Monday, November 26, 2012

Books for Children This Hanukkah


Looking for some great Jewish books for children this Hanukkah?  Look no further than Jvillage's Pinterest page.  A whole slew of Jewish books, Hanukkah and non-Hanukkah themed, for your child's reading pleasure.

Monday, November 19, 2012

The Dream of Scipio

When you think of Provence you probably think of the region’s famous French scenery and wine. But when novelist Iain Pears thinks of Provence he thinks of its deep—and often dark—history.

His 2002 novel The Dream of Scipio weaves together three Provencal stories. One concerns a Gallic aristocrat obsessed with preserving Roman civilization in the midst of its fall. The next concerns a medieval poet involved in the Papal Court at Avignon during the Black Death. And the third, set during World War II, features a French scholar deciding whether to cooperate with the Vichy government. Linking these three men is their obsession with "The Dream of Scipio," a classical text that poses philosophical questions as pertinent in the Middle Ages as they are today.

Though The Dream of Scipio does not seem primarily concerned with Jewish matters, Pears illustrates how anti-Semitism and Jewish scapegoating have, throughout history, been employed to solidify communities threatened by barbarian invasions, the Black Death, and economic decline. In each section, we, along with Pears's characters, wonder at how often Jews become cast as a threat.

With Hanukkah around the corner, The Dream of Scipio could be a perfect gift for a history buff, a philosophy student, or anyone who loves a gripping read.

Monday, November 12, 2012

One Book, Two Holocaust Novels



TThe_Canvashe next great Jewish novel is coming from the heart of Germany.

The Canvas by Berlin-born Benjamin Stein, is a mystery novel with an innovative form. It's actually two books in one: Start from one side, read your way through, then flip the book over and find a separate novel waiting for you on the other. The Canvas features two distinct stories that are tied together through some common characters and the same mysterious, final event.

Amnon is a young ultra-Orthodox yeshiva student in Israel. One day, he discovers a locked cabinet in his parents' house containing secular books. Shortly later, when a rabbi at school catches him with an Oscar Wilde novel tucked inside his Talmud, he is sent away to Switzerland, where he meets an elderly man with a riveting Holocaust history. He convinces the man to write a book.

On the novel’s flip-side is Jan Wechsler, father of two. He lives in Munich, where he's a recently-Orthodox baal teshuva and a member of the city's small Jewish community. One day, a suitcase arrives at his house bearing his name containing books that he's apparently written, though he has no recollection of writing them. Through these books Wechsler discovers that he had once investigated a fake Holocaust memoir by an elderly Swiss man.

The way these two storylines--and three characters--spiral together is perplexing, but seductive. Not just an ingenious riddle, The Canvas is a tantalizing, innovative, and psychologically complex story.


Monday, November 5, 2012

Jewish Spies and Arab Wives


In movies and TV, intelligence operations are often portrayed as glamorously dangerous human chess matches with a series of sexual entanglements and ingenious double crosses. The operatives are master manipulators, forming intimate relationships they must cast off at mission’s end.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to discover just how closely these storylines reflect reality.

A new book by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Spies Against Armaggedon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, tells the history of Israel’s intelligence establishment, whose main (known) arms are the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), the Mossad (foreign intelligence), and Aman (military intelligence).

One of the book’s most vividly described operations launched in 1952. A Shin Bet unit of Iraqi Jews infiltrated Arab villages to monitor the population as a potential "fifth column" that might join with Israel’s enemies in case of war. The spies lived in these villages and most of them married local women and had children. As time passed, the intelligence provided by the men "proved to be almost worthless," according to Melman and Raviv, but the emotional toll suffered by agents and their families was profound.

The unit was disbanded in 1959, and the spies’ wives, who faced particular hardship, were given the choice of being relocated to an Arab country or resettling with their husbands in Jewish communities in Israel. Almost all chose to stay with their husbands. Decades later, the project’s commander is still haunted by the social and psychological trauma the operation had on the children of these marriages.