Forty weeks later, Tzvia—named after my ex’s deceased radiologist father—was born. She was round and brown with a feathery layer of lanugo; she looked frighteningly like my father. We assumed that our daughter would be ugly and smart. But within several weeks, it became clear that she was not ugly—she was, in fact, cherubic, with a rosebud mouth and brown doe-like eyes. By the time she hit age five, we discovered that while Tzvia was animated and clever and funny and popular amongst her kindergarten classmates, academics weren’t exactly her thing. And so, whenever anybody asked why we were throwing our daughter a bat mitzvah at our local Chabad, where, per ultra-Orthodox Judaism, she was forbidden from leyning Torah —which, to be honest, is a pretty annoying question: “I don’t know, why are you having your daughter’s bat mitzvah at the Brentwood Country Club with a lobster buffet?”—I’d make a joke about the fact that we still weren’t certain if she could read. (For the record, she can, and very well; she’d just rather spend her time watching TikTok videos of teens shoplifting at Urban Outfitters.) 

Truth is, Chabad can be a wonderful place in which to have a child’s bar or bat mitzvah. Especially if you’re divorced and single and mired in student debt from your gazillion post-graduate degrees and can’t afford a five-star hotel with an infinity pool and flood lights and day players from the Pantages Theatre production of Hamilton. Even if I could swing all those things, I generally loathe b’nai mitzvahs resembling A-list Hollywood premieres. They’re tacky and gauche, and I say this as a jaded entertainment journalist that has attended way too many premieres to count. Chabad is haimish and warm. They’re also great with special needs children, which is why we chose to have our autistic son’s bar mitzvah there two years earlier.  

But now things were different. My ex and I were officially divorced, as opposed to being legally separated when our son Sam became a man, and this time around my ex-husband was bringing his on-and-off-and-on-again blonde, Princeton-grad, gentile girlfriend—let’s call her Polly—to our daughter’s Saturday night bat mitzvah soiree. 

I pitched a tsunami-sized fit about Polly coming for weeks. It wasn’t appropriate, it was way too soon, it would distract from a rite of passage meant to be special and meaningful and focused on family, even if ours had imploded into radioactive dust. I’d never even met this Polly person—and nor did I want to. I complained about it endlessly—to my friends, to my therapist, to the yeshiva bachor working the evening shift at the Western Kosher deli counter. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t even have a dress. Nothing fit, everything was wrong, my bangs still hadn’t grown out from the night I cut them during COVID lockdown. This bat mitzvah would be a disaster. 

When it came to bat mitzvah planning—and pretty much everything else in life—my ex and I were rarely on the same page. He pretended to be on board with keeping a kosher home, but later revealed he resented it. He argued with every kosher caterer in town, fighting fruitlessly over everything from their available start-time (“Shabbat ends at 7, so by the time we drive there we’ll be serving food around ten”) to the cost of the customized candy table. A week before the event, the Israeli hot truck we booked vanished on us, another catering company with whom we thought we had confirmed said they never got my ex’s credit card information, and my ex sent me the following text: “I am revoking my Jew card.” 

Miraculously, Tzvia’s kabbalat shabbat bat mitzvah service went off without a hitch. She recited the Rebbe’s 12 Pesukim, the kosher chicken didn’t exactly taste like cardboard, and Tzvia’s entire Camp Ramah bunk arrived wearing sparkly dresses and a congratulatory speech they’d collectively penned on pink notebook paper. By the time dessert was served, I’d knocked back three shots of Belvedere. And while I wasn’t excited about the prospect of my ex bringing Princeton Polly to the following night’s fête, I was self-medicated to the point of reason: If Bridget Moynahan could survive Gisele, I could easily weather a twice-divorced 50-year-old without children of her own. 

This is where Josh comes in. Josh was a guy I friended one night on Facebook when I was home and alone and bored. Josh was from Minneapolis and we had seven mutual friends in common, including a girl from St. Louis Park with whom I’d studied at Hebrew U. during my junior year abroad. According to his Facebook profile, Josh studied computer science at Dartmouth and held a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and worked in the technology sector in executive positions I failed to comprehend because I’d studied Shakespeare at Cornell and was left-brained to the point of being a dysfunctional everyday idiot. Josh readily confirmed my virtual friendship request: “Have we met before?” he messaged. We had not, but Josh had read a piece I’d written on Boston accents for Variety and that was more of a real-life connection than most people in the online world. By week’s end we were lunching at Dan Tana and Josh was asking me to come work for him. I repeatedly told him no, mostly because I understood 3% of whatever it was he was talking about—something about content, creative, SEO— but also because Josh looked like the love child born of Owen Wilson and Robert Redford circa The Way We Were. Josh’s eyes were the color of a swimming pool. At a certain angle, he had Gene Wilder’s nose. Going to work for a six-foot-tall Minnesotan Jew with two Ivy League degrees and who resembled a 1970’s movie star would have been a fool’s errand. Josh was also wading through the emotional morass of his own post-divorce hell. The second time we hung out—Doordash pizza and bong hits in his single-story bungalow wedged into the hills of Laurel Canyon—Josh slumped on the sofa and sobbed. “I need a friend,” Josh wept. He didn’t ask me to work for him, and I cradled him the way a child might a parent. People make a big deal about how many men you’ve slept with but you would not believe the number of Jewish men’s chests upon which I’ve laid my head. Looking for a pillow, looking for a home. 

“You wanna come to my kid’s bat mitzvah party Saturday night?” 

Josh showed up an hour early wearing a navy plaid sports jacket and a pink-striped button-down with his initials monogrammed on the cuffs. A silk yarmulke functioned as a de facto pocket square. Designer shoes from France, hair a tumbling crest of dishwater blond. A man—a Josh—plucked straight from central casting. (My look was courtesy of Anthropologie, from the label’s unofficial secret Tznius line.)  Josh tied my son’s tie, I zipped up Tzvia’s pale pink pouf dress, and we drove—top-down, wind whipping through our hair—in Josh’s Range Rover Evoque convertible through the Saturday night streets of Highland Park. Josh drove like he was on the Autobahn. With a perfunctory flourish, he fished the yarmulke from his pocket and brandished it in the air with the manic fervor of a rodeo star. Sam squealed with freakish delight. Tzvia, her Drybar braids unraveling around her wind-smacked face, screamed wildly from the backseat: “Hurry! I’m going to be late for my own bat mitzvah!” 

We arrived at Chabad just as everyone we’d hired to put this thing together the moment Shabbat ended (for a party that started 30 minutes later) raced around the parking lot stringing up tea lights and Japanese lanterns and blowing up gold and hot pink Mylar balloons. My ex was sweating, sleeves rolled up, barking orders at the waitstaff like Martin Short in Father of the Bride. It was hard to ignore Josh, who was dressed better than anybody else in attendance and had way better hair. My ex immediately put Josh to work, kicking over a box of as-yet-unassembled LED centerpiece lights with Tzvia’s initials carved out of acrylic and a lightning bolt running down the middle and a battery-operated base connected to a tiny remote control one could use to switch the colors from neon pink to fluorescent green. 

Meanwhile, Tazvia was tantruming over the mechitza on the rented black-and-white-checkered dance floor. “None of my friends had to have one at their bat mitzvahs!” she whined, her girlfriends gathered around her in protest solidarity like the tween version of Sex and the City. I called in our Rabbi for reinforcement, we explained that it needed to stay and while the rabbi made his way to the buffet of kosher Mexican fare, thus began an impromptu game of musical mechitza, with Tzvia pushing the mechitza off the dance floor, Sam pushing it back on, Tzvia pushing it off. And so on. At a certain point I’m assuming the rabbi just pretended not to notice, sitting in the tented dining area eating tacos and refried beans while tapping his feet to the beat of the instrumental trio playing an acoustic version of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” 

I was three margaritas into this thing when my ex started chasing me around begging me to say hello to his girlfriend, whom by this point I’d honestly forgotten about. Every time I turned around Josh was there, as if on cue. There was not a single moment in which I mistook Josh’s impeccable party etiquette for anything but reflexive, a product of polite Midwestern youth ferried into adulthood. Josh had two younger sisters, and he’d taken mental notes. Even so, Josh was a sight to behold. He knew nobody at this party, he barely knew me, and yet he circled the crowd with the charismatic ease of a young Bobby Kennedy. And I ran around like Zelda Fitzgerald, a dunk social butterfly in an ebullient haze of tequila shots on ice. At one point, the rabbi and I did l’chaims, and I promised I’d connect him to Robert Kraft—whom I’d met once at a fundraising gala several years prior— in the hopes he’d fund the new mikveh. 

Finally, after four hours of havdalah, hora and kids racing around in customized airbrush apparel courtesy of a t-shirt booth we’d hired, my ex yanked me aside: “Can you please just say hello to my girlfriend? She really wants to meet you.” Instinctively, I dragged Josh along. “This is Josh,” I told Princeton Polly. “He’s hot, he’s got a law degree from Columbia and he’s a Jew from Minnesota.” 

I have zero recollection of Polly’s response. I do remember yawning. 

The night drew to a close and Josh drove us home. 

“Did you have fun?” I asked Tzvia. 

 She nodded, smiled and ripped through a stack of presents: “It was the best night of my life.” 

That next morning, the phone rang. It was our rabbi. 

“Hi, Malina. Thank you for such a great party. I’m reminding you to connect me with Robert Kraft.”

Portions of this article were edited out at the request of the author.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

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Formerly Orthodox singer-songwriter Matisyahu (A.K.A. Matthew Paul Miller) has penned a heartfelt, raw, honest essay for Medium about his religious journey, musical development, and struggle with substance abuse—which started when when he was just 14.

“I found company in Bob Marley and his music,” writes Matisyahu of his high school years. “I was depressed and alone, feeling misunderstood by kids, coaches, teachers and parents, so I retreated into the confines of my room in the attic with weed and music. I began to search. Summer of junior year I went into the wilderness out west and felt the gnawing gaping hole in my chest more vast then ever, and I began to think about God in relation to the void. Am I alone?”

The answer, he decided, was no. God “was with me always like an all-powerful invisible friend.” He became a Phish groupie, experienced homelessness, went into rehab, saw numerous therapists, but still “couldn’t seem to get it right.” Eventually he fell into Orthodox Judaism, got married, committed himself to his music, and became an alt-rock reggae superstar—and darling of the Hasidic-hipsters the world over. But all was not well. Dissatisfied, he chafed against the restrictions the of movement, until he found his guru—”an anti-establishment renegade Russian therapist/original thinker/Chassidic and Kabalistic creative wiz with a heart of gold and no fingers”—and a shul where he could “scream and sing during prayers and not be judged.”

It’s a compelling piece of writing, which neatly ties in with the release of his latest single, “Hard Way,” from his 2014 album Akeda (“binding”)—an allusion to the biblical story of the binding and near-sacrifice of Isaac. Read the rest here.

(Image: Matisyahu performs in Park City, Utah, January 2014. Credit: Jason Kempin/Getty.)

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A kosher restaurant will open to the public in Tokyo next month, reports JTA. The restaurant, which is located at the Chabad house run by Rabbi Mendy Sudakevich in the Takanawa neighborhood, has been feeding customers for several weeks—but by appointment only. Once it officially opens, “Chana Place’s” will serve classic Israeli/Middle Eastern cuisine to up to 14 guests at one time. And believe it or not, they’ll have competition—there’s already a kosher felafel cart operated by the other Chabad rabbi in Tokyo, Binyomin Edery.

Tokyo might seem like a surprising place for a kosher restaurant, but there are a few hundred Jews living in the city, and thousands of Israeli tourists pass through Japan each year—plus there’s plenty of interest from Japanese diners, who have already embraced several non-kosher Jewish eateries. The two countries have positive diplomatic relations, with a new reciprocal one-year work-holiday visa program, and a concerted marketing effort to woo Japanese tourists to the Holy Land. (We’ve been following the anime series Israel, Like! with delight for the last couple of months.)

Behatzlacha and itadakimasu!

(Image: a_b_normal123/Flickr)

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In the late 1980s, Crown Heights locals going about their daily routine—rushing to farbrengens (Hasidic gatherings) with their Rebbe, or running errands down Kingston Avenue—might have glimpsed an anomaly in their midst: a Japanese woman, camera in tow, capturing the scenes around her. That woman was Chie Nishio, who spent a few years photographing members of the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Brooklyn, New York. Now, over 20 years later, her collection is finally receiving recognition at an exhibition in the Centreal branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, just a few blocks away from the community she so lovingly documented.

I met Nishio at the library last month to get a personal walkthrough of the photographs on display, 43 from the total collection of over 200 black and white prints. (Color would take away from the subject at hand, she insisted). Now 84, with silver hair framing her face, Nishio hasn’t lost any of the energy, wit and candor of her younger days.

As we scanned the prints she told me how she came to turn her lens on the Hasids of Crown Heights. Her interest was initially sparked by her Jewish husband, the acclaimed author James Trager. Though he was firmly atheist, Trager, now deceased, descended from illustrious lineage; his great-grandfather was one of the founding rabbis of the Jewish community in South Carolina. His grandfather moved to a Reform congregation interstate and the family, Trager included, eventually all assimilated.

Eager to learn more about her husband’s heritage, but with Trager unable to offer much insight, Nishio headed to Brooklyn to learn more about the people of the book. She didn’t have much luck with the strongly insular Satmar community in Williamsburg, where most were unwilling to engage with a foreigner and her camera. But in Crown Heights, a community unique among Hasidic sects for welcoming outsiders, Nishio was welcomed, and over the years she and her camera become a fixture in the Brooklyn enclave. She developed deep friendships with many of her subjects, and to this day she occasionally treks from her home in Manhattan to visit them in Crown Heights.

“I would say it all happened by accident,” Nishio laughs, “but with these people, there’s no such thing as accidental.” She points her finger heavenward. “It’s all arranged by God.”

Her photos offer an expansive yet deeply nuanced glimpse of Chabad life. Centered around the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, they portray a community of believers entrenched in ritual and practice. A one-month old baby laying on a silver tray for his pidyon haben ceremony, draped in cascading jewelry; a Bar Mitzvah boy checking the position of his tefillin in the mirror; a young bride trying on wigs in the salon before her wedding day.

Most notably, perhaps, the photos show the community’s reverence for its beloved leader, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson—known amongst his followers simply as ‘the Rebbe’—in the last years of his life, right before his death in 1994. Though women were not allowed into the main sanctuary of the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway, Nishio captured the Rebbe from their vantage point in the women’s gallery upstairs. And if the community’s acceptance wasn’t enough, the Rebbe himself seemed to overtly support Nishio’s mission by blessing her on more than one occasion.

In one image the Rebbe uncharacteristically turns aways from the men in the Synagogue, towards Nishio in the women’s gallery above, and hands her a roll of coins. The Rebbe used to hand out dollar bills, and less often coins, with a blessing, as a symbolic gesture to encourage his followers to in turn give the money to charity and pass along the blessing.

“Everyone said I was special,” Nishio told me, “they came up to me after asking for their share in the coins.”

On another occasion, when the Rebbe was handing out honey cake before Rosh Hashanah, he again called over Nishio who was photographing from a distance, giving her a piece of cake and blessings for a sweet year. And Nishio—by her own admission an ardent non-believer—seems to get excited recalling the memory. “Somehow, I don’t know how, he recognized me!” she smiles.

Though ostensibly an outsider, her photos reflect a deep sensitivity and keen understanding of the practices of daily Hasidic life, and also the individuals behind the portraits. They also show the diversity of a community committed to reaching out to and welcoming newcomers to the fold. There’s the bewigged lawyer who gazes out through the frame, the artist surrounded by his artwork inspired by Jewish mysticism, and the mother of six who also edits a magazine.

“I came with no prejudgement,” said Nishio. “Maybe that’s why they were so open to me.”

Nishio, a firm feminist who contributed regularly to Ms. Magazine, hints to a certain kinship with the woman of the community.

“When I came to the United States, people said to me, ‘Oh you’re not typical,’ because they have their own imaginations of what they think a Japanese woman is like. But they don’t know too much about it. Maybe based on a book, maybe they visited Japan and just saw the surface. So what I found in Crown Heights is that, yes, as an outsider walking in, the women are wearing a wig, long skirts, they’re supposed to cover their legs, but you walk in to talk to each family, each woman is different, each individual is different.”

“From the outside and from the inside it’s a completely different story most of the time,” she observed.

Perhaps Nishio is not, after all, an “unlikely portraitist,” but actually the ideal observer of this community, and the perfect person to document the color of its activities—in all the glory of black and white.

The exhibition, ‘The Hasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn: A Community Study by Chie Nishio’, is on display at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central branch through February 1, 2015.

(Image: Chie Nishio)

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Inspired by Hollaback‘s viral (and controversial) video depicting a woman being catcalled on the streets of New York for ten hours straight, comedian Scott Rogowsky has documented his own experience as a publicly identifiable Jewish man. The results are appalling: he is harassed every few blocks by men from the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, urging him to “do a mitzvah,” sniff an etrog, or say a prayer. They even speculate about whether or not he’s circumcised (captured in the screenshot above).

As a woman, I can not imagine what it would be like to subjected to this sort of harassment on a daily basis. Aside from occasionally being offered Shabbos candles in the subway in Brooklyn, my default position in communal, Orthodox Jewish religious practice is: pretty much invisible. Never have I felt more grateful to not be counted in a minyan. Halachic cloak of invisibility FTW!

Hats off to Rogowsky for his courage and good humor. Now, back to braiding those challahs in the peace and quiet of my kitchen.

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War, what is it good for? Policing female bodies, apparently.

COLlive.com reports that women in the Chabad enclave of Crown Heights, New York are organizing a tznius (modesty) contest for girls “in the merit of the safety of Israel.”

Beginning July 20, Project EDEN (which stands for “Eat Ice Cream and Defend Eretz Yisroel Now”) will encourage day camp attendees between the ages of 3 and 12 to wear modest clothing that keeps “necklines, elbows, knees and feet covered at all times.” The clothing compliant will then receive cards they can trade in for “great prize incentives,” like ice-cream and raffle entries. Why? Well, the Lubavitcher Rebbe saw a direct correlation between modesty and God’s protection, so… encouraging pre-pubescent girls to cover themselves up in the peak of summer seems like the natural next step towards a ceasefire, no? Because as we all know, there’s a causal relationship between the collarbones of 4-year-old girls and Hamas’ weapons cache.

Meanwhile, female visitors to the rabbinate in Ashdod, Israel, were initially blocked from entering the building’s bomb shelter on modesty grounds. MK Stav Shaffir told The Forward that her staffer observed a sign on the door that read “For men only.” Turns out the women’s shelter “was just a regular room, with windows and plaster walls and no indications of protection from rocket attacks.” SO NOT A SHELTER AT ALL, THEN. Writes Elana Sztokman:

In response to women’s exclusion from the bomb shelter in the Ashdod rabbinate, MK Stav Shaffir filed an urgent complaint with the Religious Affairs Ministry, demanding to put an immediate halt to the segregation. “The idea that women seeking shelter from a rocket barrage are met with a closed door is untenable,” she told Yediot Ahronot. “Discrimination against women is unacceptable under any circumstances, but when this discrimination prevents women from protecting themselves, it’s not only unacceptable but also dangerous.” Apparently the administration of the rabbinic courts was unaware of the exclusion, and responded to Shaffir’s query with embarrassment. “It was a local initiative of an employee acting without formal authority,” they responded. “The rabbinical court views such attempts at gender segregation in a very severe light and will take serious actions against those involved.”

Just keep those elbows covered, ladies.

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Lisa Kudrow’s son went to the mall to buy a video game and returned home a man—thanks to Chabad. The actress recounted the amusing story to long-time pal Conan O’Brien earlier this week, after he berated her for not inviting him to her son’s bar mitzvah. Turns out the event was entirely out of her auspices: young Julian was approached by a “Jewish organization” at the mall, asked if he was of the tribe, replied in the affirmative—and moments later was wearing a kippah and tefillin and saying a bracha. (Apparently there’s a selfie to prove it.) Boom. Instant manhood. Or, in Kudrow’s words, a “drive-by bar mitzvah.” Mazal tov!

Related: Lisa Kudrow on the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism, and Her Nose Job

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Recently engaged Crown Heights couple Zevi Goldin, 25, and Chana Simon, 21, are indebted to an unorthodox—but very determined—matchmaker: UPS deliveryman Terry Spiers.

Spiers has worked in the neighborhood for many years, delivering to various Jewish families and businesses, and has long had his heart set on making a shidduch. Two of the regulars on his delivery route are the Goldin family and the educational non-profit where Simon’s mother works, and a couple of years ago he began to focus his efforts on their respective families, trying to arrange a match.

“He always tries to put people together,” the bride’s mother Regina Simon told COLlive.com, “but I never looked into it… I didn’t take it seriously.” Then, to her surprise, one of her married daughters suggested setting Chana up with someone called Zevi Goldin, which prompted further investigation. Spiers acted as the go-between, asking Goldin for his shidduch resume and passing his number onto Chana’s uncle, a local shadchan (matchmaker).

“I was dismissive of the entire thing until he came back and told us, ‘Yeah, her mom is really interested. Do you have one of those things, a shidduch resume?'” Goldin told DNAinfo New York. “Next thing I knew, her uncle was calling me up to try to set up a date.”

Goldin says he knew Simon was his bashert by their second date, but he waited two months before proposing. The couple will be married on June 2.

Mazel tov!

Image: Tupungato / Shutterstock.com

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• Wanted: Jewish male psychopaths. [Tablet]

• Gary Shteyngart writes in bed. [Daily Beast]

• An ode to America’s Got Talent cast-off Edon Pinchot. [Columbia Current]

• Drake is NOT HAPPY about how popular the phrase YOLO (“You Only Live Once,” olds) has become. [Pitchfork]

• The new Chabad NYU facility on Bowery got a design shout out from Interior Design magazine. [Chabad]

• Les Mis enthusiast Julie Klausner gets an Oscar-worthy Fantine makeover. [Vulture]

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Just as Egyptians used the tools they had to construct a successful revolution, Penina Roth took the resources of what Crown Heights has to offer today–a large presence of writers, professors, West Indian and African-American locals, and new transplants, and took them into a bad bar joke with the punchline being a monthly reading series that attracts literary personalities on the caliber of Colson Whitehead, who is headlining today’s Franklin Park Monthly Reading Series installment at Franklin Park Bar & Beergarden.

CROWN  HEIGHTS PRIDE

In December 2008, the idea for the series came to Roth, and since it went underway she has been its curator/ producer/ host/ publicist/ and literary organizer. She tries to feature Crown Heights writers as often as possible. And in the process, her obsessive and passionate pursuits of iconic writing for the series is working to coalesce the literary community while promoting a positive image of the neighborhood. “It’s very important to me to feature a wide range of voices, reflecting the neighborhood’s cultural diversity,” explained Roth. “We’ve hosted authors from Haiti, Panama, China, Nigeria, India, Vietnam, all across the U.S., and even a hipster Hasid (twice).”

Raised an army brat, she was used to a heterogeneous populace. She eventually developed an inclination towards fashion, which took her to LA in the 90s. But raised Modern Orthodox and later turning to Lubavitch spirituality, neither leaning gelled with her pursuits as a wardrobe stylist, where she worked on shoots for blingbling rap and Hip hop videos. The shoots required more of her time sheet than her no-work-on-shabbos lifestyle allowed for. Unable to accept the mostly Saturday gigs, Roth, broke, moved to Crown Heights. As an undergrad at Hunter, she’d majored in writing, and, when she returned to NYC, launched her writing career.

With an eye for local reporting, she quickly realized that not much was being written about Crown Heights beyond racial tensions. She took pride in her domain’s flourishing arts community as well as the growth of the local economy. The kinetic mix of Caribbeans and Hasidim, grad students and professors, writers and journalists sparked her interest as a freelance journalist and researcher. Collective efforts across demographics in the neighborhood worked to fight crime via the city’s Operation Impact and other projects.  She finally set out to conduct her own research that served up juicy observations from within, culminating in the publication of her important article on Franklin Ave gentrification in The Sun, which was followed by a spur of confused articles on Crown Heights culture by prominent journalists as well as journalism students that made naive generalizations about population dynamics.

AN ETHOS OF GIVING

While realtors are busy toning down the locale, Roth along with Crown Heights residents, business owners, and such advocating blogs as ilovefranklinave.com and nostrandpark.com are planting various forms of seeds and cultivating the potential they see in their stomping ground. After Roth began promoting the series, she had found authors enthusiastic to participate, and she found it equally satisfying to hook up writers with their community. With the increased literary-minded population, Roth set out to acknowledge the existing arts community in keeping in contact with organizations like the directors of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, the sponsors of the biannual National Black Writers Conference. Perhaps it was her experience with such mentors as Dani Shapiro, David Goodwillie, Jennifer Egan, and Sue Shapiro (all of whom have read in the series) that instilled this ethos of giving from experienced to novice writers.

The community-oriented event engages Heights residents as often as possible, trying on local high school interns for size, while local IT professionals, designers, and others have enthusiastically flocked to contribute what they could. Meanwhile, Unnameable Books, Prospect Heights’ local indie bookstore sells books at the events. Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden’s owners, Anatoly Dubinsky and Matthew Roff, profiled by Roth in The New York Times’ BoÎte, have been generously supportive of the reading series that has even proven profitable on second Mondays. The series puts Roth in the very same limelight that Roff used to showcase such clutch Jewish Rock groups as Heedoosh and haMakor at Southpaw that influenced her synthesis of personal spirituality with artistic enterprises.

Roth’s affinity for literary fiction expanded in her series to well-written memoir through such incredible voices as Nick Flynn and Stephen Elliott. Lately, she has been trying to open up the series to more experimental literature.  Notable authors quickly joined the ranks, eager to sign up as Crown Heights cheerleaders and mentors to burgeoning writers. Such eternally relevant authors from the literary community that have shown face at the series have included Justin Taylor, Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody, Amy Sohn, Ben Greenman, Rachel Shukert, and Greg Gerke among many others. In the end, Roth managed to harmoniously reclaim literature from its academic perch and take it to the streets to share with the community in which many of the prominent Brooklyn College, Columbia, NYU, the New School, CUNY and Sarah Lawrence professors live themselves. In the spirit of generations, the diversely aged writers are inherently helping to establish a new generation of readers outside the classroom.

I JUST WANT TO HAVE A GOOD TIME

The series’ bar atmosphere sets it up for a fucking good time. Poignant yet funny 10 minute storytellers, comedians, and sometimes musicians do their thing while about 100 party animals enjoy no-cover and dope drink specials. “Because I’m a book groupie I always treat writers like movie stars,” said Roth, acknowledging the funny duality of that tinge of fan with her responsibilities in presenting the authors. The sweet stuff of boozed up schmoozing, however, puts everyone on the same plane on which series-goers, bar regulars, and other locals can go tête-à-tête with the important writers of their generation.

Book groupies can expect to spot the familiar mugs of notable literary personalities in future readings, including Deb Olin Unferth, Jami Attenberg, Darin Strauss, and Karen Russell, the last of whom was the first author on Roth’s wishlist for the series.

With this reading series, Penina Roth plays a role similar to Milton Glaser in the 70s, rejuvenating love of one’s city by way of the arts. And you’re invited to love Crown Heights too.

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