I read Herman Wouk’s new novel about Moses in a single sitting, a tribute both to his skill as a storyteller and the absence of any need to give much thought to the substance of the tale. I guess that, deep in his nineties, Wouk is entitled to the privilege of self-indulgence, but certainly The Lawgiver tells us much more about Wouk than it does about Moses, its purported protagonist.

Ingeniously constructed as an assemblage of letters, emails, Skype transcripts, and diary entries as Wouk, who makes himself a leading character in his novel, juxtaposes his role as a consultant on the script for a new movie about Moses with his own current project, a novel about Moses, narrated from Aaron’s perspective, which has been on his personal agenda for decades – and remains there, even as we assume the movie is going to be a huge success.

How could it be otherwise? Margo Solovei, the hot-shot young woman who has been given the assignment to do a script that will make the world forget Charlton Heston and Cecil B. DeMille is the daughter of the Bobover rebbe of Passaic, New Jersey, albeit a fugitive from the frumkeit (Orthodox religiosity) she was raised in. Interwoven with the progress of the film’s script and casting is the protracted and problematic romance between Margo (yes, you are intended to think of Marjorie Morningstar) and her Modern Orthodox lawyer boyfriend, and a lawsuit about algae (!) between the Weizmann Institute and an Australian geneticist, as well as the correspondence between Margo and two other Beis Yaacov alumnae, whose romantic adventures add some padding and totally extraneous humor to the slender saga.

It’s interesting that Wouk comes “back to life” as a novelist in the same time frame as the announcement by Philip Roth that he has written his last novel. When Marjorie Morningstar came out in 1955, it appeared that Wouk would be the chronicler and critic of middle-class American Jewish materialism – but then in 1959, along came Goodbye Columbus, and Roth became the pre-eminent novelistic scold, consigning Wouk to a different claim to fame, novelist as pop historian.

Will The Lawgiver cause a reappraisal or stimulate a revival of interest in Wouk’s earlier work? Maybe a blip, but not a groundswell. However, I’ll wait with hope and anticipation for the Wouk novelization of Aaron’s diary, even as I predict that we may see a new Roth novel first.

Interested in observing Shabbat in your home but not sure where to begin? These books and other resources can guide you in creating a meaningful home observance of Shabbat. If you already celebrate Shabbat in your home, tell us: What books or resources helped you get started?

• Birkon Mikdash M’at: NFTY’s Bencher, edited by Jeremy Gimbel: A small, portable book of songs, prayers, and blessings for Shabbat and holy days.

• An Invitation to Shabbat: A Beginner’s Guide to Weekly Celebration: Explore Shabbat step-by-step and blessing-by-blessing from candle lighting to Havdallah. Discover the essential elements of tradition along with modern options for enhancing spiritual awareness. This book also includes a CD recording that brings to life the music of Shabbat.

• Gates of Shabbat: A Guide for Observing Shabbat: A guide to encountering the Shabbat and it’s possibilities for those who are unsure about the significance of Shabbat as well as those who are already committed to the Sabbath

• On The Doorposts Of Your House: Prayers And Ceremonies For The Jewish Home: Use the second chapter of this Reform prayerbook (“Prayers and Readings for Shabbat, Festivals, and Special Days”) for use in the home, incorporating gender-sensitive language, traditional prayers, and new readings.

• Do It Yourself Shabbat: This guide explains each of the four prayers recited on erev Shabbat and suggests alternate ways to incorporate them into various family settings.

• Shabbat Cards: 52 Ways to Look at Shabbat: What’s your Shabbat Moment? These cards offer 52 new ways to look at Shabbat with different eyes.

by Ann Koffsky

I am an illustrator and/or author of books for children, many of them for URJ Books & Music. Because I am a storyteller, I thought I would – you guessed it – tell the story of how my book Noah’s Swim-A-Thon came to be.

Once upon a time, I lived in the suburbs with three young children. Come summertime, I had to get them out of the house, and I wanted them to go to summer camp. I became a lifeguard at Ruach Day Camp on Long Island, and alacazam! Every summer for the past 10 years, my kids have gone to camp there.

Fast forward to a Jewish children’s book conference in 2007 at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City, where I was schmoozing with a friend about how difficult it can be to find illustration work. I told her I was thinking of writing a story so I could illustrate it, something for my portfolio to show that I could take a character through different emotions and settings. Searching for an idea was proving impossible because I needed some kind of guidance as to where to start; my brain was running in circles.

Author/illustrator Ann Koffsky wrote Noah's Swim-A-Thon, which was chosen as PJ Library's 3,000,000th book title.

Then (cue angelic music) Natalie Blitt, then-program director at the PJ Library, got up to speak. PJ Library’s mission is to share kids books with positive Jewish content to families across the United States. It is so cool – and it’s free. Yes, free, with no strings. If you have not already signed your kids up for the PJ Library go to www.pjlibrary.org and do so right now! (Then please come back so you can hear the end of my story.)

Oh, good, you’re back. As I was saying, PJ Library sends books out to all these kids, which, for authors, presents an amazing opportunity to have your book read by the families you are writing for. In other words, when somebody from PJ Library speaks, I listen.

I can’t remember most of what Natalie said, but one sentence still rings in my ears: “PJ has noticed that there are not many Jewish summer camp stories,” she said. Ding! “I know about camp,” I thought. “I’m gonna write about camp.” Thank you, Natalie! Thank you, PJ Library!

The next morning, I was on my treadmill thinking, over and over: What’s Jewish about the summer? What’s Jewish about camp? What makes a Jewish camp different from all other camps? Any holidays? Well, in the summer, we have the the Nine Days and Tisha B’av, but, uh, no. A more courageous author than me is going to figure out how to make the destruction of the ancient temples an appealing children’s book topic. So I kept treading, and I got it: swim-a-thons. Every year at the pool where I am a lifeguard, campers do a swim-a-thon for Chai Lifeline, a wonderful tzedakah. Once I determined a setting, I needed a character & a plot. Because I had been coaxing kids to dunk their heads for years, I chose my character to be a reluctant swimmer named Noah, who, through persistence and generosity, learns to swim just in time for the camp swim-at-thon.

Then the most wonderful thing happene: I sent my manuscript over to Michael Goldberg, editor at URJ Books and Music, and he decided to turn it into a book. It had to go through several zillion committee meetings first, but by 2011, I was holding a copy of Noah’s Swim-a-Thon in my hands – and so were about 15,000 Jewish children, because PJ Library selected it for distribution.

Then they selected it again the following year, and 15,000 more kids got to see it.

Then last month – and this was truly an honor – PJ Library selected Noah’s Swim-A-Thon as the book to give away as the organization’s 3,000,000^th (!) title, personally presented by founder Harold Grinspoon himself to a lovely and bright girl named Jordana. I was fortunate enough to be there for the presentation and to get lots of nachas.

Thank you, PJ Library, for making my Noah available to wonderful children like Jordana, and mazel tov on your 3,000,000^th book. I look forward to seeing what great stories you pick for the next 3,000,000.

The end.

Harold Grinspoon, founder of PL Library, poses with PJ Library book recipients, including Jordana, who was presented with the organization's 3,000,00th title.

P.S.: If you’d like Jewish coloring pages for your kids, I send them out about once a month – for free. I’m very into the ‘free’ concept. To receive them, visit www.annkoffsky.com, or e-mail me at ann@annkoffsky.com, and I will sign you up.

Ann Koffsky has illustrated and authored more than  20 books for children, including “Noah’s Swim-A-Thon” and  ”My Cousin Tamar Lives in Israel,” which was given a Notable Book designation by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Visit www.annkoffsky.com for more.

As someone who grew up reading Little Golden Books in which mommies and daddies take care of their obedient children, I love how Maurice Sendak’s stories, by contrast, dive right into the fray of real life—warts and all.  As a librarian, I also appreciate what a pioneer Sendak was and how his stories and illustrations broke barriers in children’s literature.  I love the edgy realness of his characters—and especially relate to bratty Pierre of I-don’t-care fame who reminds me of my young self answering my own mother.  Sendak’s kids are not gift wrapped with pretty paper or shiny bows.  Like him, they’re real and gritty and honest.

Sendak was not a mainstream guy; he ignored conventional rules.  Lower class, Jewish and gay, he only wanted to be straight, so his parents could be happy, he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.”  Add in his sickly growing-up years, the Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, in which many of his family’s relatives perished, as well as the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932 and is it any wonder that little Murray Sendak was anything but fearful and insecure in his Bensonhurst apartment?  Is it any wonder that these fears and insecurities are reflected heavily in his works?

In 1969, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who never actually read Sendak’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are, chastised him in a Ladies’ Home Journal advice column for punishing Max, criticism that haunted Sendak for years. A 2005 exhibit at the Jewish Museum exhibited 140 pieces of Sendak’s work, and explained how strongly the Holocaust influenced his drawings.  Quoted in a 2011 essay, Sendak said, “I developed characters who were like me as a child, like the children I knew growing up in Brooklyn—we were wild creatures. So to me, Max is a normal child, a little beast, just as we are all little beasts. But he upset a lot of people at the time.”

With Sendak leading the charge, children’s literature certainly has come a long way since the Golden Book era.  A Jew who rejected Judaism, Sendak leaves us with a deep legacy of how the Holocaust surely shaped him, and continues to resonate in us.  I agree with Margalit Fox, who notes in her obituary of Sendak his enthusiasm for “the essential rightness of children’s perceptions of the world around them.”

Deborah Rood Goldman is a member and the librarian of the Garden City Jewish Center in Garden City, NY. She also is the URJ librarian and a member of the Marketing and Communications team.

by Erika Dreifus

In 2006, Günter Grass’s confession that he’d been a member of the Waffen SS surprised me. But it didn’t depress me. It didn’t anger me. Grass seemed appropriately ashamed and regretful. I knew him to be an advocate for Germany’s recognition of its Nazi past. He wasn’t asking for my forgiveness, but he would have had it, anyway.

I’d read the closing words of his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, as a regretful but accepting acknowledgment of the lasting reverberations of this past, for all of us. Those lines—“It doesn’t end. Never does it end.”—moved me so deeply that I included them as one of two epigraphs for my short story collection, Quiet Americans. (The other epigraph, also from a Nobel laureate, is Imre Kertész’s “Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?”) My book is inspired largely by the histories and experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1930s, and by my preoccupations with that legacy. The suggestions of the Holocaust’s enduring presence in other people’s minds, souls, and history seemed to be encapsulated in these lines. In fact, Grass and Crabwalk received another mention in one of the book’s stories, as part of the narrator’s point about wartime sufferings endured by non-Jewish German civilians. (Which, I believe, remains valid.)

But now I have to look at the Grass epigraph differently. Because, with the recent publication of the poem translated as “What Must Be Said,” I have to wonder if Grass was already thinking, back in 2006, that he’s not pained. He’s not regretful. He’s just fed up. And, like so many other writers, he’s displaying some appalling anti-Israel sentiment. Because, you know, the Jews (pardon me, the Israelis), aren’t so weak anymore. They’re not such easy victims. And you know, you really can’t trust them, even if they are, at heart, a democratic and peace-seeking people. (But presumably you can trust all kinds of oppressive dictators and regimes who don’t merit poems of their own.)

Others have dealt with his poem more eloquently and knowledgeably than I would be able to, so I’ll point you to their treatments. And I’m not going to get into the Israeli government’s subsequent decision to bar Grass from their country (again, you can read some feelings I share elsewhere). I’ll say only that this time, Grass had made me deeply depressed. And outraged. And that when the time comes to renew the license that was negotiated for including the quotation from Crabwalk to open Quiet Americans, I suspect that I will let it lapse.

This will cause some major inconvenience—think of the new book files, for starters. But the only question for me now is: Should I remove the epigraph sooner? I’m trying not to react impulsively, to take some time to consider and make the decision. Yes, it will be costly and time-intensive to make this change. But, to paraphrase Grass’s own explanation when he revealed his Waffen SS past, the situation is weighing on me.

Erika Dreifus was raised at Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, NJ. She is the author of Quiet Americans: Stories, a 2012 ALA Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding Jewish literature. She blogs about Jewish literature, culture, and politics at My Machberet, which is where this post first appeared.

by Peter Shapiro

The authors, Shimon Perez and David Landau, made it clear from the outset that their views on David Ben-Gurion as a man, his accomplishments and failures, as well as his vision for Israel could be considered biased. Perez, the current President of Israel, was his friend and worked with him for many years on issues about which they felt passionately, but on which they were not always in accord. Landau is a lifelong journalist and the former editor of Haaretz.  He was born in 1947, and was more critical of Ben-Gurion.  The authors concede that the book is a fusion of memory and history with multiple competing narratives.

The main source of the book was Perez’s recollection of events and a series of conversations between the authors with Landau asking penetrating and often provocative questions and Perez providing frank answers.  The authors acknowledge that whether or not the book accurately portrays Ben-Gurion and shapes his legacy is subject to debate. It was their intent that “in some sense this book is a dialogue with the future, which will need to choose what of Ben-Gurion’s legacy it elects to follow.”

David Ben-Gurion, nee David Gruen, was born on October 16, 1886 in Plonsk, Poland. He arrived in Jaffa on September 7, 1906 and moved on to Petah Tikva.  Over the next several years he engaged in agricultural pursuits. He eventually realized that he could make a greater contribution to the Zionist cause by studying law. From an early age he became involved in the political life of Eretz Israel. His politics were always pro labor.  He served in HaShomer, an armed force that guarded isolated agricultural settlements, where he rose to the rank of Captain in the Jewish Legion.

In 1920 he joined and subsequently became general secretary of Histadrut, the Zionist Labor Federation of Palestine.  Labor Zionism became the dominant party in the World Zionist Organization, and in 1935 Ben-Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of The Jewish Agency of Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. He was chairman of The Provisional State Government of Israel, its first President and its first Prime Minister,, a position he held from May 17, 1948 to June 21, 1963, with a hiatus from December 7, 1954 to November 2, 1955. He died at age 87, a few months after the Yom Kippur War on December 1, 1973.

Ben-Gurion’s North Star, the guiding principle he always unerringly followed was Mamlachtiyut. Defined as “unity despite difference” that is the line where “party and political differences should give way to the overriding needs of the national agenda”. For him the Zionist tenet that Israel was the state of all the Jewish people was a meaningful and practical precept.  His three major priorities were security, settlement and Jewish immigration. Even after the Shoah there was little unity as to whether Palestine should be subject to a mandate or partitioned. If partitioned, when, what would be its boundaries, its form of government, and the fate of Jerusalem?

Ben-Gurion’s resolve for the immediate creation of a Jewish state hardened after he met in Germany with then Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight David Eisenhower, who made the neighbors of the death camp see firsthand the atrocities their fellow countrymen had committed. More important was his comment that the world would soon forget those atrocities. In 1947 the UN voted for partition, the terms of which gave Israel three areas not contiguous with one another other connected by “kissing points” and it placed Jerusalem under a UN Protectorate. As grossly unfavorable as it was to Israel and not without substantial disagreements by the various Israeli political factions Ben-Gurion and his principle of Mamlachtiyut prevailed. Israel reluctantly accepted the terms of partition which were unanimously rejected by the Arab States.

On May 18, 1948 the British departed and the Arab Legion, as was anticipated, attacked Israel. Israel, with scant assistance from the world gained substantial territory, thus creating one contiguous land mass. Ben-Gurion, over the strenuous objection of the military and at great expense and loss of life obtained control of most of Jerusalem. After the UN imposed an armistice Ben-Gurion reached out to the Arab States in an attempt to resolve the issues of right of return, control of Jerusalem, secure borders, and a lasting peace. The response in essence was similar to that issued years later after the 1967 War, “no peace, no negotiations and no recognition of Israel”.

The authors asked the reader to contemplate which, if any, of Ben-Gurion’s values Israel has followed or should follow. A more appropriate question might be, “What would he think about the courses of action and polices of Israel since his death”?  One might say that looking at Ben-Gurion’s career from the vantage point of the 21^st century his views would be considered “Right Wing”. He was committed to the principle of compromise when the needs of the national overrode politics and party (Mamlachtiyut), if it did not drastically compromise security, settlements and immigration.  In all likelihood he would have approved of the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. The Camp David and Wye River proposals put forth by President Clinton had some restrictions on settlements but I believe Ben-Gurion would have found them acceptable.

One question that lingers is: would he require as a precondition to negotiations a statement that “Israel is a Jewish State and has the right to exist”. I believe that he would engage in negotiations without that precondition if he had realistic assurances it would be unambiguously included in the final resolution.

Ben-Gurion would never have supported the Madrid Conference in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in 1993 as they violated his core principles. He would not have countenanced the government’s actions in Hebron, the unilateral destruction of settlements, in particular Gush Katif, or the several proposals for the division of Jerusalem and control of the Temple Mount. The military incursions in Lebanon, the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in my judgment would have been opposed by Ben-Gurion.

The dilemma for the reader is whether the relationships of the authors with Ben-Gurion color the facts elicited and their conclusions. I found Perez’s account of their relationship somewhat self-serving as it seems he attempted to cover himself with the mantle of Ben-Gurion. I can’t help but think that if one of Perez’s contemporaries read this book the response to Perez would be, “I knew David Ben-Gurion and you’re no David Ben-Gurion”.

I welcome your thoughts and comments. Please join the conversation.

Read the review of this book in Reform Judaism magazine and see other Significant Jewish Books.