Notes from Around the Web: Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

  • The National Jewish Book Award winners were announced this week. As were the 2011 Sydney Taylor Book Award honorees.
  • This past Wednesday, the Jewish Book Council hosted its latest Twitter Book Club chat online. Up for discussion: Elizabeth Rosner’s Blue Nude. It was a busy day at the office for me, but I was able to drop in during the lunchtime chat. Want to know what was discussed? Read the transcript.
  • Recognizing authors’ names in Josh Lambert’s Tablet books column is getting to be a habit! This week, I was happy to see mentioned Ida Hattemer-Higgins, whose debut novel, The History of History, “features an American Jewish woman in Berlin with a hole in her memory and a growing fascination with the wife of Joseph Goebbels, living in a city in which the legacy of Nazism insinuates itself in magically concrete ways.” I’ve known about this book for several years through the author’s posts on the Poets & Writers Speakeasy online discussion forum, where I have been known to chime in, too.
  • Speaking of familiar names, imagine how excited I was to see a certain short-story collection headlining the weekly Jewish Book Council newsletter as “recommended reading”!
  • Jewish Ideas Daily let us in on Ladino.
  • We lost musical genius and spiritual leader Debbie Friedman this week. Among the many tributes, with reflections on Debbie’s contributions to the experience of Jewish prayer, is this lovely one, from Linda K. Wertheimer.
  • Coming soon: the Jerusalem Season of Culture.
  • Shabbat shalom.