Monday, November 30, 2015

In time for Hanukkah, the 9 best Jewish books of the season

By Victor Wishna for JTA

Really, every season is book season — but autumn brings a blend of offerings just right for warming up with as the weather cools down. To help you select the best one(s) to keep you cozy on the couch, or to find that perfect Hanukkah present for the avid readers in your life, check out our selection of notable new reads, all with a Jewish twist. Whether you’re interested in fiction, non-fiction, memoir or graphic novels, we’ve got you covered.

The Devil in Jerusalem (St. Martin’s Press) By Naomi Ragen

The tenth novel by best-selling American-born Israeli author Ragen is a crime thriller based on real events from a well-known Jerusalem court case. When two young brothers are brought to Hadassah Hospital with horrific injuries, an Israeli detective finds herself navigating her way through the Old City streets and parsing kabbalistic texts and cult rituals in pursuit of answers. Although Ragen has often written about the haredi realm — her early bestsellers were set in the Israeli Orthodox neighborhoods of Mea Shearim and B’nei B’rak — she has said in an interview with the Jewish Book Council that this novel “is about psychopaths who happen to be a part of the Jewish world.”

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Riverhead Books) By Carrie Brownstein 

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For even more great ideas, visit our Hanukkah Holiday Spotlight Kit




Monday, November 23, 2015

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories

From Etgar Keret; Jewish Book Council

Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Etgar Keret’s stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best writers of fiction, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain—from a father’s first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught up in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

New to Riverhead’s list, these wildly inventive, uniquely humane stories are for fans of Etgar Keret’s inimitable style and readers of transforming, brilliant fiction.

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Monday, November 16, 2015

A Stunningly Illustrated Torah Like Nothing We’ve Seen Before

By Abby Sher for Jewniverse   
An astronaut, a cowboy, and a girl kissing a moose have just made it into the Bible, thanks to the incredible vision of artist Archie Rand.

This is not your standard scroll, obviously. And yet it is a very precise vision of these ancient words. There are 613 mitzvot that are commonly called the “commandments” from the Hebrew Bible. Rand has studied each one of them for the past fifteen years and illustrated them in wild, hilarious, dark, light, and daring ways.

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Monday, November 9, 2015

To Be Young, Poetic and Black — and Jewish

Talya Zax for The Jewish Daily Forward   

Aaron Samuels started getting hype as a poet as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. A co-founder of the school’s popular slam poetry team, WUSLAM, his compelling performances and the depth of his investigation into what it meant to be black and Jewish made him stand out.

He’s continued to make his name on a broader scale since graduating. He’s the Chief Operating Officer of Blavity, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, a group of spoken-word poets, and with a wide swathe of publications in journals and two published collections of poetry, he’s established himself solidly as a working poet.

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Monday, November 2, 2015

The Morning of Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination: A Prologue

Jewish Book Council

Excerpted from Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron.

Yitzhak Rabin woke up before seven the morning of November 4, 1995, with an eye infection. He had plans to play tennis, hold several work meetings at his north Tel Aviv apartment, and then attend a peace rally that night at Kings of Israel Square. But the infection, which made his eye swollen and bloodshot, gave him a chance to reassess. Rabin felt ambivalent about the rally; it seemed to him like the kind of event some Bolshevik regime might organize, busing in paid apparatchiks and having them wave banners approved by the Party. He agreed to it mostly because his political opponents, with a few large and rowdy protests, had managed to create the impression that most of the country opposed his now second peace deal with Yasser Arafat. The demonstrators had held up doctored images showing Rabin draped in a kaffiyeh—the checkered black-and-white scarf worn by Arafat—and worse, Rabin in a Nazi uniform. But the prime minister feared that few people would show up at the square. Instead of refuting the perception of his political weakness, the rally could end up reinforcing it. Rabin himself wasn’t exactly sure whether it was just a perception or the hard reality now.

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