The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate
At almost 750 pages long, it’s is a very big book, one that contains 66 essays and personal reflections. The length isn’t a surprise, actually, when you realize that the scope of the book spans four decades of women in the rabbinate: 40 years, the amount of time it took our Israelite ancestors to reach the Promised Land.
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
In Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lively look at the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, co-authors Shana Knizhnik, a law student, and Irin Carmon, a reporter for MSNBC, mix chatty stories, photographs, charts, letters, and cartoons with legal decisions to illustrate the illustrious career of the first Jewish woman Supreme Court justice.
The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel
In the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which Israel came close to losing, a traumatized Israeli public demanded to know how Israel’s Mossad failed to detect that war was imminent, given a massive buildup of Egyptian forces along the Suez Canal and Syrian troops on the Golan Heights.
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.
Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis
German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller is best known for his celebrated confession. These oft-quoted words at Holocaust commemorative observances might lead you to believe that Niemöller was sympathetic to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. Not true.
Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception
Judy Glickman Lauder’s photographs in Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception are so masterfully crafted they make us feel as if we ourselves are on the train tracks approaching Treblinka, behind the barbed wire fence at Majdanek, at the entrance of Dachau under the sign Arbeit Macht Frei, outside a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Faced with these images, we can’t help but imagine what it must have been like for the millions of innocents who entered these passageways, in most cases never to return.
Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "The American Dream"
Many American Jews shuddered as Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead!” and “America first!” to rally crowds during his 2016 presidential campaign. We remembered how, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, these slogans were an open call for virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sentiment, white supremacy, xenophobia, and nativism.