The Midwife of Venice

 by Roberta Rich

Reviewed by Margaret Donsbach for historicalnovels.info

The Midwife of Venice is an imaginative, suspenseful tale about a sixteenth-century Jewish midwife from Venice's Ghetto Nuovo. Hannah Levi sorely misses her merchant husband, a captive in Malta after mercenaries attack his trading ship. "He had been fond of eating oranges in bed, feeding her sections as they chatted. She had not washed the blanket since Isaac had departed for the Levant to trade spices."

When a Christian nobleman comes to her house by dark of night and begs her to assist his wife, Hannah knows she must turn him down or risk torture for breaking the law. Jewish midwives are forbidden to deliver Christian babies. But the nobleman has heard Hannah is a wonder worker. Indeed, she has a dangerous secret for which she could be accused of witchcraft: "her birthing spoons, two silver ladles hinged together." The spoons can save lives, but they can kill, too. "At a recent confinement, she had exerted too much pressure and had crushed the skull of the baby instead of easing it out." But the nobleman is desperate and will pay her price, a sum high enough to ransom her husband away from the Knights of Malta.

With a baby at the center of the tale, The Midwife of Venice is as fast-paced as any thriller, the childbirth scene as gripping as any battle story. Cliffhanger chapter endings bounce readers back and forth between Hannah and her husband as each faces a series of potentially deadly perils. The setting is well researched, although the way Hannah pushes boundaries and encounters one worst-case scenario after the other can make the story seem frothy and implausible. Readers willing to suspend disbelief, though, will find her a swashbuckling midwife in a novel whose pages seem almost to turn themselves. (2011; 329 pages, including a bibliography and a brief Author's Note on the historical background)

They Called Her Rebbe

While rifling through the bargain bin at your local bookstore for a dime novel to read on the plane, you come across what looks like just the right smut: a classically pulpy woman on the cover, eyes cast down to the text in front of her. Even the title, with its exaggerated cursive font, seems right: They Called Her Rebbe.

Not a bodice-ripper after all, this 1991 release tells the story of Chana Rochel, the 19th-century girl Talmudist known as "the Maiden of Ludomir." While Jewish boys were spirited from their families to serve the czar and Hasidism swept Jewish practice from Kiev to Chernobyl, Chana Rochel became a controversial but charismatic Jewish leader.

After a solitary girlhood, Chana Rochel argued with her father, rabbis, and yeshiva-bocher fiancée for the right to study the way men do, jettisoning "the noodle board," in the words of I.B. Singer's Yentl. The book—written with a slight pop-psychology bent—is part hagiography, part egalitarian soapbox, and seems aimed more for the gender studies classroom than the beach. But with the side story of Chana Rochel's very long engagement (reader, she moved to Palestine instead), They Called Her Rebbe almost makes good on its pulpy cover.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

A New Era of Anti-Semitism Is Here. Daniel Goldhagen Blames Globalization.

In his new book, the controversial author warns against complacency, saying that prejudice against Jews is uniquely adaptable

By Vox Tablet

In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen unleashed a fury of controversy when he published the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which he argued that the Holocaust took place not because Germans were especially obedient to authority, or because a few bad apples came into power, but because an eliminationist prejudice against Jews was woven into the very fabric of German culture. Germans “considered the slaughter to be just,” Goldhagen wrote. His book hit a nerve—critics called Goldhagen out for using overly broad generalizations to indict an entire country—but that criticism didn’t hurt the book’s reception; it was a phenomenal success in Germany and around the world.

Nearly 20 years later, Goldhagen has broadened his scope in a new work. The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism offers an in-depth look at anti-Semitism around the world. He argues that it’s an almost pathological prejudice that spans centuries and cultures and therefore is a uniquely destructive force that has redoubled its strength thanks to a new age of globalization and information-sharing. Goldhagen joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss why anti-Semitism is distinct from other forms of prejudice, how globalization has contributed to its resurgence, and what we can do to combat this scourge. [Running time: 29:40.]

Click here to listen to interview.

The Ghost Shtetl of Trochenbrod

Once upon a time there was a shtetl named Trochenbrod. In its heyday, Trochenbrod, which is located in Western Ukraine just 30 kilometers northeast of the city of Lutsk, was home to approximately 5,000 Jews, with seven synagogues, and a rich farming culture. In typically frank Yiddish fashion, Trochenbrod means "bread without butter."

And then one day, Trochenbrod was wiped off the map. In 1942, the Nazis liquidated the shtetl, murdering all but 200 of its inhabitants.

Today, Trochenbrod isn't an easy find. It is so elusive, in fact, that Jonathan Safran Foer fictionalized his own journey to Trochenbrod in his debut novel Everything Is Illuminated.

Now author Avrom Bendavid-Val is exploring the place, too—only this time there's nothing fictional about it.

Lost Town, a haunting new documentary, follows Bendavid-Val, whose late father emigrated from Trochenbrod years before the Holocaust, on his voyage to track down his ancestral homeland. On the heels of his 2010 book on the same subject, the film is a poignant journey into the past, bringing Bendavid-Val into contact not only with survivors of the shtetl, but with his own personal history as well.

- Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

Kosher Pajamas and Cosmetic Surgery in Ritzy Tel Aviv

What do cosmetic shoulder blade surgery, flak jackets made of spider silk, high-end shopping sprees as a stage of grief, and The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling have in common? Nothing, perhaps, but their convergence in Textile, a newly translated novel by celebrated Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom.

Published in Hebrew in 2006, Textile features the quintessentially 21st-century coping mechanisms of the Grubers, a wealthy, anxiety-ridden family falling apart in a new, glitzy suburb of Tel Aviv. Amanda, the matriarch, runs the family kosher pajama factory and shields herself from her son's life as an army sniper by having countless plastic surgeries; Irad, her husband, is a scientific genius obsessed with his own virility. And their 22-year-old daughter Lirit masquerades as a kibbutznik, but would rather be shopping.
With her son on a sniper mission, Amanda undergoes shoulder blade enhancement surgery (which, don't worry, doesn't really exist). Meanwhile, an Israeli expatriate in Ithaca, NY invites Irad to learn top-secret scientific findings in the field they share. In lieu of a redemptive ending, Castel-Bloom maintains this sharp portrait of one family's self-made isolation structuring their ways of love and grief.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

Polish Catholic Brothers and a Village's Unsavory Past

The past might never be dead, but just how deeply can it be buried? That's the question brothers Franek and Jozek grapple with as they uncover the secrets of their rural Polish village 60 years after World War II, in Władysław Pasikowski's controversial film Pokłosie (Aftermath).

Franek returns to Poland from Chicago when he learns that Jozek's wife has left him. In an effort to understand why, Franek discovers that Jozek became a local pariah when he ripped up a road that German occupiers had paved decades earlier—with headstones from a Jewish cemetery.

Franek reluctantly supports Jozek's effort to collect the village's remaining Jewish headstones and erect them in his wheatfield. Villagers who live on formerly Jewish land try to discourage them—most viscerally through defacing their home with a dead dog and anti-Semitic graffiti. As they investigate, the brothers discover that their family's role in the destruction of the village's Jews was greater than they'd thought. The result is an unrelenting, unsentimental interrogation of historical revisionism and the ways grown children try to atone for their fathers – and a fascinating look at contemporary Poland.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

An Israeli Paratrooper's Path to Extremism and Terror Told in 'Like Dreamers'

How Udi Adiv Veered Far Off Zionist Path

By Yossi Klein Halevi for The Jewish Daily Forward

Yossi Klein Halevi’s new book, “Like Dreamers,” is about seven of the paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Their lives spiraled out from that triumphant moment in dramatically different directions, emblematic of a country that has been stretched between the extremes of right and left over the past 40 years. This week’s excerpt, the second to be published by the Forward, focuses on Udi Adiv, one of those paratroopers, who veered sharply to the left in the early 1970s. This is the story of how Adiv, a kibbutznik and son of kibbutz founders, found himself part of an anti-Zionist terrorist group, trained with militants in Damascus, and was even praised for his militancy by Yasser Arafat from the rostrum at the United Nations. Adiv would eventually repudiate his actions, but not before serving 12 years in an Israeli prison.

Udi walked the cobbled streets of Wadi Nisnass, Haifa’s Arab neighborhood near the docks. Burlap sacks with dried chili peppers and fava beans lined the sidewalks. Workmen’s restaurants served hummus for breakfast. Udi was charmed. He belonged here, he felt, more than among the Jews.

Udi was leading a schizophrenic existence. He was enjoying student life at the University of Haifa, Israel’s most integrated Arab-Jewish campus, and he felt as comfortable there as he could in any Israeli institution. He joined the university basketball team and was rarely without at least one girlfriend. But his political life was drawing him farther toward the fringe. When Naif Hawatmeh, leader of a Marxist faction of the PLO, called for incorporating “Israeli progressives” into the Palestinian war against Israel, Udi was elated.

One of Udi’s regular stops in Wadi Nisnass was a Marxist bookshop run by Daoud Turki, an Arab Israeli who had been expelled from Israel’s Communist Party for supporting terrorism. The corner bookshop was so small, there was scarcely room for a table and chairs. In his early forties, Daoud was a self-taught political theorist. He told Udi about the humiliation of growing up under Israeli military rule, which all Arab

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How Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce Changed Judaism Forever

David Kaufman's Book Revisits the Turbulent '60s

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Jewhooing the Sixties
by David E. Kaufman
Brandeis University Press

The final week of September 1961 proved to be an auspicious one in American Jewish history — or, at least, in the history of Jewish-American celebrities.

Within a matter of just a few days, Sandy Koufax set his first National League strikeout record; comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges; a then-unknown folksinger named Bob Dylan would play an opening set for the Greenbriar Boys at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village that would capture the attention of a reviewer for The New York Times; and a 19-year-old cabaret singer named Barbra Streisand made her off-Broadway debut.

The rest, as they say, is history, as well as the launching pad for David E. Kaufman’s “Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity.” An associate professor of religion, and the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University, Kaufman suggests that the approximately simultaneous rise to fame of these four third-generation American Jews was “a turning point in the history of both American celebrity and Jewish identity.”

He likens them to postwar American Jewish culture’s “Mount Rushmore of fame,” whose achievements would go on to “reshape the image of the American Jew” for both Jew and non-Jew alike.

These four were by no means the first of their kind. One could easily rattle off several lists of Jewish forebears who blazed trails beforehand, including baseball star Hank Greenberg; comedians including Groucho Marx, Jack Benny and George Burns, to name just a few; musical theater stars Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice; and in music, Benny Goodman and Irving Berlin.

But as Kaufman goes to great lengths to argue, this quartet was more transformational than those who came before, both in their personal identity as Jews and in what they represented to Jews and society at large as Jews.

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"The Lottery" & The Jews

"The Lottery" might be the most famous American short story. Written by Shirley Jackson and published in the New Yorker in 1948, it tells of an unnamed American town where, once a year, residents draw slips of paper from a black box, choosing one person to be murdered by the rest of the village.

Jackson, whose writing wrestles with social propriety and discomfort, hated to comment on her own work. When "The Lottery" was first published, The New Yorker was inundated with thousands of letters, many of which expressed readers' confusion. The magazine had never received so much feedback about any short story. Jackson kept mum. Later, however, she confided to a friend that the story was an allegory for anti-Semitism and violence in the modern world. A fascinating detail, considering the year of its publication.

Jackson's interest in anti-Semitism was personal. Her marriage to a Jewish English professor and jazz critic named Stanley Hyman was a subject of great speculation and controversy for both of their families—and, thankfully, inspired great literature.

- Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

Kibbutzniks On Mars

 Plenty of fictional energy has been devoted to what might have happened if a modern Jewish state were established somewhere other than the Middle East: Michael Chabon has examined Alaska and Ben Katchor upstate New York. But what if some enterprising Jews left Planet Earth entirely?

In his new novel Martian Sands, available as an e-book, Israeli-born Lavie Tidhar's imagines "New Israel" and its kibbutzniks on Mars. They share citizenship of the Red Planet with descendants of other earthlings, who survive on the waterless surface under a biodome. Tidhar weaves an elaborate backstory to explain the economics and culture of the planet: in this society, New Israel rules, and "old" Israeli political heavyweights like Ben-Gurion and Meir are fabricated by a simulacra shop and recycled by Martian constituents. Meanwhile, a man named after a movie star travels back in time to instruct FDR to not go to war in the Pacific, and instead to focus his energy on liberating Jews from the Nazis.

Steampunk, cinematic, and occasionally disorienting in the manner of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—where we share the characters’ surprise and wonder—Martian Sands ultimately makes us ask: if we had the technology to change the course of history, would we use it?

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

"Moo. Please No Murder Me" - and Other Torah Commentaries

 So begins "The Song of the Red Cow," one of 54 strange and delightful Torah commentaries in Unscrolled, a motley collection of essays, memoirs, cartoons, and shticks. Each is as unique as the poor red heifer, who we come to see as young, beautiful, unblemished…and tragically doomed.

Unorthodox? For sure, in both senses of the word. No straight commentary here. For example, see Aaron's defensive take on the sin of the golden calf: "For starters, it was not a calf. It was more like a pig." Or check out Murray, God's tailor, lamenting the colorful priestly garments: "Crazy ostentatious. The taste level…is fresh off the boat." Then there's Moses' father-in-law, who's drawn wearing a Jethro Tull T-shirt, and counsels Moshe to "stop wasting your time with small-time crap. Delegate!" Not to mention their clever solution to building the Tabernacle in land-starved midtown Manhattan. ("Think vertical.")

The book is a product of Reboot, a national network of young, creative Jews. They're making sure you never look at the weekly Torah portion the same.

- Marc Davis for Jewniverse

The Tumultuous Life and Nuanced Work of Israel’s Greatest Children’s Book Writer

After tragedy, Dvora Omer found flaws, beauty in the nation’s founding figures, turning them into literary heroes

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet
There are many different ways to be dumb about literature. When you’re in high school, the men and women who teach it to you—sometimes passionate and sweet, too often underpaid, insecure, and sour—insist that your primary task as a reader is to decipher the hidden meanings that the author weaved throughout the text like a serial killer leaving behind clues to taunt his weary pursuers. When you’re in college, the men and women who teach it to you—also underpaid, also probably sour—turn their attention from text to author, wrestling the creative spirit down to the therapist’s couch and squeezing it until, anguished, it is ready to cry uncle, or, more likely, mother. Both approaches are vile and joyless, but when it comes to Dvora Omer—the great Israeli writer of novels for young adults who passed away earlier this year—they seem inevitable: More than those of any other writer I can think of, Omer’s life and work are best understood as threads of the same tale, an epic poem of sacrifice and betrayal on which all Israeli children were reared.

Omer was born in a northern kibbutz in 1932, and her parents divorced when she was an infant, her father moving to another kibbutz and marrying another woman. He would visit his firstborn infrequently, once every few months, each visit culminating in the little girl sobbing and begging him to stay. He never did. Then, Omer’s mother died when the future literary lioness was only 11 years old. At the time, she was told that her mother was unhappy and had shot herself. At the funeral, Dvora was ordered to stop crying, as weakness was unbecoming of true and tough kibbutzniks. If that wasn’t enough, Galia, her caretaker at the kibbutz, disappeared shortly thereafter, leaving Omer all alone.

She took to writing, making up fantastical tales in which everyone was happy and no one was dead. Her teachers told her that her stories were horrible, often adding that she had no talent and urging her to abandon her literary ambitions for more useful tasks like cooking or cleaning. Omer, however, persevered: In 1959, after a stint as a teacher, she published her first book, The Pages of Tamar, a novel in diary form detailing the everyday life of a perfectly normal girl from a perfectly normal family living in a fictitious kibbutz. It was a hit. Tamar and her tightly knit clan were for Israelis what the Ingalls family had been for Americans—a shamelessly romanticized and utterly charming account of frontier life that was both an operatic celebration of the nation’s founding pioneers and an intimate portrayal of daily life in harsh conditions.
 
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Firestorm Over Canada's 'Guys Only' Prof

By Renee Ghert-Zand for The Jewish Daily Forward
If you’ve been anywhere near a Canadian newspaper or news website in the last week, then you’ll know that a scandal involving author and English professor David Gilmour has been dominating the headlines. The dustup is in response to remarks Gilmour made discounting Canadian, women and minority writers.
I asked some Canadian Jewish writers and literature professors for their takes on the controversy, which has not only taken up many column inches, but also led Gilmour’s fellow academics to distance themselves from him, and students to stage protests.

But before we get to the commentary, here is a summary of what led to the brouhaha.

Gilmour’s remarks came in a short, informal interview with a writer named Emily M. Keeler for Random House’s Hazlitt literary blog. According to the transcript of the conversation, Gilmour, an award-winning author who has been teaching (as a non-tenured lecturer) undergraduate courses in modern short fiction at the University of Toronto, is willing only to teach “stuff I love.” This apparently means Russian and American literature (“I just haven’t encountered any Canadian writers yet that I love enough to teach”) by middle-aged white men like him.
When the interviewer pressed him to explain why he doesn’t teach works by women writers, he answered, “When I was given this job I said I would teach only the people that I truly, truly love. And, unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Um. Except for Virginia Woolf.” Then he went on to complain about Woolf being too sophisticated for his students.

It seems common for Gilmour to be questioned about his reading lists. “Usually at the beginning of the semester someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I’m good at is guys.”

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Amos Oz, 74 Years Old and a National Treasure, Still Dreams of Life on the Kibbutz

In a wide-ranging conversation, Israel’s greatest novelist talks about working the land, making art, and Natalie Portman

By Vox Tablet

There’s no other living Israeli author who is as well known around the world as Amos Oz. Inside Israel, he’s one of the country’s most respected cultural figures. Oz has lived a tumultuous life. When he was 10 years old, he witnessed the founding of the Jewish state. When he was 12 years old, his mother committed suicide. When he was 15, he joined a kibbutz and changed his last name to Oz, Hebrew for “strength.” He eventually left the kibbutz for the desert because of his son’s asthma, but as he tells Vox Tablet contributor Daniel Estrin, he still dreams of kibbutz life at least once a week. In his newest short story collection, Between Friends, he revisits the early years of the kibbutz, when the collective farms were still a wild Israeli ideological experiment. Estrin sat with Amos Oz in his home in Tel Aviv for a far-ranging discussion about the new book, his love of Hebrew, his predictions for Israel’s future, and a bit of celebrity gossip. [Running time: 27:45.]

Click here to listen.

101 Great Jewish Books

A catalog of the works that shape the Jewish mind in America today

Welcome to Tablet's list of 101 Great Jewish Books--works that, taken together, define the living Jewish cultural inheritance in America today.

Before we explain what the list is, we should tell you what it’s not: It’s not a list of “The Greatest Jewish Books of All Time,” an undertaking that would involve sifting through thousands of texts in dozens of languages produced over the course of millennia and that could only result in either a Cecil B. DeMille-like cast of thousands or a list with one entry: the Bible. What we wanted to create was a library of works that have actually moved us and shaped the way we understand ourselves as Jewish human beings in the world. We read some of these books as children; some we read under our covers as teenagers; some we got off college syllabi; some we discovered, with wonder and awe and surprise, as adults. But all are books of supreme importance in shaping our lives and our understanding of the different ways one might be a Jew in the world—whether the authors are religious Jews, or secular Jews, or not Jewish by your definition or someone else’s definition, or by any definition at all.

When it came to organizing the list, we thought about what these books meant to us and soon came up with the metaphor of the human mind. Just as each one of the brains individual lobes is useless except as a part of the grander whole, these categories, too, are meant to serve not as hard barriers but rather as points of connection and contemplation. More than a few decisions here will raise eyebrows—why, for example, is Portnoy’s Complaint filed not under the Laughing & Complaining category but under Appetites? Why is Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl not in Suffering & Loss? The answer in all cases is that we tried to place each book according to what felt for us to be its most generative material. Some of you, we know, will disagree, and others will question the very categories themselves. That, we think, is exactly the point of putting out lists.

In order to be included, a book had to meet three requirements:

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The Hidden One of N.J.: Why Dara Horn Is the Best of the New Breed of Jewish Novelists

Her fourth novel, ‘A Guide for the Perplexed,’ reanimates the past without falling into the traps of ‘Shtetlworld’ nostalgia

By Saul Austerlitz for Tablet

Dara Horn’s home, like her life, has two levels. On the higher level are rooms full of toy dinosaurs and Babar posters. On the lower one, shelves full of Yiddish and Hebrew books and Zambian carvings and wooden panels from China do battle with water guns and baby bottles. “I live a double life,” she said as she provided me with the abbreviated grand tour of her Essex County, N.J., home. “I think all parents have a double life.” Horn’s double life is just a bit more double than most other parents’; perhaps we can call it her quadruple life. The relevant statistics: age 36; four children; and, with the publication of her new book, A Guide for the Perplexed, four novels.

In addition to two levels, Horn also has two desks. The first, in her bedroom, is home to a haphazard pile of books and school forms and cover mockups. The second is in her living room and is completely bare except for a slim laptop. Horn prefers working at her second desk, where the everyday concerns of her other life can be temporarily left behind. Her work day lasts from 9:30 until 2:30, when her children finish school, and she heads off in her minivan, outfitted with four car seats, to pick them up. On this midsummer day, though, her kids are in camp, and the workday has been extended for an additional hour.

***

Inspired by the stranger-than-fiction story of the Cairo geniza, an archive of a millennium’s worth of letters, documents, and religious texts discovered in a Cairo synagogue in the late 19th century, A Guide for the Perplexed alternates among three interlocking stories.

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A Simulated Diary of a Jewish Hamburger

An Internet diary that, instead of serving news and musings, takes you moment by moment through an 80-year-old story: this is the vision of Swedish novelist, pilot, and documentarian Torkel S. Wächter, mastermind behind the literature and family history project On This Day 80 Years Ago.
Compelled to investigate what happened to his German-Jewish grandfather after the Nazis took power, Wächter uncovered a huge trove of documents in his parents' attic. The sprawling, hybrid result of his findings brings to light the suddenly altered course of one family’s history.
On This Day, the companion to Wächter's 32 Postkarten, follows Gustav Wächter, a Jewish senior tax inspector, and his family during Hitler's rise to power, from January through July 1933. As the situation in his native Hamburg grows tense, the behavior of Wächter's colleagues and friends changes according to their political loyalties. Eventually, his superior is forced to write a report that dismisses Wächter from government service, and each of his sons is blacklisted.
The site offers an innovative model for engaging history—through family, technology, and writing—and makes for a fascinating, if difficult, read.
- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

Freud’s Jewish Mistress

Vienna, 1895. Minna Bernays, a laughably incompetent lady's companion, moves in with her sister Martha and Martha's husband, Sigmund Freud. Freud, a 39-year-old struggling professor of the fledgling field of psychotherapy, is charmed by the intellectually-minded Minna, who attends to the Freuds' 6 children and, owing in part to her fascination with her brother-in-law's work, begins enjoying his romantic attention as well.

Or at least that's how Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman tell it in their new novel, Freud's Mistress. Whether or not Sigmund and Minna actually entered into a sexual relationship has long been debated. But a 2006 discovery of a Swiss hotel log showing that the pair once checked into a hotel room as husband and wife offers some fairly convincing evidence.

While the authors do an impressive job evoking late 19th-century Vienna, the most remarkable aspect of this novel is meeting Sigmund Freud, lover.

Can we really come to embrace the father of psychology as a character who says things like, "I will indeed unlock the mystery of your dreams. And you, my dear"? Well…now that we think about it—maybe we can.

- Elie Lichtschein for Jewniverse

Mark Leibovich Channels Jewish Outsider Status for Beltway Bestseller 'This Town'

Spirituality and Partisan Fervor Intersects in Washington D.C.

By Nathan Guttman for the Jewish Daily Forward

WASHINGTON — An anecdote described in the opening of the new book that has been rattling the nation’s capital tells the story of NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell and former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein, who are described as “Jews by religion and local royalty by acclamation.”
Invited to a dinner party at the mansion of the Saudi Arabian ambassador on the eve of Yom Kippur, both felt “pangs of Jewish guilt,” according to Mark Leibovich, the author of “This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital.” But it ended up to be, the author wrote, “such a coveted social function” that the pair “could not say no to this most holy of obligations.”

“Spirituality in Washington can be more of a — I don’t want to say it — but, a networking opportunity,” Leibovich said in an August 5 interview with the Forward. “Religion is often used opportunistically in the political conversation."

A month after the launch of his book, and after reaching the top of The New York Times Best Sellers list, Leibovich was vacationing in Cape Cod, trying to get away from the buzz that his book has created in his hometown of Washington. It is a brutally sober look at the back stage of the real Washington, where politicians, consultants and journalists make up a class of their own, an unelected elite for whom personal gain trumps ideology.

Some of Leibovich’s heroes are household names, at least for those following politics. But many are known only inside the close-knit Washington circle: press secretaries to congressmen, lobbyists working behind the scenes and local socialites who show up at every event. The book, Leibovich told the Forward, has become “a marker for disgust” felt by Americans across the nation toward their political system.

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Is Jewish Control Over the Slave Trade a Nation of Islam Lie or Scholarly Truth?

When Louis Farrakhan says, ‘You need to get this book,’ he means an insidious 1991 title whose claims to scholarship echo today

By Batya Ungar-Sargon for Tablet Magazine 

At a recent rally for the Voting Rights Act in Alabama, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam spoke of the Jews. Surrounded by a cadre of tall, glowering men with snappy suits, sunglasses, and folded arms, Farrakhan addressed an enthusiastic crowd in terms that would be unsurprisng to anyone familiar with his unique way of stirring up an audience. After asserting, with a benevolent smile, that he is not an anti-Semite, Farrakhan dove into his feelings about Jews: “I just don’t like the way they misuse their power,” he said. “And I have a right to say that, without being labeled anti-Semitic, when I have done nothing to stop a Jewish person from getting an education, setting up a business, or doing whatever a Jewish person desires to do.” The remarks were evocative of the sentiments he has shared widely throughout his decades-long career as a public figure—namely, that blacks should not trust Jews. 

It’s a position that Farrakhan has articulated for years. Perhaps the most noxious element of Farrakhan’s position, that the Jews are no friends to African Americans, has been locating its point of origin in the idea that Jews were heavily involved in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1991, the Nation of Islam, a branch of the Black Nationalist Movement, published a copiously footnoted book intriguingly titled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The Nation of Islam won’t say who wrote the book, though in one sermon, Minister Farrakhan attributes it to an individual by the name of “Alan Hamet.” It is published by “The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam,” which has three titles to its credit: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, vol. 1, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, vol. 2, and a third book simply titled Jews Selling Blacks. “This is a scholarly work, not put together by nincompoops!” Farrakhan exclaimed about The Secret Relationship during a sermon. The book claimed to provide “irrefutable evidence that the most prominent of the Jewish pilgrim fathers [sic] used kidnapped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history.” Awash in footnotes and quotes from reputable, often Jewish, historians, the book provides such details as lists of slaves, lists of Jews, and their relationship (disproportionate, The Secret Relationship concludes). “The history books appear to have confused the word Jews for the word jewel,” the anonymous author states. “Queen Isabella’s jewels had no part in the finance of Columbus’ expedition, but her Jews did.”

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Across-the-Jewniverse Summer Wish List

Barely-Guilty Beach Reads

Yeah, yeah you promised yourself you'd read Proust one of these days, and you still haven't gotten to Pride & Prejudice. But how can you, when all these great new books are coming out? Our faves:

 

Jacques Derrida’s Life as an Algerian Jew Revealed in Newly Translated Bio

The philosopher’s influential legacy is reshaped by the part of his life story that is often overlooked

 
By Scott Krane for Tablet Magazine

“Writing a biography means living through an intimate and sometimes intimidating adventure,” writes Benoît Peeters in his newly translated biography of Jacques Derrida, who would have turned 83 today. But what is the difference between the biography of a living man and a dead man? In the Introduction to Derrida, published in France in 2010 and now beautifully translated into English by Andrew Brown, French artist, critic, and author Peeters writes, “Whatever happens, Jacques Derrida will not be part of his own life, like a sort of posthumous friend. A strange one-way friendship that he would not have failed to question.” The author continues in the book’s introduction: “I am convinced of one thing: there are biographies only of the dead. So every biography is lacking its supreme reader: the one who is no longer there. If there is an ethics of biographers, it can perhaps be located here: would they dare to stand, book in hand, in front of their subject?”

Peeters is pleased that his book is now appearing in English. “My biography of Derrida, the first to be based on research work first-hand, was very well received when it was published in France,” Peeters told me in a recent interview. “And Derrida as a thinker is reflected in the world; it was logical that my book be translated. The United States played a decisive role in the reception of deconstruction. It is therefore not surprising that the English translation was the first to appear,” he said. Soon, he added, there will be translations available in German and Spanish, as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

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Norway, Jews, and Political Murder

Derek B. Miller‘s debut novel, Norwegian by Night, is about aging snipers. Or, it’s about parenting and loss. Or, the lingering traces of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. It feels about as full as life itself, and almost as real.

Through shifting perspectives, Norwegian tells the tale of 82-year-old Sheldon Horowitz. After finding himself widowed and possibly suffering from dementia, Sheldon leaves New York to join his granddaughter in Norway. When the young boy from upstairs witnesses his mother’s politically-motivated murder while hiding in Sheldon’s closet, the 2 run away before the boy can be hurt, too.

Overlaying the dark drama of it all is Sheldon’s Jewishness. While recalling trying to take his deceased son golfing at a country club or settling into a country that finds Jews, as one character puts it, “unsettling,” Sheldon waxes philosophical on everything from the rules of kashrut to Europe’s dearth of Jews post-WWII. It remains unclear if we should trust Sheldon and his experience—his dementia and lucidity are continually up for debate—but his points are salient, his struggles are arresting, and the stakes are unforgettably high.

 

An Illustrated Kafka For Kids

Children's books, with their large glossy pages and sparse text, often follow puppies on magical adventures, and always end happily. My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents & Giant Bugs is no such book. The pages may be visually beautiful thanks to illustrator Rohan Daniel Eason, and the text may be spirited thanks to Jewniverse's own founding editor, Matthue Roth, but this funkily patterned cockroach and rodent party wll wend its way into your subconscious and creep around in there, long after lights-out.

My First Kafka revisits 3 Kafka stories, including The Metamorphosis. While they're familiar, they create and inhabit a new world, thanks to Kafka's inimitable sensibility, Roth's cheeky style, and Eason's quirky and endearing etchings. (The metamorphosed cockroach has more flair than your average hipster.)

Kafka enthusiasts will find a familiar friend in this spunky volume. Roth successfully channels Kafka's sense of
"filial shame, ineradicable guilt, and parental condemnation" that some tie to his "interest in his Jewish heritage." While My First Kafka does not revolve around explicit Jewish themes, it does evoke a world of threat and alienation—the very world in which Kafka lived and wrote in pre-WWII Prague.

 - Jessica Young 

The Plot Against England

Man Booker winner Howard Jacobson talks about English anti-Semitism, ping-pong, and the seriousness of Jewish jokes

By Howard Jacobson for Tablet Magazine

The British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson’s eleventh novel, The Finkler Question, was awarded the Man Booker Prize today. On the eve of the announcement, Jacobson spoke to Tablet Magazine about English anti-Semitism, Israel “swaggering around,” and why Jews used to be good at ping-pong. Plus: The first U.S. publication of Jacobson’s 1999 profile of table tennis champion Marty Reisman.

You described your 2007 novel Kalooki Nights as “the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody anywhere” and we agree—

It certainly uses the word “Jew” more than any other novel.

So what do you mean by that?

I suppose I meant that its preoccupations are unrelievedly Jew talking to Jew thinking about Jew. This was deliberate. That’s what I wanted to write. Jew, Jew, Jew, joke, joke, joke, the world as seen entirely through the eyes of Jews for Jews. There are some Jews who live like that. To a degree, there’s a possibility in every Jew I ever met, for them to live like that. That you ask the question “Why?” and then back you go to the Holocaust and back to the pogroms before that, and everyone wants to know what it is that’s made this particular kind of Jewish morbidity into a positive feature now of the Jewish imagination. So, the book was really about that. Jews thinking about Jews talking about Jews to Jews written by somebody who is a Jew, who is obsessed by the subject, has some crazy obsession, who wants to get to the bottom of this obsession and wonders where this obsession comes from. And will deploy every kind of act of the mind to think about it, including, primarily, what Jews do best, which is make jokes. No one makes jokes like Jews.

So, it’s not only the most Jewish book ever written, it’s got more Jewish jokes in it, good or bad, than any book ever written. Certainly more about Jews and more jokes in it than the Old Testament.

That leads us directly to Shylock. What do you make of him?

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‘What If The Messiah Is A Woman?’

by Susan Reimer-Torn, Special To The Jewish Week

Not long ago, a woman rabbi raised a provocative question: Might we dare imagine Judaism as it would be if the tradition had been shaped and transmitted by feminists? Or to put it differently, how is Judaism experienced through the mind/body of a spiritually attuned woman?

Tova Reich’s “One Hundred Philistine Foreskins” (Counterpoint) explores this essential question through the lifelong travails of its central character, Ima Temima, a prophetic guru and iconoclast teacher of our times. The novel moves between Temima’s life as a charismatic spiritual leader in Israel and her brutally isolating girlhood in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn. At age 11, already a voracious reader and original thinker, Temima is shattered by the death of her mother and left to the brutish cruelty of her father. Her school principal, whom she encounters lurking among the reeking garbage in the building’s basement, subjects her to sexual abuse. She withdraws into study and deep contemplation, seeking sanctuary at her mother’s grave. A few years later, Temima uses a marriage of convenience to a Zionist zealot who works at the neighborhood deli as a ticket to Israel, where she eventually makes her name as a visionary leader.

The book opens with a tumultuous, end-of-days scene in which Temima and her mob of followers — “a mixed multitude of hanger-ons and groupies, assorted fans and freaks and misfits” — are winding their way through the streets of Jerusalem, with the aged, veiled Temima, hidden like the divine presence in a portable arc, transported by four hefty bodyguards. The raucous scene, like those vividly rendered throughout the book, is set in cinematic detail. The throngs are “dancing, stamping their feet, twirling, clapping their hands, swaying, many bearing musical instruments, drums, tambourines, rattles, bells, roaring, ululating, whooping, chanting the Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn mantra.” 

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Ten Great Books to Read This Summer

 By Jordana Horn

Welcome to the Second Annual Jordana Horn Summer Reading List, in which I recommend books for your summer reading pleasure. Some are new releases; some you may have missed because you were “working” or “taking care of children” or some other time-consuming endeavor. If you do get a few peaceful moments this summer, though, any one of these reads would be worth your while. My list last year was deemed “too intellectual,” so I’ve thrown in a few suggestions of lighter fare as well. Please feel free to add recommendations in the comments as I am always reading and always excited to find new books!

Karen Joy Fowler we are all completely beside ourselves1. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler

I read a review before reading this book. While I wouldn’t say the review “ruined” the book for me, it was definitely a spoiler. This book hinges on one key fact which I would think would work better as a surprise, so I will leave you in suspense. Suffice it to say that this book rocked my world: my perception of family interactions, and what a fiction book can accomplish were changed by it. I am so glad I read it, and think you will be, too.

2. Schroder, by Amity Gaige

Beautifully written story of what happens when an East German-born man who has appropriated a new American, Kennedy-esque identity decides to make a post-separation run for the Canadian border with his young daughter.

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Kafka's Hasidic Sidekick

 In 1894, boys like Jiří Langer were a dime a dozen: Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Prague, there was nothing notable about him until, at 19, he bought "a railway ticket to a little place in eastern Galicia," where he met the Hasidic rebbe of the town of Belz. He returned to Prague wearing traditional dress and observing Hasidic customs.

This was in an era when being a baal teshuva was unheard of. Years later, in the introduction to Nine Gates, Jiří’s collection of Hasidic tales, his brother František reflected: "Jiří resembled Kafka’s novel The Metamorphosis, in which a family finds its way of life completely upset when the son is suddenly changed into an enormous cockroach."

The allusion was not to a distant literary figure but to a real person in the young man's life. Though his parents tried to talk Jiří out of his new religiosity, the famous surrealist author took an interest in just that. Jiří, who was anything but a "normal" Hasid, started studying Jewish mysticism with Kafka, and circulating among Prague's avant-garde artists. He even published several books, including a volume of poetry called The Eroticism of Kabbalah. Probably not who you'd have expected to find in Kafka's inner circle.

- Matthue Roth

Lower Manhattan Supernatural

Every culture has its superstitions and its supermen: the German imp, the South African giant Abiyoyo, the golem of Jewish lore, and the jinni of Arabic mythology. What if, during one of America’s great waves of immigration, 2 of these mythic creatures collided?

That’s what happens in The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker's compulsively readable debut novel. At the junction of 19th-century NYC's Little Syria and the Jewish Lower East Side, Chava, a female golem, meets Ahmad, a once-powerful jinni. Chava, who was created by a slightly sinister, failed rabbi to wed a man who died en route to America, now serves no master—not technically, anyway. But poor Chava feels compelled to help everyone whose fears or desires she senses: an impulse that can be a pleasure or a liability. And Ahmad has been trapped inside a metal vessel for centuries, imprisoned after a battle he doesn't remember.
As Chava's jealous creator and Ahmad's captor catch up with them, Wecker's writing jumps between magic realism and fantasy, existential exploration and adventure.
It's not quite your grandmother's immigration story. Or is it?

- Leah Falk 

The Gospel According to Jesus’s Mom

 
The more familiar a story, the greater the challenge for a novelist. How do you convince readers to look out for more than they already know? Naomi Alderman's 3rd novel, The Liars' Gospel, takes on this challenge: in 4 richly interior, interwoven narratives, Alderman reimagines the effect of Jesus's—Yehoshuah's—life and teaching on his Jewish friends, family, and their Roman-ruled society.

Rooted in primary texts—The Jewish War, the Talmud, and the Gospels themselves—the novel's dramatis personae isn't too surprising. We follow Mary (here known as Miryam), Judas (or Iehuda), and Caiaphas the High Priest of the Second Temple, all in the political aftermath of Yehoshuah's crucifixion. But we also hear from an anonymous Jewish rebel, Bar-Avo, who has a serendipitous encounter with Yehoshuah just before Yehoshuah is put to death.

Admirable in its ability to bring a few ancient facts vividly to life, The Liars' Gospel also puts forth a theory of storytelling: that the most powerful stories start with a lie. "Do not believe that an impartial observer exists," Alderman warns, suggesting that the multiple "gospels" of her characters—each biased for their own reasons—are as close to the truth as this story is going to get.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

A Bus Accident in Israel, and Afterward

"After living with a disability for 22-plus years and trying in vain to write about it for almost as many, I've finally gotten my thoughts down on paper." So Joshua Prager introduces his new memoir Half-Life, which details the aftermath of a devastating bus accident that occurred on his visit to Israel at age 19.

In the e-book Prager renders himself astonishingly vulnerable, in part by asking difficult questions: If I no longer feel like myself, am I still myself? And if I'm not, how do I interact with others?

In finely crafted language ("a cement staircase lined with dirt and dead thistles depositing me at the edge") Prager shares piercing details, ruminations, and conclusions about his journey through grief into recovery. He offers, for example, his experience with Brown-Séquard Syndrome, "which roughly meant that one half of me could move better, the other half feel better."

He fills the pages with selections of poetry and returns again and again to Herman Melville, whose words he uses to investigate not just what it has meant to cope with the immense loss of the life he knew, but what it means for anyone to understand and accept themselves.

Watch Prager's TED Talk here.

- Jessica Young

Spotlight on Emily Michelson

 Dr Emily Michelson is a transplant from the United States, and has previously lived in Italy, Jerusalem, Salt Lake City, Manhattan, and other parts of the US East Coast. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1995 in History and Literature of the Renaissance and Reformation. Despite vowing never to go to graduate school, and taking a few years off after university to pursue other interests, she returned to the field to earn a PhD from Yale in 2006 in History and Renaissance Studies.

Emily is a cultural historian of the Reformation era, with a focus on Italy. She is especially interested in how religious change affects standards of behavior for individuals and for groups, and the tensions between external social norms and internal experience. Her recent book, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy (Harvard University Press, 2013), examines the role of Italian preachers during religious crisis and schism. The book credits preachers with keeping Italy Catholic when the region’s religious future seemed uncertain, and with creating a new religious culture that would survive in an unprecedented atmosphere of competition and religious choice. She is also the co-editor of A Linking of Heaven and Earth: Studies in Religious and Cultural History in Honor of Carlos M.N. Eire (Ashgate, 2012); among other topics, the book tackles head-on the question of how to study miracles in an age of skepticism. Emily currently runs a project, funded by the British Academy, studying how people heard (or misheard) sermons in the Reformation era, and whether audience behavior links to growing religious differences. From 2010-2012 she was interim director of the Reformation Studies Institute. 

Emily’s new research examines the social and theological significance of Roman Jews in the Catholic Reformation. This project has brought her speaking engagements in Edinburgh, Tel Aviv, Rome, and Dublin. She will be spending the 2013-2014 academic year in Florence as the Robert Lehman Fellow at Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), where she plans to complete the bulk of the research for this project.

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Letting It Go: A Post-Holocaust Delight

The world of Holocaust literature is filled with horrific stories of murder and gritty survival – think Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Art Spiegelman. Seldom does a book come along from a Holocaust survivor that can truly be called delightful.

Letting It Go by Miriam Katin is that book.
Katin, a New York artist born in Hungary during World War II, has created a graphic novel about moving past her anger toward Germany. On the surface, it's the true story of Katin's reaction to her son moving to Berlin – news that, at first, sends her into a tailspin.
But Letting It Go is not a memoir of Holocaust sorrow. It's a book full of life – a colorful novel of pencil drawings portraying a million small moments that make up Katin's current life: An obsessive crusade against kitchen cockroaches; a cheer-me-up shopping spree for expensive sunglasses; an embarrassing case of diarrhea in a hotel bed; and, throughout, a touching, loving, supportive relationship with her husband.
Katin emerges as an immensely likable, complex woman – a friend you'd enjoy meeting for a drink.

- Marc Davis

The Liars' Gospel

Review by Ada Brunstein

"It is important to quiet the lamb, that is the first thing." So begins Naomi Alder­man's The Liars' Gospel, a fictional account of Jesus' life set against the backdrop of the Jews' struggles against Roman rule.

Alderman gives us four points of view, or gospels, on the life of Yehoshuah (Jesus), focusing mainly on the time between his departure from home and his death. We hear from his mother, Miryam (Mary), who laments her son's departure and has trouble accepting him in his new role as a “teacher.”

We hear from his follower, confidant, and later his betrayer, Iehuda (Judas), one of the most compelling characters in this story. It is through Iehuda's eyes that we see Yehoshuah evolve from a man who has gathered a few supporters through his messages of forgive­ness and healing, to a man who is leading a movement of thousands of followers. Through Iehuda we see how Yehoshuah loses his way gradually, in small missteps, veering incrementally farther away from the messages he started his teachings with and into a more self-serving role.

We hear from the high priest, Caiaphas, whose life's work was to maintain the precari­ous balance between the desires of the Jews and the demands of the Romans.

And finally we hear from a young Jewish rebel, Bar-Avo (Barabbas), in whose hands lies the fate of the Jewish people at the time.

 Continue reading the review and an interview with the author, Naomi Alderman.

Ancient History: A Jew Among Romans

On the long list of all-time greatest Jewish calamities, the destruction of the Second Temple is surely among the Top 10. We remember it every year on Tisha B'Av, and at every wedding when the groom smashes a glass. But how do we even know about this 2,000-year-old catastrophe?

Mainly from the writings of one man: Flavius Josephus, a remarkable Roman-Jewish warrior-historian. Frederic Raphael's recently published A Jew Among Romans captures both the gory ancient war that led to the Temple's destruction and the life of the scribe himself.

To be sure, the book is not an easy read. It's interspersed with dry patches and esoteric phrases like "mimetic opportunism" and "divine afflatus." But it is also filled with wry observations and unexpected humor. About Nero: "He was the first ruler for whom the X factor of showbiz trumped statesmanship or martial prizes." About Josephus: "Josephus entertained many ideas, and they entertained him."

Ultimately, Raphael concludes that the Judean Jews had "no great principle at stake" in their rebellion, and that they "had only themselves to blame" for the Temple's destruction.

Francesca Segal wins Sami Rohr Prize

Novelist Francesca Segal won the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature for her debut novel, "The Innocents."

Segal will receive the Jewish Book Council's first prize award of $100,000. The novel is set in modern-day London, in a community living in the shadow of the Holocaust and the demands of tradition.

"Segal's attention to details of Jewish traditions will deeply resonate with Jews of all communities," the judges said.

The award ceremony will be held in New York on May 30.

The runner-up was Ben Lerner for his novel "Leaving the Atocha Station." He will receive a $25,000 prize.

Other finalists were Shani Boianju for “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid"; Stuart Nadler for “The Book of Life"; and Asaf Schurr for “Motti."

The Rohr prize has been given annually since 2007 and considers works of fiction and non-fiction in alternating years. It honors the contribution of contemporary writers in exploring and transmitting Jewish values.

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

An armed man forces his way into the house of a man named Etgar Keret. He orders Keret, "Tell me a story." But before Keret can rattle something off, there's a knock at the door. And then another. Suddenly, Keret has 3 armed men in his home, pistols aimed at him, and he can’t come up with a story that appeases any of them.
This scene isn't just a glimpse into the strange and ingenious   imagination of Israeli writer Etgar Keret; it's also the plot of the title story of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, his latest collection.
Like his prior short story collections—which are peppered with unusual characters overflowing with big hearts—Suddenly exemplifies the kind of idiosyncratic and magical fiction Keret is famous for. In "Hemorrhoid," a man's hemorrhoid replaces his conscience as the ethical center of his body. And in "Lieland," the protagonist finds himself in a mystical land in which all of the lies he has ever told come to life, and are played out before his very eyes. Sounds crazy, and it is. But that's just an ordinary day in Keret's world.

Socrates and the Fat Rabbi

It's a common rule of public speaking: Tell a joke, and you loosen up the crowd. This idea isn't a recent one--it can actually be found in the Talmud.

"Before he began his lesson to the scholars," says the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 30b), "Rabba used to say a joking word, and the scholars were amused. After that, he sat in dread, and began the lesson."

According to Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin in his book, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, the joke isn't merely an attention-getter or an aperitif, something to make the serious lesson go down easier. Instead, Boyarin says, the two are equally necessary to teach any lesson. On one hand, laughter creates connection with another person, making it possible to communicate knowledge from one to another. On the other, there needs to be some yirah--usually translated as "fear" or "awe"--which refers to the respect, deference, and attention that students pay their teacher.

We've all had teachers that we've feared, and teachers that we've loved. Perhaps what the Talmud (and Boyarin) is suggesting is the best teachers are those who, in measured doses, make us feel a bit of both.

A Secret History of Yiddish

If languages had personalities, then Yiddish would probably be gruff and sardonic, with several unexpected surprises up its sleeve--much like the admired comic book writer Harvey Pekar who died last year.

One of Pekar's last projects was co-editing Yiddishkeit--a new, gorgeously illustrated cartoon history of the Yiddish language and its speakers. Though Pekar's books were nearly always personal memoirs, this collection is well-researched and authoritative.

Some pieces are more straightforward histories, and some take liberties, both with art and story. Hundred-year-old Yiddish political cartoons are explained and placed side-by-side with tribute comics created especially for this volume. "Shrayber un Arbeter (Writers and Workers)" portrays the Yiddish newspaper in a Wizard of Oz-type theme--the world of the immigrant is depicted as a stark, black-and-white place, but the newspaper offers an escape, a color-soaked fantasia of Yiddish stories and jokes.

Stories about the lives of luminaries such as Sholem Aleichem and Leon Kobrin are interspersed with more personal tales, such as Pekar's own recollections of reading I.J. Singer in a hospital room, conducting imaginary arguments with the author about the future of Judaism.

The Wanting

The long-awaited second novel from Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award recipient Michael Lavigne. Michael's new novel follows Roman Guttman, a Russian-born postmodern architect who is injured in a bus bombing, as he journeys into Palestinian territory. Roman's story alternates with the diary of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Anyusha, and is enriched by flashbacks of Anyusha's mother's life, a famous Russian refusenik who died for her beliefs.

Jewish Book Club

The National Jewish Book Awards host America’s most lucrative literary prize

By Jessica Weisberg

The winner of the Sami Rohr Literary Prize—which, at $100,000, is one of the most generous literary awards in the world—won’t be announced until April, but many of the finalists, along with some 150 writers, editors, and publishers, attended the National Jewish Book Awards, held last night at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Sitting for dinner at what people took to calling the “Rohr Kids Table,” writers, both nominated and not, gossiped nervously about the five finalists: Francesca Segal (The Innocents), Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station), Stuart Nadler (The Book of Life), Shani Boianjiu (The People Forever Are Not Afraid), and Asaf Shurr (Motti). “If you don’t hear by 10 a.m., you didn’t get it,” said Allison Amend, a novelist and Rohr finalist in 2011, to Boianjiu, who was visiting New York from Israel.

The Rohr Prize is intended for an emerging writer of Jewish literature—but the way the award defines “Jewish literature” is somewhat vague. “We look for books written with a Jewish pen and Jewish eyes, that have a kernel of Jewish content,” said Carolyn Starman Hessel, the director of the Jewish Book Council, which hosts the awards. “Strong feelings of Jewish identity now might change the writers’ focus in the future.” There are no submissions; finalists are nominated by a panel of judges. “Otherwise, I’d have to rent out the Empire State Building,” to house all the eager entries, Hessel said.

All of the council’s other awards are submission-based and define Jewish literature in a more straightforward way, recognizing books about Jewish people and history; there are categories like “Education and Jewish Identity” and “Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice.” In 1992, when Hessel became director of the National Jewish Book Council, awards for books written in Hebrew and Yiddish were given on the basis of more traditional categories, such as “Children’s Picture Book,” and “Israel.”

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