Monday, October 27, 2014

Mayim Bialik: I Love This Book About Santa by a “Big Bang” Writer

By Mayim Bialik for Kveller

So everyone asks me about what it’s like to work on “The Big Bang Theory.” What’s Sheldon like? What’s Penny like? Do you all get along?

Sheldon, played by Jim Parsons, is awesome. I have written here about how much I adore that man.

Penny, played by Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, is a super skilled, seasoned performer who always dresses cool and just is the epitome of cool. Her jewelry is always cool. Even in workout clothes she looks amazing and cool.

We do all get along. There are a lot of laughs when we have scenes together. It’s a happy set.

What’s even more interesting and wonderful about my job, though, is getting to know and work with our writers. They write the stuff that you all love. They are a really neat group of men and women. You love them even though you don’t know them.Santa

One of our writers just wrote a book called “Does Santa Exist?”. Eric Kaplan has written for some of the most funny shows you’ve seen in the past 20 years. He also has probably written some of your favorite jokes on “TBBT,” I can almost guarantee it. He’s hysterical.

He’s also a student of philosophy and has written a treatise/memoir/love child of a book about the conflict and intersection between reason and religion. It is definitely one of the most challenging books I have read; not just because the topics are complex and the subject matter is intense, but because Eric forces the reader to dig deep into what they believe and why. He challenges the reader to define for themselves what truly works about religion and belief and faith. It’s fantastic.

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Monday, October 20, 2014

Why “Back to the Future” is About the World to Come

By Matthue Roth for Jewniverse


Ben Lerner is not primarily a novelist – he’s a poet. He’s also not a Hasid. But his new novel 10:04 opens with a quote: “Hasidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here…Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”

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Monday, October 13, 2014

Story of the Jews, The: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD

By David Wolpe in Hadassah Magazine

Story of the JewsAlmost 30 years ago in the preface to The Embarrassment of Riches (Vintage Books), his sumptuous chronicle of the Dutch golden age, Simon Schama wrote that “all history tends towards autobiographical confession.” Now Schama ranges across lands and times and languages to confess through his own people, in The Story of the Jews.

Schama tells us that his father was obsessed by British and Jewish history. Demonstrating the wisdom of Jung’s axiom that the greatest influence on children is the unlived lives of their parents, the son has written the absorbing multivolume A History of Britain (Hyperion) and now this first of two books on Jewish history.

The personal thread throughout the narrative is one of its most engaging features. There is something at stake in this retelling; it is never bloodless. Here are the Jews for whom nothing human is alien—housewives and papermakers, scholars and sufferers, rakes and magnates, physicians and artists.

Jewish history is a history of words, as Schama reminds us, and his easy eloquence and gentle wit fill each page. Dhimmi are “the tolerated benighted.” We know Josephus is the first Jewish historian “when, with a twinge of guilt, he introduces his mother into the action.” Most histories of the Jewish people are indifferently written; this is in the gripping and preternaturally fluent British tradition of historians like A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper.

Schama celebrates the artistry of Judaism, from the floors of ancient synagogues to the pageantry of a modern service. Too often in Jewish history people have elevated Moses but not Bezalel, as if no Jew thought imagistically until Chagall sprung from the head of modernity. Schama traces the long engagement of Jews with the world. He notes the “glowing, brilliant” frescoes of ancient synagogues, where “If you were a Jewish father or mother in Dura-Europas and you were with your children in that synagogue, there would be much to tell them, pointing this way and that at the painting.”

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Monday, October 6, 2014

Jewish Women’s Surprisingly Prominent Role in Ancient Jewish Magic

Live from the Lilith Blog by Maggie Anton

Enchantress(Wait, doesn’t the Torah say something about not allowing a sorceress to live?)

It does indeed. “You shall not tolerate (let live) a sorceress,” is the way the Jewish Publication Society translates Exodus 22:18. Or you may have seen the King James Version’s “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Even knowing these lines, the most astonishing thing I learned while researching ENCHANTRESS: A Novel of Rav Hisda’s Daughter was how prevalent—even ubiquitous—sorcery was among the same people who gave us Talmud and Midrash.

Early on, I came across information about Babylonian “magic bowls.” Unearthed under homes in what is now Iraq, the land where the Talmud was created, these were common items of household pottery inscribed with spells to protect the inhabitants from demons and the Evil Eye, believed to cause illness, unsuccessful pregnancy and other misfortune.

Undoubtedly of Jewish origin, the incantations are written with Hebrew letters, quote Torah, and call upon Jewish angels and divine names. Some quote Mishna and the rabbinic divorce formula. And that’s not all. Archaeologists have found, wherever our people lived during the first six centuries of the Common Era, Jewish amulets, curse tablets, and magic manuals.

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