Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Jennifer Gilmore, author of Golden Country, posted the book trailer for her upcoming title from Scribner (April 2010), Something Red here.

And, Nextbook threw the coolest book release party ever (co-sponsored by JDub Records) for the paperback of Douglas Century’s Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter, a Nextbook/Schocken Jewish Encounters title. The evening featured JDub Records artist DJ Soulico, author Douglas Century, today’s biggest Jewish boxer, Dmitriy Salita, and a live boxing match.

Douglas Century, author of Barney Ross, and Editor-in-chief of Tablet Alana Newhouse

Dmitriy Salita

Boxing Match

Update: Jewcy has posted much better photos from the event. Check them out here.

Charles London, author of Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community, is guest-blogging for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Recently, Tel Aviv’s Museum of the Jewish Diaspora announced that it “will completely overhaul its exhibitions in an effort to put Diaspora Jews on an equal footing with those in Israel.” Part of that effort even means that museum is getting a new name: The Museum of the Jewish People.

This development acknowledges that the mindset in Israel has shifted from “the negation of exile,” to the reality that the Jewish People are a geographically and culturally diverse people, a global people.

In the past year, while doing research for a book, Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community, I had the opportunity to explore some of that diversity. What I saw astounded me, from the Abayudaya in Uganda — black African farmers who have been converting to Judaism by the hundreds and building Jewish institutions in the dusty hills outside of Mbale — to the so-called Wal-Mart Jews of Bentonville, Arkansas, a group assembled from all over the country and all across the spectrum of Jewish affiliation who are creating an amazing community in the heart of the Bible Belt.

I was lucky enough to get into Iran, where I could learn firsthand about the large Jewish community living in the Islamic republic, and I even celebrated the High Holidays in Burma, while thousands of monks staged the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in decades.

Within each of these Jewish communities there was nothing static about their identities, but also something amazingly unified, a sense of history and purpose that was awe inspiring.

It is that awe that I hope the new Museum of the Jewish People will capture. Its newly-stated purpose reminds me of a famous Jewish explorer. In the 12th century, a man known as Benjamin of Tudela took a journey. He set out from Navarre, in northeast Spain, to visit the Holy Land, but he took the long way ’round, so to speak, and visited Jewish communities in India, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His published account, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, provided a description of western Asia one hundred years before Marco Polo.

At the time of his journey, things were pretty rough for the Jews of Spain. The published Itinerary told of countless other communities of Jews, some of which were thriving, some of which were suffering. His journey seemed to say to his people back at home that no matter their current state, there were Jews all over the known world whose circumstances were different. Sometimes we are up, sometimes we are down.

He even described a war-like race of Jews in India who raided the lands from high atop mountain castles. All these diverse groups shared a Jewish — which he read as distinctly religious — identity, and the rising and falling of the communities gave his brethren in Spain a sense of the historical sweep of the Jewish people.

We can’t be sure why he wrote the book he wrote, but I think of it as a kind of community therapy for the times he lived in. Things may be uncertain, his work said, but Jews will survive and will continue to find their place in societies as diverse as Ethiopia and Baghdad, the French countryside and Jerusalem.

I hope this newly-conceived Museum will provide a similar comfort to Jews now who worry about our unstable times. Everywhere we find ourselves, from Arkansas to Tehran, we find ways to build meaningful Jewish lives and meaningful lives as global citizens, serving our neighbors and our nations. My own journey through the Diaspora certainly made me optimistic that we’ll continue to do so for a very long time. I often think that the greatest gift of the Jews to the world was not Monotheism, but Diaspora — the ability to be a people scattered, home in a thousand places.

Charles London is the author of One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War and the just-released Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community. Visit Far From Zion, his official website, and come back right here, where he’ll be blogging all week.

In her last blogs, Joanna Smith Rakoff wrote about some of her favorite books.

In the months preceding its publication, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission received more than its share of tabloid-style hype, all of which focused on, let’s say, the nonfiction aspect of the novel: the glimpse Korelitz offers of the Ivy League admissions process, a subject of rabid fascination for the American middle class.

In fact, while the novel is very much about that process — it follows a Princeton admissions officer through one application season — it’s really a sort of latter-day Victorian novel, a thick, satisfying page-turner in the vein of Eliot or perhaps Hardy, with a lovely, maddening heroine at its center. That heroine, 38-year-old Portia Nathan — the admissions officer in question — finds her carefully constructed life begins to unravel during the very months when she must read through thousands of undergraduate essays.

Portia is Jewish, but her ethnicity (for she is deeply secular and somewhat self-consciously assimilated) doesn’t truly come into play until the novel’s third section, a flashback to her college years at Dartmouth, when she finds herself slightly alienated from her prep school peers. Raised by a radical feminist mother in Northampton, Portia isn’t quite your typical Dartmouth student, and at first she falls in with the campus’ tiny Bohemian fringe. The group is led by Rebecca Marrow, “a flower of Ashkenazi frizz in a sea of limp WASP coiffure,” who runs a salon of sorts in her cinderblock dorm room, serving smoked salmon and French wine to the poets and actors and other refugees from the Greek scene.

But Portia has, perversely, been nursing a crush on Tom Stadley, a handsome jock and (of course) member of the school’s most conservative fraternity, whose mother is rumored to be a rabid anti-Semite—and who himself, according to Rebecca, has a “thing for Jewish girls.” Midway through their sophomore year, Tom turns his attention to Portia, asking her at the start of their courtship, “You’re Jewish, right?” Recalling Rebecca’s offhand comment about Tom’s romantic inclinations, lovesick Portia knows that she should simply answer ‘yes,’ for this is, strictly speaking, the truth.

And yet she pauses, “turning [the] question in her addled brain,” thinking over the varying ways in which she could answers, the various truths available to her: that she is an atheist, that she cannot speak Hebrew, that she never knew her father and he actually might not be or have been Jewish. “Her religious upbringing was limited to the brass menorah Susannah had produced one year when she was small, lit two nights running and abandoned…on the mantelpiece, and also to Susannah’s brief flirtation with feminist seders.….”

Her musings, in short, perfectly define the peculiar situation of the secular American Jew, complete with her slight discomfort—a discomfort she can’t quite articulate—that in answering “yes,” as she finally does, she’s somehow admitting to a whole host of stereotypes and clichés, somehow turning herself into an object. And yet this, for the moment, is what she wants—to be the object of Tom’s affection, no matter if he’s drawn to her because of misplaced ideas about sensual, passionate Jewesses.

Joanna Smith Rakoff has been blogging for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning. Her book, A Fortunate Age, is available now.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Well first, what IS Tisha B’Av:

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Jewish_Holidays/Tisha_BAv.shtml

http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/11955/what-is-tisha-b’av/

And some suggested reading from around the web…

Tisha B’Av Reading for Adults (Alan Jay Gerber)

Tish B’Av Books for Young Readers (Judy Chernak)

Tisha B’Av Books from Eichlers

Recommended reading for Tisha B’Av (Dov Krulwich)

MyJewishLearning recommended Tisha B’Av title

What books would you recommend?

In her last blog, Joanna Smith Rakoff wrote about a family “more identifiably old American than Jewish.“

Here in the U.S., Margaret Drabble’s novels are nowhere near as widely read as those of her older sister, A.S. Byatt, perhaps because they, to a one, seek to explore -– or, perhaps, “interrogate” might be a better word — contemporary British society, in rather the same way Philip Roth probes the uncomfortable corners of the American psyche. I lived in London in the mid-1990s—and suffered through a weird and surprising bout of anti-Semitism, which somehow did little to harm my love for the city—and, thus, I’m particularly attached to her 1996 novel, The Witch of Exmoor, a comedy of manners set in and around London during the period of my sojourn there.

Told in bold, masterful strokes—including a bossy, Forster-like narrator (“Begin on a summer evening,” she instructs at the novel’s start. “Let them have everything that is pleasant”). The story concerns a trio of grown British siblings, the daughters of a famous feminist writer who’s gone slightly mad in her old age, taking up residence in a gloomy old hotel by the sea and obsessing over her allegedly-Viking ancestry. While her son, Daniel, has chosen a cheerful British bourgeois for a mate—who happily tends to the garden of her country home, while ignoring the mounting evidence of her son’s crack addiction—her two daughters have “married out.” Grace, the elder, to a handsome Guyanese politician, David D’Anger a self-designated emblem of and spokesperson for the New Britain. Rosemary, the youngest, to Nathan Herz, who is, of course, Jewish.

Drabble’s agenda, in assigning her characters these most multicultural of spouses, is purposefully transparent: This is a novel about the evolving fabric of British society, in which—contrary to popular mythology—a David D’Anger or a Nathan Herz can be as perfectly English as a Daniel Palmer, and in which the days of the Daniel Palmers wielding all the power (all the seats in Parliament) are decidedly over.

But rather than a happy melting pot, the England of Drabble’s novel is a land of eternal outsiders, each more alienated than the next, which is precisely what makes Nathan Herz such a surprising, thrilling, and attractive character. Raised poor in East Finchley, now a wealthy ad man with a sleek, modern flat in the newly fashionable East End (the area his grandparents “worked day and night” to flee) Nathan is ostensibly more of an outsider than any of the others, including his Guyanese brother-in-law, and yet it is he who has the ease and self-possession to scoff at the silly scuffles and pretensions of his adopted family and, in the larger sense, his fellow countrymen.

While his brother-in-law (who appears, at the novel’s start, to be a heroic figure) talks a good game about social justice, ultimately it’s Nathan who truly sees the British class structure clearly. It is he who sees through his sister-in-law’s absurd preoccupation with her garden. Her roses, tellingly, smell like death to him, “a rotting, fecal, fungal smell. The smell…of old England.” It is Nathan alone who has no sentimental attachment to that old England, Nathan who is able to enjoy the prosperous and comparatively inclusive age in which he lives.

In the next installment: Jean Hanff Korelitz’s portrait of assimilation.

Joanna Smith Rakoff’s new book, A Fortunate Age, is available now. She’ll be blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Matthue Roth of MyJewishLearning interviews David Berman (former lead singer of the Silver Jews), poet and author of The Portable February here.

Josh Lambert (American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide) recommends “Ten Lost Treasures of American Jewish Fiction” on the JPS Blog here.

In her last blog, Joanna Smith Rakoff wrote about how, in her own way, Jane Austen wrote about being an undercover Jewish writer.

Laurie Colwin was, in a way, a sort of heir to Austen’s charms, even if her novels are the opposite of marriage plots: Her female characters struggle endlessly with the confines and meaning of contemporary marriage (contemporary, that is, circa the 1970s and 1980s; Colwin died, at 48, in 1992). Many, if not most, of her characters are Jewish, but none more interestingly so than those in Family Happiness, her most fully-realized novel and a sort of gloss on (or rebuke of) Madame Bovary , a novel about a happily married matron, Polly Solo-Miller Demarest, involved in an ongoing affair with a depressive painter. Who happens, of course, to be Jewish, though you mightn’t guess it if you hadn’t been told on the very first page.

The Solo-Millers are one of those old Jewish families–settled in New York even before the German banking dynasties, like the Schiffs and the Warburgs—“more identifiably old American than Jewish” with vast, dark uptown apartments, and summer houses in Maine, and traditions as labyrinthine and ingrained as any prep school. On Sundays, Polly and her brothers gather around their parents’ stolid dining room table for smoked salmon on toast points—definitely not bagels, that Oestjuden (Eastern Jewish) delight—and subtle chiding from their mother, who has so instilled in Polly her rigid ideas about women’s deportment and obligations that poor Polly almost has a breakdown, at one point, when she’s forced to go grocery shopping on a Sunday.

Polly is a wonderful character, struggling, all too humanly, not to understand but to suppress her conflicting desires for “comfort, order”—and danger and provocation. Colwin by no means ruminates on Polly’s Jewishness—or that of her family. But for me Colwin’s lack of chatter about exactly how and why the Solo-Millers are Jewish is precisely what makes them familiar and comprehensible as Jews: They exist in a milieu so thoroughly and completely Jewish that their identity (or religion) never comes into question.

It is simply woven into the fabric of their beings, as it is for so many American Jews. For Polly, her affair with the decidedly not-Jewish Lincoln, whose values and temperament are almost the opposite of those of everyone else in her life (everyone else being Jewish, of course), serves as a sort of questioning of her world, a pressing at its confines. In a way, the deeply iconoclastic decision she makes toward the novel’s end—I’m going to try not to reveal it—serves as metaphor for the sometimes uneasy, sometimes happy manner in which secular American Jews live sort of parallel lives, at once both fully American and fully Jewish (even if they don’t necessarily think of it that way).

In the next installment: Margaret Drabble’s pitch-perfect depiction of multicultural mid-1990s London.

Joanna Smith Rakoff’s new book, A Fortunate Age, is available now. She’ll be blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age and former editor of Nextbook.org, is guest-blogging for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Some years ago, when I was a doctoral student in English literature, my more conservative-minded peers sometimes made fun of the critics who practiced a more theory-based form of analysis — the followers of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and, in this case, the movement known as “New Historicism” — by saying, with a sarcastic roll of the eye, something to the effect of, “Right, and in not commenting on the French Revolution, Jane Austen is really commenting on the French Revolution.” Titters would ensue.

They were referring, of course, to the famous lack of historical context in Austen’s much-loved novels, and to the critic Warren Roberts’ then-famous (or, in some circles, infamous) book on the subject, Jane Austen and the French Revolution. Roberts set out to prove that Austen was not just a frippery writer of proto-chick-lit novels about shabby genteel young ladies in search of husbands, but a politically- and culturally-engaged chronicler of the major events of her day, who very much had the French and American Revolutions on her mind while writing Mansfield Park.

As a scholar, I was on the old-fashioned side and, thus, happy to simply read Austen’s novels for pleasure, rather than scrutinizing dialogue for coded ideas about the Napoleonic Wars — which may well be why I dropped out of said doctoral program and began writing my own marriage plots. But, though I laughed along with my classmates whenever that French Revolution comment was uttered, I was secretly attracted to the idea that a writer’s silence on a subject might say as much as her explicit exploration of a subject.

And so it was that years later, when I took a job as books editor of the Jewish culture magazineNextbook (now Tablet), that I found myself drawn to fiction that was less than straightforward in its approach to Jewish ideas or, more often, identity. It was easy to discuss the Jewish content of, say, The Counterlife or Bee Season. What interested me more — and still interests me — were the ways in which, for instance, a character’s Jewishness comes into play in a novel (or story) that doesn’t necessarily center on things Jewish.

Thus, over the next three days, I’ll be looking at a few favorite characters from such fiction, characters who, to my mind, say as much about the state of Anglo-American Judaism (in the cultural, if not the religious sense) as those in more explicitly and obviously Jewish fiction, characters from a few novels of recent decades: Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness, Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor, and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission.

Joanna Smith Rakoff’s new book, A Fortunate Age, is available now. She’ll be blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Adam Mansbach, author of The End of the Jews, blogs for JDub Records on Jewish Culture here.

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Life of Pi author Yann Martel just sold the rights to his third book to Spiegel & Grau. The new book is an allegory about the Holocaust — involving animals. Read Jewcy’s post on the new book here. Read The New York Times article about the book here.