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Books
Book Discussion: A Seat at the Table
October 26, 2009
by Rabbi Marci Bellows
Read the review of this book in RJ magazine
See other Significant Jewish Book selections
A Seat at the Table
by Joshua Halberstam
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I vividly remember learning how to read. Sometime around the age of 4 years old, I could suddenly make out the letters and words around me. I read constantly, and, as you would guess, my parents proudly encouraged me to read more and more. Most memorable is the statement that my father made as I began to feel more and more confident with my reading: "Now, there will be no secrets in the world, because you can learn everything by reading." I felt like a large, wide, important door had been opened, and that the universe of knowledge would always be there, waiting for me to discover it word by word.
It goes without saying that we Jews are a people of reading, stories, and learning. Our Passover Seder revolves around our Haggadah, our retelling of the Exodus from Egypt. We are known as the "People of the Book." Midrashim, creative interpretations of our biblical text, add allegory, folklore, and depth to many of more elusive or confusing tales. Yet, to some Jewish communities, there are some doors to learning that should not be opened, and there are some stories that should not be shared.
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Book Discussion: Houses of Study - A Jewish Woman Among Books
October 26, 2009
by Rabbi Marci Bellows
Read the review of this book in RJ magazine
See other Significant Jewish Book selections
Houses of Study -
A Jewish Woman
Among Books
by Ilana M. Blumberg
| One of my favorite activities to bring to a classroom of elementary school-aged religious school students is a deceptively simple art project: "Draw a Jew." Easy, no? In fact, I encourage you to do so, even just in your own mind, as you read these words. What does a Jew look like to you? Even more interesting, what would you imagine if I said, "Draw a rabbi?" I am infinitely intrigued by how many of my students draw, a) a man; b) an Orthodox man; and/or c) an Ultra-Orthodox, black-hat covered, payes-wearing man.
After they share their drawings, I ask them a short, important question: "Where are you in these pictures?" Silently, they look down at the drawings, slightly baffled, as a new understanding spreads over the group - they, too, are Jews. And they, too, would have been just as valid in someone's drawing of a Jew. The drawing could have been of a CHILD! A modern, baseball cap-covered, jeans-wearning child. Even more eye-opening - that drawing could have been of a woman!! Holy moly!!
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Book Discussion: A Seat at the Table
October 22, 2009
(3 Comments)
by Peter Shapiro
Read the review of this book in RJ magazine
See other Significant Jewish Book selections
A Seat at the Table
by Joshua Halberstam
| "A Seat at the Table" is a metaphor for the Chassidic adage that no matter what one has done to stray from the teachings of Torah he or she will not be abandoned by their family. This is similar to the sentiment expressed in Robert Frost's poem, "Death of the Hired Man": "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Mr. Zeitchik, a minor character, sets the tone when he says "... a story is never just a story". The author, Joshua Halberstam, used that statement as a lead-in to employ the literary device, "a story within a story". That is where the inner story often has symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in the outer story.
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Book Discussion: Houses of Study - A Jewish Woman Among Books
October 22, 2009
by Peter Shapiro
Read the review of this book in RJ magazine
See other Significant Jewish Book selections
Houses of Study -
A Jewish Woman
Among Books
by Ilana M. Blumberg
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Jewish women for almost five thousand seven hundred seventy years have struggled with a tradition that moved them into a life of modesty, early marriage and motherhood. Formal education was forbidden to women, a point brought home in Maggie Anton's three novels "Rashi's Daughters I, II and III". Women inherited wisdom by what was referred to as Binah, a mystical process where they acquired all the knowledge necessary to sustain their family's needs. The progressive streams of Judaism recently have opened up their doors to women's full participation in all aspects of religious and communal life. The author Ilana Blumberg's journey is that of a woman in love with learning of Judaism whose full participation in the Modern Orthodox world is often blocked by the rules in the sacred texts she reveres.
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So Many Books, So Little Time: A Yom Kippur Minhag
October 5, 2009
By JanetheWriter
It's not as though I don't have any unread books on my bookshelf. In fact, sometimes it feels as though most of them are unread and there's just no time to pluck one from the shelf, curl up and get lost in its pages. Among my recent acquisitions still waiting for the binding to be broken and the pages to be devoured are Rabbi Jill Jacobs' There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law and Tradition, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, The Woman with a Worm in her Head and Other True Stories of Infectious Disease by Pamela Nagami (yes, I'm the daughter of a parasitologist) and Simon Baatz' For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago.
My father recently finished the Baatz book and has now passed it along to me, highly recommended. You may recall that I first mentioned this particular book in a blog post I wrote last year at about this time. That was shortly after he and I - as we do each year - spent a bit of time on Yom Kippur afternoon browsing in the Barnes and Noble near my parents' congregation.
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Books | Community | Holidays | Lifecycle
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