Erika Dreifus

The My Machberet blog is proud to serve as September 2021 host for the Jewish Book Carnival, a monthly event where those who cover Jewish books online “can meet, read, and comment on each others’ posts.” Organized by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL), the Carnival travels around and is hosted on a different participant’s site on the 15th of each month.

Herewith, the first Jewish Book Carnival for the new Jewish year 5782.

• At Life Is Like a Library, it’s time for the annual Elul book review, starting off with The 40 Day Challenge (Kodesh Press, 2021), a new book by Rabbi Mark Wildes that, according to rapper Nissim Black, “will thaw you out and heat you up.”
• At The Whole Megillah, Barbara Krasner interviews author Bonnie Lindauer and illustrator Sofia Moore about their new picture book Hannah G. Moore Dared to Make a Difference (Kar-Ben, 2021).
• “I hoped that my book could offer a fresh example of Hitler’s insatiable quest for revenge.” Author Ann Bausum talks about her new book Ensnared in the Wolf’s Lair (National Geographic Kids, 2021) on gilagreenwrites. 
• On Mirta’s Jewish Historical Fiction blog, award-winning children’s author Shirley Reva Vernick stops by to chat.
• A Jewish Grandmother enjoyed reading (and reviews) Evonne Marzouk’s YA novel The Prophetess (Bancroft Press, 2019), about an ordinary American Jewish teenager who discovers that she has a special gift and how she grows into it. 
• With some inspiration from Bruce Feiler, Ann Koffsky reflects on “Storytime.”
• Jill at Rhapsody in Books reviews The Sisters of the Wood by Rena Rossner (Redhook, 2018).  This book about Jewish resilience during the anti-Semitic pogroms in Moldova in the late 1800s/early 1900s features two sisters as narrators and is told in the form of a fairy tale.
• The Book of Life has an interview about Little Free Libraries and the inclusion of Jewish titles in their diversity initiative Read In Color. 
• And last, but not least—may I recommend to you last week’s Jewish Lit Links post right here on the My Machberet blog? I’m especially proud of my Moment magazine review of Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews: Dispatches from a Haunted Present (W.W. Norton, 2021) which you’ll find linked there.

Many thanks to all of the contributors to this month’s Carnival—and g’mar chatima tova.