UPCOMING SELECTIONS
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PAST SELECTIONS
“Richman, once again finds inspiration in art, adding evocative details to a swiftly moving plot. Her descent into the horrors of the Holocaust, lends enormous power to Lenka’s experience and makes her reunion with Josef all the more poignant.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Staggeringly evocative, romantic, heart-rending, sensual and beautifully written, Alyson Richman’s The Lost Wife may well be the Sophie’s Choice of this generation.”
— New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart
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The events of a single night shatter one family’s sense of security and identity in this provocative and deeply affecting domestic drama from Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of A Day at the Beach and Out of Time. In the tradition of Lionel Shriver, Sue Miller and Laura Moriarty, Schulman crafts a brilliantly observed portrait of parenting and modern life, cunningly exploring our most deeply held convictions and revealing the enduring strengths that emerge in the face of crisis.
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“This provocative new book is exactly what it sounds like: an account of how Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued an order to expel Jews from their homes in the midst of the Civil War. Anyone seeking to rock the Passover Seder with political debate will find the perfect conversation piece in Sarna’s account of this startling American story…. His book is part of the prestigious [Jewish Encounters] series, matching prominent Jewish writers with intriguingly fine-tuned topics.”
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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“Ferry’s Gilgamesh is uniquely his own, self-contained in holding aloof from fads and hype. No display of adjectival fireworks could do justice to his poem’s originality or to the integrity of the poet’s formal invention. In identifying the poem as Mr. Ferry’s, I mean no disrespect to Sin-leqe-unninni, the ancient poet-editor that Babylonian tradition credits as having developed to their highest form the epic adventures of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, and his companion, Enkidu. But like Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat or Ezra Pound’s Cathay, Mr. Ferry’s Gilgamesh is a miraculous transformation of his original into his own, utterly distinctive idiom…. Perhaps the poem’s most moving element is how the desire for fame is superseded, after the death of Enkidu, by a quest that touches every reader, ancient or modern…the wish for physical immortality…. [Ferry’s] technical genius and literary sophistication evoke not only the hero’s anguish but the rage and despair of the untouchable.”
— Tom Sleigh, The New York Times
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“Peter Beinart has written a deeply important book for anyone who cares about Israel, its security, its democracy, and its prospects for a just and lasting peace. Beinart explains the roots of the current political and religious debates within Israel, raises the tough questions that can’t be avoided, and offers a new way forward to achieve Zionism’s founding ideals, both in Israel and among the diaspora Jews in the United States and elsewhere.”
— President Bill Clinton
“Peter Beinart has written the outstanding Zionist statement for the twenty-first century. The Crisis of Zionism is a courageously scathing critique of the sorry state of Zionism today and a clarion call to reaffirm the linkage of liberal values, Jewish commitment, and democratic practice that made the creation of the state of Israel possible and is the key to its moral and physical survival.”
— Naomi Chazan, former deputy speaker of the Knesset
and president of the New Israel Fund
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Similar to last year’s What Israel Means to Me, this collection of short essays edited by [Rabbi Jeffrey K.] Salkin ( Being God’s Partner) unabashedly puts American Zionism on display, as contributors describe their personal connection to Israel. The section heads reflect the roles Israel has always played for diaspora Jews: a part of their Jewish identity, a refuge from oppression and a religious center. The authors range from the usual suspects like the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman and politician Henry Waxman to historian Jonathan Sarna and Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, along with rabbis and prominent deceased Jewish-Americans as Supreme Court justices Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter. (Source: Publishers Weekly)
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In [Linda] Fairstein’s exciting 13th novel to feature New York ADA Alexandra Cooper (after Hell Gate), a middle-of-the-night call brings Alex and NYPD detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace to Harlem, where the decapitated body of a young woman has been burning on the steps of the Mount Neboh Baptist Church, originally a synagogue until the neighborhood changed. Initially, the authorities suspect a hate crime until another dead woman turns up at a cathedral in Little Italy a few days later. A religious motive emerges, especially since both victims were considered “outcasts” because of their uncompromising demands about the role of women in organized religion. Meanwhile, Alex is prosecuting a defrocked Catholic priest accused of molesting boys, a high-profile trial that a politically connected bishop wants stopped. Fairstein excels at describing New York’s complicated religious history as well as the vagaries of the city’s legal and religious politics. (Source: Publishers Weekly) Read more»
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The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust — an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, author Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives’ fates. Read more»
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[Andi] Rosenthal is as adept at evoking 15th century England and Nazi-infested Europe as she is at chronicling her own time. The surprise ending is a tour de force as global wisdom trumps anachronistic chauvinism. This brilliant book, a bona fide page turner, is about how to be a woman, a daughter and a Jew, no less than it explores how to be a principled human being. The Bookseller’s Sonnets is an extraordinary achievement. (Joan Mellen, author of A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and The Case That Should Have Changed History) Read more»
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Shapiro’s newest memoir, a mid-life exploration of spirituality, begins with her son’s difficult questions — about God, mortality and the afterlife — and Shapiro’s realization that her answers are lacking, long-avoided in favor of everyday concerns. Determined to find a more satisfying set of answers, author Shapiro ( Slow Motion) seeks out the help of a yogi, a Buddhist and a rabbi, and comes away with, if not the answers to life and what comes after, an insightful and penetrating memoir that readers will instantly identify with. (Source: Publisher’s Weekly) Read more»
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A novel that stirs us to examine the nature of loyalty, identity and history itself, The Liberated Bride presents a multitude of sectors in Israeli life, as seen through the eyes of an endearing professor named Yochanan Rivlin. (Source: Reading Group Guides) Read more»
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 When Milton Steinberg died in 1950, he left one manuscript tantalizingly unfinished. Like As a Driven Leaf, it is grand in scope, while told as a compelling personal tale. Set against a backdrop of unrest in ancient Israel, The Prophet’s Wife is a stirring portrait of the biblical prophet Hosea, his passionate and free-spirited wife Gomer, and a people seduced by the lures of power and idolatry to betray their faith (Source: Publisher’s website) Read more» |
 In May 1945, Pavel Mandl, a Polish Jew recently liberated from a concentration camp, lands near a displaced persons camp in the British occupation zone of newly defeated Germany. Alone, possessing nothing but a map, a few tins of food, a toothbrush and his identity papers, he must scrape together a new life in a chaotic community of refugees, civilians and soldiers. In Displaced Persons, Ghita Schwarz reveals the interior despairs and joys of immigrants shaped by war and illuminates changing cultural understandings of trauma and remembrance. (Source: Publisher’s website) Read more» |
 Lust • Tradition • Love • Faith • Self • Family
Elisha walks through Brooklyn with side curls tucked behind his ears and an oversized black hat on his head. He is a Chasidic Orthodox Jew and the son of a revered rabbi in whose footsteps he’s expected to follow. When he leaves his insular world to take classes at a secular college, he vows to remain unchanged… Read more»
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 Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist — books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau. This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul. Read more»
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This year’s Emanu-El Reads selection is Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible by David Plotz. Plotz’ book is based on a blog in which he recorded his reaction to reading the Hebrew Bible from cover to cover. Read more»
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A caravan of Jews wanders through pre-World War II Eastern Europe on a heartbreaking quest. Among them is Laish, a 15-year-old orphan, who narrates the story of this against-all-odds journey. Read more»
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 Raised in a secular family but interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments, to be fruitful and multiply, to love his neighbor. But, he also chooses to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to stone adulterers, to not shave his beard. The resulting spiritual journey is both funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and it will make you see history’s most influential book with new eyes. Read more»
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Not Me is a remarkable debut novel that tells the dramatic and surprising stories of two men — father and son — through 60 years of uncertain memory, distorted history and assumed identity. When Heshel Rosenheim, apparently suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, hands his son, Michael, a box of moldy old journals, an amazing adventure begins — one that takes the reader from the concentration camps of Poland to an improbable love story during the battle for Palestine, from a cancer ward in New Jersey to a hopeless marriage in San Francisco. Read more»
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 This year’s Emanu-El Reads program will be devoted to exploring a contemporary novel over the course of one month. We will be reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, who has been called one of the “wunderkind” generation of Jewish authors. Krauss’ novel incorporates and intertwines the stories of young lovers, married love, old friends separated by war, and parents and children. The settings range from pre-war Poland to Manhattan, Brooklyn to South America. The Women’s Auxiliary sponsors the second of four book discussion sessions led by Temple librarian Elizabath Stabler. Read more»
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 Even people who claim not to be “religious” generally will maintain that they do observe the Ten Commandments. Why is it that these 10 statements, thousands of years old, continue to have such a special hold on us? In Broken Tablets, 12 outstanding spiritual leaders from across the spectrum of Jewish thought bring us to the life and soul of the Ten Commandments’ unusual power. In voices that are personal and diverse, they help us take a closer look at the 10 utterances that not only touch every aspect of our lives but also present each of us with a profound challenge. Read more»
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 From the internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev comes a mesmerizing novel of two love stories, separated by half a century but connected by one enchanting act of devotion. During the 1948 War of Independence — a time when pigeons still are used to deliver battlefield messages — a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon. The bird is carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Read more»
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In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin (who comes from a prosperous Jewish family) is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, Isaac’s family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. Read more»
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All Whom I Have Loved, has been described as “The haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s that prefigures the fate of the Jews during World War II. At the center is 9-year-old Paul Rosenfeld, the beloved only child of divorced parents, through whose eyes we view a dissolving, increasingly chaotic world.” Read more»
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A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles’ cocktail hour. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows and who is sure the painting used to hang on a wall of his parents’ living room. As Ben tries to evade the police, he and his twin sister, Sara, seek out the truth of how the painting got to the museum, whether the “original” is actually a forgery, and whether Sara, an artist, can create a convincing forgery to take its place. Read more»
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Back to Women’s Auxiliary
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pen to all members of the Temple, our discussion is held in the sixth-floor lounge of the Marvin and Elisabeth Cassell Community House (One East 65th Street), unless noted otherwise. Feel free to bring your lunch. Coffee and cookies will be served. Click on the links below for book descriptions. For more information, contact the Women’s Auxiliary.
