Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. 2008, Alfred Knopf. Faust describes and analyzes how Americans dealt with the staggering carnage during the Civil War. How did they mourn, honor sacrifice, and support grieving families? Anyone who feels sentimental about war or its sacrifices should read this book.
Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn, Jews and the Civil War: A Reader. NYU Press 2010. Twenty essays on Jewish personalities (Eugenia Phillips Levy, Judah Benjamin, Alfred Mordecai, and Isaac M. Wise) and their lives during the conflagration. Excellent essays inluding such topics as General Grant's Order number 11 which "cleansed" Jews from the Tennesee district and surrounding regions, the extent to which Jews participated in the slave trade, Jewish slaveholders, Rabbinic stands on slavery, and Jews and the Abolitionist movement.
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I made a New Year’s Resolution to try and read through some of the unread books on my bookshelf, and so this month I have been reading a wonderful book by Irwin Kula called Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life. In this book, filled with both rabbinical insights and personal stories—my favorite combination-- Kula reminds us that the moment of arrival, of perfection, that we are all striving for, does not exist. Pointing to the stories of our biblical ancestors, Kula reminds us that their characters were not perfect, nor were their lives easy. Instead of giving us the answers, Kula argues, Judaism teaches us to live in the questions, and find God even in the messy parts of our lives.
A recent fascination of mine has been the Reform movement’s rigidity on the rite of circumcision. I’m often asked to explain and defend our sometimes stubborn adherence to this rite, and so I wanted to know more about its origins and its meaning. I have been reading Lawrence Hoffman’s Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. In it, Hoffman explains the ancient rabbis’ perceptions about the significance of blood—whether in the context of circumcision for men, or menstruation for women—and how this shaped the rituals of circumcision that many of us still follow today.
Each year, I pick a book on the weekly Torah portions to read each week, to add a layer to my understanding of the parasha. This year, that book is The Bedside Torah: Wisdom, Vision, and Dreams by Bradley Artson and Miriyam Glazer. This is a very readable, user-friendly approach to the weekly Torah portion. Each chapter has a brief summary of the major events of the parasha, followed by two or three short reflections on the theme of that portion. This is an interesting and manageable book for someone trying to get into the habit of studying the weekly Torah portion. Also, Bradley Artson will be speaking at Beth El later this month!
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Thinking about Leadership by Nannerl O. Keohane. Leadership is essential to collective human endeavor, from setting and accomplishing goals for a neighborhood block association, to running a Fortune 500 company, to mobilizing the energies of a nation. Nannerl Keohane draws on her experience as the first woman president of Duke University and former president of Wellesley College, as well as her expertise as a leading political theorist, to deepen our understanding of what leaders do, how and why they do it, and the pitfalls and challenges they face.
Jackdaws, by Ken Follett, a novel about the French Resistance during Nazi occupation.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore
A book about where I grew up:
Rochdale Village, New York City?s Great Experiment in Integrated Housing, by Peter Eisenstadt. From 1963 to 1965 roughly 6,000 families moved into Rochdale Village, at the time the worlds largest housing cooperative, in southeastern Queens County. The moderate-income cooperative attracted families from a diverse background, white and black, to what was a predominantly black neighborhood. In its early years, Rochdale was widely hailed as one of the few successful large-scale efforts to create an integrated community in New York City or, for that matter, anywhere in the United States.
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One Hundred Great Jewish Books: Three Millenia of Jewish Conversation, by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. I picked this up at the URJ Biennial in December, 2011. It's Rabbi Hoffman's hand-selected list of Jewish books, everything from the Babylonian Talmud to Bee Season. Books are grouped according to theme, such as rabbinic texts, books about the American Jewish experience, the Holocaust, and others. It is a fascinating read -- and an easy read, because of Hoffman's conversational writing style and the brevity of each book review. It's easy to pick this up, read one or two reviews, and put it back down again. It's certainly swelled my "reserve" list of library books to check out!
Kveller: A Jewish Twist on Parenting (an online magazine)
A Jewish take on parenting and kids. In a world of "mommy blogs", this one has an often refreshing Jewish perspective that applies to my life.
eJewishPhilanthropy.com (an online resource)
This website is helpful in my work; the articles are about trends in engagement, affiliation, and giving to Jewish organizations.
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The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture and Religion by Xu Xin. (KTAV Publishing House, 2003)
A small Jewish community lived in Kaifeng (a regional capital) from roughly 960 until the late nineteenth century. The author surmises that the ancestors of the Kaifeng Jews came from Persia along the Silk Road. They were known by their Han Chinese neighbors as Tiaojinjiao, meaning the religion which removes the sinew (a reference to Kashrut). The book opens with the following illustration of the deep isolation of this community. Upon meeting a visiting Jesuit priest in the early 1600’s, an elderly rabbi mistook the priest for a Jew that had “gone astray,” and offered that if the priest would re-learn the customs and abstain from eating pork, he would install him as his successor. The rabbi seemed to have no knowledge of Christianity or Western religious traditions. The book goes into fascinating detail about the culture, religious rituals, communal relations, clothing styles, language, and diet of this unique group of Jews who maintained their religious and ethnic identity for centuries.
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