobby—Mitchell Bard provides a timely and valuable corrective to the unbalanced view of Middle East affairs that is so widely promoted today. The so-called Israel lobby has been widely denounced and demonized in the media, but its power pales in comparison to the decades-long corruption of American interests by Arab governments. Indeed, for more than seventy years, U.S. policy in the Middle East has been shaped not by the power of a nefarious "Israel lobby" but by a misguided emphasis on pleasing and placating the Arab states. This outlook has ensured that the United States pays disproportionate attention to their demands, assisting Arab countries—all of them dictatorial regimes with abysmal human rights records—that do not share our values, and often work to subvert our interests.
Historically, the Arab lobby consisted of the oil industry, Christian missionaries, and current or former U.S. diplomats. Arabists in the State Department, many of them openly anti-Semitic, tried to prevent America from recognizing Israel in 1948, and have since waged a long bureaucratic war to undermine the alliance between America and the only true democracy in the Middle East, blocking arms and aid to Israel, while seeking larger weapons sales for their Arab friends. Many of these Arabists subsequently found lucrative jobs promoting business with Arab countries, speaking on their behalf and criticizing U.S.-Israel policy. Today the Arab states influence American policy through numerous hidden and informal channels, including former members of Congress, subsidized think tanks, paid media spokesmen, academics who hold chairs endowed by Arab money, human rights organizations, assorted UN agencies, European diplomats, and Christian groups hostile to Israel. A number of former ambassadors, university professors, and think tank experts routinely opine on Middle Eastern affairs, but never reveal these conflicts of interest. The most powerful member of the Arab lobby is Saudi Arabia, which has a nearly eighty-year relationship with the United States. From the earliest days, when American companies first discovered oil in the Arabian Peninsula, the Saudis have used a variety of tactics, including threats and bribes, to coerce U.S. policy makers to ignore their human rights abuses, support of terrorism, and opposition to American interests.
Today, Bard shows, the Arab lobby's goals include feeding America's oil addiction, obtaining more sophisticated weaponry, and weakening our alliance with a democratic Israel. It also seeks to influence public opinion through a well-funded publicity campaign, and by injecting distorted views of the Middle East into high school and college textbooks. Bard's detailed political history brings much-needed balance to a debate fraught with ignorance and propaganda.
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So… A Jew, A Baptist, and a Catholic walk into a bar… I mean a Capitol Rotunda… and the bartender says…

Young Guns
A New Generation of Conservative Leaders MBR> By Rep. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy
Summer 2010, Threshold Editions (Simon and Schuster)
From the book imprint that gave you Glenn Beck’s and Karl Rove’s comes a book by Congressmen Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy -- proud Republicans. But they believe the party had lost sight of the ideals it believes in, like economic freedom, limited government, the sanctity of life, and putting families first. This isn’t your grandfather’s Republican party. These Young Guns of the House GOP—Cantor (the leader), Ryan (the thinker), and McCarthy (the strategist)—are ready to take their belief in the principles that have made America great and translate it into solutions that will make the future even better, solutions that will create private sector jobs, maximize individual freedom, and establish a better world for our children. This groundbreaking book is a call to action that sets forth a plan for growth, opportunity, and commitment that will propel this country to prosperity once again. Together, the Young Guns are changing the face of the Republican party and giving us a new road map back to the American dream.
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Still a best seller after half a year:

Have a Little Faith
A True Story
By Mitch Albom
September 2009, Hyperion
First some background from the book. Mitch Albom was on track for Jewish scholarship. He studied Hebrew and Aramaic, Rashi and the RaMBaM. He knew Jewish texts and history. He went to Brandeis University and led Jewish youth groups. After graduation, his sports writing career began to blossom and he had a lack of need for Jewish study and practice. Then came marriage, and other events and he left his religious spirituality tucked away in a corner.
And now for the book
What if our beliefs were not what divided us, but what pulled us together? In “Have a Little Faith,” Mitch Albom offers a story of a remarkable eight-year journey between two worlds--two men, two faiths, two communities. The book opens with an unusual request: an 82 year old rabbi from Albom's old hometown asks him to deliver his eulogy. Feeling unworthy, Albom insists on understanding the man better, which throws him back into a world of faith he'd left years ago. Meanwhile, closer to his current home, Albom becomes involved with a Detroit pastor--a reformed drug dealer and convict--who preaches to the poor and homeless in a decaying church with a hole in its roof. Moving between their worlds, Christian and Jewish, African-American and white, impoverished and well-to-do, Albom observes how these very different men employ faith similarly in fighting for survival: the older, suburban rabbi embracing it as death approaches; the younger, inner-city pastor relying on it to keep himself and his church afloat. As America struggles with hard times and people turn more to their beliefs, Albom and the two men of God explore issues that perplex modern man: how to endure when difficult things happen; what heaven is; intermarriage; forgiveness; doubting God; and the importance of faith in trying times. Although the texts, prayers, and histories are different, Albom begins to recognize a striking unity between the two worlds--and indeed, between beliefs everywhere.
In the end, as the rabbi nears death and a harsh winter threatens the pastor's wobbly church, Albom sadly fulfills the rabbi's last request and writes the eulogy. And he finally understands what both men had been teaching all along: the profound comfort of believing in something bigger than yourself. The book is about a life's purpose; about losing belief and finding it again; about the divine spark inside us all. It is one man's journey, but it is everyone's story. Ten percent of the profits from this book will go to charity, including The Hole In The Roof Foundation, which helps refurbish places of worship that aid the homeless.

THE BUZZ ON THIS IS ASTOUNDING

RICH BOY
A NOVEL
BY SHARON POMERANTZ
August 2010, Twelve
Ten years in the making, Rich Boy is a well crafted novel of desire, money, grace, love, and class. It spans 4 decades, from the Sixties to the Nineties in the life of a young man, Robert Vishniak, who wants to escape his past. It is a story of rich and poor, and rich and wealthy.
Booklist writes: “*Starred Review* Pomerantz’s compelling, finely crafted debut novel chronicles one man’s journey from the blue-collar suburbs of 1950s Philadelphia to the high-society of 1980s New York. Robert Vishniak grows up in a working-class Jewish neighborhood, often at odds with his frugal, distant mother. Blessed with good looks and possessing an uncompromising ambition, Robert learns at an early age to use his physical appearance to his advantage. Eager to leave behind his humble upbringing, Robert is accepted to Tufts University, where he quickly falls in with a group of privileged students led by the enigmatic Tracey, Robert’s roommate and subsequent lifelong friend. Moving forward in time, Pomerantz chronicles Robert’s varied adventures as he copes with the panoramic complexities and rewards of rebellion, self-renewal, and heartache. Over the course of four decades, Robert becomes entrenched in the upper echelon of Manhattan’s elite, ultimately succeeding as a real-estate lawyer and marrying into a family of old money. He is finally enjoying the success he so desired as a young man, until a random encounter with a woman from his hometown begins to erode Robert’s carefully crafted persona. Pomerantz’s sweeping tale captures the intimate truths and hypocrisies of class, identity, and one man’s quintessential American experience.
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BURNT BOOKS
RABBI NAChMAN of BRaTZLAV AND FRANZ KAFKA
BY RODGER KAMENETZ
August 2010, Jewish Encounters – Schocken Nextbook
A dual biography of the venerated Hasidic storyteller Rabbi Nachman and the iconic modern master Franz Kafka that uncovers surprising parallels between two tragically abbreviated lives, both spent in search of spiritual meaning.
Rodger Kamenetz, acclaimed author of The Jew in the Lotus, has long been engaged in the study and practice of Jewish spirituality. And he has for many years taught a course in Prague on Franz Kafka. The more he learned about the life and work of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav (great-grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism), the more aware he became of unexpected connections between the lives and works of Kafka, a secular artist fascinated by Jewish mysticism, and Rabbi Nachman, a religious mystic who reached out to secular Jews. Both men died young of tuberculosis. Both invented new forms of storytelling that explore the search for meaning in an illogical, unjust world. Both gained prominence with the posthumous publication of their writing. And most intriguing of all, both left strict instructions that their unpublished writings were to be burned after they died.
Kamenetz uses these episodes as points of departure on a journey into the spiritual quests of these two troubled and beloved figures. He concludes with an analysis of their major works that illuminates the remarkable similarities between them. In their attempts to understand the existence of a Supreme Being in an imperfect world, both men teach us a great deal about the role of imagination in the Jewish spiritual experience.
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THE KOSHER BAKER
OVER 160 DAIRY FREE RECIPES FROM TRADITIONAL TO TRENDY
BY PAULA SHOYER
August 2010, Brandeis UPNE.com
The Kosher Baker is a fascinating look into the world of Jewish baking. While an incredible resource for those who eat kosher, it’s equally compelling for anyone interested in a tempting array of sweets and breads, from fast-and-easy to elegant party fare. Two thumbs up!
It is organized like a tutorial. Chapters includes (1) Quick and Elegant Desserts (15 minutes prep time) (2) Two Step Desserts (15-30 minute prep times) (3) Multiple Step Desserts and Breads (More than 30 minutes prep time) inclding Challah, mouses, tarts and puddings (4) Passover and No-Sugar and Other Special Diets
Highlights include basics, such as amaretto cookies, orange tea cake, and apple pastry. Next you graduate on to Chocolate Babka. As an expert, the book is also filled with tip on thawing and freezing , tips and techniques, and the point that if you boil caramel, don’t worry if the caramel forms into globs. Judy Lerner’s Apple Upside Down Cake; Pistachio Financiers (based on European almond gold bar shaped financiers); and Challah Beer Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce (based on a Brioche based dessert she once had, but she substitutes a challah
Paula is the owner of Paula’s Parisian Pastries Cooking School in Washington DC. She was the editor of Susie Fishbein’s Kosher by Design cookbooks. She received her pastry degree from Ritz Escoffier Ecole de Gastronomie Francaise in Paris in 1996. Click the book cover to read more.

JEWISH CHOICES, JEWISH VOICES
SOCIAL JUSTICE
Edited by Elliot N. Dorff, Danya Ruttenberg, and Louis E. Newman
August 2010, JPS Jewish Publication Society
How do we expand health care coverage to more Americans? Are hate crimes legislation and affirmative action fair? What sacrifices must we make to protect the environment? Is the death penalty morally acceptable? Contributors include Jill Jacobs, of Jewish Funds for Justice; Arthur Waskow, director of The Shalom Center; and TV commentator and UCLA law professor Laurie Levenson.
Each volume in this series presents hypothetical cases on specific topics, followed by traditional and contemporary sources. Supplementing these are brief essays, written by contributors of various ages, backgrounds, and viewpoints to provoke lively thought and discussion. These voices from Jewish tradition and today's Jewish community present us with new questions and perspectives, encouraging us to consider our own moral choices in a new light.
Danya Ruttenberg, Rabbi (Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, American Jewish University), is the author of Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon Press, 2008), and editor of The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (NYU Press, 2009) and Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press, 2001). Elliot N. Dorff, Rabbi (Jewish Theological Seminary), PhD (Columbia University), is rector and Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism) in Los Angeles.
Click the book cover to read more.

JEWISH CHOICES, JEWISH VOICES
WAR AND NATIONAL SECURITY
Edited by Elliot N. Dorff, Danya Ruttenberg, and Louis E. Newman
August 2010, JPS Jewish Publication Society
Is it morally acceptable to use surveillance and profiling to protect national security? Should war only be used in self-defense? Is torture in times of war morally acceptable? Contributors include scholar Noam Chomsky, Lt. Col. Seth Milstein, and political philosopher Michael Walzer. Each volume in this series presents hypothetical cases on specific topics, followed by traditional and contemporary sources. Supplementing these are brief essays, written by contributors of various ages, backgrounds, and viewpoints to provoke lively thought and discussion. These voices from Jewish tradition and today's Jewish community present us with new questions and perspectives, encouraging us to consider our own moral choices in a new light.
Click the book cover to read more.
See also:
Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices on these topics
Sex and Intimacy
Power
Body
Money

SOME SEPTEMBER 2010 BOOKS

A PRIVILEGE TO DIE
HEZBOLLAH‘S LEGIONS AND THEIR ENDLESS WAR AGAINST ISRAEL
BY THANASSIS CAMBANIS
September 2010, Free Press
Is it a political party, or a standing army. It is both. Plus it is a theological movement. It makes no apologies or compromises to its goal to remake the Middle East map and to destroy Israel. Who are the people willing to die for this group? While Hamas and al Qaeda are dangerous, it is Hezbollah’s foot soldiers who are sowrn to the apocalyptic belief of “The Party of God.“ This is an urgent exploration of militancy in the Middle East. Leslie Gelb called the book “Frightening.”
Cambanis, a past reporter for the New York Times and The Boston Globe, and current teacher at Columbia University’s SIPA, questions how Hezbollah has won two wars with Israel and managed to maintain a powerful position in the Islamic world, and grow in followers. Even the middle class and nursing professionals support the movement. How have the appealed to so many economic classes and religious sects? What is the apocalyptic beliefs of this Party Of God? The author introduces us to these answers as well as the “soccer moms” of the movement who are on ground, recruiting and promoting. And creating devotion. Click the book cover to read more.

Simon Wiesenthal
The Life and Legends
By Tom Segev
September 2010, Doubleday Press
From esteemed Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev, the first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, revealing the fascinating truth behind this simultaneously admired, despised, and feared hunter of Nazis. Simon Wiesenthal was the legendary “Nazi hunter” played by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier on film, a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to the punishment of Nazi criminals. A hero in the eyes of many, he was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this definitive biography, Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s hundreds of thousands of private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal’s life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Wald heim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his RIVALRY WITH ELIE WIESEL. Tom Segev has written a brilliant character study of the “hunter” who was driven by his own memories to ensure that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten
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I LIVE IN THE FUTURE AND HERE’S HOW IT WORKS
HOW NEW MEDIA IS CREATIVELY DISRUPTING YOUR WORLD, WORK, AND BRAIN
BY NICK BILTON
September 2010, Crown
The Medium is the message?
Nick Bilton is the Marshall McLuhan of the Internet Media age
The internet is creating a new type of consumer, the consumerivore. Immediacy trumps quality. How will they influence product development, the mar, and content and how it is created and delivered. Brains are changing based on the new media narratives. Is it a coincidence that ADHD ADD is increasing? Does anyone have patience? Can anyone concentrate? Does anyone have a real conversation that does not involve texting? A must read.
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SARAH
THE LIFE OF SARAH BERNHARDT
BY ROBERT GOTTLIEB
Part of the Yale University Press Jewish Lives Series of Books
September 21, 2010, Yale University Press
Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious career—redefining the very nature of her art—to her amazing (and highly public) romantic life to her indomitable spirit. Well into her seventies, after the amputation of her leg, she was performing under bombardment for soldiers during World War I, as well as crisscrossing America on her ninth American tour. Her family was also a source of curiosity: the mother she adored and who scorned her; her two half-sisters, who died young after lives of dissipation; and most of all, her son, Maurice, whom she worshiped and raised as an aristocrat, in the style appropriate to his presumed father, the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Only once did they quarrel—over the Dreyfus Affair. Maurice was a right-wing snob; Sarah, always proud of her Jewish heritage, was a passionate Dreyfusard and Zolaist.
Though the Bernhardt literature is vast, Gottlieb’s Sarah is the first English-language biography to appear in decades. Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory through which an illegitimate—and scandalous—daughter of a courtesan transformed herself into the most famous actress who ever lived, and into a national icon, a symbol of France.
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THE INVISIBLE HARRY GOLD
The Man Who Gave The Soviets The Atom Bomb
By Allen M Hornblum
September 2010, Yale University Press
In the history of Soviet espionage in America, few people figure more crucially than Harry Gold. A Russian Jewish immigrant who spied for the Soviets from 1935 until 1950, Gold was an accomplished industrial and military espionage agent. He was assigned to be physicist Klaus Fuchs’s “handler” and ultimately conveyed sheaves of stolen information about the Manhattan Project from Los Alamos to Russian agents. He is literally the man who gave the USSR the plans for the atom bomb. The subject of the most intensive public manhunt in the history of the FBI, Gold was arrested in May 1950. His confession revealed scores of contacts, and his testimony in the trial of the Rosenbergs proved pivotal. Yet among his co-workers, fellow prisoners at Lewisburg Penitentiary, and even those in the FBI, Gold earned respect, admiration, and affection. In The Invisible Harry Gold, journalist and historian Allen Hornblum paints a surprising portrait of this notorious yet unknown figure. Through interviews with many individuals who knew Gold and years of research into primary documents, Hornblum has produced a gripping account of how a fundamentally decent and well-intentioned man helped commit the greatest scientific theft of the twentieth century.
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HOW TO CURE A FANATIC
BY AMOS OZ

September 2010, Princeton University Press
Now in paperback
Oz, one of Israel's foremost novelists and also a leader in the peace movement, sets up opposite poles—pragmatism and fanaticism—in the two essays in this thin (both in size and content) volume. Pragmatism is Oz's path to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Writing in ardent, articulate and informal prose (the essays originated as lectures), Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness) writes that this conflict is a straightforward, though intense, battle over real estate in which both sides have legitimate claims to one tiny piece of land. And the necessary compromise—in the form of two states, "divided roughly according to demographic realities"—will be deeply painful for both, the loss of land a kind of amputation, in Oz's words. Also crucial to peace, in Oz's view, is providing homes and jobs for the residents of the squalid Palestinian refugee camps. But how to convince the anti-compromise fanatics on both sides? On this score, Oz is less satisfying, suggesting the remedial value of humor and imagination (i.e., learning to really see the other). The book's third part, an interview with Princeton University Press's Brigitta van Rheinberg, is largely redundant, leaving this feeling more like a padded pamphlet than a book, despite the virtues of Oz's perspective.
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AUGUSTINE AND THE JEWS
A CHRISTIAN DEFENSE OF JEWS AND JUDAiSM
BY PAULA FREDRIKSEN
September 2010, Yale University Press, paperback
A recognized scholar of the historical Jesus, Fredriksen (Aurelio Professor of Scripture, Boston Univ.; From Jesus to Christ) explores Augustine of Hippo's journey into his own particular understanding of Scripture and of the place of Judaism in the Christian world. She particularly focuses on Augustine's commentaries on Paul's letters, the Psalms, and recorded disputations with the Manicheans whom he had once embraced. Over time, Augustine (354–430) arrived at his ideas of a just God and of human freedom, which in turn led to his teaching that Jews, divinely chosen, were necessary witnesses in the development of Christianity. The author draws especially on Augustine's Confessions and City of God and also references writings of contemporaries such as Ambrose and Jerome. She points out that despite the early development of anti-Judaism in the rhetoric of the day, the populations of urban Mediterranean cities intermingled socially, with Jews practicing their religious traditions, holding civil office, etc. Featuring textual analysis of a very high caliber and an extensive bibliography, this worthy contribution to the literature on Augustine is recommended for scholarly and religion collections.
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LENIN‘S JEWISH QUESTION
BY YOHANAN PETOVSKY-SHTERN
September 2010, Yale University Press
In this first examination of Lenin’s genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was a Jew. He examines why and how Lenin’s Jewish relatives converted to Christianity, explains how Lenin’s vision of Russian Marxism shaped his identity, and explores Lenin’s treatment of party colleagues of Jewish origin and the Jewish Question in Europe. Petrovsky-Shtern also uncovers the continuous efforts of the Soviet communists to suppress Lenin’s Jewishness and the no less persistent attempts of Russian extremists to portray Lenin as a Jew. In this fascinating book, Petrovsky-Shtern expands our understanding not only of Lenin, but also of Russian and Soviet handling of the Jewish Question.
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THE GLATSTEIN CHRONICLES
JACOB GLATSTEIN
EDITED BY RUTH WISSE
September 2010, Yale University Press
In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971) travelled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as "The Glatstein Chronicles") in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Glatstein's accounts 'stretch like a tightrope across a chasm', writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction. In Book One, "Homeward Bound", the narrator, Yash, recounts his voyage to his birthplace in Poland and the array of international travellers he meets along the way. Book Two, "Homecoming at Twilight", resumes after his mother's funeral and ends with Yash's impending return to the United States, a Jew with an American passport who recognizes the ominous history he is traversing. "The Glatstein Chronicles" is at once insightful reportage of the year after Hitler came to power, reflection by a leading intellectual on contemporary culture and events, and the closest thing we have to a memoir by the boy from Lublin, Poland, who became one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.
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AFTER THE FLOTILLA, FAUX TILLA, THE SHORTENED LEGS OF THE CHAIR… this is a must read to understand present day Turkey

TURKEY, ISLAM, NATIONALISM, AND MODERNITY
A HISTORY
BY CARTER FINDLEY (Ohio State)
September 2010, Yale University Press
Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity reveals the historical dynamics propelling two centuries of Ottoman and Turkish history. As mounting threats to imperial survival necessitated dynamic responses, ethnolinguistic and religious identities inspired alternative strategies for engaging with modernity. A radical, secularizing current of change competed with a conservative, Islamically committed current. Crises sharpened the differentiation of the two currents, forcing choices between them.
The radical current began with the formation of reformist governmental elites and expanded with the advent of “print capitalism,” symbolized by the privately owned, Ottoman-language newspapers. The radicals engineered the 1908 Young Turk revolution, ruled empire and republic until 1950, made secularism a lasting “belief system,” and still retain powerful positions. The conservative current gained impetus from three history-making Islamic renewal movements, those of Mevlana Halid, Said Nursi, and Fethullah Gülen. Powerful under the empire, Islamic conservatives did not regain control of government until the 1980s. By then they, too, had their own influential media. Findley's reassessment of political, economic, social, and cultural history reveals the dialectical interaction between radical and conservative currents of change, which alternately clashed and converged to shape late Ottoman and republican Turkish history.
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APART
ALIENATED AND ENGAGED MUSLIMS IN THE WEST
BY JUSTIN GEST
September 2010, Columbia University Press
Through a novel conceptual framework and probing interviews, Justin Gest gets to the heart of why so many Western Muslims are disaffected by their social and political situations and why they undermine the very political systems that remain their means of inclusion. He also considers why so many other Western Muslims feel differently and why they choose to be engaged. Based on research conducted in London's East End and Madrid's Lavapiés district, and drawing on over one hundred interviews with community elders, imams, extremists, politicians, gangsters, and ordinary people just trying to get by, Gest maps the daily experiences of young Muslim men. Confronting conventional explanations that point to inequality, discrimination, and religion, he builds a new theory that distinguishes alienated and engaged political behavior not by structural factors but by social agents and their interpretation of shared realities. Filled with counterintuitive conclusions, Apart sounds an unambiguous warning to Western policymakers, presaging an imminent American experience with the same challenges. The way in which governments and people discipline their fear and understand their Muslim fellows, it claims, may shape the course of democratic social life in the foreseeable future.
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THE SHIFT
ISRAEL PALESTINE FROM BORDER STRUGGLE TO ETHNIC CONFLICT
By MENACHEM KLEIN, Bar Ilan University
September 2010, Columbia University Press
Since 2000, the Israeli army has increased the size and strength of its operations in occupied territories. These activities, matched with an unprecedented rise in the construction of Jewish settlements, have irrevocably changed the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis. As Menachem Klein sees it, what was once a border conflict has now become an ethnic struggle, with Jewish Israel establishing an ethno-security regime that stretches from Jordan to the Mediterranean, facilitated and accelerated by the recent results of elections in Israel, the United States, and the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. In a bold challenge to those who claim Israel has done nothing more than pursue a framework of "occupation," Klein identifies a radical shift that has put ethnicity at the center of its security initiatives. Even Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin are at risk of becoming targets. Klein closely reads the legal and political apparatus now cocooning Israel's shrinking Jewish majority. Within this system, Palestinians have been divided into several categories with different privileges: Israel's Palestinian citizens; the residents of Jerusalem; the two groups that occupy the West Bank, separated by the Separation Barrier; and those who live under siege in the Gaza Strip. Grounding his work in primary sources and hard-to-find statistics, Klein completes a groundbreaking, unflinchingly study that portrays the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He ultimately argues that a single, nonethnic state is not the best solution. Instead he supports a two-state compromise, as difficult as it may be, since it is the only viable way to peace.
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THE WORST-KEPT SECRET
ISRAEL‘S BARGAIN WITH THE BOMB
BY AVNER COHEN, GWU
September 2010, Columbia University Press
Israel has made a unique contribution to the nuclear age& mdash;it has created (with the tacit support of the United States) a special "bargain" with its bomb. Israel is the only nuclear-armed state that keeps its bomb invisible, unacknowledged, opaque. It will only say that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. The bomb is Israel's collective ineffable& mdash;the nation's last taboo. This bargain has a name: in Hebrew, it is called amimut, or opacity. By adhering to the bargain, which was born in a secret deal between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, Israel creates a code of nuclear conduct that encompasses both governmental policy and societal behavior. The bargain lowers the salience of Israel's nuclear weapons, yet it also remains incompatible with the norms and values of liberal democracy. It relies on secrecy and opacity. It infringes on the public right to know and negates the notion of public accountability and oversight, among other offenses. Author of the critically acclaimed Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen offers a bold and original study of this politically explosive subject. Along with a fair appraisal of the bargain's strategic merits, Cohen provides a critique of its antidemocratic faults. Arguing that the bargain has become increasingly anachronistic, he calls for a reform in line with domestic democratic values as well as current international nuclear norms. Most important, he believes the old methods will prove inadequate in dealing with a nuclear Iran. Cohen concludes with fresh perspectives on Iran, Israel, and the effort toward global disarmament.
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The Chosen Peoples
America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election
By Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz
September 2010, Simon and Schuster
The origins, consequences, and attendant burdens of a belief central to the identities of Americans and Israelis--that they are God's favored people.
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David Susskind
A Televised Life
By Stephen Battaglio
September 2010, St.Martins Press
A flamboyant impresario who began his career as an agent, David Susskind helped define a fledgling television industry. He was a provocateur who fought to bring high-toned literary works to TV. His series East Side/West Side and N.Y.P.D. broke the color barrier in casting and brought gritty, urban realism to prime time. He indulged his passion for issues and ideas with his long running discussion program, first called Open End and then The David Susskind Show, where guests could come from The White House one week and a whore house the next. The groundbreaking program made news year in and year out. His legendary live interview with Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War inflamed both the political and media establishments. Susskind was an enfant terrible whose life—both on and off the screen—makes fascinating reading. His rough edges, appetite for women, and scorn for the business side of his profession often left his own career hanging by a thread. Through extensive original reporting and deep access to David Susskind’s personal papers, family members and former associates, Stephen Battaglio creates a vivid portrait of a go-go era in American media. David Susskind is as much a biography of an expansive and glamorous time in the television business as it is the life of one of its most colorful and important players.
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PATTI LuPONE
A MEMOIR
BY PATTI LUPONE
September 2010, Twelve
A no holds barred honest insightful memoir by Broadway star Patti Lupone. From growing up and scrap booking, to attending Julliard in its first drama class (they hated her there). He work for the Acting Company and her first Broadway roles and major starring roles. The inside story from London. And Sunset Boulevard, and Gypsy and all the other major roles. The failures and the successes. She discusses the ’x’ factor of sex appeal and charisma and magnetism, and why American Idol stars who come to star on Broadway don’t have it. But then of course, show business, is a business. Click the book cover to read more.

WALKING ISRAEL
A PERSONAL SEARCH FOR THE SOUL OF A NATION
BY MARTIN FLETCHER
September 2010, St. Martins Press Thomas Dunne
Fletcher is one of the most respected television journalists. He received five Emmys and a duPont. For the past 30 years he was NBC News‘ Bureau Chief in Tel Aviv. He is the author of BREAKING NEWS. Last year, he strolled along Israel‘s entire coast, from Lebanon to Gaza. He observed the facets of the country that are ignored by print and tv news. His stories seek to tell a truer, different, more nuanced story of the people and country. It is filled with insights, humor, history, emotion, and great storytelling.
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PEACE IN THE MAKING
THE MENACHEM BEGIN - ANWAR SADAT PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE
EDITED BY HARRY HURWITZ
September 2010, Gefen
The intimate correspondence between Israel’s PM Begin and Egypt’s President Sadat. The letters, transcripts from their speeches, press conferences, interviews, official documents reveal the personal relationship between these two political leaders. How did this relate to thetreaty they eventually signed. The personaliities, the principled issues, the maneuverings, the clashes, the compromises, and agreements that were, at the time, hidden in the background, are unveiled in this books It spans June 1977 to Sadat’s murder in October 1981.
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WHEN THEY COME FOR US
WE’LL BE GONE
THE EPIC STRUGGLE TO SAVE SOVIET JEWRY
By Gal Beckerman
September 2010, HMH Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the Soviet Union. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue. Journalist Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet government documents as well as hundreds of oral interviews with refuseniks, activists, Zionist “hooligans,” and Congressional staffers. He shows not only how the movement led to a mass exodus in 1989, but also how it shaped the American Jewish community, giving it a renewed sense of spiritual purpose and teaching it to flex its political muscle. He also makes a convincing case that the movement put human rights at the center of American foreign policy for the very first time, helping to end the Cold War. In cinematic detail, the book introduces us to all the major players, from the flamboyant Meir Kahane, head of the paramilitary Jewish Defense League, to Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, who labored in a Siberian prison camp for over a decade, to Lynn Singer, the small, fiery Long Island housewife who went from organizing local rallies to strong-arming Soviet diplomats. This multi-generational saga, filled with suspense and packed with revelations, provides an essential missing piece of Cold War and Jewish history.
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TO BE REISSUED FOR SEPTEMBER 2010:

MATZOH BALL GUMBO
CULINARY TALES OF THE JEWISH SOUTH
BY MARCIE COHEN FERRIS
September 2010 reissue UNC Press North Carolina
From Publishers Weekly Many traditional Southern foods—pulled-pork barbecue, crab cakes, fried oyster po' boys, to name a few—violate traditional Jewish dietary laws, which forbid the consumption of pork and shellfish. What's a Southern Jew to do? Anthropological historian Ferris (UNC–Chapel Hill) answers that question in a gustatory tour of the Jewish South. She uncovers many dishes that blend Jewish and Southern foodways (recipes included for such tasties as Temple Israel Brisket and Cornmeal-Fried Fish Fillets with Sephardic Vinagre Sauce). Ferris sees food as a symbol that encompasses the problem of how Jews live in a region dominated by Christians: "The most tangible way to understand Jewish history and culture in the South is at the dinner table." Cynics will wonder if a Jewish kugel (noodle casserole) prepared in the South is really any different from kugel in Chicago. Ferris's answer is an emphatic yes—because Jews in the South face different challenges than those in Chicago. Southern Jews must be more intentional about cooking that kugel and passing the recipe down from generation to generation. If this book were a restaurant, Michelin would award it two out of three stars: not absolutely first-rate, but "excellent cooking, worth a detour
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PROMISE ME
How a Sister's Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer
By Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker and Joni Rodgers
September 2010, Broadway
Suzy and Nancy Newman Goodman were more than sisters. They were best friends, confidantes, and partners in the grand adventure of life. For three decades, nothing could separate them. Not college (UIUC), not marriage (Leitstein, Koman), not miles. Then Suzy got sick. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977; three agonizing years later, at thirty-six, she died.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Goodman girls were raised in postwar Peoria, Illinois, by parents who believed that small acts of charity could change the world. Suzy was the big sister—the homecoming queen with an infectious enthusiasm and a generous heart. Nancy was the little sister—the tomboy with an outsized sense of justice who wanted to right all wrongs. The sisters shared makeup tips, dating secrets, plans for glamorous fantasy careers. They spent one memorable summer in Europe discovering a big world far from Peoria. They imagined a long life together—one in which they’d grow old together surrounded by children and grandchildren. Suzy’s diagnosis shattered that dream.
In 1977, breast cancer was still shrouded in stigma and shame. Nobody talked about early detection and mammograms. Nobody could even say the words “breast” and “cancer” together in polite company, let alone on television news broadcasts. With Nancy at her side, Suzy endured the many indignities of cancer treatment, from the grim, soul-killing waiting rooms to the mistakes of well-meaning but misinformed doctors. That’s when Suzy began to ask Nancy to promise. To promise to end the silence. To promise to raise money for scientific research. To promise to one day cure breast cancer for good. Big, shoot-for-the-moon promises that Nancy never dreamed she could fulfill. But she promised because this was her beloved sister.
I promise, Suzy. . . . Even if it takes the rest of my life.
Suzy’s death—both shocking and senseless—created a deep pain in Nancy that never fully went away. But she soon found a useful outlet for her grief and outrage. Armed only with a shoebox filled with the names of potential donors, Nancy put her formidable fund-raising talents to work and quickly discovered a groundswell of grassroots support. She was aided in her mission by the loving tutelage of her husband, restaurant magnate Norman Brinker (Brinker International), whose dynamic approach to entrepreneurship became Nancy’s model for running her foundation. Her account of how she and Norman met, fell in love, and managed to achieve the elusive “true marriage of equals” is one of the great grown-up love stories among recent memoirs.
Nancy’s mission to change the way the world talked about and treated breast cancer took on added urgency when she was herself diagnosed with the disease in 1984, a terrifying chapter in her life that she had long feared. Unlike her sister, Nancy survived and went on to make Susan G. Komen for the Cure into the most influential health charity in the country and arguably the world. A pioneering force in cause-related marketing, SGK turned the pink ribbon into a symbol of hope everywhere. Each year, millions of people worldwide take part in SGK Race for the Cure events. And thanks to the more than $1.5 billion spent by SGK for cutting-edge research and community programs, a breast cancer diagnosis today is no longer a death sentence. In fact, in the time since Suzy’s death, the five-year survival rate for breast cancer has risen from 74 percent to 98 percent.
Promise Me is a deeply moving story of family and sisterhood, the dramatic “30,000-foot view” of the democratization of a disease, and a soaring affirmative to the question: Can one person truly make a difference?
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SO NU? AND WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT SHAMMAI??
New For 2010...2 Thousand years after the passing of Rabbi Hillel (assumed to be in 10 CE)

HILLEL
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
By RABBI JOSEPH TELUSHKIN
(and Edited by Jonathan Rosen, Editor Extraordinaire)
Jewish Encounters Series
September 2010, Schocken
From the best-selling author of Jewish Literacy, a provocative biography of one of the greatest rabbis of the Talmudic era and a figure of prophetic importance to today’s world.
“What is hateful to you, do not do unto others. That is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary.” This is the most famous teaching of Hillel. What makes this teaching so extraordinary is that it was offered to a Gentile seeking an on-the-spot conversion. Teachings, stories, and legal rulings of Hillel can be found throughout the Talmud; what many of them share is his emphasis on ethical and moral living as an essential element in Jewish religious practice. After offering that concise summation of the Torah’s contents, Hillel adds the injunction to “now go and study,” and then converts the seeker to Judaism.
For Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, this is not a metaphor, but a model. Faced with unprecedented levels of intermarriage and assimilation, and with the interest of so many unchurched non-Jews in Jewish teachings, Judaism today is in need of the sort of openness that Hillel championed 2,000 years ago.
The most prominent religious leader in the Land of Israel during the reign of Herod, Hillel may well have influenced Jesus, his junior by several decades. In a provocative analysis of the evolution of both Christianity and Judaism, Telushkin reveals why, over the ensuing centuries, Hillel’s teachings began to be ignored in favor of the stricter and less inclusive teachings of his rabbinic adversary, Shammai. This bold new look at an iconic religious leader—the first to cite the ethical concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world) as a basis for making modifications to Jewish law—is certain to generate passionate discussion and debate.

Some extra background…. Rabbi Telushkin met a friend, another rabbi. The friend recounted the story of a young couple, one Jewish, the other not, who came 6 weeks prior to their marriage for a conversion. The rabbi told them it was not possible in 6 weeks and maybe not 6 months. The non Jewish partner said that Judaism had something to teach about how to be a good person. The rabbi told Telushkin, had the person said they wanted to keep kisher and keep Shabbat, he would have something to work with, but this couple gave him nothing to work with… This encounter heightened Telushkin‘s resolve to write a book about Hillel. Hillel is one of the greatest sages, and maybe the most inclusive. Hillel also give equal or greater weight to ethical behavior, along with adherence to ritual laws. While the rabbi above could not convert someone in 6 weeks or 6 months, Hillel was able to help a Roman convert while standing on one foot.
Part 1 The Unique Teachings of Hillel; Part 2 Hillel versus Shammai; Part 3: Hillel and Jesus, The Jewish Sage and the Christian Messiah; Part 4 Lessons from the First Century for the 21st Century and Beyond , with chapters on outreach, why the impatient cannot teach, why the bashful who cannot question cannot learn, the eternal challenge to make time to do things, passionate moderation; and the appendices on Hillel’s 7 middot, his teachings in the Pirkei Avot, and additional teachings.
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A CURABLE ROMANTIC
A NOVEL
By Joseph Skibell
September 2010, Algonquin
Set mostly in early 20th century Vienna, the novel chronicles the life and times and loves of Dr. Jakov Sammelsohn-from his early expulsion from his Hasidic family (for his crime of reading secular books) when he was twelve, into a friendship with Sigmund Freud (circa 1894), into the early Esperanto movement (1895-1907), and finally through WWI and into the Warsaw ghetto.
PW Starred Review. “Skibell's fat, cheeky, and sweeping latest begins in early 1895 Austria when his endearing protagonist, young Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, comes face-to-face with Sigmund Freud in a room full of mirrors that create an ironic "unending trail of Freuds." Eventually, the story follows Sammelsohn through the shadow of Freud, the arms of several lovers, and eventually to the Warsaw ghetto, providing a grand portrait of Eastern Europe, but it is the initial setup of Sammelsohn as a naiÌêve crucible for Freud's vicarious obsessions that makes Skibell (A Blessing on the Moon) more of a social satirist than a straightforward portraitist. In the figure of Sammelsohn, we see the timid makings of the modern psychoanalytic man: the young doctor is, at heart, a lonely romantic led into a bungle of overanalysis in a world "glittering with the usual accoutrements of late-century masquerade," sporting the foolish instrumentation of "monocles, lorgnettes, pince-nez, stickpins, watchfobs" and an "assortment of impractical hats." Skibell's delicious juxtaposition of Sammelsohn against the cocaine-snorting Freud, and Sammelsohn's infatuation with the "cruel, vindictive, haughty, caustic, dismissive, even murderous" character of Emma Eckstein, one of Freud's patients, make for a magnetic collection of personalities.”
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YOU‘RE GROUNDED FOREVER…
BUT FIRST, LET‘S GO SHOPPING
THE CHALLENGES MOTHERS FACE WITH THEIR DAUGHTERS AND TEN TIMELY SOLUTIONS
BY SUSAN SHAPIRO BARASH
September 2010, SMP
From the author of TOXIC FRIENDS, Marymount Manhattan College instructor, Susan Shapiro Barash, examines the relationships between mothers and daughters. Chapters include
What color would you like that Prada bag in? (material indulgence)
Do you need to be eating that? (fixations with food and diet)
Of course you can drink when you are home with me (loose boundaries and rules)
I know she‘s your friend, but… (underestimating female friendships)
I‘ll just say you are not feeling well (making excuses)
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Engineer Ari and the Sukkah Express
By Deborah Bodin Cohen and Shahar Kober
Summer 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 5 - 9
As Engineer Ari drives his train to Yerushalayim, he stops as friends along the way help him to gather branches and fruit for his backyard sukkah. When the Sukkot holiday begins, he is sad that those friends are not with him to join the celebration. But wait. His pals Jessie and Nathaniel have a surprise for him at the train station
See also the Engineer Ari Rosh Hashana book
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TASHLICH AT TURTLE ROCK
By Susan Schnur and Anna Schnur-Fishman and Alex Steele-Morgan
Summer 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 5 - 9
Annie is excited about the Tashlich ceremony on the afternoon of Rosh haShanah. She and her family will walk to Turtle Rock Creek and throw crumbs into the flowing water. As Annie leads her mishpacha through the woods, they think about the good and the not so good things that happened during the past year and they make plans for a sweeter new year. Susan Schnur is a rabbi, and Anna Schnur-Fishman is her daughter, a Brown student.
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SHARING OUR HOMELAND
PALESTINIAN AND JEWISH CHILDREN AT SUMMER PEACE CAMP
BY TRISH MARX
Summer 2010, Lee and Low
Ages 6 - 11
Well… look at the cover pic. Not all the kids are smiling. One isn’t flashing a peace sign. I have to give credit to the authors for not selecting a cover picture in which all the kids get along and are smiling and happy.
Alya, a Palestinian Israeli girl from a Muslim family; she wears a hijab; and Yuval, a Jewish Israeli boy from a moshav community, live a short distance from each other in Israel, yet they have totally different and separate lives. Then one summer they have a chance to meet when they attend Peace Camp, a day camp operated by Givat Haviva, an educational organization that works toward Jewish-Arab peace. At Peace Camp, the Jewish and Palestinian children experience two weeks of fun in close contact with each other. They participate in sports, arts and crafts projects, field trips, and other camp activities. They begin to understand what their shared ancient homeland means to the "other side." Most of all, they learn not to be afraid of each other. Maybe they even become friends. This eye-opening story offers hope for breaking down the distrust and violence that define the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The children's experiences at Peace Camp may well help their generation build a foundation for living together peacefully in one homeland.
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SAMMY SPIDER’S FIRST SIMCHAT TORAH
BY SYLVIA A. ROUSS
AND KATHERINE JANUS KAHN
Summer 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 3- 8
Sammy Spider returns with a new Holiday. He crawls down to inspect the candy apple that Josh has attached to his Simchat Torah flag. Josh leaves for the synagogue for the Simchat Torah parade, and he doesn’t realize that sammy the spider is stuck to the candy apple. Sammy therefore joins the parade and dances with the TorahRoah parade.
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MIRIAM IN THE DESERT
BY JACQUELINE JULES
AND NATASCIA UGLIANO
Summer 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 5-9
The Israelites have been freed from slavery and led by Moses. Miriam helps them through hunger and thirst. Her grandson Bezalel draws pictures in the sand. Then Bezalel learns that he has been chosen to craft the holy ark.
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MACCABEE !
THE STORY OF HANUKKAH
BY TILDA BALSLEY AND DAVID HARRINGTON
Summer 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 3 - 8
The story of the Maccabees. Judah and his army fright to free Jerusalem
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ZISHE THE STRONGMAN
BY ROBERT RUBINSTEIN AND WOODY MILLER
Summer 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 3 - 8
At the age of three, Zishe was lifting a nine pound hammer in his father’s blacksmith shop. By the age of eleven, there was not a bar he could not ben or a chain he could not snap. This is the unusual story of Zishe, a poor Polish Jewish man who became a featured strongman in circuses throughout the world. This story is based on thetrue story of Zishe of Lodz
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SAY HELLO, LILY
BY DEBORAH LAKRITZ (MSW) AND MARTHA AVILES
September 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 3 - 8
On Lily’s first visit to the Shalom House for the Aged, she clings closely to her mother, overwhelmed by all the new faces of the senior citizens who live there. But slowly Lily joins the activities, makes new friends, and celebrates a birthday to remember!
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ANNIE SHAPIRO AND THE CLOTHING WORKERS STRIKE
BY MARKENE TARG BRILL AND JAMEL AKIB
October 2010, Kar-Ben and Millbrook Press
Ages 7-10 Grades 2-4
In September 1910, one hundred years ago, 18 year old Hannah “Annie” Shapiro had the job of sewing pockets at the Hart, Shaffner and Marx clothing factory in Chicago, Illinois. She was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and she had been working in the garment industry for five years, since the age of 13. The foreman reduced the wages of the workers. The wages were already considered low by the workers and others, and so Annie took a stand. She helped to lead the historic strike that eventually involved 40,000 workers in the Chicago metropolitan area.
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HAPPY HANUKKAH LIGHTS
BY JACQUELINE JULES AND MICHELLE SHAPIRO
Summer 2010, Kar-Ben
Ages 1- 4
A happy family celebrates the 8 nights of Hanukkah by lighting and eating and playing, candles, latkes, and dreidels, respectively. Also helps learn to count.
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TO THE END OF THE LAND
A NOVEL
BY DAVID GROSSMAN
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
September 2010, Knopf
From one of Israel’s most acclaimed writers comes a novel of extraordinary power about family life—the greatest human drama—and the cost of war. Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the “notifiers” who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit. Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days’ leave being offered by their commander—a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy. Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers, and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a “war and peace” rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the joys and anguish of raising children. Never have we seen so clearly the reality and surreality of daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew. Grossman’s rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time.
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HUSH
A young adult novel
BY EISHES CHAYIL
September 14, 2010, Bloomsbury USA Walker Yong Adult
Inside the closed community of Borough Park, where most Chassidim live, the rules of life are very clear, determined by an ancient script written thousands of years before down to the last detail—and abuse has never been a part of it. But when thirteen-year-old Gittel learns of the abuse her best friend has suffered at the hands of her own family member, the adults in her community try to persuade Gittel, and themselves, that nothing happened. Forced to remain silent, Gittel begins to question everything she was raised to believe. A richly detailed and nuanced book, one of both humor and depth, understanding and horror, this story explains a complex world that remains an echo of its past, and illuminates the conflict between yesterday's traditions and today's reality.
Obviously, due to the theme of this story and the nature of the Boro Park community, EISHES CHAYIL is a nom de plume and pseudonym for the actual author. She was raised in a world of Chassidic schools, synagogues, and summer camps and is a direct descendant of the major founders and leaders in the Chassidic world. She holds a masters degree in creative writing and has worked as a journalist for several Orthodox Jewish newspapers.
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Dom, Cricket, Micah, Autumn, Ingrid, Brianne…

THE KID TABLE
A young adult novel
BY ANDREA SEIGEL
September 14, 2010, Bloomsbury USA Walker Yong Adult
Stuck at the kid table? It might be the best seat in the house. Ingrid Bell and her five teenage cousins are such a close-knit group that they do not mind sitting at the kids’ table. Although they share it with a four year old. But the Brianne, the oldest cousin, is promoted to the adult table, leaving her younger cousins shocked and confused. How does one graduate from kids table to adults table? Over the course of five family events, Ingrid chronicles their adventures and her generational shift. There is the adult man who must play Baby New Year at a party, and the family members who play xmas music at a bar mitzvah. Is the right generation at the kid table? Maybe the teens are more mature than the adults? Ingrid must question how she fits into the family and what it means to grow up. Is the kids table actually the best place to be?
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Half Empty
By David Rakoff
September 21 2010, Random House Doubleday
The inimitably witty David Rakoff, New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, defends the commonsensical notion that you should always assume the worst, because you’ll never be disappointed. In this deeply funny (and, no kidding, wise and poignant) book, Rakoff examines the realities of our sunny, gosh everyone-can-be-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much as a universal rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph, justice will not be served, and your dreams won’t come true. The book ranges from the personal to the universal, combining stories from Rakoff’s reporting and accounts of his own experiences: the moment when being a tiny child no longer meant adults found him charming but instead meant other children found him a fun target; the perfect late evening in Manhattan when he was young and the city seemed to brim with such possibility that the street shimmered in the moonlight—as he drew closer he realized the streets actually flickered with rats in a feeding frenzy. He also weaves in his usual brand Oscar Wilde–worthy cultural criticism (the tragedy of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, for instance). Whether he’s lacerating the musical Rent for its cutesy depiction of AIDS or dealing with personal tragedy, his sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling in the power of negativity
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COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND ON 5 SHILLINGS A DAY
BY BILL SCHELLER
September 2010, Thames and Hudson
(There were 20 shillings in a pound… and a pound would be about $82 dollars in 2009)
A truly informative and entertaining travel and history book. How hard or easy was it to get to Boston or New England. Where did you stay once you arrived. What did you eat, how much was lodging, how were the roads, and how many dresses do you to pack? The trip was so long, you usually stayed for two seasons. SO you had to dress accordingly. In America, you could just powder your hair instead of bringing your own wigs, although there were plenty of wigmakers to buy from. Jews? There are two pages of information on the Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island.
Navigate the dangerous shoals of Cape Cod, talk politics with John Adams, sample the porridge known as “Indian pudding”—how to get around and enjoy Colonial New England’s towns and scenery. It’s 1765, and you’ve just arrived in New England. Once you’ve had a chance to freshen up and powder your wig, you’ll want to know where to find a room for the night (and how many other travelers might be sharing your bed), which tavern serves a good rum flip, and what you might expect to pay silversmith Paul Revere for a teapot or a set of spoons. Colonial New England on 5 Shillings a Day answers these questions and many more, as it takes you on a time-traveler’s tour of Yankeedom’s cities and hamlets, highways and byways, customs and quirks in the decade before the American Revolution. What time does the stagecoach leave Boston for Portsmouth, New Hampshire? Should you travel from Providence to Newport by land or sea? Who serves the best fried clams on the Connecticut coast? When you settle into the chimney corner in a Hartford tavern, what newspaper will you likely read? This lively, carefully researched guide will be an invaluable resource as you roam the post roads and village streets of a world nearly 250 years distant from our own, vastly different yet somehow as familiar as a sharp-steepled meetinghouse on a village green, a hearty greeting at a country inn, or a bowl of clam chowder. So count your shillings (take a few extra if you’re stopping in at Mr. Revere’s), prepare to embark by ship or via the King’s Highway, and set your course for the eighteenth century.
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THE POPE’S MAESTRO
By SIR GILBERT LEVINE
Sep 2010, Jossey Bass
The story of the friendship between a Jewish-American conductor and Pope John Paul II. This book offers the inspirational story of an unlikely friendship and the two men who collaborated in an extraordinary way to begin to help heal centuries-old wounds. For two decades Sir Gilbert Levine and Pope John Paul II collaborated on symbolic acts of reconciliation: a series of internationally broadcast concerts designed to bring together people from all religious backgrounds under the auspices of the Vatican. These concerts broke new ground and demonstrated the Vatican's desire for rapprochement and even atonement in its relationships with Jews around the world. And it resulted in Sir Gilbert recovering his own Jewish faith in a deeper and more meaningful way. Details the extraordinary collaboration between a world-renowned musical maestro and an innovative Pope; Shows how music can act as a bridge between people of different faiths; A moving, inspirational, and personal story that appeals to music lovers and to people of all faith traditions
This is a compelling tale of faith, friendship, and the healing power of music to bring people together.
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JEWISH IDENTITY AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICA
BY KENNETH L. MARCUS (CUNY)
September 2010, Cambridge
What does it mean to be Jewish? This ancient question has become a pressing civil rights controversy. Despite a recent resurgence of anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses, the U.S. Department of Education's powerful Office for Civil Rights has been unable to protect Jewish students. This failure has been a problem not of execution but of conceptualization. The OCR has been unable to address anti-Jewish harassment because it lacks a coherent conception of either Jewish identity or anti-Jewish hatred. Given jurisdiction over race and national origin but not religion, federal agents have had to determine whether Jewish Americans constitute a race or national origin group. They have been unable to do so. This has led to enforcement paralysis, as well as explosive internal confrontations and recriminations within the federal government. This book examines the legal and policy issues behind the ambiguity involved with civil rights protections for Jewish students. Written by a former senior government official, this book reveals the extent of this problem and presents a workable legal solution.
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HOW TO MAKE PEACE
IN THE MIDDLE EAST
IN SIX MONTHS OR LESS
WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR APARTMENT
BY GREGORY LEVEY
September 2010, Free Press
You loved his SHUT UP, I’M TALKING, his story of working for the Israeli Foreign Ministry and UN delegation, and now he has returned with this.
In this funny and insightful story, Levey attempts to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict himself in six months. Levy was the English speechwriters for two Israeli Prime Ministers. When he returned to the US for a book tour, he was deluged with suggestions on how to solve the problems in the Middle East. These well meaning book buyers said that if only they had the resources and half a year, they could bring about peace. So Levey decided to do it himself, from his home, in just 6 months. This book explores why so many people who live in North America are so eager to bring about peace. Using his contacts in the White House, Zionist groups, pro-Israel big wigs, the military, the PLO, the Palestinian Authority, Jewish grandmothers, and the Palestinian grocer on his street corner, Levey attempts to bring about peace.
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N O W IN P A P E R B A C K

A LUCKY CHILD
A MEMOIR OF SURVIVING AUSCHWITZ AS A YOUNG BOY
BY THOMAS BUERGENTHAL
September 2010, Back Bay Books paperback edition
You think you’ve heard it all: the roundups, deportations, transports, selections, hard labor, death camps (“That was the last time I saw my father”), crematoriums, and the rare miracle of survival. But this one is different. The clear, nonhectoring prose makes Buergenthal’s personal story––and the enduring ethical questions it prompts––the stuff of a fast, gripping read. Five years old in Czechoslovakia at the start of World War II, Buergenthal remembers being crowded into the ghetto and then, in 1944, feeling “lucky” to escape the gas chambers and get into Auschwitz, where he witnessed daily hangings and beatings, but with the help of a few adults, managed to survive. In a postwar orphanage, he learned to read and write but never received any mail, until in a heartrending climax, his mother finds him. In 1952, he immigrated to the U.S., and now, as human-rights lawyer, professor, and international judge, his childhood’s moral issues are rooted in his daily life, his tattooed number a reminder not so much of the past as of his obligation, as witness and survivor, to fight bigotry today
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C STREET
THE FUNDAMENTALIST THREAT TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
BY JEFF SHARTLET
September 2010, Little Brown
We are FAM-I-LY…… all my brothers sisters and me… no,no…. this is a different FAMILY.
The secretive Christian fundamentalist group known as "The Family" is leading a new crusade for a "God-led government." Jeff Sharlet, author of the New York Times bestseller The Family, is the only journalist to have reported from within the organization, garnering intense media coverage when it was revealed that their townhouse on Washington DC's C Street was central to three Republican politicians' sex scandals in the summer of 2009.
In C STREET, Sharlet shows how the Family, steeped in the influence and corruption one usually associates with the notorious lobbying industry, fuels and funds political fundamentalism from within our government. His exclusive access to sources and explosive documents show the true implications of fundamentalism in American politics--now, leading up to the next election, and beyond.
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LOST LIVES, LOST ART
JEWISH COLLECTORS, NAZI ART THEFT, AND THE QUEST FOR JUSTICE
BY MELISSA MULLER AND MONIKA TATZKOW
September 2010, Vendome
The legendary names include Rothschild, Mendelssohn, Bloch-Bauer—distinguished bankers, industrialists, diplomats, and art collectors. Their diverse taste ranged from manuscripts and musical instruments to paintings by Old Masters and the avant-garde. But their stigma as Jews in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe doomed them to exile or death in Hitler’s concentration camps. Here, after years of meticulous research, Melissa Müller (Anne Frank: The Biography) and Monika Tatzkow (Nazi Looted Art) present the tragic, compelling stories of 15 Jewish collectors, the dispersal of their extraordinary collections through forced sale and/or confiscation, and the ongoing efforts of their heirs to recover their inheritance. For every victory in the effort to return these works to their rightful heirs, there are daunting defeats and long court battles. This real-life legal thriller follows works by Rembrandt, Klimt, Pissarro, Kandinsky, and others.
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MANAGEMENT?
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK
BY HENRY MINTZBERG
September 2010, AMACOM
A lot of things have been said about management over the years: that it’s an art, not a science; that it’s a science, filled with “best practices” and systematic steps anyone can use to get great results; that it’s the fuel that powers successful organizations. Only one thing is for sure: there is no one, easy definition of whatever it is that managers do! Henry Mintzberg, one of today’s most respected and controversial thinkers on management, has joined forces with other leading business figures to provide a provocative and unusual mix of writing on management. Management? It’s Not What You Think! gets readers thinking as they never have before about the practice of management. Readers will find differing perspectives—and plenty of food for thought—on topics including management terminology and buzz words; myths and maxims; MBAs; management fads; leadership; strategy; and much more. Presenting articles, book and journal excerpts, letters, web selections, and musings, these pieces will have readers pondering, laughing, and sometimes even crying (for poor old management itself!). This irreverent, highly relevant, and insightful book will inspire managers of all types, spark debate, and renew their passion and interest in doing what they do best… managing.
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Encyclopedia of Jewish Food
By Gil Marks
September 2010, Wiley
672 pages
A comprehensive, A-to-Z guide to Jewish foods, recipes, and culinary traditions. Food is more than just sustenance. It's a reflection of a community's history, culture, and values. From India to Israel to the United States and everywhere in between, Jewish food appears in many different forms and variations, but all related in its fulfillment of kosher laws, Jewish rituals, and holiday traditions. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food explores both unique cultural culinary traditions as well as those that unite the Jewish people. Alphabetical entries—from Afikomen and Almond to Yom Kippur and Za’atar—cover ingredients, dishes, holidays, and food traditions that are significant to Jewish communities around the world; This easy-to-use reference includes more than 650 entries, 300 recipes, plus illustrations and maps throughout; Both a comprehensive resource and fascinating reading, this book is perfect for Jewish cooks, food enthusiasts, historians, and anyone interested in Jewish history or food.
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food is an informative and eye-opening guide to the culinary heart and soul of the Jewish people. Food is more than just sustenance. It's a reflection of a community's history, culture, and values—and this is especially true for the Jewish people—a community that spans the globe. From Brooklyn to India and everywhere in between, Jewish food is represented by a fascinating array of dishes, rituals, and traditions.
Jewish cuisine is truly international. In every location where Jews settled, they brought culinary traditions with them and also adopted local dishes, modifying them to fit their dietary laws, lifestyle, and tastes. Unique traditions and dishes developed within the cuisines of North Africa, Europe, Persia, Asia, and the Mediterranean, but all are recognizably Jewish.
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food explores the foods and culinary traditions of individual communities, such as the honey-nut sfratto cookies beloved by Italian Jews in Tuscany, as well as those that unite Jews everywhere, like the key elements of the Passover Seder plate. Alphabetical book entries—from Afikomen and Almond to Yom Kippur and Za'atar—present recipes, ingredients, and holidays that are significant to the story of Jewish food, spanning three thousand years.
Even those with a well-developed knowledge of Jewish food will find plenty of new and compelling information here—dishes and ingredients they've never heard of, surprising and delicious variations on favorite traditional recipes, and plenty of historical and cultural tidbits that explore how, when, and why Jewish foods developed into what they are today.
For anyone interested in Jewish cooking, culture, or history, the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food is an enlightening and engaging tour through the culinary heart and soul of a people.
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IT’S A JUNGLE IN THERE
INSPIRING LESSONS, HARD-WON INSIGHTS
AND OTHER ACTS OF ENTEPRENEURIAL DARING
BY STEVEN SCHUSSLER
September 2010, Union Square
As a burgeoning businessman in the 1980s, Steven Schussler stopped at nothing to make his dream of a tropical-themed restaurant come true, even turning his home into a rainforest-complete with indoor waterfall, life-size replica of an elephant and 40 tropical birds-in order to have a prototype to show potential investors. Drawing from his own life and business triumphs, Schussler offers would-be entrepreneurs a new way of utilizing creativity to achieve their dreams.
Schussler distills his principles for entrepreneurs on a budget, and also reveals the ways in which his lessons-from self-branding to developing strategic partnerships to giving recognition where recognition is due-can work in larger corporations. Just like his famous themed restaurants, Schussler's insights provide entertainment, education, and ample food for thought for all business people aspiring to their next level of success. Steven Schussler is founder and CEO of Schussler Creative, Inc., a company that creates theatrical environments for attractions, restaurants and retail stores worldwide. He founded the Rainforest Cafe, which holds the record as the top-grossing concept restaurant in the US.
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PRELUDE TO CATASTROPHE
FDR’S JEWS AND THE MENACE OF NAZISM
BY ROBER SHOGAN
September 2010, Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Grp
The Jews who so deeply admired Roosevelt made up the richest, most influential Jewish community in the world, leaders in government, commerce, and the arts. Yet by the time Franklin Roosevelt died in office, six million European Jews had been murdered by the Nazis while neither FDR nor American Jews lifted much more than a finger to help them. How did the president, the nation he led, and American Jewry allow this to happen? There is no simple answer, but Robert Shogan seeks a partial explanation by examining the behavior of a handful of Jews, so close to Roosevelt and supposedly so influential that they could be considered the president's Jews.
There was Frankfurter and Brandeis. There was Sam Rosenman, FDR’s chief speechwriter. Henry Morgenthau at Treasury and Dutchess County neighbor. Benjamin Cohen created much of the early New Deal financial reforms. Their actions and, at times, the inactions, illuminate, in this book, their strengths and limitations, and the limits of interest group politics that FDR nurtured, and which dominated American politics in the last half of the 20th Century. The book highlights the conflict between conscience and self-interest, principles and expediency.
Shogan, who currently teaches at Johns Hopkins, read an article about one of the first protests by American Jews against Hitler. It was organized by the Jewish War Veterans (of WW1). It was held in March of 1933, three weeks after FDR was sworn in for his first of four terms. FDR was their hero. Why couldn’t they persuade him to help. The Jewish leaders thought that the “President’s Jews” could get FDR to lift immigration quotas so that German Jews could escape to America, But the top three Jews were actually buffers. They shielded FDR from the Jewish community’s pleas. They did not want to stir the pot of resentment and give fuel to Jew haters in the media, cities, and towns. Brandeis was more interested in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine and promoting New Deal policies. Frankfurter wanted a seat on the Supreme Court and did not want to screw up his ambition by bringing up Jewish issues as the Great Depression raged. And Rosenman obstructed the cause of Jewish refugees and advised FDR to avoid the issue. It would, he felt, cause too many political problems for the President, whom he wanted to please. Benjamin Cohen however, was different. He knew that talking to FDR would be worthless. So Cohen focused on getting support to Britain, giving them 50 destroyers with which to fight Hitler, destroy the Nazis and save the Jews. Morgenthau also was not timid. He got in the face of FDR and the State Department and got them to set up the War Refuge Board which saved 200,000 lives. According to the author, Rabbi Stephen Wise was enamored by FDR and became the President’s Rabbi. He ingratiated himself to the President. It helped his ego, but didn’t accomplish much.
Asked whether the Jews learned from their experiences, the author said that by Truman’s presidency, the Jewish leadership knew how to exert its political clout and power. David Niles, Truman’s aide, can be credited with getting Truman to recognize Israel in 1948. Click the book cover to read more.

The Jewish Odyssey
An Illustrated History
By Marek Halter
September 2010, dist by Rizzoli
The far-reaching story of a people that, despite facing perpetual struggle, has shaped modern civilization. In The Jewish Odyssey, best-selling author Marek Halter charts the course of Judaism from its origins in Mesopotamia to its place in the world today. Predating all Western culture, its early development of the written word enabled it to lay the foundations of modern civilization. Richly illustrated, the book addresses the extent of Jewish suffering over the years, as well as the lasting contributions of Jews in fields such as science, politics, philosophy, and the arts—from Gutenberg to Einstein, Freud to Trotsky, and Kafka to Dylan. Halter explains the delicate state of interdependence that exists between the significant Jewish Diaspora communities worldwide and the Israeli nation, taking into account the Zionist notion of the Jewish "promised land." With his expertise, international status, and political insight, Halter offers a unique and compelling view on contemporary issues ranging from anti-Semitism to the emergence of multi-faith families. This engaging illustrated tribute to the Jewish story culminates in a message of hope for the universal freedom of all mankind
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HONEYBEE DEMOCRACY
BY THOMAS D. SEELEY
September 2010 Princeton
Honeybees make decisions collectively--and democratically. Every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing and traveling to a new home, honeybees stake everything on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. In fact, as world-renowned animal behaviorist Thomas Seeley reveals, these incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to collective wisdom and effective decision making. A remarkable and richly illustrated account of scientific discovery, Honeybee Democracy brings together, for the first time, decades of Seeley's pioneering research to tell the amazing story of house hunting and democratic debate among the honeybees. In the late spring and early summer, as a bee colony becomes overcrowded, a third of the hive stays behind and rears a new queen, while a swarm of thousands departs with the old queen to produce a daughter colony. Seeley describes how these bees evaluate potential nest sites, advertise their discoveries to one another, engage in open deliberation, choose a final site, and navigate together--as a swirling cloud of bees--to their new home. Seeley investigates how evolution has honed the decision-making methods of honeybees over millions of years, and he considers similarities between the ways that bee swarms and primate brains process information. He concludes that what works well for bees can also work well for people: any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader's influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution. An impressive exploration of animal behavior, Honeybee Democracy shows that decision-making groups, whether honeybee or human, can be smarter than even the smartest individuals in them.
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Visitation
A novel by Jenny Erpenbeck
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
September 2010 New Directions
A bestseller in Germany, Visitation has established Jenny Erpenbeck as one of Europe’s most significant contemporary authors. A house on the forested bank of a Brandenburg lake outside Berlin (once belonging to Erpenbeck’s grandparents) is the focus of this compact, beautiful novel. Encompassing over one hundred years of German history, from the nineteenth century to the Weimar Republic, from World War II to the Socialist German Democratic Republic, and finally reunification and its aftermath, Visitation offers the life stories of twelve individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the last century, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation, with its drama and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.
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ARE YOU MY GURU
HOW MEDICINE, MEDITATION, AND MADONNA SAVED MY LIFE
BY WENDY SHANKER
September 2010 NAL
From the author of The Fat Girl's Guide to Life--an insightful and humorous memoir of one woman's quest to navigate the world of alternative healing. At age 33, Wendy Shanker was on the verge of Have It All-itis: a Midwestern girl living in Manhattan, writing for television, mingling with celebrities, and publishing her first book. Plus, she had a fierce haircut. Life was good. Then suddenly, it wasn't. Diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, Wendy knew she was in for it- at the very least a cocktail of chemo and steroids (certain to challenge her body image), a bustling career put on hold, and a major hurdle to her dating life. When she ran out of medical options, Wendy found herself exploring everything from acupuncture, colonics, and energy healing to detox retreats, tarot card readers, and an intuitive therapist who wanted her to talk to her liver. Surely there must be a guru somewhere who can fix everything-right?
Wendy Shanker is the author of The Fat Girl's Guide to Life and a contributor to The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt. She's also performed stand-up and two acclaimed one-woman shows
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A HIGHLY ANTICIPATED FOLLOWUP TO SARAH’S KEY

A SECRET KEPT
A NOVEL
BY TATIANA de ROSNAY
September 2010 ST MARTIN’S PRESS
This stunning new novel from Tatiana de Rosnay, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Sarah’s Key, plumbs the depths of complex family relationships and the power of a past secret to change everything in the present. It all began with a simple seaside vacation, a brother and sister recapturing their childhood. Antoine Rey thought he had the perfect surprise for his sister Mélanie’s birthday: a weekend by the sea at Noirmoutier Island, where the pair spent many happy childhood summers playing on the beach. It had been too long, Antoine thought, since they’d returned to the island—over thirty years, since their mother died and the family holidays ceased. But the island’s haunting beauty triggers more than happy memories; it reminds Mélanie of something unexpected and deeply disturbing about their last island summer. When, on the drive home to Paris, she finally summons the courage to reveal what she knows to Antoine, her emotions overcome her and she loses control of the car.
Recovering from the accident in a nearby hospital, Mélanie tries to recall what caused her to crash. Antoine encounters an unexpected ally: sexy, streetwise Angèle, a mortician who will teach him new meanings for the words life, love and death. Suddenly, however, the past comes swinging back at both siblings, burdened with a dark truth about their mother, Clarisse.
Trapped in the wake of a shocking family secret shrouded by taboo, Antoine must confront his past and also his troubled relationships with his own children. How well does he really know his mother, his children, even himself? Suddenly fragile on all fronts as a son, a husband, a brother and a father, Antoine Rey will learn the truth about his family and himself the hard way. By turns thrilling, seductive and destructive, with a lingering effect that is bittersweet and redeeming, A Secret Kept is the story of a modern family, the invisible ties that hold it together, and the impact it has throughout life.
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If you want to read an excerpt, click the book cover and read the reviews. There is an excerpt there filled with jokes.

OLD JEWS TELLING JOKES
5000 YEAS OF FUNNY BITS AND NOT SO KOSHER LAUGHS
BY SAM HOFFMAN AND ERIC SPEIGELMAN
September 7, 2010 Random House OldJewsTellingJokes.com
A grasshopper walked into a bar and ordered a drink.
The bartender looked at him and said, “You know we have a drink named after you?”
The grasshopper replied, “You have a drink named Stanley?”

Schtick happens.
For five thousand years, God’s chosen people have cornered the market on knee-slappers, zingers, and knock-knock jokes. Now Old Jews Telling Jokes mines mothers, fathers, bubbies, and zaydes for comic gelt. What we get are jokes that are funnier than a pie in the punim: Abie and Becky jokes; hilarious rabbi, doctor, and mohel tales; and those bits just for Mom (Q: What’s the difference between a Jewish mother and a Rottweiler? A: Eventually a Rottweiler will let go!).
Some are just naughty and some are downright bawdy—but either way you’ll laugh till you plotz. With Borscht Belt gags from Brooklyn to Bel Air to Boca, Old Jews Telling Jokes is like chicken soup for your funny bone.
I mean, would it kill you to laugh a little?
Sam Hoffman has Produced, Directed or Assistant Directed numerous films, shorts, second units and commercials including: The Royal Tenenbaums, School of Rock, The Producers Musical, Donnie Brasco, Dead Man Walking and Groundhog Day. Hoffman is a Penn grad. So you better buy the book. Eric Spiegelman of Silverlake (I guess since his mother wasn’t Jewish he can’t live on Fairfax)/ Los Angeles is a lawyer. So don’t screw with them. Don’t try to email all the jokes without buying the book, like some people did to Haikus for Jews.
Knock Knock
"Who's there?"
"Oedipus."
"Oedipus who?"
"Oedipus shmedipus, as long as he loves his mother."

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EFFORTLESS ENEPRENEUR
WORK SMART, PLAY HARD, MAKE MILLIONS
Founders of College Hunks Hauling Junk
By Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman with DD Schwartz
Foreword by Michael Gerber
September 2010 Three Rivers Press Random House
Nick and Omar met in high school. They got poor grades. They justify the poor grades saying they were just good entrepreneurs. They were better at leading and networking. Like the time Nick led the senior class to break the rules and run onto a football field, or when Omar never bought the calculator for the math class he was failing since it was old technology. In college, they mostly partied and played. The name of the game is to have a system so you can play most of the time. Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman started the multimillion-dollar franchise College Hunks Hauling Junk when they were just twenty two, and they’ve been having the time of their lives ever since. What’s their secret? That's just it--there isn't one. There's no fancy software or complicated business schemes. No outside investors or quirky market niche. They just followed 10 common-sense commandments to building a straightforward, fun, and successful business that does a simple job well. Anyone can understand it, and anyone can do it. They started hauling junk one summer after borrowing Omar’s mother’s delivery van and putting up flyers. College Hunks Hauling Junk has grown into a multimillion-dollar franchise and has been mentioned in the New York Times and the Washington Post. They were on Shark Tank and Millionaire Matchmaker. They have 35 franchised locations. Nick and Omar have been named among the top Under 30 Entrepreneurs in America by Inc.
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I’M GOD, YOU’RE NOT
OBSERVATIONS ON ORGANIZED RELIGION AND OTHER DISGUISES OF THE EGO
BY RABBI LAWRENCE KUSHNER
September 2010 Jewish Lights
Kushner, of SF Temple Emanu-EL, and teacher at HUC JIR, looks at and offers insights on Congregational life, Laughter, Judaism, Family, Mysticism, and Holiness. Click the book cover to read more.

SOME OCTOBER 2010 BOOKS

NEMESIS
A NOVEL
BY PHILIP ROTH
October 12, 2010, HMH Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Narrated by Arnie Mesnikoff
In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, iron lungs, and even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark Jewish community and its children.
At the center of NEMESIS is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, a college grad and Phys Ed teacher who is severely devoted to his young charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war during WWII alongside his contemporaries and best friends. They are serving overseas and seeing action; he has the body to fight, but is stuck in Newark
Cantor was raised by his maternal grandparents; his young beautiful mother died in childbirth and his father was jailed for theft and disappeared forever. He helped his grandfather in the store growing up, and was trained to be dedicated and service oriented. He gets the job done.
Cantor is a strong hero; he single handedly faces down a gang of Italian punks who have come to his playground to spread disease and fear using spit and intimidation. He is dating the daughter of the local esteemed Jewish doctor; she is also a school teacher, but away at a summer camp in the Poconos. Roth focuses on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground--and on the everyday realities he faces--Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.
Nearly at the end of the entire novel, in 1971, nearly 30 years after the war, Arnie runs into Bucky, who is now a shambles. He is no longer the handsome solid confident strongman. Arnie was one of the kids in the playground when polio started to spread.
Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos --whose "mountain air was purified of all contaminants"--Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic.
Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood.
Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels,
EVERYMAN,
INDIGNATION,
THE HUMBLING, and now,
NEMESIS:
what kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us when confronted with the force of circumstance?
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THE TRIALS OF ZION
A NOVEL
BY ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
Moved to Fall 2010. Grand Central
When Harvard Law School Professor Dershowitz is not busy teaching, defending, parenting, defending rights, America, Israel or patrilineal descent, he has been hard at work on a thriller that may become as classic as Leon Uris' Mila 18 and Exodus. There has been a SHOCKING act of terrorism which focuses the world's attention and brings the Middle East to a point of conflagration. A young Jewish American lawyer, Emma, takes a position on the defense team of a Palestinian who stands accused of terrorism. Her father, Abe Ringel (a stand in for Dershowitz, perhaps) is a famed criminal defense attorney, who must accept the case to save his family. In order to win the case for the accused Palestinian, he must take into the history of the Middle East and what is termed by many, the Holy Land. There is action on the streets as well as the courtroom in this book, which shows the differences between the American and Israeli systems of jurisprudence. Dershowitz adds a compelling, thrilling plot and unique, memorable characters against a panoramic backdrop that will cry out for a movie deal.
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Cut Throat Dog
A Melville Mysteries Paperback
By Joshua Sobol, Translated from Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
October 2010. Melville House
This is the story of a fromer Mossad agent who is either cracking up or cracking the case of a bungled assignment from long ago – one the left his partner and best friend dead, and left himself in an agony of despair. His only comfort is the knowledge that the murderer is dead. Or so he as told. But now, years later, he spots the murderer on the streets of New York, or does he? It is a taut spy thriller with literary allusions, wordplay, and gunfire. Sobol is best known for his plays, and “Ghetto,” his most controversial stage play. The Jerusalem Post write that this book allows you to leave the macho realm of bars and agents and whores and relive the harrowing experiences of an entire generation
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Kosher Nation
Why More and More of America's Food Answers to a Higher Authority
By Sue Fishkoff
October 2010, Schocken
Fishkoff, a resident of Oakland, author of THE REBBE’S ARMY, and a longtime reporter for JTA.ORG and JPOST.com, has written an enlightening look at the history and the current practice of producing and consuming kosher food is America.
Kosher? That means the rabbi blessed it, right? Not exactly. In this captivating account of a Bible-based practice that has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, journalist Sue Fishkoff travels throughout America and to Shanghai, China, to find out who eats kosher food, who produces it, who is responsible for its certification, and how this fascinating world continues to evolve. She explains why 85 percent of the 11.2 million Americans who regularly buy kosher food are not observant Jews—they are Muslims, Seventh-Day Adventists, vegetarians, people with food allergies, and consumers who pay top dollar for food they believe “answers to a Higher Authority.” She interviews food manufacturers, rabbinic supervisors, and ritual slaughterers; meets with eco-kosher adherents who go beyond traditional requirements to produce organic chicken and pasture-raised beef; sips boutique kosher wine in Napa Valley; talks to shoppers at an upscale kosher supermarket in Brooklyn; and marches with unemployed workers at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant. She talks to Reform Jews who are rediscovering the spiritual benefits of kashrut and to Conservative and Orthodox Jews who are demanding that kosher food production adhere to ethical and environmental values. And she chronicles the corruption, price-fixing, and strong-arm tactics of early-twentieth-century kosher meat production, against which contemporary kashrut scandals pale by comparison. A revelatory look at the current state of kashrut in America, this book will appeal to anyone interested in food, religion, Jewish identity, and big business.
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A Complicated Man
The Life of Bill Clinton
As Told By Those Who Know Him
By Michael Takiff
October 2010. Yale University Press
You think you know him? You think you know what drives him? You think you know what went on behind the scenes. Find out first and second hand. Though Bill Clinton has been out of office since 2001, public fascination with him continues unabated. Many books about Clinton have been published in recent years, but shockingly, no single-volume biography covers the full scope of Clinton’s life from the cradle to the present day, not even Clinton’s own account, My Life. More troubling still, books on Clinton have tended to be highly polarized, casting the former president in an overly positive or negative light. In this, the first complete oral history of Clinton’s life, historian Michael Takiff presents the first truly balanced book on one of our nation’s most controversial and fascinating presidents. Through more than 150 chronologically arranged interviews with key figures including Bob Dole, James Carville, and Tom Brokaw, among many others, A Complicated Man goes far beyond the well-worn party-line territory to capture the larger-than-life essence of Clinton the man. With the tremendous attention given to the Lewinsky scandal, it is easy to overlook the president’s humble upbringing, as well as his many achievements at home and abroad: the longest economic boom in American history, a balanced budget, successful intervention in the Balkans, and a series of landmark, if controversial, free-trade agreements. Through the candid recollections of Takiff’s many subjects, A Complicated Man leaves no area unexplored, revealing the most complete and unexpected portrait of our forty-second president published to date.
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the marriage artist
a novel
by andrew winer
October 2010, Henry Holt
When the wife of renowned art critic Daniel Lichtmann plunges to her death, she is not alone. Lying next to her broken body is the body of her suspected lover, Benjamin Wind, a celebrated artist who, ironically, owes his success to Daniel, who made him a star. Daniel is left to grapple with the emotional pain of his double loss and double betrayal. Decades earlier in a Vienna on the verge of World War II, a child artist prodigy emerges from a most unlikely place, the son of Jews who've turned their back on their religion only to have their son fall in love with his new-found ability to create some of the most beautiful ketubot—traditional Jewish marriage contracts—the world has ever seen. As the young ketubah artist navigates between the survival of his body and of his soul, his choices will shape not only his life, but the lives of those born many miles—and many years—away. The result is a lyrical and unflinchingly honest story that strips away notions of passion and fidelity to reveal an essential truth: there is a love greater than the words that bind it, one that cannot be described, but only illuminated.
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TREASURES FROM THE ATTIC
THE EXTRAORDINIARY STORY IF ANNE FRANK‘S FAMILY
BY MIRJAM PRESSLER
October 2010, Doubleday
A lost treasure trove (6,000 documents) from her grandmother’s attic about Anne Frank and her family, now woven into a chronicle. An old lady dies in Basel, Switzerland. Her devoted daughter-in-law, Gertrude, steels herself to do what all families must in the aftermath of death—she heads upstairs to the attic to sort through the effects. But Helene Elias wasn’t just any old lady, and none could put a price on what she left as an inheritance. Helene Elias was born Helene Frank, sister to Otto Frank, and thus Anne Frank’s aunt. Alice Frank, the matriarch and grandmother of the family, left Germany for Switzerland in the 1930s, and though her family had scattered across Europe, she remained at the hub of their lives. They wrote voluminously, sent photos, visited for summer holidays and reunions, and of course wrote about them when they returned home. Alice kept every bit she could. It all sat upstairs in the house, which was eventually passed down to Alice’s grandson, Buddy Elias, Anne Frank’s childhood playmate, and his wife, Gertrude. What Gertrude found has become an utterly engaging, endearing, and convincing account of a family that tells us who shaped Anne Frank, made her who she was. They believed themselves to be ordinary members of Germany’s bourgeoisie. That they were wrong is part of history—one that we celebrate here. About the Author. Pressler is one of Germany’s most beloved authors. She was the German translator of Anne Frank’s diary.
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ANNEXED
A NOVEL
BY SHARON DOGAR
October 4, 2010, Houghton Mifflin
COVER BLURB: Everyone knows about Anne Frank and her life hidden in the secret annex – but what about the boy who was also trapped there with her? In this powerful and gripping novel, Sharon Dogar explores what this might have been like from Peter’s point of view. What was it like to be forced into hiding with Anne Frank, first to hate her and then to find yourself falling in love with her? Especially with your parents and her parents all watching almost everything you do together. To know you’re being written about in Anne’s diary, day after day? What’s it like to start questioning your religion, wondering why simply being Jewish inspires such hatred and persecution? Or to just sit and wait and watch while others die, and wish you were fighting. As Peter and Anne become closer and closer in their confined quarters, how can they make sense of what they see happening around them? Anne’s diary ends on August 4, 1944, but Peter’s story takes us on, beyond their betrayal and into the Nazi death camps. He details with accuracy, clarity and compassion the reality of day to day survival in Auschwitz – and ultimately the horrific fates of the Annex’s occupants.
I HAVE NOT READ IT YET… MY COMMENTS. Sharon Dogar is a psychologist. Her daughter was reading the Diary of Anne Frank. Dogar pondered the story from the POV of Peter Van Pels, the teenage boy known as the Van Daans in the original diaries. Did she exploit Anne Frank for her own gain as a novelist? In June 2010, The Times of London said the novel includes scenes in which Peter yearns for Anne, intimately. Ms. Dogar says the novel does not emphasize the sexuality of Anne. Some take issue with Dogar’s fictionalization of Anne Frank. I personally have two copies of the novel as I type this, but I have not read it yet. The Guardian in the UK wrote, that the co-founder and executive director of the Anne Frank Trust, Gillian Walnes, reacted angrily to her first sight of Sharon Dogar's novel Annexed, saying that her re-imagining of the relationship between Anne and a boy who hid from the Nazis in the same Amsterdam building, Peter van Pels, was "not fair on someone who was a living person. I really don't understand why we have to fictionalise the Anne Frank story, when young people engage with it anyway. To me it seems like exploitation. If this woman writer is such a good novelist, why doesn't she create characters from scratch?" Dogar says that the idea of this book plagued her for nearly 2 decades. She wasn't sure it was legitimate, she didn't believe she had the talent to portray the horror of the Holocaust. But then she decided to write it anyway.
The novel opens with Peter on the point of death, is told as a series of diary entries interspersed with the thoughts of the dying boy, charting the story of the time he spent hiding with the Franks in the Annex at 263 Prinsengracht, his discovery, his imprisonment in the Mauthausen death camp. But it is the small part of the book that concerns Peter's teenage sexuality that has angered many. They have accused Dogar of "putting 21st-century mores on to young people" from a different era. Dogar has rejected the accusation of anachronism, countering that there is nowhere in the book where they come close to breaking the taboo around sex, and that "in the book the reality of just one truly intimate touch was enough to stop them". Although Peter does worry in the novel that he "will never make love to a girl", and there is a scene in which Anne and Peter kiss, the editors reject the accusation that the book is mainly concerned with sex. Maybe it is secretly being hyped to sell the book??
Dogar added, "The sexual awakening of Anne plays more of a major part in her diary than this book," citing moments in the diary where Anne discusses her menstrual periods. Anne’s diaries were first published in the face of some opposition from relatives and acquaintances in 1947, in a version edited by Anne's father Otto which did not include these passages. "Otto Frank remarked, upon reading Anne's diary, that he did not recognise his daughter as she described herself," she continued, "and that 'from this' he could only conclude that 'as parents we do not really know our children'. Historical novelists are, in a sense, in loco parentis to their characters, and like parents, they have a duty to try and understand their subjects."
Well… as the fictionalised character Peter says to Anne in a discussion about her diary towards the end of the novel, "It's on a page where it looks like the truth – even if it isn't."
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THE WITNESS HOUSE
Nazis and Holocaust Survivors Sharing a Villa during the Nuremberg Trials
By Christiane Kohl
October 2010, Other Press
Autumn 1945 saw the start of the Nuremberg trials, in which high ranking representatives of the Nazi government were called to account for their war crimes. In a curious yet fascinating twist, witnesses for the prosecution and the defense were housed together in a villa on the outskirts of town. In this so-called Witness House, perpetrators and victims confronted each other in a microcosm that reflected the events of the high court. Presiding over the affair was the beautiful Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky (a woman so blond and enticing that she was described as a Jean Harlowe look-alike) who took great pride in her ability to keep the household civil and the communal dinners pleasant. A comedy of manners arose among the guests as the urge to continue battle was checked by a sudden and uncomfortable return to civilized life. The trial atmosphere extends to the small group in the villa. Agitated victims confront and avoid perpetrators and sympathizers, and high-ranking officers in the German armed forces struggle to keep their composure. This highly explosive mixture is seasoned with vivid, often humorous, anecdotes of those who had basked in the glory of the inner circles of power. Christiane Kohl focuses on the guilty, the sympathizers, the undecided, and those who always manage to make themselves fit in. The Witness House reveals the social structures that allowed a cruel and unjust regime to flourish and serves as a symbol of the blurred boundaries between accuser and accused that would come to form the basis of postwar Germany.
Christiane Kohl has worked as a correspondent to the Cologne Express, a press officer for the Environment Ministry in Hessen, and, from 1988 to 1998, an editor with Der Spiegel.
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Till I End My Song
A Gathering of Last Poems
Edited by Harold Bloom
October 2010, Harper
Harold Bloom, 80, who The Forward characterized as a master of the weary insomniac, is the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He has published more than thirty books, has been the editor of a myriad of others, and has received numerous awards and honorary degrees, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism. In this book, he collects poems, some of them by the Jewish poets Isaac Rosenberg, Samuel Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Kenneth Koch, and Anthony Hecht.
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For Every time, there is a season… a season to read a book

The Wisdom Books
Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes
A Translation with Commentary By
Robert Alter
October 2010, WW Norton
http://jewishstudies.berkeley.edu/courses/index.html
A magnificent new volume in Robert Alter’s award-winning, landmark translation of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible.
Here, in Robert Alter’s bold new translation, are some of the most magnificent works in world literature. The astounding poetry in the Book of Job is restored to its powerful ancient meanings and rhythms. The account of creation in its Voice from the Whirlwind is beautiful and incendiary—an unforgettable challenge to the place of man in the universe. The serene fatalism that construes life as ephemeral and without purpose suffuses Ecclesiastes with a quiet beauty. The pithy maxims of Proverbs impart a worldly wisdom that is still sound and satirically shrewd.
Each of these books conveys and undermines the universal wisdom that the righteous thrive and the wicked suffer in a rational moral order; together they are essential to the ancient canon that is the Hebrew Bible. In Alter’s translation they regain the energy and force of the original, enhancing their ongoing relevance to the lives of modern readers.
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CHRISTIANS AND JEWS
FAITH TO FAITH
TRAGIC HISTORY, PROMISING PRESENT, FRAGILE FUTURE
BY RABBI JAMES RUDIN
October 30, 2010 Jewish Lights
For two thousand years, Christians and Jews have coexisted in an uneasy state of tension, mutual suspicion, and often hatred and violence. But in recent years, courageous Christian and Jewish leaders have together confronted the past with laserlike intensity and commenced the urgent task of building bridges of solidarity, mutual knowledge and respect. This extraordinary effort, coming after two millennia that were frequently filled with intolerance and distrust, reverses a tragic history and creates a new and constructive relationship between Christians and Jews. But it has not been easy. How did this happen? How was it possible to begin the process of overcoming centuries of stereotypes, caricatures and bigotry? And does the development of constructive Christian-Jewish relations, albeit still fragile, offer a successful model to resolve other intergroup conflicts? This probing examination of Christian-Jewish relations looks at the major issues facing both faith traditions to guarantee that the recent hard-earned gains and achievements will not be lost or weakened in the difficult years ahead.. Click the book cover to read more.

You should read this before you give to the Red Cross, the AJWS, the JJDC, or any other aid group. Not that THEY do anything wrong, but it is good to enter with the knowledge of the aid industry and the current aid environment

THE CRISIS CARAVAN
WHAT‘S WRONG WITH HUMANIATARIAN AID?
BY LINDA POLMAN
October 2010, Metropolitan
Linda Polna, the Dutch journalist based in Amsterdam, is the author of WE DID NOTHING and WAR GAMES; THE STORY OF AID AND WAR. In this book, she does not hold back. This is an expose on the profiteering and ambiguous ethics that pervade the world of humanitarian aid.
A vast industry has grown up around humanitarian aid: a cavalcade of organizations—some 37,000—compete for a share of the $160 billion annual prize, with "fact-inflation" sometimes ramping up disaster coverage to draw in more funds.
Insurgents and warring governments, meanwhile, have made aid a permanent feature of military strategy: refugee camps serve as base camps for genocidaires, and aid supplies are diverted to feed the troops. Even as humanitarian groups continue to assert the holy principle of impartiality, they have increasingly become participants in aid's abuses.
In a narrative that is impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman takes us to war zones around the globe—from the NGO-dense operations in "Afghaniscam" to the floating clinics of Texas Mercy Ships proselytizing off the shores of West Africa—to show the often compromised results of aid workers' best intentions. It is time, Polman argues, to impose ethical boundaries, to question whether doing something is always better than doing nothing, and to hold humanitarians responsible for the consequences of their deeds. Here is a quick glance at an aid project: SERIOUSLY, this is not made up
$150 million is allocated to a province in Afghanistan for house-building
An aid agency in Geneva Switzerland take 20% as a fee, or $30 million. They send $120 million to a second group, which takes a fee, and then subcontracts the project to a 3rd group, which takes a fee of 20%
$90 million is left after fee.
The purchase wood for the homes, but pay a shipping fee that is five times the normal commercial rate
The wood arrive in the province and villages, but is the wrong type and is used as kindling.

Don’t believe it? Look at the South African charity that raised millions worldwide for water pumps in Africa that were part of children’s playgrounds. The game pumped water into tanks as the children played. Eighty percent of the tanks were non functioning 6 months after the installation.
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THE JEWS OF SAN NICANDRO
JOHN A. DAVIS
October 2010, Yale University Press
Not many people know of the utterly extraordinary events that took place in a humble southern Italian town in the first half of the twentieth century—and those who do have struggled to explain them. In the late 1920s, a crippled shoemaker had a vision where God called upon him to bring the Jewish faith to this “dark corner” in the Catholic heartlands, despite his having had no prior contact with Judaism itself. By 1938, about a dozen families had converted at one of the most troubled times for Italy’s Jews. The peasant community came under the watchful eyes of Mussolini’s regime and the Catholic Church, but persisted in their new belief, eventually securing approval of their conversion from the rabbinical authorities, and emigrating to the newly founded State of Israel, where a community still exists today. In this first fully documented examination of the San Nicandro story, John A. Davis explains how and why these incredible events unfolded as they did. Using the converts’ own accounts and a wide range of hitherto unknown sources, Davis uncovers the everyday trials and tribulations within this community, and shows how they intersected with many key contemporary issues, including national identity and popular devotional cults, Fascist and Catholic persecution, Zionist networks and postwar Jewish refugees, and the mass exodus that would being the Mediterranean peasant world to an end. Vivid and poignant, this book draws fresh and intriguing links between the astonishing San Nicandro affair and the wider transformation of twentieth-century Europe.
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Running the Books
The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
By Avi Steinberg
October 2010, Doubleday
Avi Steinberg is stumped. After leaving his yeshiva, he went to Harvard. He wrote his senior thesis on Bugs Bunny. His friends and classmates are advancing in the world with professional degrees and success and jobs. Yet he is stuck. He feels that he is unable or unwilling to meets the expectations of his Orthodox Jewish family (dude… did you ever think of therapy?) He is working as a freelance writer of obituaries. It just is not cutting it. He needs direction; he needs health insurance. So he takes a job as a librarian in a Boston prison. A tough prison (since when are prisons not tough?) The inmates seek out the library for books and a connection. A pimp needs help writing a memoir. A gangster hopes to read and one day have his own tv show called THUG SIZZLE. (sonds like a horrible title. I would have made up a title based on the GALLOPING GOURMET, like the Marauding Gourmet, or Plundering Gourmet)… An stripper asks Steinberg to arrange a reunion between her and her estranged son, who is an inmate. A community of outcasts lives among the bookshelves, and he recounts his experiences in this book.. Will Steinberg find his place? Or will he get fired?
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BLACK FACES IN WHITE PLACES
BY RANDAL PINKETT AND JEFFREY ROBINSON, with Philena Patterson
October 2010, AMACOM BOOKS
Advance praise on this book from Mayor Cory Booker (Newark, NJ); Cornel West (Princeton NJ); Bill Cosby, PhD; Stephen and Sean Covey; BJ Jealous (Naacp); Kevin Powell (activist); Skip Mason (Alpha Phi Alpha); Zack Lemelle, Darrul Cobb; Rev Otis Moss III; Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole (Spelman); Alfred Edmond Jr. and more.
In his latest book, says that for generations, African-Americans have been told that to succeed, they need to work twice as hard as everyone else. But sometimes hard work is not enough. For example, Pinkett was on the TV reality show called The Apprentice, and won he won, he was asked to share his prize. He refused.
This book is about “the game.” It offers 10 strategies for playing, mastering, and changing “the game.” It is not only about shattering the old “glass ceiling,” but also about examining the four dimensions of the contemporary black experience: identity, society, meritocracy, and opportunity. Ultimately, it is about changing the very concept of success itself. Based on the authors’ considerable experiences in business, in the public eye, and in the minority, the book shows how African-American professionals can think and act both Entrepreneurially and “Intrapreneurially,” combine their collective strengths with the wisdom of others, and plant the seeds of a positive and lasting legacy.
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The Worldwide Bestseller is now in paperback

OUTLIERS
THE STORY OF SUCCESS
By MALCOLM GLADWELL
October 2010, Back Bay
Why on my Jewish list??
Because several chapters discuss why so many Nobel Prize recipients are Jewish, why Jewish law firms succeeded in the 1970/80s in New York City, and many other hypotheses on Jewish success.

PW writes, “Gladwell (The Tipping Point) once again proves masterful in a genre he essentially pioneered—the book that illuminates secret patterns behind everyday phenomena. His gift for spotting an intriguing mystery, luring the reader in, then gradually revealing his lessons in lucid prose, is on vivid display. Outliers begins with a provocative look at why certain five-year-old boys enjoy an advantage in ice hockey, and how these advantages accumulate over time. We learn what Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart had in common: along with talent and ambition, each enjoyed an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. A detailed investigation of the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants persuasively explains their rise in 20th-century New York, first in the garment trade and then in the legal profession. Through case studies ranging from Canadian junior hockey champions to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, from Asian math whizzes to software entrepreneurs to the rise of his own family in Jamaica, Gladwell tears down the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success—and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts. Even as we know how many of these stories end, Gladwell restores the suspense and serendipity to these narratives that make them fresh and surprising.One hazard of this genre is glibness. In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Gladwell explores the persistence and painstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years; though fascinating in its details, the study does not prove that a rice-growing heritage explains math prowess, as Gladwell asserts. Another pitfall is the urge to state the obvious: No one, Gladwell concludes in a chapter comparing a high-IQ failure named Chris Langan with the brilliantly successful J. Robert Oppenheimer, not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone. But who in this day and age believes that a high intelligence quotient in itself promises success? In structuring his book against that assumption, Gladwell has set up a decidedly flimsy straw man. In the end it is the seemingly airtight nature of Gladwell's arguments that works against him. His conclusions are built almost exclusively on the findings of others—sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians—yet he rarely delves into the methodology behind those studies. And he is free to cherry-pick those cases that best illustrate his points; one is always left wondering about the data he evaluated and rejected because it did not support his argument, or perhaps contradicted it altogether. Real life is seldom as neat as it appears in a Malcolm Gladwell book.“
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GOD AND SEX
WHAT THE BIBLE REALLY SAYS
BY MICHAEL COOGAN
October 2010, 12 Twelve
For several decades, Michael Coogan's introductory course on the Old Testament has been a perennial favorite among students at Harvard University. In God and Sex, Coogan examines one of the most controversial aspects of the Hebrew Scripture: What the Old Testament really says about sex, and how contemporary understanding of those writings is frequently misunderstood or misrepresented. In the engaging and witty voice generations of students have appreciated, Coogan explores the language and social world of the Bible, showing how much innuendo and euphemism is at play, and illuminating the sexuality of biblical figures as well as God. By doing so, Coogan reveals the immense gap between popular use of Scripture and its original context. God and Sex is certain to provoke, entertain, and enlighten readers.
Michael Coogan is Director of Publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum and Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College. For several decades, he has taught an introductory course on the Hebrew Scriptures at Harvard University, as well as at Wellesley College, Boston College, and Stonehill College.
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The Envoy’s Briefcase
The Envoy
The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II
By Alex Kershaw
October 2010, de Capo
December 1944. Soviet and German troops fight from house to house in the shattered, corpse-strewn suburbs of Budapest. Crazed Hungarian fascists join with die-hard Nazis to slaughter Jews day and night, turning the Danube blood-red. In less than six months, thirty-eight-year-old SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann has sent over half a million Hungarians to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Now all that prevents him from liquidating Europe’s last Jewish ghetto is an unarmed Swedish diplomatic envoy named Raoul Wallenberg. The Envoy is the stirring tale of how one man made the greatest difference in the face of untold evil. The legendary Oscar Schindler saved hundreds, but Raoul Wallenberg did what no other individual or nation managed to do: He saved more than 100,000 Jewish men, women, and children from extermination. Written with Alex Kershaw’s customary narrative verve, The Envoy is a fast-paced, nonfiction thriller that brings to life one of the darkest and yet most inspiring chapters of twentieth century history. It is an epic for the ages.
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HANUKKAH - an animation book
Illustrated by Kate Ohry
October 2010, Accord
Hanukkah employs Accord's New York Times best-selling AniMotion(tm) technology to celebrate the Festival of Lights. This sparkly tribute reveals an entertaining way to introduce youngsters to the traditions associated with the holiday. Animated windows feature flickering menorahs, spinning dreidels, and flipping latkes to celebrate important Jewish traditions associated with Hanukkah. In addition to the book's entertaining narrative and sparkling, full-color illustrations, a collection of Hanukkah facts can be found in the back of the book, providing further opportunity for children to learn about--and celebrate--the rich traditions around the Festival of Lights.
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USA‘S BEST TRIPS 99 THEMED ITINERARIES
From Lonely Planet
October 2010, Lonely Planet
99 of the Country’s Best Trips! Whether you’re a local looking for a long weekend escape, or a visitor looking to explore, Lonely Planet’s Trips series offers the best itineraries – and makes it easy to plan the perfect trip time and again. Includes the Mid-Atlantic, New England, the South, Florida, the Great Lakes, the Great Plains, Texas, the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest, California and the Pacific Northwest. Easy-to-use maps for every trip, plus driving times and directions. Explore the country with trips ranging from two days to two weeks. Theme icons make finding the perfect trip simple – no matter what your interest. Local experts share their favorite trip ideas, including a food-lovers’ tour of Northern California from Alice Waters and a musician’s tour of the Midwest music scene. Tune in on the road with our regional music play lists. Family-friendly and pet-friendly listings throughout Green index lists the most environmentally friendly options across the country
My faves were the following themes. Route 66; Massachusetts to Miami; New Jersey Diners; Civil War Sites; Md Crab Quest (I don’t eat crab, but a good tripi for friends); Heriateg Music Trail; Ivy League Schools; Literary New England (not just the Belle of Amherst); Maine Lobster Tour (for friends); 60 Lighthouses in 60 hours; Twain Tour; The Beef Tour; Texas Odd Art and Aliens; Offbeat Idaho: Hot Potatoes and Hot L; Alice Water;s Culinary California; and California’s Other Wine Countries.
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WHY MAHLER
HOW ONE MAN AND TEN SYMPHONIES CHANGED OUR WORLD
BY NORMAN LEBRECHT
October 2010, Pantheon
Norman Lebrecht—noted British music critic, novelist, and author of the classic Mahler Remembered—explains why Gustav Mahler, relatively obscure in his own time, has become the most popular symphonist of ours. Although he was well regarded as a conductor, when Gustav Mahler died in 1911 his compositions were considered “incomprehensible” and “unlistenable.” In the 1960s, with Leonard Bernstein’s passionate advocacy, Mahler’s star began to rise. And in 2009, superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel chose a Mahler symphony for his first concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mahler had famously remarked that his “time will come.” Why Mahler? explores how we have come to find ourselves in Mahler’s time. Norman Lebrecht approaches the question from an unusual and personal angle, discussing how the composer’s music has affected his own life as well as the cultural life of the twentieth century. He travels to Mahler’s birth- and resting places; speaks with surviving members of his family; and delves into why, for many fans, Mahler is not just a composer but a religion, and why, even for less-ardent listeners, Mahler’s popularity has eclipsed that of Haydn or Beethoven. Equal parts biography, memoir, and appreciation, this is a book that will allow us a fuller understanding than we have ever had of Gustav Mahler and of his abiding place in our musical sensibilities.
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TIMED TO COINCIDE WITH THE EXHIBIT AT THE NY JEWISH MUSEUM

HOUDINI
ART AND MAGIC
By Brooke Kamin Rapaport with Alan Brinkley, Gabriel de Guzman, Hasia R. Diner, and Kenneth Silverman
October 2010, Yale University Press
Born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary, Harry Houdini (1874–1926) was a rabbi’s son who became one of the 20th century’s most famous performers. His gripping theatrical presentations and heart-stopping outdoor spectacles attracted unprecedented crowds, and his talent for self-promotion and provocation captured headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.
Though Houdini’s work has earned him a place in the cultural pantheon, the details of his personal life and public persona are subjects of equal fascination. His success was both cause for celebration in the Jewish community and testament to his powers of self-reinvention. In Houdini: Art and Magic, essays on the artist’s life and work are accompanied by interviews with novelist E. L. Doctorow, magician Teller (of Penn and Teller), and contemporary artists including Raymond Pettibon and Matthew Barney, documenting Houdini’s evolution and influence from the late 19th century to the present. Beautifully illustrated with a range of visual material, including Houdini’s own diaries, iconic handcuffs, and straitjacket, alongside rare period posters, prints, and photographs, this book brings Houdini—both the myth and the man—back to life.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport is a curator and writer. Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University. Gabriel de Guzman is Neubauer Family Foundation Curatorial Assistant at The Jewish Museum. Hasia R. Diner is Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University. Kenneth Silverman is professor emeritus at New York University
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GREAT HOUSE
A NOVEL
BY NICOLE KRAUSS
October 2010, WW Norton
A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through. For twenty-five years, a solitary American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be his daughter arrives to take it away, sending her life reeling. Across the ocean in London, a man discovers a terrifying secret about his wife of almost fifty years. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer is slowly reassembling his father's Budapest study, plundered by the Nazis in 1944. These worlds are anchored by a desk of enormous dimension and many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. In the minds of those it has belonged to, the desk comes to stand for all that has disappeared in the chaos of the world-children, parents, whole peoples and civilizations. Nicole Krauss has written a hauntingly powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss
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THE WISDOM BOOKS
JOB, PROVERBS, AND ECCKESIASTES
A TRANSLATION WITH COMMENTARY
By ROBERT ALTER (Berkeley)
October 2010, WW Norton
A magnificent new volume in Robert Alter’s award-winning, landmark translation of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible. Here, in Robert Alter’s bold new translation, are some of the most magnificent works in world literature. The astounding poetry in the Book of Job is restored to its powerful ancient meanings and rhythms. The account of creation in its Voice from the Whirlwind is beautiful and incendiary—an unforgettable challenge to the place of man in the universe. The serene fatalism that construes life as ephemeral and without purpose suffuses Ecclesiastes with a quiet beauty. The pithy maxims of Proverbs impart a worldly wisdom that is still sound and satirically shrewd. Each of these books conveys and undermines the universal wisdom that the righteous thrive and the wicked suffer in a rational moral order; together they are essential to the ancient canon that is the Hebrew Bible. In Alter’s translation they regain the energy and force of the original, enhancing their ongoing relevance to the lives of modern readers
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THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF LEONARD COHEN
BY ANTHONY REYNOLDS
October 2010, OmnibusPresUsa.com
Anthony Reynolds' fascinating and detailed biography draws on scores of new interviews conducted with Cohen's band members past and present, his business associates, editors, friends, fans, producers, colleagues, enemies and peers. As well as their revealing accounts, the author has gained access to hours of previously unpublished interviews with Cohen as well as video archive recordings from several decades. The book also includes an authoritative summary of every Cohen album, with insights and recollections supplied from the musicians who appeared on the recordings. Gradually, despite Cohen's own good-natured evasiveness over the past 40 years, a surprisingly frank portrait begins to emerge of the legendary figure who commands unparalleled loyalty from his fans and followers, young and old. From the distant days of his penniless beginnings as a much-praised poet in Montreal, through the travels, affairs, religious crisis and drama of his latest tours. Cohen's extraordinary life and body of work is examined as never before
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BLOOD COUNT
A mystery novel
An Artie Cohen Mystery
By Regie Nadelson
October 2010, Walker Books Bloomsbury
It is the winter before Obama’s inauguration. He has won the election, and Wall Street is imploding. It is cold and winter has set in in Manhattan. Artie Cohen gets a call from his ex girlfriend. She worked for Obama’s in the election, and she lives in Harlem at the Louis Armstrong. There has been a murder at her Sugar Hill residence and she is scared. There are more deaths to come, and Artie Cohen is on the case. Can he win back his ex? Can he figure out the mystery? Click the book cover to read more.

A COUNTRY CALLED AMREEKA
ARAB ROOTS, AMERICAN STORIES
By ALIA MALEK, ESQ.
October 2010, Free Press
PW writes, “Starred Review. The U.S. has long lauded itself as a nation of immigrants, but some communities have had considerable difficulty weaving themselves into the American tapestry, notably, Arab-Americans. In this superb snapshot of the Americans of Arab-speaking descent, individuals with roots in Jordan, Yemen, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon share their stories and demonstrate the extent to which, even as they play football, work assembly lines and hold public office, they remain shut out of the national narrative. With a remarkable ability to capture her subjects' voices, Malek, a Syrian-American civil rights lawyer, sketches illuminating responses to her question: What does American history look and feel like in the eyes and skin of Arab Americans? There's the Lebanese-American, too dark for 1960s Birmingham; the Palestinian-American surrounded by anti-Arab violence during the Iranian hostage crisis; the Yemeni-American deployed to Iraq with the Marine Corps. In her effort to demonstrate the impact of foreign affairs on American soil, Malek focuses too heavily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, giving short shrift to other important stories of upheaval, but this is an excellent book, one certain to put right some of the wrongs it catalogues.”
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Finishing the Hat
Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments,
Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes
By Stephen Sondheim
October 2010, Knopf
The winner of seven Tonys, seven Grammys, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Sondheim has become synonymous with the best in musical theater. Now, in Finishing the Hat, he has not only collected his lyrics for the first time, he’s given readers a rare, personal look into his extraordinary shows and life. Along with the lyrics for all of his productions from 1954 to 1981—including West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd—Sondheim discusses his relationship with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and his collaborations with legends Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Ethel Merman, Richard Rodgers, Angela Lansbury, Hal Prince, and countless others. The anecdotes—rich with history, personal insights, and intimate details—transport us back to a time when theater was a major pillar of American culture. And throughout the book, Sondheim analyzes his work and dissects his own songs as well as those of others, offering unparalleled insight into songwriting that will be studied for years to come. Brilliant, poignant, scathing, and funny, Finishing the Hat is the newest production Sondheim can add to his list of classic works.
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Bloodlands
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
By Timothy Snyder (Yale University)
October 2010, Basic
This book will come out in Fall 2010. Here is a part of a lecture Snyder gave in Vilnius in 2009.
Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best they can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come. The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.
This form of survivors' history, of which the works of Primo Levi are the most famous example, only inadequately captures the reality of the mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frank concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland. Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden —were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.
An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived. About a million more Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, or Auschwitz, many more shot in actions in the eastern half of the country
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AMEN, AMEN, AMEN
MEMOIR OF A GIRL WHO WOULDN’T STOP PRAYING (AMONG OTHER THINGS)
BY ABBY SHER
October 2010, Scribners Paperback
Until the age of ten, Abby Sher was a happy child in a fun-loving, musical family. But when her father and favorite aunt pass away, Abby fills the void of her loss with rituals: kissing her father's picture over and over each night, washing her hands, counting her steps, and collecting sharp objects that she thinks could harm innocent pedestrians. Then she begins to pray. At first she repeats the few phrases she remem-bers from synagogue, but by the time she is in high school, Abby is spending hours locked in her closet, urgently reciting a series of incantations and pleas. If she doesn't, she is sure someone else will die, too. The patterns from which she cannot deviate become her shelter and her obsession. In college Abby is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and while she accepts this as an explanation for the counting and kissing and collecting, she resists labeling her fiercest obsession, certain that her prayers and her relationship with G-d are not an illness but the cure. She also discovers a new passion: performing comedy. She is never happier than when she dons a wig and makes people laugh. Offstage, however, she remains unable to confront the fears that drive her. She descends into darker compulsions, starving and cutting herself, measuring every calorie and incision. It is only when her earliest, deepest fear is realized that Abby is forced to examine and redefine the terms of her faith and her future. Amen, Amen, Amen is an elegy honoring a mother, father, and beloved aunt who filled a child with music and their own blend of neuroticism. It is an adventure, full of fast cars, unsolved crimes, and close calls. It is part detective story, part love story, about Abby's hunt for answers and someone to guide her to them. It is a young woman's radiant and heartbreaking account of struggling to recognize the bounds and boundlessness of obsession and devotion.
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PIRKE AVOT
TIMELESS WISDOM FOR MODERN LIFE
BY WILLIAM BERKSON
October 2010, JPS Jewish Publication Society
The great Jewish ethical tradition through a contemporary lens. In this new edition of the well-known Jewish classic, Berkson helps us see that Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) is more than just a fundamental religious text; it is also a compelling, contemporary ethical guide.
Berkson looks at the individual sayings, or mishnayot, through the interpretations of the great Jewish commentators and also within the broader context of Western thought--through views found in the Bible, the ancient Greeks, the Enlightenment, Buddhism, Confucianism, and American culture today. The book's most important and innovative feature is its exploration of the relationship between the beliefs of the ancient Sages and modern psychology, particularly the key to good relationships: ethical conduct. The result is a book that goes far beyond the plain meaning of the sayings to explore their ethical, psychological, and religious significance for us today. Included are an extensive index, historical chart, glossary, and the full text of Pirke Avot in English and Hebrew on facing pages.
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BEST JEWISH BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND TEENS
A JPS GUIDE
BY LINDA P. SILVER
October 2010, JPS Jewish Publication Society
So many books, so little time! Where do you start? With this book: Linda Silver's guide to the most notable books for young readers. Here are a top librarian's picks of the best in writing, illustration, reader appeal, and authentically Jewish content in picture books, fiction and non-fiction, for early childhood through the high school years. You'll find the classics like K'tonton and the All-of-a-Kind Family books, right on to Terrible Things, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and today's bestsellers, along with hundreds of others. Chapters are organized by subject and entries within each include a succinct description of the book and author, and Silver's own insights on what makes it worth reading. There are title, subject, author, and illustrator indexes, title-grouping by reading level, and lists of award winners. A wonderful reference for parents, grandparents, teachers, librarians--and, of course, the kids so dear to them. Linda is co-editor of the newsletter of the AJL (Association of Jewish Librarians)
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MESILLAT YESHARIM
THE PATH OF THE UPRIGHT
BY MOSES HAYYIM LUZZATTO
October 2010, JPS Jewish Publication Society
Connecting the wisdom of tradition with contemporary spirituality. Mesillat Yesharim is a classic of Jewish ethical literature. Written by one of the leading kabbalists of the late Middle Ages, it is also a window into the kabbalist's understanding of the connection between ethics and mystical vision. Luzzatto, one of the great Hebrew stylists of his time, is acknowledged by some as the first writer of modern Hebrew; thus Mesillat Yesharim is also important for its place in Hebrew literature. This translation, published originally in 1936 by JPS, is a landmark in Jewish publishing. It made this Hebrew text finally available to English readers, and it gave us insights into the groundbreaking work that Kaplan did in orienting American Jews to the deep connection between ethical living and religious belief. It is no wonder that this book has become the centerpiece of the modern-day Mussar Movement, which inspires so many on their spiritual path. Rabbi Ira Stone, consummate teacher and stirring speaker, is a major force in the resurgence of the Mussar Movement. In his introduction, he presents Luzzatto and Mesillat Yesharim in their historical context, and gives us new insights into Kaplan's emerging theology. Stone also explains the principles of reading that he uses in his commentary and teaching to make this medieval text so inspiring to readers today.
This volume contains the original Kaplan translation, as well as those sections of the text that Kaplan omitted, along with Stone's new commentary. The original Hebrew text is in the back of the book.
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THE BLESSING OF A B MINUS
USING JEWISH TEACHINGS TO RAISE RESILIENT TEENS October 2010, Scribners
Dr Mogel is a clinical psychologist, parent educator, and keynote speaker for educational and religious organizations and schools. You loved her earlier work, “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” on the topic of raising younger children with Jewish wisdom, not being overprotective, or overscheduled. Now comes her book on raising teens, giving them space, giving the limits, understanding puberty and the changes that occur and the desire to form individual personalities. If Genesis was early childhood, this is Exodus, in which the parent Moses has to guide his complaining teenaged Israelites.
Dr. Mogel has two daughters, and when they were teens, she thought she could calmly and logically deal with the, their one word answers, their inability to clean their rooms, go to bed on time, wake up on time, do chores, participate in family activities. If only she could bake a challah and have Friday night Shabbat dinner and they would run downstairs and be good obedient young women. Nope. Didn’t happen. How do you pick your battles when everything is a battle?
How do you raise a teen in a culture that expects material and academic success and perfection? Mogel, using mussar and other wisdom teachings, shows other parents how not to be overindulgent and how not to pressure kids. How do you develop sound judgement. How do your maintain composure, detachment, acceptance, integrity, moderation, delight, and even parental authority. Parents will uncover an appreciative and reflective relationship with their children, and set an example for them. Click the book cover to read more.

THE TENTH SONG
A NOVEL
BY NAOMI RAGEN
October 2010, SMP
When the unimaginable happens without warning, a mother and daughter must find a new path to happiness in this poignant novel. Abigail Samuels has no reason to feel anything but joy on the morning her life falls apart. The epitome of the successful Jewish American woman, she is married to a well-known and respected accountant and is in the middle of planning the wedding of her daughter, Kayla. Kayla is a Harvard law student who has never questioned her life or path. Things fall apart and Kayla runs away to a desert commune. Her mother rushes to save her…
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LEON URIS
LIFE AS A BEST SELLER
(Jewish History, Life and Culture series)
BY IRA NADEL
October 2010, University of Texas Press
As the best-selling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers could not put down. Uris's thirteen novels sold millions of copies, spent months on the best-seller lists, appeared in fifty languages, and have been adapted into equally popular movies and TV miniseries. Few other writers equaled Uris's fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and celebrity author tours. Beloved by the public, Uris was, not surprisingly, dismissed by literary critics. Until now, his own life and work--as full of drama as his fiction--have never been the subject of a book.
In Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, Ira Nadel traces Uris from his disruptive youth to his life-changing experiences as a marine in World War II. These experiences, coupled with Uris's embrace of his Judaism and desire to write, led to his unprecedented success and the lavish excesses of a career as a best-selling author. Nadel reveals that Uris lived the adventures he described, including his war experiences in the Pacific (Battle Cry), life-threatening travels in Israel (Exodus), visit to Communist Poland (Mila 18), libel trial in Britain (QB VII), and dangerous sojourn in fractious Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (Trinity). Nadel also demonstrates that Uris's talent for writing action-packed, yet thoroughly researched, novels meshed perfectly with the public's desire to revisit and understand the tumultuous events of recent history. This made him far more popular (and wealthy) than more literary authors, while paving the way for writers such as Irving Wallace and Tom Clancy.
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Be sure to ask Rabbi Glickman if the Cairo Genizah had a Starbuck’s inside of it

Sacred Treasure, the Cairo Genizah
The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic
By Rabbi Mark Glickman
November 2010 Jewish Lights
In 1897, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered. He had entered the synagogue's genizah-- its repository for damaged and destroyed Jewish texts--which held nearly 300,000 individual documents, many of which were over 1,000 years old. Considered among the most important discoveries in modern religious history, its contents contained early copies of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, early manuscripts of the Bible, and other sacred literature. The importance of the Genizah's contents rivals that of the Rosetta Stone, and by virtue of its sheer mass alone, it will continue to command our attention indefinitely. Sacred Treasure--The Cairo Genizah is the first accessible, comprehensive account of this astounding treasure trove of documents and their discovery. It will delight readers with its fascinating adventure story--why this enormous collection was amassed, how it was discovered and the many lessons to be found in its contents. And it will show readers how Schechter's find, though still being "unpacked" today, forever transformed our knowledge of the Jewish past, Muslim history and much more.
Rabbi Mark Glickman is rabbi of Congregations Kol Ami in Woodinville, Washington, and Kol Shalom on Bainbridge Island, WA.
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WILL EISNER
A DREAMERS LIFE IN COMICS
BY MICHAEL SCHUMACHER
Nov 2010, Bloomsbury

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The Dangerous Otto Katz
The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy
By Jonathan Miles
October 2010, Bloomsbury
Communist spy Otto Katz played a crucial role in the history of the first half of the twentieth Century. His story takes us from Bohemian Prague to Weimar Berlin, from the Reichstag Fire to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, from Paris to London and New York. We see behind the curtain of Communist espionage in America and Britain - with the man who was the inspiration for the character of Victor Lazlo in Casablanca and who the FBI described as 'an extremely dangerous man'. Along the way he encountered major historical figures including Franz Kafka, Marlene Dietrich, the Cambridge Spies, Hitler, Stalin, Noel Coward, Dashiell Hammett, and Trotsky.
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OPERATION EXODUS
FROM THE NAZI DEATH CAMPS TO THE PROMISED LAND
A PERILOUS JOURNEY THAT SHAPED ISRAEL‘S FUTURE
BY GORDON THOMAS
November 2010, Thomas Dunne
A riveting account of the Exodus 1947, from Haganah’s planning, the acquisition of the steamship, the collection of passengers, the cruise, the boarding by the Royal Navy, the killings, and the eventual aftermath. Click the book cover to read more.

DYLAN’S CANDY BAR
UNWRAP YOUR SWEET LIFE
BY DYLAN LAUREN
October 2010, Crown Clarkson Potter
You have been to her store(s), now read the book.
Includes a chapter or well.. a page.. for Hanukkah, with a candy menorah
Filled with candy recipes and craft ideas that will appeal to all. Also filled with candy trivia and history
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FOLKTALES OF THE JEWS
TALES FROM THE LANDS OF ISLAM
EDITED BY DAN BEN-AMOS
DOV NOY - CONSULTING EDITOR
November 2010, JPS Jewish Publication Society
Tales from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq. An important collection. The third volume in the series in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg‘s magnum opus
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See Also:

WHY ARE JEWS LIBERALS?
BY NORMAL PODHORETZ
October 2010, now in paperback. Vinatge
Washington Post (Justin Moyer): Launching an ideological artillery shell sure to spoil innumerable Passover seders, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz juxtaposes political autobiography with a history of anti-Semitism to pose a controversial question: Why are Jews liberals? "Liberalism has become the religion of American Jews," he writes, "even though it conflicts in substance with the Torah . . . [and] the most basic of all Jewish interests -- the survival of the Jewish people." A Jewish neoconservative who has taken up his pen to battle communism, McGovernism, affirmative action and terrorism, Podhoretz ably explains why Jews seeking respect and equality embraced Enlightenment philosophy, Marxism and FDR's New Deal, even when those institutions demanded that they "justify the space they take up on this earth." But, like so many other authors on the right and the left, Podhoretz stumbles when equating Judaism -- a millennia-old, multifaceted religion and culture -- with the cause of Israel, a secular state created by U.N. fiat in 1948. "Anti-Semitism was now disguising itself as anti-Zionism," he complains, dismissing worthwhile debate about the Arab-Israeli conflict while wondering why Jews can't reconcile with pro-Israel evangelical Christians and why Jews overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama ("the stealth candidate . . . for the anti-Israel Left"). According to Podhoretz, "we Jews have an obligation to join with the defenders of [America]" -- i.e., Republicans -- "against those who are blind or indifferent or antagonistic." A better question than the one asked by his book's title: How can Norman Podhoretz pretend to speak for every Jew?
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THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL
BY ANNE FRANK
Edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler, Translated by Susan Massotty
October 2010. Everymans
PW: This startling new edition of Dutch Jewish teenager Anne Frank's classic diary written in an Amsterdam warehouse, where for two years she hid from the Nazis with her family and friends contains approximately 30% more material than the original 1947 edition. It completely revises our understanding of one of the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. The Anne we meet here is much more sarcastic, rebellious and vulnerable than the sensitive diarist beloved by millions. She rages at her mother, Edith, smolders with jealous resentment toward her sister, Margot, and unleashes acid comments at her roommates. Expanded entries provide a fuller picture of the tensions and quarrels among the eight people in hiding. Anne, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, three months before her 16th birthday, candidly discusses her awakening sexuality in entries that were omitted from the 1947 edition by her father, Otto, the only one of the eight to survive the death camps. He died in 1980. This crisp, stunning translation provides an unvarnished picture of life in the "secret annex." In the end, Anne's teen angst pales beside her profound insights, her self-discovery and her unbroken faith in good triumphing over evil.
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MY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
BY THE DALI LAMA
October 2010. HarperOne
His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He is the author of two memoirs and numerous books on Buddhism, including The Way to Freedom and Awakening the Mind, Lightening the Heart--the first two volumes of the landmark Library of Tibet series
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WITH SO MANY ISRAELIS VISITING INDIA AND MANY JEWS DOING YOGA, LET’S UNDERSTAND THE CLASSIC INDIAN TEXT:

The Difficulty of Being Good
On the Subtle Art of Dharma
By Gurcharan Das
October 2010. Oxford
Gurcharan Das.. why does that name ring a bell? Oh, maybe because he was the star of three famous Harvard Business School HBS Case Studies. Das was born in what is now Pakistan and riased in India. He finsihed high school in Washington DC when his father was transferred there for work, and studied at Princeton, Harvard, and Harvard Business School. He led P&G in India and South Asia for decades and then retired. He writes columns for many Indian papers. He studied under John Rawls (Theory of Justice) at Harvard.
In this book, he has a conversation with the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata, which deals with just wars, human relations, families, leadership, obligations, and so much more. Using this classic story, this epic poem, he seeks to to answer the question, ‘why be good?’ He discovers that the epic’s world of moral haziness and uncertainty is closer to our experience as ordinary human beings rather than the narrow and rigid positions that define most debate and discussion.
The Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma — in essence, doing the right thing. He doesn’t define it, since even the characters aer searching to understand it. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he gets on with it; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and contradictory take on dharma. It is like the rabbis discussing an issue in the Talmud. The epic’s characters are flawed; they stumble. Sousins fight; a father forget to teach his son to exit, only teaching him to enter, and this leads to death. Their incoherent experiences illuminate envy, revenge, remorse, status anxiety, compassion, courage, duty and other moral qualities. As the Mahabharata’s story unfolds in each chapter (and the author lets the epic speak as far as possible), the focus moves to a single character and his or her ethical problem–and its significance for our lives.
The classical Indian life has four aims. Gurcharan Das’ earlier book, India Unbound, examined the aim of artha, material well being. This one dwells on the goal of dharma, moral well being. It addresses the central problem of how to live our lives in an examined way–holding a mirror to us and forcing us to confront the many ways in which we deceive ourselves; how we are false to others; and how we oppress fellow human beings. Its premise is that ordinary human life does not have to be so cruel and humiliating.
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THE BOY
A HOLOCAUST STORY
BY DAN PORAT, Hebrew University
October 2010. Hill and Wang
A gravel road.
A sunny day. A soldier.
A gun. A child, arms high in the air.
A moment captured on film. But what is the history behind arguably the most recognizable photograph of the Holocaust? In The Boy: A Holocaust Story, the historian Dan A. Porat unpacks this split second that was immortalized on film and unravels the stories of the individuals—both Jews and Nazis—associated with it. The Boy presents the story of three Nazi criminals, ranging in status from SS sergeant to low-ranking SS officer to SS general. It is also the story of two Jewish victims, a teenage girl and a young boy, who encounter these Nazis in Warsaw in the spring of 1943. The book is remarkable in its scope, picking up the lives of these participants in the years preceding World War I and following them to their deaths. One of the Nazis managed to stay at large for twenty-two years. One of the survivors lived long enough to lose a son in the Yom Kippur War. The sixty-two photographs dispersed throughout help narrate these five lives. And, in keeping with the emotional immediacy of those photographs, Porat has deliberately used a narrative style that, drawing upon extensive research, experience, and oral interviews, places the reader in the middle of unfolding events.
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BLOOD COUNT
AN ARTIE COHEN MYSTERY NOVEL
BY REGGIE NADELSON
October 2010. Walker
Mid-December 2008. Barack Obama has just been elected; all New York is ecstatic, especially Harlem. On a freezing night a few weeks later, detective Artie Cohen gets a late call from his ex girlfriend, Lily Hanes, begging for his help. Lily has been living at the Louis Armstrong Apartments, one of Harlem's great buildings, while working on Obama's campaign; now her Russian neighbor, Marianna Simonova, has died, and Lily fears she's at fault and needs Artie's Russian connections. Over a weekend when the city is locked in by snow and cold, with the financial markets tanking, one after another people at the Armstrong die. Artie, out of his element, a white detective in a black world, is drawn inexorably into the realm of Sugar Hill and the Armstrong, where almost everybody except for the real estate developers seems locked in the past. Working to solve the murders, Artie tries desperately to win Lily back. Blood Count is a murder mystery, a love story, and a tale about New York, race, real estate, money, and music, with an ending one could never predict.
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SOME NOVEMBER 2010 BOOKS

What a Difference a Dog Makes
Big Lessons on Life, Love and Healing from a Small Pooch
By Mr. Dana Jennings (New York Times)
Nov 2010,
Jennings' son was fighting liver disease.
Jennings, turning 50, had a routine exam, not a very high PSA, but an aggressive case of prostate cancer.
And then there was their Jewish dog, or as Dana writes it, their D-G
Jennings offers an adoring look at the wisdom and healing powers of his prized miniature poodle, Bijou.
Jennings and his son, Owen, both find solace in the companionship of their "canine Zen master" (whose succinct life lessons are peppered throughout the book). Jennings's wry sense of humor shines through (especially while describing reproducing lizards and Bijou achieving nirvana thanks to spilled Cheerios) and he pays valiant tribute to his beloved pet and friend. It's the rare reader who won't take some pleasure in Jennings's strength (and how smitten he is with the noble Bijou).
(And yes, Jennings is Jewish... I can attest to it since I have seen the Jewish Star of David he wears around his neck.)
And yes, after reading the book, I went out to get a PSA test
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Rwanda, Israel, Africa, The Gulf Wars, conflicts, education, memory, conscience, illness, god, and more

An Ethical Compass
Coming of Age in the 21st Century
Preface by Elie Wiesel, Foreword by Thomas L. Friedman
Edited by The Ethics Prize Essay coordinators
Nov 2010,
In 1986, Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his victory over “the powers of death and degradation, and to support the struggle of good against evil in the world.” Soon after, he and his wife, Marion, created the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. A project at the heart of the Foundation’s mission is its Ethics Prize—a remarkable essay-writing contest through which thousands of students from colleges across the country are encouraged to confront ethical issues of personal significance. The Ethics Prize has grown exponentially over the past twenty years. “Of all the projects our Foundation has been involved in, none has been more exciting than this opportunity to inspire young students to examine the ethical aspect of what they have learned in their personal lives and from their teachers in the classroom,” writes Elie Wiesel. Readers will find essays on Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda, sweatshops and globalization, and the political obligations of the mothers of Argentina’s Disappeared. Other essays tell of a white student who joins a black gospel choir, a young woman who learns to share in Ladakh, and the outsize implications of reporting on something as small as a cracked windshield. Readers will be fascinated by the ways in which essays on conflict, conscience, memory, illness (Rachel Maddow’s essay on AIDS appears), and God overlap and resonate with one another. These essays reflect those who are “sensitive to the sufferings and defects that confront a society yearning for guidance and eager to hear ethical voices,” writes Elie Wiesel. “And they are a beacon for what our schools must realize as an essential component of a true education.”Click the book cover to read more.

SAL MINEO
A BIOGRAPHY
BY MICHAEL GREGG MICHAUD
Nov 2010, Harmony
On the 55th anniversary of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, comes the biography of SAL MIENO, an actor famous for REBEL, and also EXODUS. Mineo was murdered early in his life and career. This book uses newly recovered information as well as extensive interviews with his two primary lovers. He started young, on Broadway, opposite Yul Brynner on Broadway in The King and I, and then made it to Hollywood where he became a success. At age 37 he was murdered.
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THE OTHER SCHINDLERS
WHAT MADE PEOPLE SAVE JEWS FROM THE HOLOCAUST
BY AGNES GRUNWALD-SPIER, with MARTIN GILBERT
November 2010, History
The inspiring stories of courageous non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. Thanks to Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark, and the film based on it, Schindler’s List, people have become more aware of the fact that, in the midst of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, courage and humanity could still overcome evil. While six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, some were saved through the actions of non-Jews whose consciences would not allow them to pass by on the other side, and many are honored by Israel's official memorial to Jewish Holocaust victims, Yad Vashem, as "Righteous among the Nations" for their actions. As a baby, Agnes Grunwald-Spier was herself saved from the horrors of Auschwitz by an unknown official, and is now a trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. She has collected the stories of 30 individuals who rescued Jews, providing a new insight into why these people were prepared to risk so much for their fellow men and women. With a foreword by one of the leading experts on the subject, this is an ultimately uplifting account of how some good deeds really do shine in a weary world.
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They say that Jewish teens get nose jobs, and this man is a plastic srugeon on Long Island at Long Island Jewish Hospital and other medical centers. So, before getting work done, read the guide

THE SAFE AND SANE GUIDE TO
TEENAGE PLASTIC SURGERY
BY FREDERICK N. LUKASH, MD FASC FAAP
Nov 2010, Benbella
The Safe and Sane Guide to Teenage Plastic Surgery, by Dr. Frederick N. Lukash, is a guide to this ever-expanding phenomenon. Written by the American Society of Plastic Surgery‘s acknowledged expert and official media spokesperson on pediatric and adolescent plastic surgery, this book answers those tough questions parents of potential teenage plastic surgery candidates have: Will surgery increase their child’s self-esteem and help them fit in better? Or is it a dangerously easy solution to deeper issues? When is surgery right, and when is it not. Interviewed in The New York Times and featured on Discovery Health among many other media outlets, Lukash guides families through every step of the process, from finding the perfect-fit doctor and applying for medical insurance to surgery and finally to recovery and a changed life. A virtual, free consultation with a renowned expert in the field, the book doesn’t just offer easy solutions to teen’s body-image problems but helps parents understand the emotional, psychological and social dilemmas involved. Complete with action plans, real-life stories and pictures, The Safe and San Guide to Teenage Plastic Surgery offers advice on what can, can’t and shouldn’t be done—and on how to spot the doctors who will exploit a teen’s fragile sense of self-esteem as well as his or her parent’s pocketbook. Most important, Lukash provides a useful red light/yellow light/green light guide for considering teen plastic surgery..
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DESIGN IT!
THE ORDINARY THINGS WE USE EVERYDAY
AND THE NOT-so-ORDINARY WAYS THEY CAME TO BE
BY RONA ARATO
Nov 2010, Tundra
Ages 9 - 12
Behind the toaster, the toilet, the tub, the microwave, the camera, and countless other features of our everyday lives are smart ideas from smart people who executed them.
A bright idea of a book, Design It! is a great introduction to lots of satisfying careers from architecture to model making, to the pioneers - thank you, Mr. Cummings for the modern-day toilet! - and to the principles of good design that make life more pleasant. Rona Arato introduces young readers to the world of industrial design by focusing on our homes and by presenting the basics. She asks readers to be the judge: Does it do what it's supposed to (function)? Is it big enough, small enough, or light enough for the person who'll be using it (usability)? Is it safe and comfortable to use (ergonomics)? Does it look great (aesthetics)? And, is it eco-friendly? Equal parts fascinating history and eye-opening facts, Design It! makes for great reading and is a useful resource for those who are beginning to think about careers.
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The Long Divergence
How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East
Timur Kuran
Nov 2010, Princeton
In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind--in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions. Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life--including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies--all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history--will take generations to overcome. The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.
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ORGINALLY TITLED THE DYBBUK BY ANNE RICE (not the An-sky novel)

Of Love and Evil
Songs of the Seraphim
A novel by Anne Rice
Nov 2010, Knopf
Anne Rice's magnificent Songs of the Seraphim series continues with a lyrical and haunting new novel of angels and assassins set in dark and dangerous worlds — in our time and in centuries past. Toby O'Dare, former government assassin, is summoned by the angel Malchiah to fifteenth-century Rome — the city of Michelangelo and Raphael, of Leo X and the Holy Inquisition — to solve a terrible crime of poisoning and to uncover the secrets of an earthbound restless spirit, a diabolical dybbuk. Toby is plunged into this rich age as a lutist sent to charm and calm this troublesome spirit. In the fullness of the high Italian Renaissance, Toby soon discovers himself in the midst of dark plots and counterplots, surrounded by a still darker and more dangerous threat as the veil of ecclesiastical terror closes in around him. And as he once again embarks on a powerful journey of atonement, he is reconnected with his own past, with matters light and dark, fierce and tender, with the promise of salvation and with a deeper and richer vision of love.
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TRUTHS DESIRED BY GOD
AN EXCURSION IN TO THE WEEKLY HAFTORAH
BY DR. MEIR TAMARi
November 2010, Gefen
With the mounting interest in traditional Jewish texts, classes abound in Chumash, Talmud, Tehillim, and the Megillot. Yet the books of Nevi im through which a major part of Judaism s special message is transmitted have been largely overlooked. Using the weekly haftarah as his entry, renowned author Dr. Meir Tamari tackles this challenge, offering original insights and bringing together commentators from the span of Jewish history. Dr. Meir Tamari s thirty-year Bank of Israel career culminated as Chief Economist. He pioneered the study of economic behavior and Jewish ethics at Bar-Ilan University. He has written extensively on Chassidut, Tanach, and Jewish thought.
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DAVID BEN-GURION AND THE JEWISH RENAISSANCE
BY SHLOMO ARONSON (Hebrew University)
November 2010, Cambridge
This book offers a reappraisal of David Ben-Gurion's role in Jewish-Israeli history from the perspective of the twenty-first century, in the larger context of the Zionist "renaissance," of which he was a major and unique exponent. Some have described Ben-Gurion's Zionism as a dream that has gone sour, or a utopia doomed to be unfulfilled. Now - after the dust surrounding Israel's founding father has settled, archives have been opened, and perspective has been gained since Ben-Gurion's downfall - this book presents a fresh look at this statesman-intellectual and his success and tragic failures during a unique period of time that he and his peers described as the "Jewish renaissance." The resulting reappraisal offers a new analysis of Ben-Gurion's actual role as a major player in Israeli, Middle Eastern, and global politics.
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JEWS, MONEY, AND ANTISEMITISM
THE STORY OF A STEREOTYPE
BY ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN, ADL
November 2010, palgrave
In the wake of Bernie Madoff’s ruinous investment schemes, Abe Foxman takes a cultural and political look at the many variations throughout history of the assumptions made about Jews and money. These include Jews as greedy global capitalists; Jews as wealthy secret communists; Jews as cheapskates; and Jews controlling the media with their money to unduly influence society. Foxman makes the case that these stereotypes have permeated cultures globally and argues that these beliefs are rooted in deep-seated and pervasive anti-Semitism. As with all forms of bigotry, society at large needs to respond to the persistence of stereotypes by educating the young, denouncing hate speech, and by encouraging Jews, like all groups, to express pride in their ethnic and religious heritage.
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Two Cents Plain
My Brooklyn Boyhood
By Martin Lemelman
Nov 2010, Bloomsbury
A graphic memoir set in the aisles of a local candy store. Lemelman, the son of Holocaust survivors, grew up in the back of his family‘s Brownsville Brooklyn candy store in the postwar 1950s and 1960s. It is nostalgic for candy, sodas, egg creams, comic books, toys and the voices of the neighborhood, but shows how Brownsville was declining and violence and white flight was beginning. The fish monger, deli man and fruit salesman come to vivid life in these pages. The climax comes in 1968 with the riots. Would it be a new Holocaust?
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QUICHES, KUGELS, AND COUSCOUS
MY SEARCH FOR JEWISH COOKING IN FRANCE
BY JOAN NATHAN
November 2010, Knopf
What is Jewish cooking in France? In a journey that was a labor of love, Joan Nathan traveled the country to discover the answer and, along the way, unearthed a treasure trove of recipes and the often moving stories behind them. Nathan takes us into kitchens in Paris, Alsace, and the Loire Valley; she visits the bustling Belleville market in Little Tunis in Paris; she breaks bread with Jewish families around the observation of the Sabbath and the celebration of special holidays. All across France, she finds that Jewish cooking is more alive than ever: traditional dishes are honored, yet have acquired a certain French finesse. And completing the circle of influences: following Algerian independence, there has been a huge wave of Jewish immigrants from North Africa, whose stuffed brik and couscous, eggplant dishes and tagines—as well as their hot flavors and Sephardic elegance—have infiltrated contemporary French cooking. All that Joan Nathan has tasted and absorbed is here in this extraordinary book, rich in a history that dates back 2,000 years and alive with the personal stories of Jewish people in France today.
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SEWING SCHOOL
HAND SEWING PROJECTS KIDS WILL LOVE TO MAKE
BY AMIE PLUMLEY AND ANDRIA LISLE
November 2010, Storey Publishing
Kids everywhere are in stitches...sewing stitches, that is. They are discovering the wonder and joy found in simple needle and thread. And while sewing offers an array of benefits for children -- it nurtures creativity, fosters cognitive abilities, refines motor coordination, boosts confidence, and gives them a skill they'll use wheir whole lives -- kids know that it's just plain fun. Sewing School authors Amie Plumley and Andria Lisle teach a sewing camp in Memphis, Tennessee, which has earned accolades from delighted children and parents. When families clamored for more, Plumley and Lisle launched a blog, sewingschool.blogspot.com, to rave reviews. Now, they've channeled the best of their children's sewing projects into this lively, how-to-sew book for ages five and up. Featuring 21 inspired projects for young sewers, Sewing School allows kids to create fabric masterpieces with minimal adult supervision. All projects have been kid-tested, most can be made using simple hand stitches, and all can be embellished with a personal touch, making them a terrific outlet for kids' natural creativity. To further inspire young needle-crafters, the book is peppered with photos and quotes from real boys and girls who have participated in the authors' sewing camp. Projects include items that children can hug (pillows, doll, blanket), hold (wallet, tote, draw string pouch), and wear (sleep mask, hat, cuffs, doll skirt). Each project features step-by-step instructions written at a second-grade comprehension level, along with a close-up photo of every step and a photo of the finished project. The book also offers full-sized cut-out patterns in a front pocket and special instructions for how teachers and grownups can help. There are only a few sewing books written specifically for children, and none have the fresh look, fun voice, and contemporary feel of Sewing School. This book is sure to be a hit in homes everywhere as children discover that they can make enchanting, useful items using nothing but simple needle and thread!
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MOSES MENDELSSOHN
BY SHMUEL FEINER, Bar Ilan University
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY BERRIS
Part of the Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press
October 2010, Yale University Press
The “German Socrates,” Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Berlin celebrity and a major figure in the Enlightenment, revered by Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities common to Jews of his time while formulating the philosophical foundations of a modern Judaism suited for a new age. His most influential books included the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that paved the way for generations of Jews to master the language of the larger culture.
Feiner’s book is the first that offers a full, human portrait of this fascinating man—uncommonly modest, acutely aware of his task as an intellectual pioneer, shrewd, traditionally Jewish, yet thoroughly conversant with the world around him—providing a vivid sense of Mendelssohn’s daily life as well as of his philosophical endeavors. Feiner, a leading scholar of Jewish intellectual history, examines Mendelssohn as father and husband, as a friend (Mendelssohn’s long-standing friendship with the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was seen as a model for Jews and non-Jews worldwide), as a tireless advocate for his people, and as an equally indefatigable spokesman for the paramount importance of intellectual independence. Shmuel Feiner is professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University and holds the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Prussia.
See also Moses Mendelssohn: Ein judischer Denker in der Zeit der Aufklarung. Mit einem Vorwort von Dan Diner. Aus dem Hebraischen von Inge Yassur (German Edition)
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THE SUPREME COURT IS NINE SCORPIONS IN A BOTTLE

SCORPIONS
THE BATTLES AND TRIUMPHS OF FDR’s GREAT SUPREME COURT JUSTICES
BY NoAH FELDMAN
November 2010, TWELVE
A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America's leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed.
Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius. They began as close allies and friends of FDR, but the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. SCORPIONS tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself.
But wait… another story is told as well. A story of their battles, victories, and defeats. These four reinvented the Constitution along four divergent paths. It is a story of competition and controversy
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Crossing over Sea and Land
Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period
Michael F. Bird
2010
Were there Jewish missionaries during Jesus' time? Second Temple Judaism was not a typical missionary religion with decisive and intentional plans for converting those outside the faith. However, Jewish attitudes and actions toward the Gentile world were diverse in the scattered communities across Palestine, resulting in differing strategies for recruiting new adherents and useful sympathizers. Bird examines the extent and nature of Jewish proselytizing activity among non-Jews in Palestine and the Greco-Roman Diaspora leading up to and during the beginnings of the Christian era. He enters the debate by interacting with other works on the topic (Scott McKnight, Martin Goodman, John Dickson, Rodney Stark, John Barclay) and offers reasons why some researchers prefer one perspective over another. Based on evidence from forced conversions during the Maccabean period, Qumran, the Gospels, Palestinian inscriptions, and rabbinic literature, Bird asserts that no significant proselytizing activity occurred in Second Temple Palestine. He further examines the New Testament; Josephus and Philo; and Apologetic-Propagandistic, early Christian, Greek, and Latin literature and concludes that Jewish missionary activity during the Diaspora occurred only as isolated incidents. Those teaching and doing research in the area of ancient Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity will appreciate Bird's well-documented study. The inclusion of short extracts of primary sources with English translations makes the material more accessible to college and seminary students.
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The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism
Edited by John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow
2010
The Dictionary of Early Judaism is the first reference work devoted exclusively to Second Temple Judaism (fourth century b.c.e. through second century c.e.). The first section of this substantive and incredible work contains thirteen major essays that attempt to synthesize major aspects of Judaism in the period between Alexander and Hadrian. The second — and significantly longer — section offers 520 entries arranged alphabetically. Many of these entries have cross-references and all have select bibliographies. Equal attention is given to literary and nonliterary (i.e. archaeological and epigraphic) evidence and New Testament writings are included as evidence for Judaism in the first century c.e. Several entries also give pertinent information on the Hebrew Bible. The Dictionary of Early Judaism is intended to not only meet the needs of scholars and students — at which it succeeds admirably — but also to provide accessible information for the general reader. It is ecumenical and international in character, bringing together nearly 270 authors from as many as twenty countries and including Jews, Christians, and scholars of no religious affiliation.
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KADDISH AND OTHER POEMS
1958 - 1960
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Number Fourteen
December 2010, City Lights Publishers
Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish," a poem about the death of his mother, Naomi, is one of his major works. This special fiftieth anniversary edition of Kaddish and Other Poems features an illuminating afterword by Ginsberg biographer Bill Morgan, along with previously unpublished photographs, documents, and letters relating to the composition of the poem. Allen Ginsberg, founding father of the Beat Generation, inspired the American counterculture of the second half of the twentieth century with his groundbreaking poems. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), founding father of the Beat Generation, inspired the American counterculture of the second half of the twentieth century with his grounbreaking poems. His books include Howl & Other Poems, Kaddish & Other Poems, Reality Sandwiches, Planet News, Fall of American, Mind Breaths, and Plutonian Ode, all published by City Lights.
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THE LAST JEW OF TREBLINKA
BY CHIL RACHMAN
INTRO BY ELIE WIESEL
WW NORTON, Feb 2011
One of the last survivors offers this stark memoir
With 75,000 copies planned in the first printing, this book will be huge.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
BY JAMES L. KUGEL
Free Press, February 2011
Professor Kugel, Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature aty Harvard University, and author of How To read The Bible, and so much more, has written this meditation on the origins and authenticity of religious belief and what matters most in human lives. Why? A few years ago, Kugel was diagnosed with a usually fatal form of cancer. He felt alone and SMALL. It was a feeling that early religious writing expressed. Using this insight, he reexamined the writings with these new eyes of his. He explores the history of religious doubts and the idea of SMALLNESS and so many interesting topics. It is a depply moving affirmation of faith in God. He will do readings in Boston, Chciago, LA, NYC, SF, DC, and Philly.

THE CRISIS OF LIBERAL ZIONISM
BY PETER BEINART
TIMES BOOKS, Forthcoming late 2011
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. TBA
Mystery crime novel
By Linda Fairstein
Forthcoming 2011
She is fascinated by the religious institutions within NYC, and a little bit about their history. So the first dead body is found in the opening scene, on the steps of an elegant, old Baptist church in Harlem, right on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and 114th Street. So it’s the heart of Harlem in New York City, and the cops don’t realize, and none of us realized when we got there, is that the building was built as a synagogue 100 years ago. It was a point in time when Harlem was home to many, many wealthy Jews and so a lot of the Baptist churches there were once synagogues. And as clear as day, when someone points this out to you – in stained-glass windows, or Old Testaments with Hebrew writing in them, and the pediment of the building, instead of saying 1920, has the Hebrew years – the killings have a motive that ties to religion and it allows her to explore how these institutions developed in the city …

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