Dear Diary: The morning after I underwent hip replacement surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, I was visited in my room by the surgeon. I expected the routine inquiry about my condition and almost fell out of my bed when he asked me, as though he were talking to my body, ''Which side are you on?'' Since this is the title of one of the great songs in our country's labor history (''My daddy was a miner, and I'm a miner's son.''), I recovered my senses long enough to point to my left side.Meanwhile, Marilyn Gelber -- companion of Dorothy's son Robert -- showed up in a Jan. 22 article on the petty vindictiveness of Rudy Guliani:
“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”(Gelber was fired by Guliani, apparently for attacting too much personal publicity for her landmark work in negotiating a landmark agreement with upstate governments to preserve the watershed that drains into New York City's water supply.) A week later she appeared in a happier report: The story of how a kid from the projects of Brooklyn made it to an upstate, small-town college -- thanks to the foundation that Gelber directs. Dorothy Epstein, who never relaxed her gratitude for the free public education she received at Hunter College during the Great Depression, would be very proud.]]>
Willful Jewish girl Karimah HaCohen al-Tustari flees her home in Cairo, Egypt, to run off with her lover. Complicating the situation is that the year is 1031 and the love of Karimah's life is Muslim. Karimah's departure has devastated her family, and her father declares her dead. Karimah vehemently disagrees and writes to her brother that "there is a huge difference between being in love and being dead." Like generations of girls before and after her, she struggles with the restraints placed upon her by society and religion, and the novel tells of how she comes to terms with her decisions and the unconventional life that she has chosen to live. Visotzky, an educator, rabbi, and author of nine nonfiction books, devoted over two years of scholarly research to the preparation of this debut novel and it shows. Using the Cairo Geniza (an actual storage room where Jews deposited everything written in Hebrew), Visotzky poignantly re-creates a time period in which adventurers, scholars, Jews, and Muslims lived together in relative harmony. Includes in-depth notes on sources and glossary; for Jewish fiction and larger historical fiction collections.—Marika Zemke, Commerce Twp. Community Lib., MI]]>
Ben Yehuda Press is proud to be publishing The Wicked Wit of the West, the memoir of this stalwart and funny union man.
]]>]]>Open “From the Coffee House of Jewish Dreamers” (Ben Yehuda Press) in one direction, and you can read Isidore Century’s “Poems of Wonder and Wandering”; from the other, “Poems of the Weekly Torah Portions.” On one side of the cover, the author is drinking coffee with the Cyclone behind him; on the flip side, he’s got his coffee at the same table, with the Kotel behind.
Isidore Century is a wonderful poet. He writes of traveling to Coney Island; visiting Israel and returning there to the land of Yiddish in which he grew up; his father, who escaped from Poland and made his way illegally to the U.S., where he became an official in the Painter’s Union; and about his own reluctant and penetrating faith, “I keep running from a God/in whom I do not believe/hoping he catches me.”
His poems are brief stories: they’re funny, deeply observed, without pretension, written with a knowingness and rhythm of things old and new. Those related to Torah readings are poetic, original midrashim. He brings the figures of the Bible to Central Park, or places the poet in Egypt and service as Joseph’s valet and butler, adding his distinctive accent to the text.
Lawrence Bush wants to believe in God. Really, he does. But, for reasons of personal temperament, constitution and bedrock skepticism, he can’t.
That doesn’t mean he has abandoned Judaism. For most of his life, Bush has worked in the Jewish world — as a journalist, as a speechwriter for the late Reform leader Rabbi Alexander Schindler and now as editor of Jewish Currents magazine.
Still, Bush is an atheist, albeit a reluctant one. His book, “Waiting for God,” explains his take on faith and doubt, with a little John Lennon thrown in for good measure.
“Most liberal-minded Jews struggle with issues of faith and skepticism,” said Bush during a swing through the Bay Area. “The difference between my book and most of the new atheists is, I don’t indulge the scorn. I approach religion as one who worked in religious life, with great respect.”
By “new atheists,” Bush means writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, all authors of recent books blasting organized religion — and the unorganized kind as well.
Instead, Bush has delved into Torah study, and even published commentaries on the weekly Torah portion.
He even found a way to reconcile his leftist politics with Judaism. “The fundamental principle is Psalm 24: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all the fruits derived,’” Bush said. “I saw in Jewish law a mixing of community responsibility with the acknowledgment of people’s fearfulness and ambition. Economics are social. Judaism, with that psalm, acknowledges that.”
Bush grew up in a secular home in Queens, N.Y. He received little Jewish education, but he did know to skip the words “under God” when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
If he got religion at all, it came in the form of the Fab Four. Calling the Beatles the “central aesthetic experience of my life,” Bush cites John Lennon as a key influence. “My strength as a writer is self-examination,” Bush said.
“I identify with Lennon’s style that way.”
Lennon influences him still. Consider the song “Imagine.” It begins with what Bush calls the four no’s: No countries, no possessions, no heaven and no religion.
“Does atheism bring with it any affirmation, or is it basically no, no, no, no?” he asks. “It may just be about saying ‘No, no, no.’ But there’s something about saying no — about not trusting our own senses — that frees us.”
Bush is quick to differentiate between religion and spirituality. He’s the first to admit he, too, has had spiritual experiences. He just doesn’t ascribe anything supernatural to them.
He views spirituality as “the emotions that happen when you recognize interconnection. We are interconnected. But we substitute God — the ‘You’ — for the ‘We’ that we can’t possibly express. All I ask is: What if we look at what we’re really talking about, which is the ‘we,’ not the ‘you?’”
At Jewish Currents, Bush has a forum to express his views on politics, religion and Judaism. Founded as a socialist outlet, Currents teamed up with Workman’s Circle, expanding readership but at the same time furling up the socialist banner.
“We have 12,000 more readers,” Bush said, “with a range of liberalism, radicalism and conservatism. The one principle is skepticism.”
Skeptic, yes. But Bush says he, his wife and their 20-year-old twins never miss tashlich during Rosh Hashanah. Near their upstate New York home, they stand before a creek and cast their woe-begotten bread crumbs into the waters.
“It’s a remarkable thing to have your children express love,” Bush added. “It is remarkable to see them bond within this Jewish ritual. It bonded us to Jewish identity, and was one of those things as a family we walked away from as high as a kite.”
But not to heavenly heights. Bush remains godless, though he may turn up at a local Shabbat morning class alongside his most fervently religious neighbors.
“The Talmud is where Judaism begins,” he said, “and the more liberal down-to-earth conversations begin. It’s a big civilization.”
“Waiting for God: The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist” by Lawrence Bush (194 pages, Ben Yehuda Press, $16.95).
Copyright J, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California
]]>This work collects Rosenwein's articles for “The Home Front,” a column that ran in the New York Jewish Week for seven years. With unfailing fluency, humor, and an accessible style, Rosenwein wrote about her children, New York, the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001, Israel, her battle with cancer, and more. Through it all, Judaism informed her outlook and gave her strength. She rightly perceives herself as belonging to a “conduit” generation, i.e., one falling between her parents' Holocaust sorrows and the American pleasures of her children's lives. Rosenwein's writings exemplify the pleasures of reading journalistic columns dealing with daily matters that touch on universals.]]>
Before her life was cut short by cancer at age 42 in 2003, Modern Orthodox writer and editor Rosenwein had been a beloved columnist for seven years for the New York Jewish Week, reflecting once a month on child-rearing, careers, love, holiness and Jewish tradition.]]>
With equal parts humor and heartache leaping from the page in the columns written after her cancer diagnosis, Rosenwein deals with aging parents, challenging modern schedules, timeless holy days and the joys of raising her three children. The columns address the quotidian concerns of a suburban Jewish family as well as more global issues: the fear and sadness after 9/11 and the sense of anxiety that some American Jews have about Israel.
Sometimes, the rough thematic order of the short essays is distracting, as readers are expected to jump forward and then backward in time—her daughter is four, then a newborn. Since the essays are so heavily autobiographical, a chronological order would have better suited the collection.
Still, this is a treasure trove of wisdom from one of American Judaism's most beloved and lamented voices. Rosenwein's husband, Barry Lichtenberg, provides a touching afterword, and novelist Tova Mirvis (a former intern of hers) the foreword.
Dorothy, it turns out, was a long-time friend and supporter of Amnesty International USA, where she served on AIUSA's Executive Director Leadership Council since 1996.
Appropriately enough, you can now buy her book and support Amnesty International at the same time, thanks to the magic of Amazon affiliate programs.
At Ben Yehuda Press, we're honored to be able to help Amnesty in this way. So check out the book on the Amnesty web site.
The topic is "Kol She Omar David Hatah Eino Eleh To'eh:" Rabbinic perspectives on the David and Bat-Sheva Narratives.
The shiur will take place on Sunday, June 24th at Rinat Yisrael, 389 West Englewood Avenue in Teaneck, NJ, between Mincha at 8pm, and Maariv at 9:15pm.
The shiur, in Hebrew, is free and open to the public.
For Ben Yehuda Press the shiur celebrates this year's publication of the Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Tanakh Companion to the Book of Samuel.
]]>kind of like Russian Ark meets "Shalom in the Home" meets that part in "The Sopranos" where Meadow can't parallel park.But why take some blog's word for it? Watch for yourself:
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Rabbi Shefa Gold’s new book, Torah Journeys, is a trip. It’s not a trip through the scenic byways of northern New Mexico, or along Route 66. It is a journey along an ancient and venerable Jewish pathway of spiritual and personal discovery.]]>What makes it so special is that it takes the difficult and often obscure, and makes it accessible, and in so doing opens our hearts, and speaks to our yearning soul.
Our tradition teaches us that it is our responsibility to study Torah daily, and prescribes a portion of Torah for every week of the calendar year. For many contemporary Jews, observing that Mitzvah can be challenging, partly because some portions are dense and difficult to understand, and partly because many of us have limited Hebrew skills, or lack the scholarly skills needed to reach into these ancient texts and decode their meaning.
Another aspect of the challenge is that, for many of us, the chapters of rules, or the counting and naming of Tribes, or the descriptions of Temple rituals is arcane at best, and appears irrelevant to our current lives.
Torah Journeys offers a threefold way of approaching each Torah portion: What is the blessing of this chapter? What is its spiritual challenge? And then, a suggested technique to practice coming to understand ourselves in relationship to the wisdom of this section of Torah.
That seems like a tall order, but it is done simply, with compassion and a great deal of psychological awareness of issues that hold the attention of contemporary seekers of spiritual awareness.
I recommend Judith Abrams’s “Torah and Company” as a way to spice up the talk at the Sabbath table. It provides a good way to continue the ancient Jewish tradition of making the meal into a time for nourishing the soul and mind as well as feeding the body.
Judith Abrams’s book is geared to a general audience. She uses a very simple recipe: one part Torah, two parts classic Jewish texts that expound upon the Torah, and three parts thought provoking questions that make you think about what are the implications of this Torah passage for our lives today. Stir them up together and you have the makings of a lively discussion.
Let me give you just one sample to whet your appetite.
In the sedra of Ekev, the Torah commands that we give thanks to God after each meal.
That seems clear enough, but now she shares two passages from Rabbinic Literature with us that are based on this passage. The first is the passage from the Mishna that says that women, children and slaves are not counted towards the three that are needed to recite the invitation to the grace after meals.
What? I can already hear some of the people at the table getting indigestion and demanding to know why women are excluded. The Sages seem to consider these three groups as on the borderline, not quite in, not quite out, of the religious order.
She says: before you decide whether to swallow that idea or not, ask yourself this question: who is in your group and who is out, and what are the determining factors that you use in making this decision?
By the time you finish discussing that question, you will surely have finished the appetizer and the soup. And now Judith Abrahams shares a little known midrash that is bound to surprise the people at the table.
She cites a passage in the Talmud that says that when the Messiah comes, there will be a great feast. And at the end of the meal, God will look around for someone to lead the Grace After Meals. Abraham will decline the honor, because he gave birth to one good child and one wicked child, and so he does not feel worthy. Isaac will decline for the same reason. Jacob will decline the honor because he married two sisters, something that the Torah later forbid. Moses and Joshua will decline the honor too, each because of a shortcoming in their lives. And then David will come forward and volunteer.
Judith Abrams says that when she first read this midrash, her jaw dropped in surprise. How can David---who committed adultery and murder---outrank Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Moses and Joshua? And the answer she gives is that they suffered from low self esteem and therefore felt themselves unworthy of the honor, whereas David had no such problem.
I am sure that the discussion of what low self esteem can do to us, and of how it can keep us from enjoying life and from accepting honors will go on at least through dessert and maybe even longer. And if you have kids in your house who are struggling with a low self image, this discussion will not only enlighten the family about an ancient midrash but will help the family understand and deal with a real issue in the lives of teenagers today.
I recommend Judith Abrams’s “Torah and Company” as a way to spice up the talk at the Sabbath table. It provides a good way to continue the ancient Jewish tradition of making the meal into a time for nourishing the soul and mind as well as feeding the body.
Rabbi Jack Riemer resides in Boca Raton, Fla.
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