Birds and Life
The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature by Jonathan Rosen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $24
Reviewed by Haim Watzman
Prophecies Unfulfilled
Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 320 pp., $26.00.
Reviewed by Sean R. Singer
Women Remaking American Judaism
Women Remaking American Judaism, Riv-Ellen Prell, ed. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2007. $25.95, 352 pp.
Reviewed by Judith Rosenbaum
Changing Families
The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism , by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Indiana University Press, 2007. 320 pages, $24.00
The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives , by Marla Brettschneider, SUNY Press, 2006. 232 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Caryn Aviv
Prayers from the Heart
Dinah Berland, ed. and adaptor, Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda’s Book of Prayers for Jewish Women. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. $24.00
Reviewed by Elisheva Carlebach
Exploring the Alliance
A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance
by Zev Chafets. HarperCollins, 2007 240 pp $24.95
Reviewed by Michael Kress
Jewish attitudes toward Evangelicals tend to range from the paranoid (“They’re out to make America a Christian theocracy!”) to the condescending (“They’re backwater, low-IQ, gun-toting simpletons!”). [...]
Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exile
Alicia Ostriker
Emma Lazarus by Esther Schor,
Nextbook, Schocken, 2006. 350 pp, $21.95
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
The words of Emma Lazarus, famously engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty [...]
Transforming Synagogues: Two New Guides
Jack Bloom
ReThinking Synagogues: A New Vocabulary for Congregational Life Lawrence A. Hoffman, Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006, 240 pp, $19.99
The Spirituality of Welcoming: How to Transform Your Congregation into a Sacred Community Ron Wolfson, Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006, 224 pp, $19.99
Synagogue 2000 (S2K) — now (S3K) — is one of the most exciting synagogue ventures of [...]
Visionary Leadership
Jen Glaser
Nathan Laufer, The Genesis of Leadership: What the Bible Teaches Us about Vision, Values and Leading Change Jewish Lights Publishing, 2006, 288 pp, 24.99
In a moment of personal reflection and disclosure in the second section of The Genesis of Leadership, Rabbi Nathan Laufer speaks to the Janus-like vision of good leaders. Visionary leaders develop [...]
The Mighty and the Almighty
Marc Gopin
Madeleine Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty, HarperCollins, 2006, $26, 352 pages
Madeleine Albright’s book The Mighty and the Almighty is path-breaking; for the first time, one of the major political actors on the world stage and in American foreign policy is seriously engaging and interweaving the issues of religion, politics, diplomacy, war, and peace. [...]
