In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War by Tobias Wolff is certainly a worthy collection of non-fiction stories about the Vietnam War. Wolff captures the stupidity and waste of war – especially in the context of Vietnam, which as wars go, was worse than most. That said, some of the episodes he tells here feel “puffed up” to be humorous. These moments soil an otherwise powerful collection.
Has Archaeology Buried the Bible? is an excellent overview of biblical archeology, the historicity of the bible (or the lack), and what we can and cannot know about this subject, by William G. Dever. This is the same book as his other works on the topic, for a general audience. But if this is your first time on this topic, or if you have been away from it so sometime, this is a great book.
In War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, author Chris Hedges explores the utter havoc war causes, but also the appeal of war (for young men seeking) to prove themselves. We often forget that the urge to fight a war is an attempt to find meaning. The simple necessity of staying alive and killing people is loaded with meaning. Despite the title, Hedges shows how the long-term effect of war leads to nothing but damage and loss in a micro and macro sense. War is based on lies and confusion. The only way to get human beings to voluntarily kill each other is through deception. Everyone involved in war eventually reaches this sobering conclusion.
How the Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book by Liel Leibovitz lives up to its title. The author contextualizes the Talmud in novel ways. The author starts each chapter with some modern story that seems not connected to Talmud. But it does,, every time, in many successful ways. If you want a book that makes Talmud relevant, here it is.
Despite its salacious title, While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness, is not salacious. Unlike most true crime, especially featuring a sexual crime against women, this book makes great efforts to humanize everyone – including the perpetrator. This book is about a terrible crime, but also about a system that is unable to treat the mentally ill. This book transcends its genre to become an important statement about the price we all pay for a broken healthcare system.
I was in my late teens and early 20s when the Soviet Union fell, and I was too distracted by my life to pay more than fleeting attention to the fall of both the Iron Curtain and the USSR. For me, The Future Is History How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen is a great way to fill in the gaps. In a certain sense, it should not surprise us that Russia would become totalitarian in the decades following the collapse of the USSR. What other kind of society and political system had Russians ever known?
But at the same time, it is profoundly disheartening to read Gessen’s book. How can a people turn their society, culture, and political system around? It almost seems impossible. Gessen’s book hammers on the inevitable: will Russians always live and be a party to their doom?
Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress by Leonard Greenspoon is an interesting exploration of the grand and minute history of Bible translations conducted by Jews from the Septuagint to the New JPS translation in the 1980s. Truthfully, unless you come to this book with a healthy interest in biblical tradition, this is not a good way to spend your time. But if you have such an appetite, Greenspoon will satisfy it with his expansive scholarship on remote corners of the Jewish linguistic world.
Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community by Charles London is the author's search for the meaning of Jewish identity. London is an interesting choice for this mission. As of the writing of this book in 2009, he knew little about “synagogue” Judaism – and he visits synagogues in diverse places such as Arkansas, Teheran, and Burma. Despite this (or because of it) he is a deft guide, and as a gay man, he brings even more to the table of “intersectionality” than we would otherwise expect.
What They Didn't Burn: Uncovering My Father's Holocaust by Mel Laytner shows how difficult it is to really know a loved one, in this case a father. Laytner’s father survived the Holocaust, and while not completely silent about his experiences to his son, so many of his stories were simply part and parcel of his father’s life, that Laytner never dug deep.
With his father’s death, Laytner started to find out details though documents, interviewing witnesses, and combing through archives. The vision of his long gone father is by some measures clearer, and by others, far murkier. But his search makes for fascinating reading.
All of Craig Childs’ prodigious gifts are on display in his The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters
in the Wild. I am not even an animal
person (I am more drawn to plants) but Childs pulled me into the life of wild
animals with an immediacy that is difficult to explain. Read this book, and you will get as close to
inside the life of animals as (humanly) possible.
Tales of a Mad Yogi: The Life and Wild Wisdom of Drukpa Kunley by Elizabeth Monson, is supposed to be the story of an antinomian Tibetan Buddhist monk born in 1455. The problem is, he was not that wild. Perhaps it is my vantage point. Would I be shocked if I knew more about Buddhist theology and monkish practices. He is supposed to have drunk to excess and had forbidden sex with women. He does, but it's not crazy sex. It just seems like serial monogamy. Nor does he drink too much. Most of this collection involves explicating dharma in long speeches! Kunley is no Diogenes
James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel is the book everyone is reading this summer (2024) and it’s not hard to see why. This is a compelling work that is both readily accessible to wide audience and also has deep messages about the state of our society. For me, McBride falls short in certain areas. A character reads the Talmud and the narrative keeps explaining that it is in Hebrew. That is not technically correct. It is in Aramaic and Hebrew, and sometime a curious mix of the two. This chipped away at me. Also, the water sub-plot seems strangely misplaced until it is used near the end. It is confusing and is deployed for a specific use only. It called the entire structure of the novel into question; it exposed the framework of the author’s choices to me for criticism. So, this is an accomplished but by no means perfect novel.
Mafia Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob by Gil Reavill recounts the famous, or infamous Mafia meeting at the home of Joseph "Joe the Barber" Barbara, in Apalachin, New York, on November 14, 1957. This is an interesting subject, but it does not seem to lend itself to a book-length treatment. This topic is more suited for a semi-long magazine article. There is not enough subject matter here to warrant a book. But if the history of the summit, and its ramifications is your area of interest, you won’t find this flawed!
A Cure for Sorrow (Sori HaYagon): A Rabbinic Guide to Suffering by Shem-Tov Falaquera is the closest Judaism will come to offering a consistent stoic philosophy. Unfortunately, the quality of this treatise is not very high. For instance, it certainly comes nowhere near the soaring heights of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. As far as I know not even the groundwork has been prepared for a stoic philosophical take on Judaism. We must all wait for one.
Our Immoral Soul: A Manifesto of Spiritual Disobedience by Rabbi Nilton Bonde is certainly interesting to read, if not confusing. Rabbi Bonde pulls a Nietzsche-type inversion in these writings: the soul impedes our progress, while the body breaks boundaries and moves us forward. That is an interesting premise, and worthy of exploration. But these essays certainly need to do more to advance this thesis. They are opaque and clumsily worded.
The subtitle of A Life Worth Living: Meditations on God, Death and Stoicism by William Ferraiolo is not very clear, it turns out. I thought this work would be exclusively about how to practice Stoic philosophy here and now; and certainly, some of it is. But by and large, the author moves to other topics, like a philosophical exploration of No Country for Old Men, and a valiant effort to revive some kind of concept of creation by design. And interesting book, but not quite what I thought it would be.
The Golden Thread: The Cold War and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjöld by Ravi Somaiya is a who-done-it that does not live up to its promise. We learn very little. Either Hammarskjöld's plane crashed due to pilot error or some technical malfunction, or it was shot down from the ground or the air (either accidentally or purposeful) but we do not know and never will know. And this book won’t give you a compelling reason to believe any scenario. Not a captivating read.
Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito explores some ideas that are interesting but would never work. It does make a great deal of sense that to reverse the climate crisis, and other crises as well, we should all do with less and slow down our economies. For Saito, the answers are found in theories Marx jotted down at the end of his life. Now Marxists are picking apart their founder’s death bed marginalia for new articles of faith to rescue moribund Communism. Saito wants a type of grassroots commune/communism to spring up in various parts of the world. This seems like a fairy tale: for this to work, we would need to be different creatures.
The Land of Truth: Talmud Tales, Timeless Teachings by Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, is an exciting collection of stories drawn from the Talmud and given free-standing life. These are great stories indeed: one of the most timely in this volume is if a rabbinical court has the right to bring a king of Israel before them and force him to testify. The answer is equivocal, but in the end, it seems to be no; a king is too exalted to be forced before a rabbinical court. There is a conflict between power and justice that cannot be reconciled. This is a fascinating conclusion for a rabbinical source! This, and other stories like it, make this book well worth reading.
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler is a somewhat interesting, if a bit overwrought account of drug use in the German military in WWII, and among Hitler and his close circle. But there are problems.
People (as of this writing July 2024) are constantly talking about how Germany invited meth; this isn’t true, Japanese scientists invited the drug. The German military certainly used it to give their soldiers extra pep - that case is clearly laid out in the book.
The problem with this book is that it makes drug use central to the disease that was National Socialism. It was Nazi ideology and actions that created a world war and genocide, not pills. Drug use was the least of Nazi Germany's sins.
The Quest for the Historical Israel: Archaeology and the History of Early Israel (Archaeology and Biblical Studies) by Israel Finkelstein charts a middle course between biblical maximalist and minimalist views, the two poles of reference for exploring the entity known as Israel in the bible.
Maximalists hold that most (or at least most of) the bible can be collaborated with external sources and archeology. Therefore, the Bible is of use as an historical document. For minimalists, what we can know of Israel in the bible is not historically verifiable – neither in external sources nor from archaeology.
Finkelstein sees the bible as having some merit as a document with some historical merit – if it is scrutinized. For example, he considers the Book of Judges as having some authenticity of the condition of Israel in its early phases – but only as filtered through other traditions and sources. He takes a middle course.
In the end, we will never know how Israel came about. Ancient Israel, who are so important now, simply did not merit much attention by anyone in the Iron Age. Finkelstein helps us navigate the important issues of Israel’s beginnings as best as we can with what we have at hand.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for me is the quintessential 80s book. The book was given to me by a Cuban friend in 1990. The young woman who would become my wife also had a copy. In thirty years I have tried again and again to pick it up and finish it. I always failed. I finally read it to the end – mostly – I skimmed material near the middle – and now I know why I never carried this book over the end zone.
Structurally, I find and always found the book difficult to follow. It does not help that the characters are so indistinguishable from each other – it is difficult to plant one’s feet firmly in the flow of the story. I’ve read hundreds (really thousands) of books since I started reading seriously when I was sixteen. This is just one of those novels that never clicked – or was meant to click.
So, I am glad I put this to bed.
The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson is an engaging popular history of the rise and expansion of violent anarchism at the turn of the century. With the invention of dynamite, terrorism became economical, and one person with a bomb could cause a great deal of death and destruction.
Johnson takes us on a voyage that would be repeated many
times in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the
rise of terror organizations, the state would increasingly exercise more
authority over its citizens. Terrorism
and the Surveillance State, Johnson shows us, were born at the same time.
The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, by Thant Myint-U, is an insider view of the contemporary history of Burma. The author was a child when his family left Burma, but when the military rule of the country appear to loosen up a decade ago, he returned. He acted as an advisor of sorts for the government during this more relaxed time.
Thant Myint-U is a knowledgeable guide of Burma’s post-colonial woes. This book will give you insights into the challenges the country faces – and faces anew as the military rule of Burma has returned (after the publication of this book). As of this writing, various rebel factions based along ethnic identities are fighting the military government for a “federal” system to adequately represent Burma's diversity.
Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism by Molly M. Zahn is an interesting, somewhat complex, analysis of how biblical and non-biblical books may have been written and re-written in antiquity. This book is not for the strict novice: not an introductory text, but certainly, if you have some background about the issues involved in the transmission of ancient texts you will get a great deal out of this book. Zahn’s broad contribution here is to show how modern and artificial the separation of texts from the Second Temple period is; and how canonical and non-canonical texts conversed.
More: A Memoir of Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter is a brave memoir to write, and as Winter’s book shows, she and her husband are brave people – of a kind. I should say that adult couples with equal power relationships (does that even exist?) should communicate together on the parameters of what their union means to them. That includes sex, of course. If they decide to have an open relationship, than that is their right.
That said, it is not for me! Winter and her husband crave emotional and physical relationships with others – but I don’t get any sense that they are any happier than other people with a closed marriage. In fact, bringing more people into the sexual/emotional scene seems to not only solve little in the way of marital problems, but expands them.
In the end, though, it is their choice, and we have a choice to read about their experience or not.
Journey to Heaven: Exploring Jewish Views of the Afterlife by
Leila Leah Bronner, is an excellent overview of this history of Jewish notions
of life after death. There have been
very many, spanning across history, and Bronner is a very capable guide.
All too often Jews, and others, know very little about
Jewish versions of the afterlife.
Reading Bronner’s book will fix this deficiency.
Jewish Concepts of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction by Benjamin D Sommer is an interesting overview of a broad subject: how individual Jews, and sometimes broader categories like Rabbinical Jews or modern Israeli writers, have interpreted the Tanakh. The answer is, of course, in nearly every way imaginable; this kind of openness of discourse and discussion is fitting for a book that has been around in some form or another for at least 2000 years. Sommer's work provides a base that will satisfy a broad interest.
The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin is simply a classic by this author. These short stories, some novella length, deal with her typical fixations in an entertaining and intelligent mode. I especially enjoy the stories that revolve around gender, race, and the sociology and/or anthropology she creates to study the worlds she generates.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson is a fascinating book that takes on the issue of race or ethnicity in America and molds it into the paradigm of caste. According to Wilkerson, most American ills can be traced to our devotion to caste, and the constantly changing nature of caste: the ruling white male elite in the United States has proven that they maintain and mold caste, and their superiority within it, since the European colonization of North America.
I am usually skeptical of meta-theories and one-answer-to-all problem scenarios, but it is hard to find fault with Wilkerson’s historical reasoning. It makes more sense than racial theories of subjugation, in most cases.
Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt is a fascinating exploration of a question that does not occupy many people – and seems remote: why is there something, rather than nothing? This is a remote concern: answering this question will not save the earth from the damage we have done or feed hungry people, but there is a place for such questions in human life. Why are we here? Why does the world exist? Is there a purpose to our existence – and if so, how can we find it, and how do we even frame that question to get a meaningful answer?
Just take one idea from this book. The Big Bang happened around 14 billion years ago. That makes the universe not very old at all. What was before it? How does that make us related to time, the creation of the universe, and the “stuff” of the universe?
In this book, Holt takes on questions like these, and dozens of others. All of this he does in an approachable manner.
Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler is a detailed and well-documented history of the attempted (and sometimes effective) eradication of Native American tribes east of the Mississippi River before the Civil War.
While the book focuses on the attempts of the US government and its citizens to force Native communities from their land, and often eradicate them as a people, this book highlights the successful attempts by many native groups to maintain their identity, power, and agency in the face of brutal dislocation. They survived genocide through a combination of strategic alliances, guerilla warfare, and sometimes the sheer luck of patterns of American settlement. Ultimately, this is not so much the story of victims as survivors.
Shalom, Eric
Well, I asked you not to answer my email, but you did (I knew you would, but I had to ask) – mercifully, your email was very short. But still disturbing! Do I have to drive to T-burg and take your shoelaces, belt, and the knives in your kitchen and hide them? Seriously man, give me a call – immediately, if what you wrote is the true state of things.
Barring that, let's get right back to 3, and call it, for the sake of clarity, 3b
3b. You do and have hated the concept of the Third Way, but if you look at this closely, there is no other option for Jews like you and me. We are Americans – neither radically pro-Zionist nor anti-Zionist. We hardly think of the Jewish state at all! We look on with horror as events unfold there, as the moral beings we are – but we are people caught in the middle. But do we look on with any special horror? Right now ethnic cleansing, murder, and sexual crimes (mass rapes) are happening in Sudan. But no one pays attention. Where is their special horror? Why is this catastrophe a lower moral priority for American Jews than Israel Palestine? Ask yourself that. But on to the main topic: Why are we in the middle? We belong to the first, or second-largest Jewish community in the world (depending on who is counting and how). And despite our numbers and influence, look at what the American Jew has become. Either you are a cheerleader for Israel – and that is your primary Jewish Identity. Or you find the Jewish state, and its actions, and even the fact that one exists, morally wrong, or repugnant. But why must we be in either of those camps? I know this dichotomy causes you much pain. Let’s examine it a bit.
3c. If you are in either camp, you are bound to Zionism – either for or against. You tell me stories of the minyan you belong to, and a great deal of energy is spent on justice for the Palestinians. OK. That is noble. But on the other side of town are the Jews you talk about (not at your shul) who hang their primary identity as Jews as Zionists. Some, not all, do not consider anti-Zionist Jews, Jews, or more graciously, but still a nasty, mean-spirit, self-hating Jews. As you know, I reject the entire structure. From A-Z. That is why we need the Third Way. We need to create an authentic progressive Judaism (really Judaisms) right here in America. We need our way. A Third Way. Why should we be tethered to a place we have never been? Why must be Jews in the very place where our shoes touch the ground.
4. Let’s tackle four tomorrow. It is getting late. Well, Sunday or Monday, after Shabbos. What will I say: what does the Third Way look like? Well, preview [!] we are already doing it, but not calling it such. So, I will leave you with that. But I do want you to rest on the day of rest. And I don’t just mean just your body – I mean your heart and soul. The way you are heading now, well, it is not good my friend. I say this out of the deep love I have for you. You are so kind and generous… please treat yourself the same way! Love & Shalom: JD
Shalom Eric,
Today is a perfect day to start this, Eric, as today is a day that only exists once every four years. What better way to throw useless words into the empty air than on a day that hardly ever exists! So let’s get into it.
We’ve been talking, texting, and even calling each other, but I still worry about your state of mind. I keep going over your words in my head, thinking, no, no, he should not think that, it is harming him. Why does he not think this. Or this. If he did, he would be in less pain. He wouldn’t sound so close to the edge. So I need to be painfully honest here. We’ve know each other for twenty-five years… if I can’t tell you these things, than who can? So I am going to write you a series of emails. Yes, they are old-fashioned. But here I think necessary. I want my thoughts to flow, but also be structured, like an old fashioned letter. I want both, and email can do that. I’m going to number things for a while, and see how that goes.
1. First, let’s get into the Jewish Thing Again, as we call it, for what else do we always get around to eventually no matter where we start? I ask you again, abou the Jewish Thing Again, and please think about it: what kind of Jew are you? Remember what you said, an American Jews. Consider that phrase. America. Jew. American Jew. Your mother’s family came from Poland/Russian in 1890. They were not Zionists, and whatever religion they had petered out in less than a generation, and long with that, Yiddish was flushed down the toilet. What Jewish immigrant on the Lower East Side and then Brooklyn supported a family speaking Yiddish? By going to shul? You are the progeny of these people: who shed their Jewishness as if they were clothes on their backs which were on fire! You great-grandparents were no pioneers.
2. Now here you are, standing, sitting, sulking, on your windswept hill outside of Ithaca, and you worry about the Jewish Situation. I ask again, why is such a vast abstraction yours to worry about? You’ve got bigger problems friend, than to solve the problem of the Eternal Jew. You should worry about the Eternal Eric (and we both know you are not eternal, that you will die, and lately, it sounds like you wish it would come sooner rather than later. But more on that soon). I say this not to ridicule you, (HaShem forgive I should do that to you, my friend, my brother) but I am trying to do is to steer you to the course where I know you can make a difference: inhabiting that thin line where the events you can control and those you can’t stand side by side, and it is up to you to decide which is which, and which one to grasp and act, or grasp and sink. We’ve spoken of this so many times. There is no formula. You take it all case by case. I have known you for a quarter of a century, and the times you have been most grounded, most balanced, most SANE, is when you live in the zone. You change what you can… you make peace with what you can’t. When you don’t, you act crazy… really fucked in the head… and that is the point you are at right now. Fucked in the had
3. The Third Way: Yes, I am here already. Why so fast, you may ask? Because it ties to one and two above so closely, they are really one topic. One problem. And maybe one solution. You fought me viciously on the topic when we last spoke. And then the texts! Shit! But fair enough. We are all upset after October. It comes out in different ways. I forgive your cruel words. Even if you don’t ask for forgiveness (and you should, I am you BEST FRIEND); regardless, I forgive you nonetheless. So last time we spoke it was Am Israel this, Am Israel that, and when I could get a word in, and I hardly could, I asked where is this people you call Israel? This Am Israel. Is it the Chasid on the bus who looked at your jeans, bright knit kippah, and long tallit, and thought perhaps you were gay? Or that woman you study with, who constantly reminds you that Judaism has never had a feminist tradition until fifty years ago (and she is right, even when the Chasid is wrong about your sexual orientation) and makes you feel like that holder of a tradition you find abhorrent. Is this your Am Israel, you People of Israel, or really, is it something more, far more complex… yes, the Third Way I was trying to talk about. Crazy stuff. Look at the time. Let me continue tomorrow. I have to get to bed. Don’t email me back. I have more to say! I have to get to campus by 8AM for a meeting. Can you believe that crap? What kind of masochist does that, Eric? Get some rest, you look like shit. Shalom – Jake.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Papp̩ is a difficult book to quickly review. Part of this is because of the complexity of the topic Рand how fraught any historical investigation of the war that gave birth to Israel and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians inevitably becomes.
Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from the Holy Land from 1947 to 1949. This fact seems beyond dispute. Palestinians lived in large swatches of the Holy Land, and then were forced to leave. There is complexity here: some left from fear, others were forced; their homes and villages were destroyed. In the end, the country of Israel was, except for a population of Palestinians in the Galilee, largely "cleansed" of Palestinians.
Pappe presumes that the ethnical cleansing was the reason for the war and not the result of Israeli armies conquering territory. Does it matter that much? Probably not. Plan Dalet, the largest effort by the Israeli forces to capture territory, can either be seen as a military endeavor – an effort to create a contiguous Israeli territory, or primarily a mission to remove Palestinians from the Holy Land. Again, does it matter? Not very much. The result was the same. One can view Plan Dalet in two ways: the military mission as paramount, to create a continuous country, and the other as a mission to get rid of Arabs. This is Pappe’s position. He downplays Arab and Palestinian armed resistance to Israel – as if they were not much of a threat at all, except for Jordan’s Arab Legion.
It is difficult not to see this as a purely ideology view. And the numbers tell the story. The pre-state Yishuv and wartime Israel had a population of 600,000, and 6,000 died in the War of Independence. The loss of one percent of a small population is tremendous. Pappe is not interested in this. He never mentions this number.
This is an important book, that highlights the horrors of war. The twentieth century was largely the story of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and population transfers. We need a book like Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder (and his other works) that ties together the Holocaust with other genocide/transfer events in Europe. I think to truly understand the Nakba, it needs to be tied together with other such events in the twentieth century, like the Partition of India. As far as I know, that book has yet to be written.
Unlocking the Secret of
the Erev Rav: The Mixed Multitude in Jewish Kabbalah by Rivka Levy is about
a religious notion that seems to have some adherents in the “orthodox” Jewish
world. Mixed multitude, erev rav in
Hebrew, refers to people who came out of Egypt with the Israelites (who were
not Israelites). Scholars do not know exactly
who these people were and in the Torah,
they are never mentioned again.
But in later Jewish tradition they became a shadowy group
within the Jewish tradition hell bent on destroying it. Today calling someone an erev rav seems like
a way for one Jewish person to cast a shadow on another person’s Jewish credentials
because of a political or religious difference.
Needless to say, the concept of an erav rav is dangerous and
specious. Levy’s book does not overly go
into conspiratorial territory. She sees the erev rav as a distinctly Jewish problem (and not an othering issue) with a
Breslov solution. But I don’t like the
concept of the mixed multitude. We don’t
need it; we Jews are good enough at creating differences among ourselves without the idea of a shadowy cabal, but at least Levy’s treatment is humane and broad.
Afterlife: The Jewish View: Where are we headed? by Jonathan Morgenstern is a certain take on the Jewish system of the afterlife, if we say there is a system at all. Unlike Christianity, where the idea of an afterlife (can be) extraordinarily important, in Judaism, it is important but carries less weight. Most Jews, particularly secular or progressive, have little idea of speculations of Jewish life beyond death.
I don’t agree with Morgenstern’s theology or worldview, but if you want a pretty short book to give you a picture of the Jewish afterlife, this is not too bad. Just don't think it is the only one in town.
Jewish Mysticism: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Kabbalah, Merkabah Mysticism, and Ashkenazi Hasidism (Jewish Spirituality) by Mari Silva is actually one of the better introductions to Kabbalah I have read. Given the author’s (seemingly other) New Age type works, this book is surprisingly scholarly in a popular and comprehensible way. Except for the somewhat long digression about fundamentalist religions (I suppose this was written post-911) this is an excellent book to ground your Jewish mysticism.
Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza is one of the more powerful books I have read recently. This is everything a piece of art should be: a moving invocation to life and loss, an examination of the injustice in this world, especially for women at the hands of predatory men, all written in powerful and gorgeous prose.
This book is deeply sad but also hopeful. Rivera Garza has written a work that is a memorial to her long dead sister that shines brighter than any plaque or statue. By the end we, the reader, know Liliana, murdered at twenty, as if she was still her young and vibrant self; her sister brings her to life so we can love her too.
How to Read the Bible by Marc Zvi Brettler is a tour de force of the historical-critical method as applied to the Hebrew Bible. He uses the biblical texts, external sources, archeology in his exploration of this well-known, but little understood book. This is simply an excellent introduction to this particular view of the bible text, for both beginners and more advanced readers interested in this topic.
I can see why The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold was the gigantic hit that it was: it captures the essence of the seventies when fears of missing/murdered children began to enter the zeitgeist. The ghost theme was worn out by the time this book was published, but Sebold largely pulls it off- and it is necessary for the story. The ghost entering the friend part and the sex scene was excessive; this is particularly the case in a novel about sexual violence. But I did enjoy that-no-real solution to Susie’s murder – people learn to live with her passing as a memory and a presence.
Sudan: The Failure and Division of an African State by Richard Cockett details the modern history of Sudan, and its rapid descent into a malfunctioning state. It is hard to summarize quickly why Sudan is failing; many factors have come together to create this situation.
The classic colonization borders are at work: the country has an elite “Arab” population that sees itself as the natural rulering class of Sudan’s other Muslim and “African” groups in the west Darfur and along the coast. There is no sense of being Sudanese in the nationalist sense of the word.
Cockett does an excellent job showing the people and players in this complex geo-political mess. The book was finished in 2010, and unfortunately, a civil war much like the one in the early 2000s is in progress. This is from today’s (1-8-24) news:
“The east African nation of Sudan is in the midst of a devastating civil war that has killed over 12,000 people and displaced more than 7.3 million within the country since fighting began in April, according to data from the United Nations.”
This is happening now, and the world seems to only care about the Hamas/Israel war and Ukraine.
ParshaNut: 54 Journeys into the World of Torah Commentary by David Kasher is an excellent dive into the traditionally “accepted” commentaries on the Torah, which was once part and parcel of nearly all Divrei Torah. Kasher is creative in his use of Rashi, Nachmanides, and ibn Ezra, among others. This is a refreshing read free of diversions into Kabbalah and esoterica; just clean Torah commentary and how it relates to our contemporary lives.
