Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

Each year we receive hun­dreds of Jew­ish inter­est books. Many make it into our mag­a­zine, Jew­ish Book World, many make it onto our blog and web­site, and a whole lot more are sub­mit­ted to the Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards. While we do our best to remain time­ly and share the lat­est news on all things Jew­ish lit­er­ary, unfor­tu­nate­ly it some­times takes a bit longer to get the word out about cer­tain books than we’d like. In order to slight­ly ease the delay for some of these titles, I’ll be post­ing a brief list­ing of a few of the books that have come across my desk every sev­er­al weeks. You will most like­ly see more about the these titles in the com­ing months, so just think of this as a lit­tle heads up.

The New Year begins with these books…

Vidal: The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy (April 2011, Trafal­gar Square Pub­lish­ing)
Yep. He’s Jewish.

Kad­dish and Oth­er Poems: 1958 – 1960 , Allen Gins­berg with a new after­word by Bill Mor­gan (Decem­ber 2010, City Lights Pub­lish­ers)
50th Anniver­sary Edi­tion. A part of City Lights Pock­et Poets series.

The Free World: A Nov­el, David Bez­mozgis (April 2011, FSG)
David Bez­mozgis’ long await­ed first novel!

Begin­nings: Reflec­tions on the Bible’s Intrigu­ing Firsts, Meir Shalev (March 2011, Crown)
Meir Shalev explores firsts” from the Bible: First Love, First Dream, First Laugh, First Lov­ing Woman…

What We Brought Back: Jew­ish Life After Birthright- Reflec­tions by Alum­ni of Taglit-Birthright Israel Trips, edit­ed by Wayne Hoff­man (Decem­ber 2010, Toby Press)
Pub­lished by Toby Press in coop­er­a­tion with Birthright Israel NEXT and Nextbook

Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.