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.
Houdini: The Elusive American
In Houdini: The Elusive American, Adam Begley, tells the remarkable story of how a Hungarian-born rabbi’s son achieved global fame as the world’s greatest magician and the master of “self-liberation.”
On the Other Hand: Ten Minutes of Torah - Mishpatim: Mindfulness, Being Present and Having Heart
What does it mean to be "mindful," to truly slow down and pay attention to what's happening in our daily lives? This week, Rabbi Rick Jacobs explores this question through Parashat Misphatim when God beckons Moses to not only come up to a mountain, but to also "be" there.
On the Other Hand: Ten Minutes of Torah: Building Our Own Tabernacle Together - Parashah Trumah
In this week’s Parashah, the Israelites contribute whatever they can to Moses in order to help build the Mishkan (Tabernacle).
On the Other Hand: Ten Minutes of Torah: Let Your Eternal Light Shine - Parashat T'tzaveh
This week, Rabbi Rick Jacobs takes a look at parashat T’tzaveh, in which the Israelites are commanded to create the ner tamid (eternal light) in the Tabernacle.