New Novel From Jonathan Safran Foer Coming in September

By Alexandra Alter for The New York Times

In the book of Genesis, when God calls for Abraham to order him to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham replies obediently, “Here I am.”

That line provided inspiration for the author Jonathan Safran Foer, whose new novel, “Here I Am,” will be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel, his first since “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” was published in 2005, unfolds over a single month in present-day Washington, as a Jewish family with three sons falls apart after the parents’ marriage falters. While the family implodes, relatives from Israel are visiting for the bar mitzvah of one of the sons. The drama unfolds as a larger catastrophe engulfs the Middle East, when a massive earthquake devastates the region and Israel is invaded.

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An Improbable Friendship

An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and their 40-year Mission to Build Understanding Between Their Peoples by Anthony David

Review by Annette Gendler, Jewish Book Council
Marketed as a chronicle of the friendship between Ruth Dayan, the first wife of Israel’s iconoclastic war hero Moshe Dayan, and Raymonda Tawil, a Palestinian leader in her own right who ended up becoming Arafat’s mother-in-law, An Improbable Friendship does not deliver. Given its highly personable introduction, involving Skype sessions with these two feisty older women—Ruth in Tel Aviv and Raymonda in Malta—the reader wonders how they became and remained friends. That question, however, is never answered.

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Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp by Ann Kirschner

Review by Bill Brennan for Jewish Book Council

For nearly fifty years—from just before the infamous 1881 gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, that secured his place in the lore of the Wild West until his death in early 1929—Wyatt Earp shared his life with his Jewish common-law wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus. And thereby hangs the tale that Ann Kirschner tells with affection, zest, and insight in Lady at the O.K. Corral.

Kirschner’s unabashed affection for, and fascination with, the woman who became Mrs.Wyatt Earp are infectious, and her scrupulous regard for historical accuracy in telling her tale is admirable. The latter is probably reflected most notably in the brevity of her treat­ment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral itself, from which only one witness—Wyatt Earp himself—survived.

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How Jews Invented American Comedy

By Fabian Wolff for The Jewish Daily Forward   

The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy; By Kliph Nesteroff; Grove Press, 448 Pages, $28.00

This book is about comedy, but it’s not very funny. Nor should it be: In his history of American comedy, Kliph Nesteroff writes about “drunks, thieves and scoundrels” — comedians, in a word. His book is concerned with basically everybody who has stood on a stage or behind a microphone and told jokes, from 1900 to today.

That means vaudevillians chased out of “hate towns” in the South; nightclub comics paid by the Mob; radio entertainers kowtowing to sponsors (or not); comedy writers inventing TV; hippie comedians trying to bring down the Man; stand-up hacks doing 20 minutes (and coke before and after) in three different clubs every night during the comedy boom of the 1980s; and cranky comedians podcasting out of their living rooms or garages. Canadian writer Nesteroff brings them all together.

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