I am a long-time journalist and have been passionate about understanding history ever since taking a wonderful AP course in European history in high school. I have read many historical books, both fiction and nonfiction, so it makes sense that my first novel, Rebecca of Ivanhoe, is historical fiction. To be a good journalist and citizen, you have to know and understand history to inform your reporting and try to prevent the bad moments of history from repeating themselves.
This book is the fascinating story of a Sephardic Jewish emigrant in London who, in the 1660s, was permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi even though she was a woman. The narration flips between Esther Velasquez’s remarkable story and an ailing historian in the 21st century who is trying to determine the identity of the mysterious scribe known to scholars only as “aleph.”
I liked this story because it revealed a fascinating window on how women, and particularly Jewish women, were treated in 17th-century Europe.
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…
My first published novel, Mahu, was about a gay cop coming out of the closet in Honolulu while investigating a dangerous case. I didn’t even realize there was a whole genre of gay mysteries until I’d finished it, but since then I have made it my business to read as much as I can of these books, both classics and new ones. My reading has deepened my understanding only of my protagonist’s life, but of my own.
Doug Orlando is a conflicted New York City detective with a past, and that gives him a lot of psychological depth. Originally published in 1992, this was one of the best of the wave of gay mysteries. I loved it because the police procedures seemed so authentic and Doug seemed like a guy I’d want to know, and want on my side in case of trouble.
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST MYSTERY! The bestselling crime novels of New York life in the early nineties are back. Gruff, weary, gay Brooklyn Homicide cop Doug Orlando is facing his most shocking case: Rabbi Avraham Rabowitz lay in a pool of his own blood, a prayer shawl stuffed down his throat, and his beard shaved off. The question for Detective Orlando isn’t who hated the right wing religious sect leader—Rabowitz had been the open enemy of blacks, gays, pro-choice women, even fellow Jews. In a case that moves from the depths of the ghetto to the high-rise office…
I'm a Conservative Rabbi who served Temple Sholom in Bridgewater NJ from 1975-2015. I'm currently the Rabbi of Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood New Jersey. I've always been intrigued with the Haggadah and its origins, and for almost 50 years I've hosted the Passover seders at my home. I always wanted to search for just the right Haggadah that I could use to make the experience fun and participatory for all. Because of my passion for wanting to give participants at my seder a positive experience, I decided to write my own Haggadah, I've written several including Seder in Motion: A Haggadah to Move Body and Soul coauthored with my wife Leora Isaacs.
This Haggadah is a product of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, the Union of Conservative Rabbis of which I am a proud member. We have used this Haggadah when our participants at our seder included more adults than children. The Haggadah includes a guide to the requisite rituals, detailing how and why each ritual is performed. There is also ample commentary on the text, explaining passages and provoking questions, in order to engage participants, Finally, alternative readings are included to replace or augment the text.
This bestselling Passover haggadah has been a user-friendly favorite at seders for a generation. Provocative and stimulating commentary, clear instructions, and bold artwork grace the pages of this contemporary American classic. Full-color artwork by Dan Reisinger.
Ever since my primary school teacher read out my essay about a friendly octopus to the whole class, I’ve known I was a storyteller. I went on to enjoy a long career as a journalist–first, writing stories about rock and pop groups for the music paper Sounds (where I coined the term ‘The New Romantics’), then as editor of the pop magazine Record Mirror, and subsequently as a writer/editor for national newspapers including The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph. After that, I became a coach, a public speaking trainer, and a book editor. However, my most enduring passion is helping people find and tell their most meaningful stories.
I love a deep dive, and this book goes to profound depths to explore different aspects of storytelling, from the personal to the universal.
I found it eye-opening and moving to consider storytelling as a healing spiritual practice and to link my own story to ancient story-sharing traditions such as the ‘ladder to the moon.’
A perfect accompaniment for balmy evenings when you’re sitting around a campfire, honouring your ancestors and sharing life stories.
Over the years, television and other cultural forces have robbed us of storytelling as a tool of communicating, learning, and healing. In The Healing Art of Storytelling, professional storyteller Richard Stone describes this crisis and its devastating effects, and then offers a step-by-step guide for creating a storytelling tradition that we can use to transform our families, our friendships, and ourselves. This ancient art offers us a fresh approach to issues such as coping with death and grieving, building esteem in ourselves and our children, finding courage in the face of uncertainty, and discovering the miraculous in the everyday. With…
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 have been teaching college students about aging since I was in my late 20s. The audacity! Now that I am officially in the “young-old” category I used to describe to my students, I more fully appreciate the social constructions of aging that affect elders, the medical conditions that can derail plans for “a good old age,” and the challenges we all face in attempting to live with meaning and purpose as we grow older. In addition to teaching, writing about, and researching various aspects of aging, especially aging with various type of dementia, my work has addressed the positive and negative ways religious faith can shape how people cope with aging.
Rabbi Dayle Friedman’s wisdom about aging can be appreciated by people of all religions and no religion. Her honest engagement with some of the most difficult issues aging persons face leaves readers with hope rather than despair. Her many years as a chaplain for people living in long-term care with dementia undergird her suggestions on how to make sense of what she calls “dementia’s brokenness”. She concludes each chapter with a spiritual practice readers can employ to engage more deeply with the chapter’s topics, and also at the end of each chapter, she offers readers a blessing for their own efforts to flourish as they age.
Growing Older Can Be a Time of Growing in Depth and Wisdom
"My sense is that the whole journey beyond midlife is a mysterious blend of light and dark, wholeness and fragility…. We have a chance beyond midlife to become the person we were truly meant to be. We can draw on everything we have experienced so far to contribute to the people around us and the wider world, and to find strength and resilience amid the challenges." ―from the Introduction
Whether you are fifty-five or seventy-five, approaching retirement or age one hundred, growing older brings remarkable opportunities but often…
A lifelong practitioner and teacher of both Zen and Judaism, I am also a psychologist, who has constantly grappled with human needs, suffering, and the craving for meaning. The focus of my life has been to integrate the profound teachings of East and West and provide ways of making these teachings real in our everyday lives. An award-winning author, I have published many books on Zen and psychology, and have been the playwright in residence at the Jewish Repertory Theater in NY. Presently, I offer two weekly podcasts, Zen Wisdom for Your Everyday Life, and One Minute Mitzvahs. I also provide ongoing Zen talks both for Morningstar Zen and Inisfada Zen, workshops, and other talks for the community.
Like a Zen koan or a Jewish folk tale, One God Clapping presents a series of stories, each containing a moment of revelation that is never simple or contrived. This book is a bold experiment in the integration of Eastern and Western ways of looking at and living in the world.
From Zen Buddhist practitioner to rabbi, East meets West in this firsthand account of a spiritual journey.
Rabbi Alan Lew is known as the Zen Rabbi, a leader in the Jewish meditation movement who works to bring two ancient religious traditions into our everyday lives. One God Clapping is the story of his roundabout yet continuously provoking spiritual odyssey. It is also the story of the meeting between East and West in America, and the ways in which the encounter has transformed how all of us understand God and ourselves.
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"…
I am the author of three novels that all explore contemporary notions of fidentity. In 2016 I received a scholarship to travel from New Zealand to Berlin for three months and fell in love with the city. I ended up staying there for nearly four years, until the pandemic started. As a writer I liked the way that being detached from your regular life, and living in a country where you are unfamiliar with the language and the rules, makes you alert to the quirks. It helps you to gain a fresh perspective about the place that you came from, and also the place that you are in.
Suffering from writer’s block, a novelist leaves her husband and children in Brooklyn and checks into the Tel Aviv Hilton to be near the pool from her childhood holidays.
Away from her usual domesticity, she considers where her choices have lead her: “What if, I thought, rather than existing in a universal space, each of us is actually born alone into a luminous blankness, and it’s we who snip it into pieces, assembling staircases and gardens and train stations in our own peculiar fashion, until we have pared our space into a world?”
This novel has many strands, but I loved how the writer is drawn into a mystery surrounding Kafka’s estate, with an elderly cat hoarder claiming legal rights to his unpublished papers. All the more alluring because it is based in truth.
CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND THE TIMES
'Lucid and exhilarating ... A great gift' New York Review of Books
'Tantalizes and compels ... A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly and brilliantly novel' Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman
Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he's fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean…
Not only am I a writer of urban fantasy romance, I've been a huge fan of the subgenre since I was a kid—since before it was called urban fantasy. When I happened upon a series I liked back then, I'd track down every book, stack them on the green shag carpet beside my bed, and read one right after another until I was finished. Thankfully, my mom and grandmother were readers and understood my obsession. If you like action, suspense, a little magic, and a splash of romance in your fiction, consider giving one of these stories a try. Enjoy!
My last pick is action-packed, sexy, and pure fun.
Nava Katz’s twin brother, Ari, was chosen at birth to join the Brotherhood of David, a secret organization of demon hunters. The induction ceremony takes a turn when Nava is chosen instead. The first female ever to be chosen, and everyone—her parents, her rabbi, and the other hunters—all agree this must be a mistake. It might seem that this one doesn't qualify as slow burn since it's sexy right from the start, but it's the heart connection that takes time and therefore, qualifies it for inclusion.
Enjoy this urban fantasy series by best-selling author Deborah Wilde. Featuring a snarky heroine, kickass action, and spicy romance, this hilarious adventure sucker-punches you in the heart when you're not looking.
What doesn’t kill you ... … seriously messes with your love life.
Nava is happily settling into her new relationship and life is all giddy joy and stolen kisses.
Except when it’s assassins. Talk about a mood killer.
She and Rohan are tracking the unlikely partnership between the Brotherhood and a witch who can bind demons, but every new piece of the puzzle is leaving them with more questions…
