God Is Everything, in Drag
Elie Spitz
Irwin Kula with Linda Loewenthal, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life , Hyperion, 2006, 224 pp, $22.95
Irwin Kula wears his hair long, speaks dramatically, and confronts his audience with edgy ideas that spur conversation long after the presentation ends. It is hard to translate his energetic, frank, conversational tone into writing. Yet Kula, [...]
New Lives
Kenneth Moss
Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York. Harvard University Press, 2005. $27.95 Hella Winston, The Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. Beacon Press, 2005. $23.95
The cover of Tony Michels’ A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York dredges from the archives an arresting sketch of “Russian [...]
Revisiting the Pedagogy and Purpose of Holocaust Education
Maurice Elias
Simone A. Schweber, Making Sense of the Holocaust: Lessons from Classroom Practice.
New York: Teachers College Press, 2004. 185pp. $19.95 paperback
The study of exemplars opens varying kinds of windows through which one can make inferences about typical performance. Simone Schweber’s book features an extensive look at three teachers’ classes about the Holocaust, with the work [...]
Assigning New Meaning to Yiddish Culture
Amelia Glaser
Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture.
Jeffrey Shandler, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CA Press, 2006. 271 pp., $39.95
Late one night during the summer of 2002, I found myself in a dorm room with four fellow graduate students listing the serious Yiddish scholars under the age of 40. We estimated that between us [...]
Approaching Jewish Law
Ken Koltun-Fromm
The Unfolding Tradition: Jewish Law After Sinai.
Elliot N. Dorff. Aviv Press, 2005, 566 pp., $19.95
Elliot Dorff has put together a masterful collection of Jewish writings on the meaning and function of Jewish law within the Conservative movement in America. As one of the leading American theoreticians of halakhah, Dorff strongly defends the authority, continuity, [...]
Healing a Fractured World
Daniel Septimus, editor of MyJewishLearning.com, interviews Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Sir Jonathan Sacks, about his new book.
Daniel Septimus: In regards to the responsibility you write about in your book, To Heal A Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility, are there distinctions between the Jewish community’s responsibility toward its own [...]
Reading the Bible
Benjamin D. Sommer
Marc Zvi Brettler, How to Read the Bible . Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2005. 283 pp $35
As a professor of biblical studies, I am frequently sent textbooks in biblical studies, and I often consult academic introductions to the field as well. None of them is as clear, sophisticated, and readable as this [...]
The Young and the Restless: Works by Young Writers
Michal Lemberger
Jubana! The Awkwardly True and dazzling Adventures of a Jewish Cuban Princess , Gigi Anders. Rayo, 2005, 298 pp., $23.95
Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past with its Last Wandering Shepherd , Sam Apple. Ballantine Books, 2005, 304 pp., $23.95
Beware of God: Stories , Shalom Auslander. Simon & Schuster, 2005, 194 [...]
Understanding the Prophets
Jill Jacobs
The Hebrew Prophets:
Selections Annotated & Explained.
Rami Shapiro, Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2004. $16.99 167pp
Long relegated to the margins of Jewish thought, the biblical prophets made a comeback in the modern era as the early Reform Movement declared “prophetic Judaism” its hallmark, and Jewish civil rights activists found in the prophets a call to [...]
Reading a Memoir and Hearing a Prayer
Diane Cole
The Holy Thief: A Con Man’s Journey From Darkness To Light. Rabbi Mark Borovitz and Alan Eisenstock. (William Morrow, 2004) $23.95, 226 pp.
To Wear The Dust Of War: From Bialystok To Shanghai To The Promised Land — An Oral History. Samuel Iwry. Ed. L.J.H.Kelley. (Palgrave Macmillan. 2004) $22.95, 214 pp.
In many ways, a confessional [...]
