Building A Jewish Framework To Live By
These essays are written by strong women who are strong thinkers, well-versed in articulating Jewish teachings and values. Judaism provides the foundation and the framework of their lives. For this writing endeavor, each woman looked at her life experience through her “Jewish lens,” and chose a single snapshot to share.
Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War
In 2006, the State of Israel proclaimed Martha and Waitsill Sharp “Righteous Among the Nations” – an honor bestowed by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, upon non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Sharps became two of only five Americans so recognized.
Moonglow: A Novel
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon is back with a shimmering mirage disguised as a personal history. Moonglow, Chabon's fourteenth novel, was inspired by the week he spent at his dying grandfather's bedside, listening to his life story.
Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death
Nearly 40 years have passed since Dan White, a disgruntled political rival, shot and killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and Mayor George Moscone in their City Hall offices
I, Sarah Steinway
The specter of a flood-swept future is all too easy to envision. In the past two years alone, catastrophic floods have inundated parts of Maryland, Texas, and Louisiana
The Comedown
There is pleasure to be had in a work of fiction whose scope spans two generations. Characters are introduced or shown in flashbacks as children, and we see how they fulfill – or don’t – the expectations placed on them by their parents, or how traumas they experience later come to bear. In The Comedown (Henry Holt) – as in Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s recent epic of the African diaspora, or Amy Tan’s classic The Joy Luck Club – Rebekah Frumkin explores the ways in which choices made by parents echo through children and grandchildren for decades
Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling
In Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), literary critic and poet Adam Kirsch presents us with a collection of 270 letters spanning the period from 1924 to 1975, the year of literary critic Lionel Trilling’s death at the age of 70. The letters are organized in chronological order rather than thematically, juxtaposing love letters to his wife Diana (an important literary critic in her own right) to discourses on his favorite British authors, to dealings with his psychoanalysts.
On the Other Hand: Ten Minutes of Torah - Shof’tim: Demanding Justice
At the core of being Jewish is a fundamental demand for justice. Demanding justice involves asking others to work toward a more just world, but it also involves asking ourselves to do that work.
On the Other Hand: Ten Minutes of Torah - Ki Teitzei: The Morality of War
Ki Teitzei translates to “when you go out,” but it doesn’t mean going out to dinner or the movies.
On the Other Hand: Ten Minutes of Torah - Ki Tavo: Spiritual Centering
Hasket, which translates to silence or stillness, is a word that appears in the Torah only once, during this week's Parasha, Ki Tavo.