Translator Yaacov David Shulman Jewish Spiritual Growth is a translation into English of one of the great Jewish spiritual treasures of the twentieth century, which was miraculously rescued after the Holocaust. This book was written by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, one of the great Hasidic masters of the twentieth century, living in pre-World War II Warsaw (author of the famed Aish Kodesh). Seeking to revitalize the Hasidic movement, Rabbi Shapira…
2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved classic From the Mixed-up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. When Claudia decided to run away, she planned very carefully. She would be gone just long enough to teach her parents a lesson in Claudia appreciation. And she would go in comfort-she would live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She saved her money, and she invited her brother Jamie to go,…
A son receives an inheritance from his father and tries to dispose of it before it destroys him. Inherited Disorders tells this elemental story in over 100 hilarious, witty variations. Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s Inherited Disorders is a rueful, absurd, and endlessly entertaining look at a most serious subject—the eternally vexed relations between fathers and sons. In a hundred and seventeen shrewd, surreal vignettes, Sachs lays bare the petty rivalries, thwarted…
How can our sacred institutions preserve tradition while retaining the flexibility to accommodate modern life? And how do you fold that theme into a lively kids’ book? Almost a Minyan, the latest offering from Austin’s Sociosights Press, brings children into the world of a loving daughter and granddaughter whose family stays connected to each other and to the past through sacred ritual. The book is a multi-generational love story for…
Using the covers of books I mentioned on this site in May 2017 I crated a new image for our social media channels. (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) :
Here is the list of the 79 books that I posted on this site Between January and May 2017 : The 28th of Iyar – 50th Anniversary Edition by Rabbi Emanuel Feldman Akim Volynsky; A Hidden Russian-Jewish Prophet by Helen Tolstoy Americans and the Birth of Israel by Lawrence J. Epstein Art from the Holocaust by Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg Becoming a Soulful Educator by Aryeh Ben David The Bodrum Jewish Cemetery…
In The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry an international group of scholars examines aspects of religious belief and practice of pre-emancipation Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Amsterdam, Curaçao and Surinam, ceremonial dimensions, artistic representations of religious life, and religious life after the Shoa. The origins of Dutch Jewry trace back to diverse locations and ancestries: Marranos from Spain and Portugal and Ashkenazi refugees from Germany, Poland and Lithuania. In the new…
Israel Celebrates is about the intersection where Israeli inventiveness and Jewish tradition meet: the holidays. It employs the anthropological history of four Jewish holidays as celebrated in Israel in order to track the naturalization of Jewish rituals, myths, and symbols in Israeli culture throughout “the long twentieth century” of Zionism and on to the present, and to demonstrate how a new strand of Judaism developed in Israel from the grassroots.…
‘Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian’s magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years’ – Philippe Sands, Guardian Books of the Year A prescient interwar masterpiece, available in English for the first time ‘Absolutely, definitively alone’, a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn’t belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and…
There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre.…