Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

The literary publisher Dalkey Archive Press has teamed up with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature (with support from the Office of Cultural Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel, NY) to create a new Hebrew Literature series:

The Hebrew Literature Series at Dalkey Archive Press makes available major works of Hebrew-language literature in English translation. Featuring exceptional authors at the forefront of Hebrew letters, the series aims to introduce the rich intellectual and aesthetic diversity of contemporary Hebrew writing and culture to English-language readers.

The first book in the series is Eshkol Nevo’s Homesick (translated by Sondra Silverston). The publisher’s blurb is below…stay tuned for the JBC/Jewish Book World review and interview with the author (although, I’ll let it slip that we’re fans of the book…so don’t wait for our review to read it yourself!):

This remarkable, kaleidoscopic novel tells the fragmented stories of a group of women and men brought together by chance in a small neighborhood in the hills of Israel. It is 1995, and Amir, a young man studying psychology in Jerusalem, and his girlfriend Noa, studying photography in Tel Aviv, decide to move in together, choosing a tiny apartment midway between their two cities—a village that was forcibly emptied of its Arab inhabitants in 1948. Although the two students are only looking for a convenient place to spend time together, they find their new home to be no less complex a web of relationships than urban life: their landlords live on the other side of a paper-thin wall; the next-door neighbors have just lost their eldest son in Lebanon; and further down the street, a Palestinian construction worker named Saddiq is keeping a close watch on the house where his own family used to live.

(And for those that don’t know about Dalkey Archive Press and their wonderful books: “Founded in 1984, Dalkey Archive Press “was and is a hopelessly quixotic venture” devoted to publishing the best contemporary literature from across the world.” More information can be found on their website here.)

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Last month, five leading magazines teamed up to develop an advertising campaign for “the power of print.” We love our internet-based resources, but it is true that they can’t replace the feeling of holding the flesh of a magazine in your hands (oh, and by the way, we print a magazine, Jewish Book World, which you should definitely subscribe to). Read the full WSJ article here.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Two of our favorite authors delve into the world of film and music:

Etgar Keret on adapting his work for the screen for Jewcy here

Jennifer Gilmore shares her Something Red music playlist with the Largehearted Boy here

In his last posts, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, the author of Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities, wrote about learning to bake your own matzah and new models for engaged Jewish life. He has been blogging all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s author blogging series.

Imagine you don’t know how to read a novel.

Now, this is a thought experiment, so bear with me: You know how to read other books and essays, but you don’t know how to read a novel.

But instead of learning how to read a novel, you find another solution: a blog about novels. This is sort of a 21st century version of Cliff’s Notes. You get the blogger’s take on the novel, but you have to trust her to convey the meaning of the novel itself.

Then you discover a whole world of blogs on novels. Dozens of blogs. Soon you start getting weekly emails from the bloggers. Then they come daily. You are awash in other people’s takes on the novel. You start to become overwhelmed.

Then you find the answer: a “best of novel blogger” site. Now you don’t have to read all those blogs, you can just tune in to the best blog takes on the novel.

But you still can’t read a novel.

Now substitute the novel for Jewish texts –- Torah, Talmud, Kabbalah -– whatever you like.

Most of us can’t read the texts ourselves. So we rely on the blogger –- a translator or interpreter -– to help us understand the text. In the olden days, we were stuck with one blogger -– the local rabbi. Good or bad, he (and the rabbi was usually a “he”) was the one tell who would tell us what was in the texts.

Then along came the internet. We no longer had to rely on the local rabbi for a take on the text. We could sign up for email lists and read blogs. Then it became overwhelming. So we picked a few to read. Or maybe we stopped altogether.

But we never learned to read the text.

So what is the role of the rabbi nowadays? At a minimum, a rabbi should be someone who is the “best of the novel blogger” – someone who is more than mediocre, who can offer enlightening opinions, and stand out among the cacophony that the internet has bequeathed to us.

But what if the rabbi were actually a teacher who empowered us? What if the solution to the cacophony was to dive into the source for ourselves, form our own interpretation and offer our own opinion? What if we learned to read the novel, as it were? In that vision, the rabbi is the guide: someone who teaches us how to read, not someone who tells us what it says. She could direct us, and steer us away from faulty interpretations. But ultimately we could add our own voice to the conversation. We could make meaning on our own, and we could see the value in the original text, not only the interpretation.

These days, other people’s interpretations are a dime a dozen. Finding a blog is easy. Bringing our own self to the original text is an all-too-rare event (just think of how many people actually read the Health Care Bill or the State of the Union Address).

Imagine a world in which people only talked about novels, but never actually read them. If novels don’t matter, then no problem. But if they do matter….

We live in a world where people often talk about Jewish texts, but don’t actually read them. If we don’t think these texts have much importance for our lives, no problem. But what if they do matter? Wouldn’t we want to access them directly?

Jewish vibrancy, as I argued in Empowered Judaism, is not about handing off the text to someone else. It is about internalizing the text -– with a guide, a real teacher -– and then taking that text seriously.

There’s a reason that Cliff’s Notes were forbidden in high school.

Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is the author of Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities. He’s been blogging all week in Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s Visiting Scribe.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Our favorite photo from the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize Jewish Literature ceremony, held in Jerusalem at the King David Hotel on March 31:

2010 Sami Rohr Prize Winners Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Kenneth B. Moss with their families

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Are you an author or publisher that plans to make a book trailer? If so, check out this great, first annual, book trailer contest from ForeWord Reviews. More information can be found here.

Oh, and the grand prize is an Apple iPad…so what are you waiting for?? (Not to mention lots of publicity at BEA.)

In his last post, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer wrote about new models for engaged Jewish life. He’ll be blogging all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s Visiting Scribe.

A few years ago, my friend and colleague, Rabbi Ethan Tucker, wrote an article about independent minyanim in which he asked, almost as an aside, “We all cook and bake. Why shouldn’t every community be baking its own matzot?”

I admit at the time I thought this was a relatively marginal goal in the general trend toward Jewish empowerment. After all, we need people who can pass on the core Jewish principles of study, worship and acts of lovingkindness, not a competitor to the ably skilled people at Streit’s.

But Ethan’s challenge was an interesting one. He put it a different way in a lecture series he recently gave on Halakhah (Jewish law). Does your own Jewish community have the skills, knowledge and confidence to truly own the Jewish tradition? Or, to put it another way, if we all eat matzah on Passover, why is it that none of us know how to make it?

And here I thought I was an empowered Jew. After all, I just wrote a book called Empowered Judaism. But I have no clue how to make matzah, one of the oldest commandments of Jewish living. And until this year (see below), I didn’t even know anyone who could do it (and believe me, I have a lot of Jewish friends on Facebook).

What’s worse: we free ride on other communities that don’t really buy into our approach to Jewish life in order to get matzah on Passover. Isn’t it odd that the people I buy matzah from would never be a 10th person in the minyan I daven in on Shabbat? We live in parallel Jewish communities, but only one group is totally dependent on the other to celebrate Passover (and make tefillin, and ritually slaughter animals, and write sifrei Torah, with a few exceptions to the latter two.)

To be clear, this is not a “liberal” vs. “Orthodox” issue. Very few Modern Orthodox communities (excluding those on religious kibbutzim in Israel) bake their own matzot. What kind of message does it send when we take school-kids on a tour of the matzah factory, and they only see ultra-Orthodox Jews in charge?

Now this doesn’t mean we all need to go out and bake our own matzot for Passover. But it does mean that someone we know, someone in our Jewish community, broadly speaking, should be baking matzah.

This all came home for me last week, when a number of fellows at Yeshivat Hadar – men and women – baked their own matzah under the supervision of Rabbi Tucker. The event was so unusual that it merited coverage in the New York Times. “This is the essence of Pesach,” one of our students, Rachel Druck, was quoted as saying.

This underscored for me the ways in which we have a long way to go to seriously live out an empowered Jewish life. It’s not enough to build engaged communities of prayer, learning and lovingkindness. It also means setting our sights on the possibility of being fully Jewishly self-sufficient. Even to the point of baking our own matzah.

If all the matzah factories closed next year, and you were forced to go it on your own for Passover, what would you do? I, for one, am going to take some time this year to learn how to bake matzah.

Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, the author of Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities, is blogging all week for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning.

Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is the author of Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities. He’ll be blogging all week for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s Visiting Scribe.

It’s strange to write a book about independent minyanim when you don’t even attend one anymore.

Independent minyanim are those grassroots, all-volunteer-led Jewish prayer communities that have popped up with force across the United States, Israel and Europe over the past decade. In 2000 there were three of them; now there are more than 70. I wrote about them in Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities.

For eight years, since I co-founded Kehilat Hadar -– one of the flagship independent minyanim –- in 2001, the minyan was my Jewish community and spiritual home. Even after I retired from the leadership in 2005, I would attend the minyan’s services and learning programs, watching the community grow and mature.

Then I fell victim to a force much more powerful than upstart Jewish community: New York City real estate prices. My wife and I had a daughter a couple of years ago, and all of a sudden, our cozy 1-bedroom apartment on 110th Street transformed into a nightmare of space needs. We couldn’t afford a bigger place on the Upper West Side. So we did what Jews have done for centuries: we migrated.

Shunning the obvious next-step neighborhoods like Park Slope or Riverdale, we moved up to Washington Heights. We even recruited people to join us. But we didn’t start an independent minyan. Instead, we joined a synagogue.

The synagogue is by no means cutting-edge. It was founded in 1938. It has an old-school name: The Fort Tryon Jewish Center. It uses a siddur that was published in 1960. There is a ritual committee, a board and membership dues.

And yet, it’s not your average synagogue either. It never affiliated with a denomination, and prides itself on being independent. Laypeople read the Torah and lead the prayers. It is multigenerational, with people in their 80s schmoozing with people in their 20s (many of whom are students at Kehilat Hadar’s affiliated Yeshivat Hadar) at kiddush. They have hot cholent and hot veggie stew for the non-meat-eaters.

The synagogue hired a young rabbi last year named Micha’el Rosenberg; he received Orthodox ordination in Israel but believes in equal participation for men and women. (When he lived on the Upper West Side, he used to daven at Kehilat Hadar). Taking a page out of the independent minyanim playbook, he only speaks for 5 minutes.

The synagogue isn’t perfect. In fact, its main challenge is space. It meets in the social hall of another synagogue, and the room is simply too big for the number of people who come. It’s hard to build religious energy with 60 people in a room built for 400. But every week there are new faces, and the community is certainly gaining momentum.

So what does it mean that one of the chief champions of independent minyanim is a member at a synagogue? It demonstrates that the whole independent minyan phenomenon was never an either-or proposition between minyanim and synagogues. People are looking for Jewish community that works. If it’s in a synagogue, they will happily join a synagogue. It also shows that synagogues are being influenced by independent minyanim. When the rabbi knows the ethos of independent minyanim from the inside, s/he is unafraid to borrow tactics that worked there for use in the synagogue.

The future of Jewish community is not limited to independent minyanim or synagogues. In the ideal, both minyanim and synagogues will learn from each other, and we will see a variety of models for engaged Jewish life.

Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, the author of Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Building Vibrant Jewish Communities, is blogging all week in Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning’s author blogging series.

In her last posts, Nora Rubel wrote about keeping kosher and “keeping Jewish”and Jewsteria Lane. She has been blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

I love television, I love movies, and I read too (when I can squeeze in time between my regularly scheduled programming). I have always been interested in how popular culture attempts to warn us about the dangerous influences of our time. Such literary and cinematic narratives warn us about the consequences of certain behaviors. Sometimes they warn us about the influence of alcohol or drugs as in the 1980s’ after school specials Angel Dusted and Desperate Lives (both of which feature Helen Hunt). Sometimes, we can learn to fear the influence of certain types of people and religious beliefs (think about Iranians and Islam in the 1991 film Not Without My Daughter). If we examine the context of such films however, we can see that they tell us more about ourselves and our times than they do of the chosen subject matter.

When I was in college, my mother gave me the Naomi Ragen novel Sotah. While I ravenously devoured it, enjoying the sneak peek into the hidden world of ultra-Orthodox (haredi) Jews, I imagine that I (embarrassingly uncritically) swallowed the content as completely true.

Nora Rubel

One such famous (and false) tale is the 1836 bestselling exposé Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed, which told of unspeakable horrors that took place in a Montreal convent: the sexual solicitation of nuns by priests, infanticide, and murder. Read by many at a time when convents were actually being burned down by angry mobs, these convent tales fueled already existing nativist passions. A ghostwritten work, its purpose was to warn Protestant women of the dangers of the Catholic Church.

After I read this piece, my thoughts turned back to Sotah, a novel that (likeAwful Disclosures) highlighted anxiety about the nature of power and authority, primarily the power wielded over women. I thought of my response to the novel, particularly my feelings of certainty that the haredi world was a dangerous place for women, and wondered if perhaps I was being manipulated as a reader. I began seeking out fictional narratives that featured ultra-Orthodox characters and found that for many this theme of Ragen’s was common. Sometimes the agenda was in favor of a more moderate religiosity, sometimes it favored a progressive secularism. In all cases, the texts seemed to function as weapons in an ongoing culture war, one that is an argument over authentic Judaism.

The texts pursued in my new book, Doubting the Devout: the Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, emerge therefore in a period of cultural contestation, a moment when the dominant group, mainstream American Jewry, consciously or unconsciously believes it is being threatened by an invasion of the marginalized group, the ultra-Orthodox. As in the earlier anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim narratives, the dominant culture constructs extreme portraits of the marginalized group as an articulation of its own cultural insecurity and anxiety. The anti-haredi writings that I profile in this book place this American Jewish culture war in a long line of American ethnic and religious conflict. The narratives replace the lecherous priests in anti-Catholic tales with manipulative rabbis, the abusive convent with the repressive yeshiva, but the formula remains the same: these people are different and threatening, and the public should be warned.

Nora Rubel is the author of the recently published Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination. She has been blogging here all week.

In her last post, Nora Rubel wrote about keeping kosher and “keeping Jewish”. She will be blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

I just published my first book, Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, a book which deals with contemporary tensions among American Jewry. While I was working on it, my family moved to a beautiful neighborhood in Western New York. Our house was chosen primarily for its 1930s Arts and Crafts style and charm. Sidewalks and vintage street lamps lined the street, which was in a great location.

Little did I know that I was about to move into what is essentially a microcosm of American Jewry, as well as into the pages of my book. We knew that the area was a relatively Jewish one, but I think we were unprepared for quite how Jewish it was. Located within an eruv, our neighborhood is where our town’s haredi Jews live. Our particular block is made up of a mix of wig-wearing and black hat Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, and hard-core Reform and interfaith families. I know there are local Conservative Jews, but they don’t live here.

Within a short time of moving in, we became aware of the street’s character — joking that the street was so safe for the kids on Saturday because hardly anyone drove. We were soon approached by a neighbor who confided that he was relieved when he discovered that we weren’t Orthodox (too many of them already). My first impression of the street was thus one of sharp divisions, proving my book’s argument.

However, over time, I began to romanticize the pluralistic nature of my street—thinking perhaps I had overstated the original hostility I had picked up on. Many of the religious women in the neighborhood were nothing but nice to me (in spite of my nose ring and non-Jewish husband) and when the weather was nice, outdoor socializing between the various strands of the tribe was not uncommon. But as I began to become closer with these neighbors — and I started to think of many of them as friends — I learned that there are even deeper divisions beneath the Midwestern pleasantries that exist here. One woman’s skirt is too short, another’s house is not kosher enough. As an academic, I frequently critique the need for categories, yet recognize that this is still how we see the world. And the contemporary Jewish world is one framed by sharp—yet complex—categories.

There’s a house for sale on my street again, and I feel my neighbors’ eyes upon it — waiting to see who will move in (and what sort of hat the new neighbor will sport).

Nora Rubel is the author of the recently published Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination. She will be blogging here all week.