4th Annual
Ben
Yehuda Press
Labor Day BBQ and Literary Hootenanny
The Hootenanny will take place at the Ben Yehuda Press home office, 430 Kensington Rd., Teaneck, New Jersey at 1 p.m. on Labor Day, Monday, September 1st.. The Ben Yehuda Press Hootenanny is free and open to the general public.
Three years later, the independent publishing house boasts 17 titles in print. Works range from fiction to poetry, to Torah study, Jewish scholarship, memoir and biography. Ben Yehuda Press authors include Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis, as well as socialists, Yiddishists, Kabbalists, agnostics, atheists and rabble rousers.
Just as a Hootenanny throws voices together―bringing together the folk songs and the music of America―the Ben Yehuda Press Literary Hootenanny brings forth the song of American Jewish Creativity. Rabbis, Atheists, Scholars and Poets will channel for us to hear
• the voice of two Jewish bloggers setting the record straight about God in this election season
• the voices of a talented couple who channel the relationship between God and Moses onto a comic book page
• the voice of one who charts a path to understand the Kabbalah
• and a master storyteller channeling the voice of the shtetl.
FEATURED BOOKS
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Larry Yudelson and Yori Yanover: will read/debate from their book: How Would God Really Vote: A Jewish Rebuttal to David Klinghoffer's Conservative Polemic Just in time for the November elections! In his book, How would God Vote?: Why the Bible Commands you to be a Conservative, Klinghoffer claims to lay out a traditional Jewish theology to embrace conservative values like a ban on divorce, restrictions on birth contraol, and the idea that smoking is good for you. We hope we have succeeded in conveying a sense that Torah (understood broadly to include rabbinic commentary) is not a conservative manifest. (Since Mr. Klinghoffer, who lives in Seattle, cannot be here to state his opinions, his part in the debate will be played by a sock puppet reading from his book.)
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Yori Yanover, editor of Grand Street News, will read selections from the long awaited, newly published: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption -- She's the clone of the late, great Cabalist of Brooklyn. She's gorgeous, and she's here to save the world. The question is, will her friends, an ancient Rabbi mystic, a spec-op policeman and an African warrior witch be able to keep her in one piece until she does?
- Sharon Rosenzweig and Aaron Freeman , will discuss their upcoming THE COMIC TORAH: REIMAGINING THE VERY GOOD BOOK, it's the Torah -- the take is a comic look, the format is a comic book, from the minds of Chicago artist, Sharon Rosenzweig and stand up comic, Aaron Freeman.
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Louis Rieser will read from The Hillel Narratives: What do Talmudic Tales of the First Rabbi Teach us about our Faith?, a work that Jacob Neusner called, "A fresh and engaging reading of the rabbinic biography. Louis Rieser has reopened the rabbinic stories and made them interesting again."
- Roslyn Bresnick-Perry, award-winning storyteller, will tell some tales from her upcoming book, I Loved My Mother on Saturdays, a collection of heartwarming stories that stretch from life in the shtetl, to the Bronx, to Florida.
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Isidore Century will read from his book, Poems From the Coffee House of Jewish Dreamers. Mr. Century writes about rediscovering his past through small awakenings: forgiveness, redemption, kindness and justice. There is also a poem for each weekly Torah Portion.
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Rabbi David Ornstein, will discuss his delightful children's book to be published by Ben Yehuda Press, Four Bright Lights: A Hanukkah Tale of the Underground Railroad.
Rabbi DovBer Pinson, scholar, author, thinker, and spiritual teacher, will read from his Fall 2008 title, 32 Paths: A Concise Guide to Awakening through Kabbalah.
- Adam Simms, translator of Rober Badinter's Free and Equal: Emancipating France's Jews, 1789-1791. Published in France in 1989, and now translated for the first time into English, Free and Equal recounts the interplay of the French Revolution and the emancipation of France's Jews. The author, Robert Badinter, was France's Minister of Justice and head of its Constitutional Court. He is currently a member of the French Senate, and lives in Paris. Adam Simms is a writer, editor and translator. He has served on the staff of the American Jewish Committee and United Israel Appeal, among others.
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Robert Jacobson will be reading from A Song of Social Significance, his mother Dorothy Epstein's memoir of her childhood in an immigrant household and her career organizing the labor movement.