The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai

Irina Reyn is the author of the novel What Happened to Anna K. Her work has appeared in publications such as Tin House, Nextbook, The Forward, One Story, Town & Country Travel, The Moscow Times, Los Angeles Times, and many others.

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth

Only a fool, or a Ph.d, would even attempt to name a short list of essential “Jewish” books (maybe I’m just bitter; it’s been several centuries and I’m still working on my masters thesis). In any case, I’m already in big trouble, because I’m one of those sad cases who has trouble reading anything written before 1955. Especially if it is over 300 pages.

So even though reading Jewish books is essential to my wellbeing, I’ve somehow managed to narrow my own field by approximately 2,950 years. What can I say, except that these books have been essential to me? (Meantime, for info about those approximately 2,950 missing years, go to Zachary Baker’s bibliography a couple years ago of the 1000 best Jewish books; or The Schoken Guide to Jewish Boggs, edited by Barry W. Holtz (1992).

It is not incisive commentary to say Philip Roth, like David Mamet, has been a sexist pig dog in his past. He has been. It has also been suggested that Roth, in the sunset of his career, must be juicing himself on the literary equivalent of steroids. What but a performance-enhancing elixir could explain Roth's inspired twilight work such as American Pastoral and Everyman? Yet The Plot Against America will be the Roth novel most remembered and re-read, as he details what happens to a Newark Jewish neighborhood when Charles Lindbergh is elected President in 1940.

Neal Karlen is a long-time contributor to The New York Times. He was an Associate Editor at Newsweek and Contributing Editor for Rolling Stone. He has authored many books, including the recently published The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews (William Morrow, 2008).

One Minute to Midnight, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

Michael Dobbs, Theodore Sorenson

Michael Dobbs’ riveting account of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis allows us to understand those heart-stopping days from the point of view of the key decision-makers, most importantly President John Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev. Dobbs describes more vividly than ever before, and with new historical documentation, the deadly brew of miscalculation, limited information, mistakes, and false assumptions which almost trigged nuclear annihilation. As Kennedy famously remarked at one point when a U.S. spy plane went off course, potentially triggering a Soviet attack at an especially perilous moment, “There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the message.”

Theodore Sorenson’s wonderful memoirs add greatly to our feel for President Kennedy as an individual and world leader, and also shine with Sorenson’s own Olympian talents, not only as the greatest speechwriter of the modern Presidency but as a great and humane policy advisor and analyst. Read in conjunction with Dobb’s book, Sorenson’s memoirs help us to understand more deeply why the world survived the missile crisis. Kennedy’s humanity, judgment, and good sense trumped the misguided and hothead advice of the generals. No doubt, Khrushchev’s similar abhorrence of war was also pivotal. One of Kennedy’s greatest strengths was his ability to intuit Khrushchev’s shared will to find a peaceful outcome.

These harrowing events are not simply a matter of history. They speak to us across two generations. How shall we treat our adversaries? Shall we assume the worst and perhaps thereby accidently trigger it? Can peace be found in the midst of bluster and missteps? I believe that the Cuban Missile Crisis and the successful negotiation the following year of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty together confirm Kennedy’s greatest insight: that our adversaries are, in the end, human beings with common interests and a similar will to survive. It is on those common interests that peace can be built.

John Kennedy and Theodore Sorenson put it this way, in the most important Presidential speech of modern history: John Kennedy’s “Peace Speech” at the American University Commencement in June 1963.

So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we can not now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin, 2008). He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty. He has been named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.

The Women’s Bible
Commentary, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beginning Anew

Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, Viktor Frankl, Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith Kates

Three books seem to me particularly dependable. First, the Women’s Bible Commentary, (URJ Press 2007), offers high quality biblical and rabbinic scholarship, contemporary reflections, and poetry on the 54 portions of the Torah. Second, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon 2006 or scads of used paperback editions) always moves me with its belief that we become more truly human by making meaning from our sufferings. Third, I bring Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith Kates’s collection Beginning Anew (Simon & Schuster 1997) to shul with me every High Holidays to read during the boring parts, and I always find some insight that reminds me why I need to be there. Whether it's Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg's stellar essay on the death of Sarah and the binding of Isaac or Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi on "Brothers and Others" or Judith Plaskow on Leviticus 18, sexuality, and teshuva, Beginning Anew always offers some sustaining truth.

Rachel Adler is Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew Union College-Los Angeles and author of Engendering Judaism which won a National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought.

The Black Atlantic

Paul Gilroy

Much hay has been made of life in the diaspora, and this book—while occasionally a little theory/jargon heavy—is an incredibly rich conceptualization of the material and cultural life of diaspora. For Gilroy, it's not diaspora as a sense of exile in which one is always longing to return "home," but rather about the ways that culture, ideas, and material circulate in and around diasporic communities. This is not a book about Jews, but it sheds important light on life in the diaspora.

Ari Y. Kelman is an assistant professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Most of his research focuses on popular and unpopular cultures, both Jewish and not. He's working on a book about recorded sound, and has co-authored two studies and a series of reports with Steven M. Cohen about contemporary Jewish culture and identity. His first book Station Identification: a cultural history of Yiddish radio in America will be published by the University of California press.

The Family Moskat, The Manor & The Estate, Shadows on the Hudson

Isaac Bashevis Singer

When I was in college, I took a popular course affectionately called “Yid Lit,” in which we were assigned, among other works, the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I. B. Singer was born in 1904 in the town of Radzymin, Poland, the son of a rabbi and grandson, on his mother’s side, of rabbis. He started his career as a journalist in Warsaw between the two world wars, and emigrated to the United States in 1935. He wrote exclusively in Yiddish and died in 1991.

The stories I read in college---“Gimpel the Fool,” “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” “Taibele and her Demon”---depicted small-town rustics amidst all their confusion, superstition, religious fervor, hope, and poverty. The stories are both strange and charming, with a large dollop of magic. It wasn’t until I happened upon a copy of The Manor in the library of my synagogue that I was even aware that Singer had written longer, multi-generational, epic novels. Two pages in, and I was hooked.

I can’t recommend the Singer novels highly enough. Masterpieces of world literature, they do what great fiction is supposed to do: they depict an entire universe, which, in the case of Singer, involves not only the passions, but also the nature of faith, obsession, romantic and sexual love, ambition, wealth, and poverty---all of it played out against the backdrop of the lost world of Polish Jewry. Singer’s prose is both straight-forward and vivid, and there is no feeling of being high-jacked by overly-styled or self-conscious writing. Instead, you are just carried along by the majesty of the interwoven stories themselves, which are conveyed in prose so clear and brilliant that you don’t even notice it---until, of course, you do.

Each of the novels takes as its subject a family caught in the grip of history---the particular and tragic history of European Jewry. Along the way, the reader gets a real sense of lives lived in places that no longer exist, most notably bourgeois, comfortable, merchant-class Jewish Warsaw, a place of lushly-decorated apartments (and Catholic servants), vaulting ambitions, snow, carriages, and duplicity. His characters range from despotic Polish counts to despotic rebbes, saintly teachers, lovelorn young women, raging housewives, and impoverished poets. All his characters are rendered so fully, with all their human yearning and striving as well as human sinfulness and failure, that you can not only see and hear them, but feel that you know them personally. The books are not for the lazy or faint of heart, however, as they demand attention, and, while often very, very funny, they are also very, very sad. Nothing is left out: There is carnality and lust, ambition and violence, spirituality and cruelty, kindness, love, generosity, confusion, depression, and innocence.

The last of his epic novels, Shadows on the Hudson, is set among Jewish refugees and survivors in post-war New York. But like the other major novels, its ethos and animating spirit is pure Yiddishkeit.

Singer’s long novels have been compared both to the early work of Thomas Mann---most notably Buddenbrooks (which I loved)---to the work of Leo Tolstoy. I wish he had written twenty more.

Jennifer Moses is a writer and painter who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is the author of the books, Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou and Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom. Her articles, essays, travel writing, Op-Eds, and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Commentary, Bon Appetit, Town and Country, Salon, Poets and Writers, The Jerusalem Report, Moment, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Parenting, The Pushcart Prizes, The Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, Story, The Ontario Review, and many other publications. Her paintings have been shown at Nicholls State University, Louisiana State University, the Acadiana Center for the Arts, the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, the Inside Out Gallery at the Interact Center of Minneapolis, and the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl

There are a handful of books that belong to the human race. A few such books emerged from the holocaust: Elie Wiesel's Night, Anne Frank's diary, and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. Alongside these distillations of the wisdom and brutality of human beings stands this short book by a psychiatrist, the founder of logotherapy. This is the book to hand to someone who believes life is empty, meaningless, worthless. One can truly say of Frankl, whose penetrating wisdom shines through these pages, what Andre Malraux said to Whittaker Chambers: "You have not returned from hell with empty hands."

Rabbi David Wolpe is the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, California. He lectures widely at universities, synagogues and institutes throughout the country, and he was named "one of the fifty most influential Jews in America" by the Forward. In 2004 he delivered the keynote for the General Assembly of Jewish leaders.

Rabbi Wolpe is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers on subjects of Jewish and general religious interest. His columns run in Jewish newspapers throughout the country. His own writings, as well as profiles and reviews of his work, have appeared in such publications as Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, and many others. He has also been a frequent television guest, including appearances on PBS, CNN and CBS This Morning as a commentator on spiritual questions. He has been featured most recently in a series on A&E called Mysteries of the Bible.

Rabbi Wolpe is the author of six books: The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God, In Speech and In Silence: The Jewish Quest for God, Teaching your Children About God, Why Be Jewish?, Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times, and Floating Takes Faith: Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz

I can think of no better book to introduce a reader into the layered, fragile, complex, and painful truth of what it means to be an Israeli. Amos Oz, already an intellectual hero, taking his own people and his own history to task over the past 30 years, elevates his writing to a level that very few get to experience over centuries of writing. His storytelling is sharp and clear. This beautiful book offers an extraordinary insight into the Israeli psyche, painting it as feverishly idealistic, mortally wounded, and bitterly optimistic. One comes away changed after reading A Tale of Love and Darkness, swearing that the scent of Jerusalem has been seared into their souls forever; knowing Israel in a way never known quite that way before. I feel a sense of tremendous pride and joy that I am part of a nation that gave birth, witnessed, and nourished such a writer, and that has embraced such writing.

Born in Israel to American parents, Danny Maseng first came to the United States to star on Broadway in 'Only Fools Are Sad.' A playwright, actor, singer and composer, Danny has served as Evaluator of New American Plays/Opera-Musical Theater for the National Endowment For The Arts. Danny has also been the Director of Hava Nashira for the URJ, the Artisitic Director of the Brandeis-Bardin Instittute in California and the Director of The Spielberg Fellowships for the FJC. Danny has was named the Patron Artist of the Avraham Geiger School for Cantorial Arts in Berlin, Germany, from 2005 - 2007.

Danny is also one of the most popular and respected composers of contemporary Liturgical and Synagogue music. He has been the invited guest of the American Conference of Cantors, the Cantor's Assembly, as well as the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. When Danny is not appearing on show's like Law & Order or narrating Wild Discovery, he is a frequent faculty member of The Wexner Heritage Foundation, Synagogue 2000, The Whizin Institute, Limmud and many other national and international institutes and conferences. A much sought after Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Danny travels the world, inspiring, teaching and rekindling the love of Judaism through Torah, Kabbalah, Jewish culture and the arts.

The Truth About Camp David

Clayton Swisher

Before Swisher wrote this book in 2004, conventional wisdom dictated that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David negotiations was all Arafat's fault and that Barak was a victim. Swisher, who was at Camp David, interviewed all the players and demonstrates that Barak was as much responsible for the failure as Arafat. Additionally, he shows that the Clinton "peace team" helped doom the Camp David talks by acting, in negotiator Aaron Miller's words, as "Israel's lawyer" not as an honest broker. This book helps Jews get beyond the blame-the-Palestinians game to the realization that peace was almost achieved, and that the reason it wasn't is due to mistakes, blunders and, in Barak's case, the sheer arrogance of the various parties. The book also helps one understand just how Barak evolved from peace negotiator to the hawk he is today. The answer: he hasn't evolved. He is no more skeptical about negotiating with Palestinians today than he was then.

M.J. Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum (IPF), a position he has held since the spring of 1998. In this position, MJ heads IPF's Washington, D.C. office and writes IPF Friday, a weekly opinion column on the Arab-Israeli conflict which is widely circulated throughout the United States and the Middle East. In addition, MJ has published numerous op-eds, in the national and Jewish press.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Harold Kushner

I didn't read this book when it first came out and everyone was talking about it and saying it changed their lives—it was a best seller and I was a snob. When I grew up and finally did read it, it changed my life too: I assign it every time I teach interfaith chaplains or medical students, when I teach Jewish biomedical ethics or theology to undergraduates. It answers the BIG theological questions from a feeling Jewish perspective: No, God does not give us suffering because God wants to teach us a lesson. No, God does not decide to make certain airplanes stay up in the sky and others crash. Yes, God is present when our community helps us to mourn and to heal.

Vanessa Ochs is an associate Professor of Religious Studies at UVA and author of Inventing Jewish Ritual, (2007 JPS), winner of a National Jewish Book Award.