Escape Velocity, A Post-Apocalyptic Passover Haggadah
Escape Velocity works under a very simple assumption: The Haggadah is the one source Jews use, on the one night they have, to express, and be impressed, by their faith. Escape Velocity sees to...
Tagged: new books
Moroccan Sephardic Romancero Wins European Prize for Folklore
Susana Weich-Shahak, has just won the European Prize for Folklore for her work on the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero, published 2013. This is an anthology of Judeo-Spanish ballads from the Spanish romancero tradition that have...
What Ever Happened to Italy’s Jews?
We usually think of historical fiction as storytelling that attempts to simulate the events and atmosphere of the past—but what if historical fiction recreated not the past itself, but the historian’s process of trying...
Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul by Daniel Gordis
Menachem Begin—maker of peace with Egypt, Nobel Prize winner, welcomer of the Ethiopian Jews to Israel—was shunned by David Ben-Gurion and renounced as a terrorist. In this sympathetic biography, Daniel Gordis, a prominent American-Israeli...
Essential Figures in Jewish Scholarship by Ronald L. Eisenberg
Despite the fact that scholars of the post-Talmudic era have been of great importance to the continued interpretation of religious texts for more than a millennium, they are typically not given as much attention...
Mannequin Girl by Ellen Litman
Growing up in Soviet Russia, Kat Knopman worships her parents, temperamental Anechka and soft-hearted, absent-minded Misha. Young Jewish intellectuals, they teach literature at a Moscow school, run a drama club, and dabble in political...
Killing the Second Dog by Marek Hlasko
Robert and Jacob are two down-and-out Polish con men living in Israel in the early 1960s. They’re planning to run a scam on an American widow visiting the country. Robert, who masterminds the scheme,...
Playlist Judaism Making Choices for a Vital Future By Kerry Olitzky
Every Jewish institution,” writes Kerry Olitzky, “is undergoing significant change and is in danger of becoming irrelevant to the majority of North American Jews. All these institutions will have to reimagine themselves if they...
The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew
Gentile reader, and you, Jews, come too. Follow Sue William Silverman, a one-woman cultural mash-up, on her exploration of identity among the mishmash of American idols and ideals that confuse most of us—or should....
Reference Guide to the Talmud
A revision of the excellent Random House Reference Guide. The Reference Guide is divided into three sections: Historical Background, Talmud Study, and Halakha. Although it is the ideal companion volume to the Koren Talmud...
