The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America

by Stephen M. Silverman and Raphael D. Silver

Review by Maron L. Waxman for Jewish Book Council

Mention the Catskills and most Jews immediately call to mind the Borscht Belt. But as Stephen Silverman, a Time Inc. veteran, and Raphael Silver, a real estate developer and film producer, demonstrate in this richly illustrated volume, the Catskills have far more stories to tell than a Grossinger’s tummler.

The story begins with Henry Hudson, who sailed up the river now named for him—he called it the “Great River of the Mountains”—in 1609, seeking the northwest passage to Asia. The search was futile, but Hudson claimed the territory for the Netherlands. A trading post was established a few years later and settlement followed, with the English taking over in 1664. Soon after, the Catskills became an active center of American social, economic, and cultural history, perhaps influencing if not, as suggested in the subtitle, changing it.

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The Raging Skillet, From Microwave to Top Caterer

By Amy Kritzer for Hadassah Magazine

Oprah. Cher. Madonna. Rossi. One of those names may not immediately conjure up a powerful, take-no-prisoners woman, but as the owner of The Raging Skillet catering company, Chef Rossi has earned her mononym nonetheless. She shares her wild rise to award-winning caterer in her memoir with recipes, appropriately titled The Raging Skillet: The True Life Story of Chef Rossi.

Chef Rossi has a vivacious and unapologetic personality that gives life to her almost unbelievable anecdotes, from rebellious, runaway teenager, to a short-lived stint in Lubavitch Brooklyn (“Feminism was not popular in shul,” she writes) to maritime bartender, to her eventual success as an “anti-caterer.” Chef Rossi’s favorite career moment? Catering the celebrity-packed Vagina Monologues after-party. Complete with an anatomically correct feast including a giant vagina-shaped fruit platter.

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Photos from the World’s Most Isolated Jewish Communities

By Abby Sher for Jewniverse

The wandering Jew is more than a stereotype and a striped houseplant.

In their beautiful new book, Scattered Among the Nations: Photographs and Stories of the World’s Most Isolated Jewish Communities, Bryan Schwartz, Jay Sand, and Sandy Carter explore what it feels like to practice Judaism in far-flung corners of the globe.

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Herman Wouk, the American Jewish Writer Who Wrote Huge Best-Sellers and Wasn’t Especially Neurotic

The 100-year-old titan of American letters recalls his very happy publishing career, in the new ‘Sailor and Fiddler’

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine   

Looking back on it, the triumph of American Jewish literature in the 20th century seems like something foreordained. Take a people, Eastern European Jewry, that had always cherished literacy and give them a freedom they had never been granted before, and the result is a creative explosion—Death of a Salesman, The Adventures of Augie March, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Catcher in the Rye (not to mention the Broadway musical, Tin Pan Alley, and Hollywood). Why is it, then, that the American Jewish writers who were most successful, whom we now regard as classics, did not make success their theme? On the contrary, they generally wrote about failure, alienation, neurosis, and guilt—to the point that these subjects came to seem stereotypically Jewish in American culture. If the American Jewish story is, on balance, a very happy one, why are our books so miserable? Where are the well-adjusted Jewish writers?

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Good on Paper: A Novel

Review by Juli Berwald for Jewish Book Council

Don’t be fooled by the chick-lit-sounding title of Rachel Cantor’s second novel, Good on Paper. Much more than a beach read, this book a highly-crafted, multi-layered, complex story that prompts the reader to question the line between fiction and reality.

Shira Greene is a temp worker and a single mother raising her daughter, Andi, with the help of her old college friend Ahmad. She’s also a Ph.D. washout. Her thesis on Dante was nearly brilliant—until life got in the way. Shira suffers from the wounds of her mother’s abandonment of her when she was a child, her father’s suicide, and a freak accident that killed Ahmed’s best friend. Unable to cope with the compounding losses, Shira retreats into a comfortable safety of mediocrity.

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Robert Capa's Road to Jerusalem

By Stuart Schoffman for Jewish Review of Books

When David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948, at the old Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Robert Capa was there. The world’s most famous photojournalist had covered the Spanish Civil War, the Allied conquest of North Africa and Italy, the invasion of Normandy, and the liberation of Paris. He had hobnobbed with Hemingway, romanced Ingrid Bergman, and toured Stalin’s Russia with John Steinbeck. Now he was in the Jewish homeland for the first time. His striking image of the state’s founding moment was recently shown in the postmodern wing of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, one of the 40-plus prints in Robert Capa: Photographer of Life (Tzalam shel ha-chayim in Hebrew).

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A Remarkable Kindness: A Novel by Diana Bletter

By Joan Baum for Hadassah Magazine
The title of this ambitious, compassionate tale of four women who love, lose and rededicate themselves to life refers to a “solemn, ancient, sacred” burial ritual, a hesed shel emet, the truest act of kindness. It is described by a rabbi in the book as the greatest mitzva because “the dead can never thank you.” Jewish communities have always had burial societies, as Aviva—the oldest and strongest of the American-born quartet—points out. But in agricultural, seaside villages such as Peleg in northern Israel, where the story takes place, such care to cleanse, dress and pray over a body by strangers as well as friends constitutes a hallowed rite that ironically can bring about a renewed appreciation of living.

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