What's New
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Two Books That Lifted My Spirits in the Time of COVID
July 26, 2021
Jared Goldin discusses the lessons he took away from A Life of Meaning, Embracing Reform Judaism’s Sacred Path and What Kind of Future Will Our Children Inherit?
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A Conversation with Best-Selling Cookbook Author Jake Cohen
June 4, 2021
Jake Cohen’s debut cookbook, jew-ish: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch (HMH), is a New York Times bestseller. Jake is a former food staffer at Saveur, food editor of Tasting Table and Time Out New York, and most recently the editorial and test kitchen director of FeedFeed (@thefeedfeed).
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The Mom of a Trans Child Wrote a Beautiful New Rosh HaShanah Book
September 7, 2020
As the mother of a transgender child, Rabbi Ari Moffic knows that personal transformation is a key and beautiful part of who each of us is.
Social Justice Literature
Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen
By the time she was 3 years old, Jazz Jennings (not her original first name or her real last name) knew she was meant to be a girl. In her new book Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teenager, Jazz tells her story, including how she and her family became reality TV stars and outspoken advocates for transgender rights.
Children's Book Reviews
Bone Button Borscht
A tired beggar reaches a small town on a cold, wintery night, seeking food and a warm bed. When the poor locals are reluctant to assist, he promises to make a delicious soup from six bone buttons.
Book Reviews
The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
In 2010, during Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan’s tense Senate confirmation hearing, Lindsay Graham (R-SC), who supported her nomination, jokingly asked President Barack Obama’s nominee what she did on Christmas Day. It was a strange, even bizarre question because it had nothing to do with her judicial qualifications. But Kagan’s humorous reply completely disarmed her Senatorial opponents: “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” But there is much more to the Jewish-Chinese
I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: a Post-Holocaust Memoir
If the author’s name sounds familiar, it should. Esther Safran Foer’s son, Jonathan, is the author of the best-selling novel, Everything is Illuminated, a fictionalized story of the pre-Holocaust shtetl called Trochenbrod and his travels to Ukraine to search for the woman who saved his grandfather’s life. I In I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: a Post-Holocaust Memoir (Tim Duggan Books), Esther Safran Foer, formerly CEO of a D. C. - based arts
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
The Light of Days, a soaring and harrowing account of the role dozens of Jewish women played in the resistance during the Holocaust, is the product of many years of research, and a dose of bashert as well.
Review of the New 5-Volume Steinsaltz Collection
A review of the New 5-Volume Steinsaltz Collection: A Concise Guide to the Torah, A Concise Guide to Halakhah, A Concise Guide to Mahshavah, A Concise Guide to the Sages THE SAGES, and A Reference Guide to the Talmud.
Layers: Personal Narratives of Struggle, Resilience, and Growth from Jewish Women
In 2015, Shira Lankin Sheps, a clinically trained therapist, blogged about her long struggle with chronic pain. The overwhelming number of positive responses from other women prompted her to create an online magazine called The Layers Project. The success of this attempt to allow women to talk frankly about their challenges and triumphs led her to transcribe and edit 34 first-person accounts for this interesting and unusual anthology of life stories of Jewish women who
Discussion Guides
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Night, A Memoir, by Elie Wiesel
Eliezar Wiesel was born in 1928 in the small Hungarian village of Sighet, in what is today Romania.
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Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
Prior to its publication in Spring 2002, an excerpt of Everything Is Illuminated appeared in the New Yorker'sdebut-fiction issue.
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The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant
The cover of Anita Diamant's extraordinary book reads, The Red Tent: A Novel. A more accurate description of her rich elaboration on the biblical narrative of Dinah would be The Red Tent: A Midrash.
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Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, was born near Montreal in 1915 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents.
Learning
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Building a Serious Jewish Library
A young friend and former student of mine recently asked her Facebook network for suggestions as to what books she ought to buy as first steps in building a serious Jewish library.
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7 Elie Wiesel Books that Show the Range of His Influence
Most people know Elie Wiesel as the author of Night, one of the first published autobiographical accounts of what life was like inside Nazi concentration camps.
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How to Start a Social Justice Book Club
Reform Jews across North America come together in their own communities to read, explore and discuss social justice-themed books. RAC Reads provides thought-provoking stories and tools to get your family, congregation, and community talking about racial justice.
History
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First They Came for the Books
In his fascinating and eminently readable new book, Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books, Rabbi Mark Glickman reminds us that Jews have always relied on books as essential sinews, binding Jews to God, to each other, and to the rest of humanity, regardless of time or space.
Making Meaning of Tisha B’Av Through the Lens of Literature
When you have come into the land that the Eternal your God is giving to you as a heritage, and you have possessed it and settled there, you shall take from among all the first fruits of the ground that you bring forth from your land- which the Eternal your God has given you- and you shall put them
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A Dangerous Trend in World War II-Era Novels
I understand why Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last month. It is a beautiful, captivating and moving story.
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Were Shakespeare's Plays Actually Written By a Jewish Woman?
William Shakespeare's name appears on many of play, but no evidence demonstrates that he actually wrote them. Could they have actually been written by Aemelia Bassano?