Our friends at Tablet Magazine have put together a great list of Rosh Hashanah resolutions from a wide range of well-known Jewish figures. Each response offers advice for the coming year and some things for all of us to think about, and do, over the next 12 months.

Here are our five favorites—you can check out the rest over at Tablet.

Dr. Ruth, sex therapist

The one thing you must do in the New Year is pay greater attention to the humans next to you than the gadget in your hand. No matter how much you love your phone, it will never hold your hand or make your heart flutter. If you want to have a productive year, if you want to feel the warmth of human contact, if you want to marry or stay married, have children and get the most that life has to offer, put your gadgets down and connect to those around you with your mind, your arms, and your heart.

Mayim Bialik

The last time I was in Israel was two years ago. I’ve almost gone a few times since then but just have never gotten around to it. This past year has seen an increase in my Jewish learning, observance, and sense of connection to the State of Israel. I had a serious car accident a month ago, and since then I’ve felt a very strong pull to go back to Israel. I would go so far as to say I feel like I need to go to Israel this year to heal from the accident, to heal from a particularly rigorous year emotionally, and to put my feet back on the Land.

Jonathan Ornstein, director of the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland

Go to Auschwitz. Feel sad. Feel angry. Contemplate the unimaginable loss. Weep for the souls of the victims. Say “Never Again.” Then go one hour down the road to Krakow and learn the real lesson of the Holocaust. Go meet a growing, vibrant, optimistic, pluralistic, forward-looking Jewish community that refuses to allow itself to be defined by tragedy—the one community in Europe where it is getting better, safer, and easier to be Jewish every single day. Learn the lesson of the Holocaust that the Krakow Jewish community has learned: The strength of the Jewish People lies in defining ourselves by what we do, not by what is done to us.

Emily Nussbaum, television critic for The New Yorker

My goal this year is to use the word “ham-handed” in a TV review. I also want to cook 4 percent more (I’m a terrible cook), wear eyeliner, buy a bunk bed for my two boys, go see more standup comedy, read something fancy like Montaigne, and convince my husband to grow a mustache. Plus, write notes to people when I admire something they wrote (like Nora Ephron and David Rakoff did) and gossip more.

Joshua Cohen

My New Year’s resolution is straight-ahead: Stop imposing Hallmark® goyisher narrischkeit on Jewish tradition. It isn’t New Year’s. It’s Rosh Hashanah.

Happy 5773, people.

(Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

What To Do in 5773 [Tablet Magazine]

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• Getting pooped on by a bird at the Western Wall becomes a catalyst for introspection for one Birthright-goer.

• Bar Refaeli gets sushi in Tel Aviv.

• Do Jews live longer than other people? Jewcy contributor Sala Levin debunks that and other myths.

• Leon Black is the mystery buyer who dropped almost $120 million for Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, “The Scream.”

• Girls’ Alex Karpovsky stars in this short film, based on an upcoming book by Joshua Cohen.

The post Daily Jewce: Israel’s Social Justice Activist, Bar Refaeli in Tel Aviv, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

The Brooklyn literary community muttered a collective “what a dick” this morning when New York Magazine reported some comments that were made by Jonathan Lethem to the LA Times.  Lethem who was born in Boreum Hill and whose most successful novel name drops Brooklyn in its title, said, “Brooklyn is repulsive with novelists, it’s cancerous with novelists.”

This is not only wrong on so many levels, but a bit hyperbolic.  Just because a place has lots of something, doesn’t mean that it’s cancerous with it.  Is Brooklyn cancerous with Pizza?  Is it cancerous with models? (Wait, don’t answer that…)

What about Brooklyn rich literary tradition?  Lethem’s comments go on to state that more or less that Brooklyn is not a good place to be a writer.  This is like saying that Belgium is a bad place to make waffles.  The worst part of it all, Lethem is now a California resident.  So while he lives out his Californication fantasies, flirts with Scientology and transitions to screenplay writing, we’ll be enjoying our cancerous pizza at Roberta’s and going to better readings.  Maybe while in Pomona, Lethem will write a great novel to back up his statements.  Considering that Lethem lived in Brooklyn while writing, You Don’t Love Me Yet there might be truth to his statement after all.

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Once he tones down the self-aggrandizing, Cohen compares The Instructions to the Talmud (“there isn’t much plot, just water-fountain tattle, summaries, lists and, interspersed, charts and strange doodled maps that only distract.”), then goes on to say that David Foster Wallace is Levin’s “tutelary goy.” Finally, he gets around to more or less saying that he doesn’t like the book in what has to be the shortest word count I’ve seen from the Witz author.  What bothers me is the ethics question:  Cohen obviously has a stake in all this, so was it fair to let him review Levin’s book?  Wouldn’t another critic have been more appropriate to tackle The Instructions?  Maybe a critic shouldn’t be able to come out and try to essentially advertise his own book in one of the most respected forums around.  To put it in really simple terms, It’s almost like they let the author of Twilight review the Vampire Diaries.  Maybe big Jewish book writer on big Jewish book writer is a bad thing.

Still, the review itself isn’t at all bad. But the way Cohen starts the thing left a sour taste in the mouths of some book people on the internet.  Can you really fault Cohen for reviewing The Instructions this way?  He’s a critic, and one who has never been shy when it comes to being critical– especially of more contemporary titles.  Sure, we’ve seen Cohen court controversy with boisterous statements before, and maybe he felt his position as Big Jewish Book Guy was being threatened.  But at the very least, the prospect of a nice little literary feud isn’t so bad.  Even better, one between two fine writers such as Joshua Cohen and Adam Levin.  That’s a rivalry I can dig my teeth into.

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This week we were bummed to learn that Justin Taylor would no longer be blogging over at HTML GIANT.  He didn’t really give any specifications as to why, but I’d have to guess the guy just got a little too busy with his forthcoming novel coming later in the winter.  Whatever the case, I still hold tight to the claim that he’s one of the best young writers around, and I’m excited to see what he has coming up.

One writers widow discusses another: Norris Church Mailer talks about the late Harold Pinter’s wife Lady Antonia Fraser at The Daily Beast.

Over at The Millions, some discussion about Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson.

Bookslut has an interview with Ben Greenman.  The picture used of the author is pre-beard.

Our pal Largehearted Boy has started his list of other peoples “Best of 2010” lists.

At Tablet, Joshua Cohen reviews the latest translation of Doctor Zhivago.  It’s quite long (would you expect anything less from Cohen?), but well worth the read.

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