Jewish Literary Links
Posts Tagged‘Jewish-American history’
Words of the Week
I’m going to switch things up a bit this week. Instead of excerpting something that I’ve read lately, I’ll recommend that you “attend” two terrific lectures that are now available via video recording.
The source for each, in this case, is the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University.
(more…)Words of the Week
“Jewish history and Black history are actually replete with flawed heroes, dating all the way back, in Jewish history, to the biblical patriarch Jacob, who deceived his father, stole his brother’s birthright, and played favorites among his children. In America, there have been Black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois who reviled Jews, and Jewish leaders, like Mordecai Noah, who reviled Blacks. Perfect heroes, for obvious reasons, have been few and far between. Indeed, the more closely we probe, the more flaws even the greatest of our heroes inevitably display.”
Source: Jonathan Sarna, “Woodrow Wilson Was a Hero to Jews: What Should We Do with His Racism?” (Forward)
My Year in Jewish Books (2019 edition)
For a number of years, I have found it useful (and kind of fun) to look back on “my year in Jewish books.” Here’s my attempt to do something similar for 2019.
Reviewing my reading for the past year, I can see that, again, I do not and would not ever limit my reading to “Jewish books” exclusively. (By the way, in case you haven’t heard me say this before, I define “Jewish books” in the simplest terms as books with substantive Jewish content. In my view, non-Jewish authors can write “Jewish books.” And Jewish authors can write books that don’t strike me as overtly Jewish. Occasionally, something may pop up that doesn’t seem to fit this description. I can be flexible.)
But this year, as usual, I did read quite a few books that fall within the “Jewish book” category. And, as an advocate for Jewish literature, I’m proud of that.
What you won’t find here: My own book (Birthright: Poems), which you can be sure I read this year! Nor will you find all the works that I reread in preparation for the course on 21st-Century Jewish Literature that I taught at Baruch College this past fall.
With all of that in place, I’m happy to present the list, complete with annotations that I’ve updated slightly since first writing them as “brief book reviews” immediately after finishing each book:
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