I’m a historian of China and Japan whose work has hewed close to the cultural interactions between Chinese and Japanese over recent centuries. I’m now working on the history of the Esperanto movement in China and Japan from the first years of the twentieth century through the early 1930s. The topic brings together my interests in Sino-Japanese historical relations, linguistic scholarship, and Jewish history (the creator of Esperanto was a Polish-Jewish eye doctor). Over the last couple of decades, I have become increasingly interested in Jewish history. I think by now I know what counts as good history, but I’m still an amateur in Jewish history. Nonetheless, these books all struck me as extraordinary.
The late Herbert Davidson wrote on medieval Jewish and Muslim philosophy, and Maimonides was a natural topic for him. Of the roughly eight or ten biographical studies of Maimonides that I have read, Davidson’s stands out for the strength of its logical analysis and its great breadth. It offers numerous insights into the polymath that is its subject.
Moses Maimonides (1137/38-1204), scholar, physician, and philosopher, was the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages. In this magisterial biography, Herbert Davidson provides an exhaustive guide to Maimonides' life and works. After considering Maimonides' upbringing and education, Davidson expounds all of his many writings in exhaustive detail, with separate chapters on rabbinic, philosophical, and medical texts. Moses Maimonides has been recognized as the standard work on a towering figure of Western intellectual history.
I founded the All-Weather Friend, which is about helping friends get through difficult situations. My first book, Alzheimer’s: A Crash Course for Friends and Relatives, tells how to help people living with dementia. I’ve had hard times in my life—my husband’s brain tumor and suicide, my father’s dementia, infertility, miscarriage, my brother’s sudden death, and other things that flooded me with grief. But my life is filled with joy; I’ve learned that joy comes from God and from a compassionate connection with friends and people we love. I write and speak about “informed compassion.” I hope you’ll visit my website, where there’s a great dementia resource page with contributions by many readers.
Although this book may not seem to fit the list,
it’s one of the best books on loss I have ever read, and I’ve read quite a few. Dementia is about loss, after loss, after loss. Yes, there are moments and
times of joy. And yes, it challenges and expands our love, faith, compassion,
and sense of self. But dementia is, indisputably, about loss.
I read this book
shortly after my husband’s suicide, and it comforted me at a time when comfort
was hard to come by. My Southern Baptist mother also read it and, when she
finished, held it up and said in her practical, down-to-earth way, “This is a
book I will read over and over again like I read the Bible.”
Rabbi Wolpe’s
book is beautifully written and wonderfully wise, and I recommend it to
everyone.
Some losses are so subtle they go unnoticed, some so overwhelming and cruel they seem unbearable. Coping with grief and experiencing loss overwhelms us in ways that seem both hopeless and endless. In painful moments like these, we must make a choice: Will we allow the difficulties we face to become forces of destruction in our lives, or will we find a way to begin learning from loss, transforming our suffering into a source of strength?
A theologian with the heart of a poet, Rabbi David Wolpe explores the meaning of loss, and the way we can use its inevitable…
I love mythological creatures! I grew up gravitating toward fantasy books but because I have a narcissistic parent, I got teased for reading them. To avoid the teasing, I ended up reading a lot of mythology because that was a “safe” fantasy option; reading mythology was “educational” rather than “silly.” When I got older, I discovered that there’s a whole category of fantasy books that retell myths from alternative points of view. This subgenre opened new doors of understanding and empathy for me. Reading old stories from new perspectives opens my eyes to a myriad of different types of people and broadens my view of the world. And I’ve been reading them ever since.
The story of two mystical creatures stuck in 1899 New York who have to make their own way in the world. Despite their different natures, they become unlikely friends and have to work together to survive.
While I enjoyed the perspective of both supernatural beings in this book, I found the golem especially engaging. Through her eyes, the reader gets an amazingly detailed view of turn-of-the-century New York as well as the intricacies of human behavior.
The jinni faces different challenges—he’s lost a chunk of his memory—but he also has to adapt to life among people. Wrapped in a rich tapestry of historical details, the story walks us through their processes of acclimating to human society and facing the dangers of their pasts.
'One of only two novels I've ever loved whose main characters are not human' BARBARA KINGSOLVER
For fans of The Essex Serpent and The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock.
'By far my favourite book of of the year' Guardian
Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master, the husband who commissioned her, dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York in 1899.
At the age of fifty-three, I was suddenly thrust into the role of primary caregiver for my disabled twin sister who was unable to sit, stand, feed herself, eat solid foods, or communicate. Up to that point, that role had been my mother’s with the help of home-attendants; but my mother was aging and the care provided by the ever-changing attendants was wanting. I was forced to place Judy in a nursing home. The challenge left me overwhelmed with the responsibility of overseeing her care and there were days I wondered if I could go on. With the support of family and friends, I was able to make it through.
I first read this book shortly after it was published in 1981. I was looking for the answer to the question of why bad things happen in this world.
Kushner did not have an answer to that question, but insights into how we might face the challenges that life can present when those “bad things” happen. He, himself, went through a significant trauma: hearing that his young son had a progressive disease that would not allow him to live into adulthood. Yet Kushner found a way to survive and to move forward.
I’ve read this book multiple times. It always reinforces for me the idea that the difficulties we face in life are just part of living and that even though we may suffer through hard times, life is, indeed, worth living. We can and we must go on.
The #1 bestselling inspirational classic from the nationally known spiritual leader; a source of solace and hope for over 4 million readers.
When Harold Kushner’s three-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease that meant the boy would only live until his early teens, he was faced with one of life’s most difficult questions: Why, God? Years later, Rabbi Kushner wrote this straightforward, elegant contemplation of the doubts and fears that arise when tragedy strikes. In these pages, Kushner shares his wisdom as a rabbi, a parent, a reader, and a human being. Often imitated but never superseded, When Bad…
I love the experience of reading a book that combines a known (to me or not!) story combined with elements that make it new again. It could be a parody, a “fractured fairy tale,” or a new retelling, funny or serious. For my book Little Red and the Cat Who Loved Cake, I read so many nursery rhymes and fairy tales in order to populate the town with fun versions of recognizable characters for Little Red to encounter, it makes me appreciate these books even more.
In another Wild West setting twist, an advice dispensing Rabbi is the vehicle for upcycling traditional folk tales. And it is funny: whether the Rabbi is busting through saloon doors to beat someone to the punchline of an Abe Lincoln joke or using his wits to outsmart bandits or simply helping out with a frontier domestic issue, I find myself literally laughing out loud. The illustrations are charmingly folky, and there is a glossary for the story sources which often turn out to be tales that are many hundreds of years old.
Rabbi Harvey is Back with Ten Hilarious New Adventures
In this follow-up to the popular The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Wisdom and Wit in the Wild West, the Rabbi returns to the streets of Elk Spring, Colorado. Part Wild West sheriff, part old world rabbi, Harvey protects his town and delivers justice, wielding only the weapons of wisdom, wit, and a bit of trickery. These adventures combine Jewish and American folklore by creatively retelling comic Jewish folktales and setting them loose on the western frontier of the 1870s.
I’ve loved fiction that excites my mind and imagination since I was very young. I spent a lot of time in the library growing up, mostly reading horror and historical narratives. Later, I became interested in music, painting, film, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, religion, and politics. I’m not an expert in anything—I’m too driven to make things to be a good scholar—but these are the subject areas that inform what I write.
This novel evokes an extraordinary range of emotions. Skibell works wonders with folklore and history, turning out a tale of tales that is by turns shocking and horrifying, tender, and outrageously funny. The language is deceptively simple and beautiful. Consider this description from the murdered narrator, on returning to his plundered neighborhood after climbing out of a mass grave: “In front of every house were piles of vows and promises, all in broken pieces. How I could see such things, I cannot tell you.” The balance here—of imagination, grief, and lightness—is exquisite.
Joseph Skibell’s magical tale about the Holocaust—a fable inspired by fact—received unanimous nationwide acclaim when first published in 1997.
At the center of A Blessing on the Moon is Chaim Skibelski. Death is merely the beginning of Chaim’s troubles. In the opening pages, he is shot along with the other Jews of his small Polish village. But instead of resting peacefully in the World to Come, Chaim, for reasons unclear to him, is left to wander the earth, accompanied by his rabbi, who has taken the form of a talking crow. Chaim’s afterlife journey is filled with extraordinary encounters whose…
I love to read. A life-changing event in 1997, started my journey into writing and eventually into my conversion to Judaism. Many years later, I’ve come to realize that there are grains of truth in every faith tradition and I search for those truths in my own life. Currently, I have four books in print, writing under the pen names of Brenda Ray (The Hebrew Midwives Trilogy) and B. K. Ricotta (Two of a Kind and A Love So Sweet). Two other novels (Book 1 and 2 of the Econfina Creek Series) are in the works.
Rabbi Cooper, through easy-to-follow and deeply human instruction, guides you through a soul-changing journey in this book. His own journey leads the way for anyone who wants to understand how meditation can change your life and the world. He taught me so much about how to express my faith in daily living. A must-read.
A comprehensive guide to meditation for people of all faiths, from the best-selling author of God Is a Verb.
The only complete nonsectarian guide to meditation, A Heart of Stillness is a comprehensive guidebook to its basic principles and practices.
By showing the way to what mystics have experienced for thousands of years, David Cooper's accessible, clear advice provides invaluable guidance both for students already studying with a meditation teacher, and for those who want to develop a meditative practice on their own.
Drawing from the wisdom of the world's great spiritual traditions, Cooper teaches basic meditative principles and practices…
If there's a throughline in all my books, it occurs to me I've always been writing about the dangers of extremism, the times when we get sucked too deeply into ideologies that lead to dangerous action. So this most recent novel felt like an ideal time to take that head-on: to see what would happen within a sect of Kabbalists, led by a self-proclaimed prophet, when things went bad. With that in mind... here's a bunch of books focused around prophecy!
The only other novel I know, along with my book, directly about the 17th-century false prophet Sabbetai Tzvi. Singer's is a kind of historical novel of that moment, imagining the effect of that prophet on a small European town during his days of false prophecy. It's a good one.
As messianic zeal sweeps through medieval Poland, the Jews of Goray divide between those who, like the Rabbi, insist that no one can "force the end" and those who follow the messianic pretender Sabbatai Zevi. But as hysteria and depravity reign free, it becomes clear that it is not the Messiah who has come to Goray.
Praise:
"Beautifully written by one of the masters of Yiddish prose, and beautifully translated, ''Satan in Goray'' is folk material transmuted into literature." — The New York Times Review of Books
"A gripping parable of reason versus revelation, hysteria in the face of apocalypse"…
My heart has been Southern for 35 years although I was raised in Boston and never knew the South until well into my adulthood. I loved it as soon as I saw it but I needed to learn it before I could call it home. These books and others helped shape me as a Southerner and as an author of historical Southern Jewish novels. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t describe 19th-century North Carolina so much as immerse his voice and his reader in it. Dara Horn captures her era seamlessly. Steve Stern is so wedded to place he elevates it to mythic. I don’t know if these five are much read anymore but they should be.
For my money, Stern is the South’s premiere literary comic writer. In this one, he is a Southern Philip Roth with an I.B. Singer twist. A teenage boy discovers a frozen rabbi in the Kelvinator inside his parent’s Memphis basement. The rabbi’s been frozen for one hundred years. Bernie thaws him and what ensues covers a universe of incident: teenage hope and angst, Talmudic wisdom, kabbalistic film-flammery, the seduction of all of Memphis, from lowlifes to elite, by a rabbi (who can fly) selling himself as the font of all magic and knowledge. Stern obviously loves his Memphis and his Jews. At the same time he skewers them with the sleekest wit. Even Israel gets a gratuitous knock. It was the only thing I did not like in the book but it was fleeting, so I got over it. Such is the power of genius.
Award-winning novelist Steve Stern's exhilarating epic recounts the story of how a nineteenth-century rabbi from a small Polish town ends up in a basement freezer in a suburban Memphis home at the end of the twentieth century. What happens when an impressionable teenage boy inadvertently thaws out the ancient man and brings him back to life is nothing short of miraculous.
I love historical fiction, and with dual timelines, I often find myself identifying with a contemporary character who is trying to solve some mystery from the past. I wrote an article titled Five Questions to Ask Before Writing a Dual Timeline Novel, in which I addressed structure, how to relate the timelines to each other, and how to keep the reader engaged when going back and forth between time periods. I also wrote a blog post about how fitting the pieces together for this kind of work can be a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Each of the novels I’ve recommended is an example of a satisfying final picture.
This is one of my favorite books of all time! Kadish adeptly intertwines the story of Ester in 1660s London with that of two modern academics, the soon-to-retire Helen and the grad student Aaron. As they research a treasure trove of papers they have received, they slowly learn of Ester’s astonishing story.
Academic success is not all that is at stake in the lives of Helen and Aaron, and we carefully follow their trials, too. Kadish wrote an article for the Paris Review in 2018 called “Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women,” which I often think of when creating my own characters.
WINNER OF A NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD A USA TODAY BESTSELLER "A gifted writer, astonishingly adept at nuance, narration, and the politics of passion."-Toni Morrison Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a…
