April 29, 2008

Dear Readers,

John Keats, not a Nice Jewish Author but a good one, once wrote that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," but experience informs us that truth can get ugly. Fast. Which is why it's so difficult to be fully honest in our day-to-day conversations with people.

This social contract, in which we try to detour around unkind words, has a particularly Jewish expression. It's the practice of avoiding what's known as evil speech or loshon hora, about which Rabbi Joseph Telushkin says, "The fact that a statement or incident is true does not mean that others have the right to know about it."

But do we want to our authors to be relentlessly polite? Myself, I prefer writers who make honesty their first order of business. As John Updike once said, "our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves." (For those keeping score, that's the second Gentile mentioned in this newsletter!)

Turns out, I'm not the only kind of Jewish reader out there. I remember once meeting a person, someone my own age, who refused to read Philip Roth because his father said that Roth defamed the Jews. This was difficult for me to digest—I couldn't believe this guy let his dad's sensibilities determine his own literary choices!—until I recalled Roth's terrific 1994 novel, Operation Shylock, and the way it detailed how effectively the loshon hora process works, or could work, in the Jewish world. In this essay, Rachel Somerstein pays Shylock a return visit.

And here's what else our writers have to say on the subject of literature and loshon hora:

In this smart article by Stephanie Wellen Levine, Naomi Alderman, Shalom Auslander, and Reva Mann talk freely about writing, loshon hora, and the religious communities they come from.

A series of graphic novels aims to redefine the term "Jewish superhero" by teaching kids, "Every single day we wait for Mashiach to come, but—do you hear this—he is being held back because we are speaking loshon hora!" Josh Lambert says that the result is visually fascinating but ultimately less-than-super.

The Forward's literary critic, Joshua Cohen, gets rough on the punishment for speaking evil. It goes by the intimidating name of tzaraat... which is a frighteningly biblical skin disease. "The sufferer of tzaraat, splotched over with an albescent fungus, was to be separated from the community, as lepers once were. The Talmud identifies four types of this leprotic white: one case of tzaraat is the white color of snow; another white is the whiteness of lime; the third degree is the white of an egg; and the fourth, the white of white wool," writes Cohen.

This is a book about Jews and sex, a pairing that might make some readers out there more than little uncomfortable. (The book is entitled, straightforwardly, Jews & Sex.) Menachem Wecker reports.

And while you're here, check out the latest article from Secular Culture & Ideas, in which Paul Kurtz tells why secular values matter today.

Which brings us to the end of this issue. I sincerely hope it got you thinking about the ethical import of your words, and those of your favorite authors.

Happy Reading,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

April 4, 2008

Dear Readers,

It's time for the Passover edition of Secular Culture & Ideas. Click around and enjoy some terrific articles about liberation.

Happy reading,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

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Dear Readers,

In this issue of Secular Culture & Ideas we turn to Passover, exploring its meaning for secular Jews, what the themes of liberation and freedom mean in a modern context, and, on a perhaps lighter note, the changing culinary traditions of the holiday. Secular Jews relate to Passover in modern, innovative ways, rewriting haggadot, adding new foods to the seder plate, and reconceiving the holiday as a call to action.

In our first piece, Elliot Ratzman revisits the role of Moses, considering him not as a biblical hero but as a role model for modern day revolutionaries. “Remembering Moses’ role in the Israelite freedom struggle is important to recall in our time,” Ratzman writes. Reminding us that “liberation doesn’t happen by accident,” he praises Martin Luther King Jr. as a modern day Moses, “one who helped coordinate the talent, the people, and the strategy to win concrete victories.”

Also in this issue: Rachel Elior praises “god, the handiwork of man,” as she explores the importance of freedom in the foundation of Jewish peoplehood. She considers the ideas and philosophies that humankind has created which became powerful guiding principles—divine principles. As Elior writes, “There was not a single society in the ancient world that thought it possible to alter an inherited or acquired social structure, with the exception of the Jews, with their faith in the power of the divine promise to make slaves into free men.”

Freedom and liberation are integral to Passover, but so is eating. In our next article, food writer Clara Silverstein explores the multitude of culinary options for secular Jews, including Southern Jewish matzo toffee, Midwestern matzo lasagna, and New Orleans creole-seasoned matzo balls.

Our fourth piece has multiple authors. Secular Culture & Ideas asked seven secular Jews to reflect on the holiday and to describe, in a paragraph or two, their own innovative secular Passover traditions. From rewritten haggadot to Passover games, these new traditions make the holiday meaningful and bring it to life.

Michael Felsen’s seder, which he describes in our next piece, reflects the “central view that while we are grounded in Jewish culture and heritage, our frame of reference is really all of humanity.” By drawing attention to contemporary struggles for freedom, Felsen finds renewed meaning in the celebration of Passover.

Rabbi Adam Chalom presents a brief history of the holiday and reminds us that Passover traditions have always been adapted to reflect contemporary values. For a perfect illustration of this principle, read Rabbi Peter Schweitzer’s irreverent version of a classic Passover song: Who Knows One?

Passover has always been a time for gathering, innovation, and reflection on the central values of freedom and liberation. This issue of Secular Culture & Ideas celebrates this tradition—and whatever traditions you wish to add. Happy Passover!

—The editors of Secular Culture & Ideas

March 20, 2008

Dear Readers,

Truth: Can we talk about it? Can we talk about it, that is, seriously? Without quotation marks? Without qualification? In Hebrew well call it emet; in Yiddish emes, but neither of these fine words brings us terribly close to the concept. In fact, the more we meditate, examine, and worry the facts of life, the less certain we seem to possess them. As the brilliant, and sometimes anti-Semitic, poet Philip Larkin once put it:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

I was reminded of this when reading Rachel Somerstein's superb review of Mimi Schwartz's Good Neighbors, Bad Times, a defiantly multidimensional memoir of a small German town during WWII. Writes Somerstein: "because [Schwartz's] book is comprised of oral history and memory, the 'truth' advanced here is by necessity a fluid one. To her credit, Schwartz does not shy away from the contradictions and gaps in these histories... These competing stories give the book a casual feel that belies the rigorousness of Schwartz's reporting."

That's the kind of impassioned and serious truth, no matter how fluid, we need to take seriously. Several kinds of truth-seeking tomes appear elsewhere in this issue.

For instance: The Book of Dahlia. Elisa Albert's debut novel slices through the clichés that cloud around mortality with comedy, pathos, and frozen pizza. Our reviewer, Sarah Weinman, says that the book's heroine faces death "in a way that, if not quite the beacon of clarity, is infused with honesty."

There's a great Russian saying, "He lies like an eye-witness," which implies volumes about the Soviet-era disdain of free speech. In a new memoir, Maxim Shrayer recounts what it was like to make his way out of Russia and into democracy, with ample helpings of comedy and thanksgiving.

Jay Neugeboren's 1940 attempts to bring the moral enormity of the Shoah into human perspective by featuring a fictionalized version of the life of Hitler's pediatrician. Sanford Pinsker gives the book his typically intelligent read, and compares the novel's medical man to history's.

To wrap up, Secular Culture & Ideas presents the second part of "The Original Atheists With Attitude," looking at Karl Marx, religion, and economics.

And that's all for now. Here's hoping that when your life and your books are filled with truth, it's an experience that enriches and instructs you.

Happy reading,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

March 3, 2008

Dear Readers,

David Gantz is dead. An absurdly talented illustrator and writer, Gantz died at the age of 85, on December 14, 2007. I didn't hear about this from a friend of his or a relative, but through a Google Alert message, which is incredibly ironic in that Gantz was no one's idea of an Internaut, and he certainly didn't know from email. When we talked about him creating a history of the Jewish graphic novel for JBooks, we talked on the phone. Dave was a terrific older guy--and I used to love kibbitzing with him because he had been around.

Gantz had lived through, and fought in, WWII. He was high-school pals with Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee! He'd worked for Stan Lee! I'm still not quite sure why he agreed to create an illustrated essay for a webzine (I'm not sure he knew what a webzine was), but I was damned glad to work with a guy with a real and true historic sense. You can find this in the last book he ever published, an amazing, one-of-a-kind volume, Jews in America: A Cartoon History.

The loss of Gantz reminds me of our ever-diminishing sense of history. Our attention spans contract, our lives are continually crowded with information. So we forget. We need order and clarity to understand ourselves and our history, and I get that order from books and authors. To try and compensate for the loss, and to honor the work of David Gantz, we present several pieces of historically informed content:

We chat with Geraldine Brooks, author of a strong new novel, People of the Book, about the Sarajevo Haggadah. Brooks tells a great story of how she was "possessed by Jewish history."

Michael Chabon swashbuckles his way through the past, conjuring up a Frankish physician and an Abyssinian giant who travel Silk Road around the year 950. Blood, guts, and provocative commentary on Life in the Diaspora.

Chicago native Robert Birnbaum reviews Touch and Go, the memoir by Chicago legend Studs Terkel. A fascinating look at the art collecting oral history.

Secular Culture & Ideaspresents a review of The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby, who writes passages such as: "the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to a functioning democracy."

And then there's Dough, a funny, touching, and strange slice of personal history about a family bakery, Jewish identity, and inheritance.

There's a lot here to read, a lot to remember. It's grand thing to think about books preserving our people's history. And it's been grand talking about it to you here.

Happy reading,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

February 12, 2008

Dear Readers,

The Jews, you might have heard, are a minority. Indeed, the world stage, the cultural stage, is crowded with all sorts of non-Jewish people and many kinds of Gentile narratives. Sometimes our stories clash, and sometimes they mesh, but when they meet, they often make for excellent reading.

How to address this interfaith intersection? JBooks formed a partnership with our friends at InterfaithFamily.com, to explore how Jews and Gentiles work things out in the literary realm.

The issue opens with a book called The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God, in which two writers struggle together to spell out their beliefs. Our reviewer, Beliefnet's Rebecca Phillips, calls the result "an uncommonly candid and honest book about faith and friendship." To further the candor and the honesty, we asked both authors, Peter Bebergal and Scott Korb, to give us the inside story on what it was like to compose such a volume.

Another great behind-the-scenes essay: Joshua Cohen, literary critic of the Forward and author of the novel A Heaven of Others, tells us about his research into how different religions view the idea of the afterlife. "A Heaven of Others attempts to put to rest the idea of an afterlife established exclusively for one religion or race--which in turn might cast doubt on the idea of our mortal lives lived to such exclusion; behind borders, fences, or walls."

Dropping down to earth, Michael Kress returns to Will Herberg's classic Protestant—Catholic—Jew to see if it still relevant for contemporary readers; Rachel Somerstein reads the novel Matrimony, in which a WASP marries a Jew but there's little interfaith friction; and Micah Sachs, editor of InterfaithFamily.com, sounds off on New American Judaism, a book teeming with interfaith issues.

And from Secular Culture & Ideas, here's an essay about Ernestine Rose, who said that man made God in his own image. This is the first installment of a series called "The Original Atheists with Attitude."

Happy reading (interfaith and otherwise),


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

January 25, 2007

Dear Readers,

It's time for another provocative issue of Secular Culture & Ideas. Click around and enjoy some terrific articles about Sephardic and Mizrahi secularization.

Happy reading,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

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Dear Readers,

For this issue of Secular Culture & Ideas we turn to the often-overlooked secularization among Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish cultures and communities. This special focus illustrates the global and varied processes of secularization during the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather than attesting to a homegrown secularization movement, as experienced within the world of Ashkenazi Jewry, the Sephardic and Mizrahi experiences attest to the influences of European colonialism, the Sephardic and Mizrahi legacy of tolerance and coexistence, and the role that language plays in identity.

Michel Abitbol provides an overview of the secularization process for Mizrahi Jews. His essay, an adaptation from New Jewish Time: Jewish Culture in a Secular Age, explores the role of colonialism and European influences on Mizrahi Jewish life during the 19th and 20th centuries. He also demonstrates the manner in which Mizrahi Jews were open to secularization and did not view it as a challenge to Jewish life and culture.

Eyal Ginio explores the changes to Jewish life and culture for Ottoman Jews as the Empire secularized and adopted European political and legal systems. Pamela Dorn Sezgin further narrows this focus as she highlights the life and success of one of the Mediterranean’s greatest pop-singer: a Turkish Jew known as Dario Moreno, perhaps the “Frank Sinatra” of the Mediterranean. Moreno embodied the cosmopolitanism and the secular culture, which continued to pervade Turkey following the Ottoman Empire’s decline.

Moving into the contemporary period, Vanessa Hidary’s poem, Lucette Valensi’s reflections on growing up Jewish and secular in Tunisia, Bernard Horn’s conversation with A.B. Yehoshua, and David Shasha’s exploration of “The Levantine Option,” further remind us of the rich history and vibrant life of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry.

A.B. Yehoshua, in his conversation with Bernard Horn, reflects on his Sephardic heritage, nostalgia for a bygone Sephardic era, the role of secular Jews in Israel today, and their challenge to create meaningful Jewish culture in a land of ancient tombs.

Vanessa Hidary and Lucette Valensi provide us with pieces that explore their Sephardic identity and heritage. Valensi shares her experiences growing up in Tunisia’s Jewish community—after simultaneously being abandoned by god and abandoning god on a summer night. Spoken word artist Hidary, in a poem dedicated to her Aunt Essie, reflects on the two worlds that she traversed–Brooklyn’s “Little Syria” and Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her poem pays tribute to her Sephardic heritage and identity.

David Shasha explains “The Levantine Option” that draws upon the legacy of coexistence and tolerances in Sephardic Jewish life. Angered by the absence of Sephardic history in dominant Jewish cultural narratives, he draws our attention to the rich culture and the lessons that can be learned if we look at the progressive and humanitarian Jewish culture of the Sephardim.

Each of the articles in this issue places the oft-forgotten legacy and life of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry within the ongoing conversations on secularization, and secular Jewish life and culture. By exploring these themes within diverse communities, we expand the framework and the influence of secular Jews and the secularization of Jewish life.

Sincerely,

—The Editors of Secular Culture & Ideas

January 19, 2007

Dear Readers,

I am haunted by the ghost of Alfred Kazin. Those of you who've done time in the English Department know how this powerful critic shadows us as we scribble in the margins of a new novel, or browse the stacks at our favorite used bookstore. For those of you who have yet to make his acquaintance--in the 20th-century literary world, Alfred Kazin was the man. No less an authority than Philip Roth called him, after Kazin died in 1998, "America's best reader of American literature in this century."

The spirit of Kazin stares skeptically at the literary choices we make, at how well--or poorly--we respond to the text at hand. Kazin's shade is not impressed by how casually, how carelessly, we handle our literary materials. (Something tells me that Kazin wouldn't have appreciated the rise of the Internet.)

The Kazin-haunting has been particularly fast and furious nowadays, because of the publication of a new Kazin biography by Richard Cook. In this insightful review, Gerald Sorin, who won the National Jewish Book Award for his biography of Irving Howe, reads deeply into Kazin's life.

Andrew Furman provides some important context, and lively prose, about the crowd our critic more-or-less belonged to, the New York Jewish intellectuals. If you want to know why Kazin & Co. mattered, you have to read this.

Naomi Seidman (who wrote this fine essay on growing up in Brooklyn) revisits our author's classic depiction of his hometown of Brownsville, New York: A Walker in the City.

Sandford Pinsker amusingly recounts his relationship with the ever-cranky (and ever-brilliant) Kazin, and I remember my own tortured, and somewhat absurd, experience with the man's opinions.

Finally, an intelligent piece from Secular Culture & Ideas. In honor of the birthday of one humanitarian, here is the philosophy of another who influenced him.

But before you go, consider this question, from contributor Gerald Sorin. Thomas Wolfe's protagonist in You Can't Go Home Again realized, "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood… back home to the old forms and systems of things…." And the historian David Lowenthal reminds those of us still suffering from homesickness and nostalgia that one of the hallmarks of modernity is "isolation and dislocation of self from family, family from neighborhood, neighborhood from nation, and even one-self from one's former selves." What then could Alfred Kazin mean by his longing for the "enclosure of home"? Certainly, he did not want to reconstruct the Upper West Side as a Brownsville ghetto, nor did he want to give up his extraordinary mastery of the English language for a resuscitation of Yiddish, a mameloshn he thought dead and uninteresting. What kind of "home," therefore, could Kazin have been imagining?

Happy Reading,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

December 22, 2007

Dear Readers,

I am surrounded. As the editor of JBooks.com, my cubicle is bounded by piles and piles of books: Jewish literature of varying sizes, genres, authors. I glance quickly around and see a self-help volume about Jewish Motherhood, a red-and-black-covered call for Jewish justice, and a memoir of life in Jewish Baghdad, to name just a very few.

How comforting to be ensconced in a fortress of Jewish literature! The proliferation of Jewish books, the many genres, and sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres tell me not just that Jews love to read, but that the Jews are engaged in a vigorous discussion about the nature of Jewish literacy. To be truly literate, it seems to me, one must taste many kinds of Jewish books--and we're fortunate that there's such a smorgasbord available to us.

So it is, as I see it, my job to offer readers a varied diet of Jewish literature. And I'm serving you, this issue, a plate heaping with variety.

To begin, a review of Philip Schultz's magnificent new volume of poetry, Failure, which Richard Chess, a fine poet in his own right, says is "a testament to the power of the human spirit to endure, not only endure but to make of our suffering—our failures—art."

Then, a look at an engrossing new Bible book by James Kugel. "Kugel courageously refuses to bow to the pressure of either apologetics or ignorance, and at the same time allows himself to admit that the Bible, because of the generations of readers who continually molded and reinterpreted it, has a power and significance that is far greater than the sum of its parts," says writer Bezalel Stern.

Can we talk Yiddish? Bestselling author Michael Wex says, "Sure, why not"; Sanford Pinsker, agrees, but only up to a point.

Now for something with bite: a review of Bagels and Grits a memoir about a Jew thrown into the cultural stew that is the Big Easy. The book's author is the sort of person who describes Christianity as "an ever-changing mishmash of conflicting stories, all of them resting on the head of this poor schmuck of a Jewish boy who was hideously tortured to death."

Finally, from Secular Culture & Ideas, a helping of Jewish thought: Yaakov Malkin explores the ancient Jewish tradition of heresy.

Happy reading,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

December 4, 2007

Dear Readers,

It's time for the holiday of light and fight, of miracles and militarism, of latkes and tchochkes and complex conversations about Christmas trees. Yes, it's Hanukah, and here at JBooks, we're hosting our own Literary Festival of Lights. Enjoy.

First, a fine review of an essay collection called How to Spell Chanukah: 18 Writers on 8 Nights of Lights. Check out the holiday confessions of Steve Almond, Tova Mirvis, and Elisa Albert.

Kathy Bloomfield, a member of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee of the Association of Jewish Libraries, lists off some classic kids' books that might make great presents.

Read our profile of Ellen "Golden Dreydl" Kushner.

Fiction writer Jon Papernick hoped for the miraculous--to sell 1,001 copies of his novel--but things didn't work out that way.

A little seasonal pugnaciousness next: the last book by the late great writer/fighter, Norman Mailer.

And from Secular Culture & Ideas, Judith Seid's "Hanukah, sans Holy Oil," a look at the historic roots of this holiday, and an Israeli perspective on Hanukah.

Happy reading and Hanukah sameach,


Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

November 16, 2007

Hi, Readers,

Here's the latest issue of Secular Culture & Ideas, sponsored by the Posen Foundation. This time around, the subject is memoirs. Enjoy this diverse group of essays.

Happy reading.

—Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com


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Dear Readers,

For this Memoirs Issue of Secular Culture & Ideas we bring you the reflections of seven secular Jews, some of their names are already familiar to you, and others you will encounter for the first time. This issue is exciting as it brings together a number of perspectives from a diverse group of authors, illustrating the complexity and multiplicity of secular Jewish voices over the past century. These articles focus on issues of identity, community, and challenging tradition.

Beth Kaplan’s tale of her great-grandfather, playwright Jacob Gordin, turns the spotlight on one of the most influential Yiddish playwrights known as the Jewish Shakespeare. Gordin not only revolutionized the style of Yiddish theater, but also challenged his audience to re-conceptualize the place of Jews in political and social movements and to re-imagine Judaism, Jewish themes, and the Jewish family. 

Also contemplating the role of Jews in social and political movements, Bennett Muraskin, with a nostalgic look towards his revolutionary childhood heroes, questions why secular Jews were so over-represented on the political-left but under-represented in pacifism movements. Linking contemporary secular Jewish thought to Jewish folktales, he finds that pacifism is very much a part of secular Judaism. 

On a personal note, Lauren Sandler and Katie Halper provide humorous and introspective narratives about their quest to define themselves as secular Jews. In a light and engaging manner, and without providing easy answers, they raise many of the questions that young secular Jews ask and encounter. Alan Dershowitz, in an essay included in I am Jewish, also reflects on his Jewish identity and responsibility.

Eugene Goodheart and Ilan Stavans both challenge themselves and their audience to understand Judaism without religion and god. The contemplative work of both authors reveals the complexity of defining Judaism and Jewishness.

Each of the articles in this issue provides a unique personal perspective on secular Jews.  Without providing simple definitions and answers the authors take us on their personal journeys that allowed them (and, now us) to realize the depth and importance of their secular Jewish identity.

Sincerely,

The Editors of Secular Culture & Ideas

November 2, 2007

Dear Readers,

Want to put our vaunted Jewish pluralism to the test? Ask a group of Jews--not your like-minded friends and relatives but people from the four corners of the Jewish world--to name a heretic. Then ask them to name a hero. Answers will inevitably, as the say, vary. Why? One Jew's hero is often another's heretic.

This lack of hero/heretic agreement happens to be the argumentative genius of Judaism. Entire chapters of our intellectual heritage, of Jewish identity, depend on people whose business is to identify and slaughter the cows some deem "sacred." To say the unsayable, or what people in various communities think is unsayable. This issue, we consider books that aim to articulate the unsayable.

Ruth R. Wisse--scholar and provocateur--has written a provocative new volume, Jews and Power, which our reviewer, Sanford Pinsker, calls "a reading of Jewish history that is honest, unsparing, and perhaps above all else, disturbing."

The extremely ambitious Shalom Auslander has written a memoir, Foreskin's Lament directed against... God. It's a deadly serious--yet sometimes very funny--volume. First Naomi Seidman gets theological on Auslander and then Donald Weber puts his comedy into an appropriate cultural context.

A radical way to think of the most infamous Jewish radicals next: a non-fiction graphic novel about Emma Goldman. Former JBooks editor Josh Lambert says that Goldman's life is "a writer's dream: long and sordid, inspiring and debased, full of sex, political courage, and international intrigue."

Speaking of dreams, let's segue to the tricky world of dream interpretation. There's a long tradition of Jews who provide provocative interpretations of our night visions--think Freud--and now Rodger Kamenetz takes his own stab at the topic, with The History of Last Night's Dream. Beliefnet editor Michael Kress sifts through the pillow talk.

We hope you find these articles interesting, and that they encourage you to re-examine your own literary heroes and heretics.

Happy reading,


--Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

October 15, 2007

Dear Readers,

Nathan Zuckerman is finished. Exit Ghost, which Houghton Mifflin claims is Philip Roth's final Zuckerman book, has just been released. This is an enormous deal. We don't close the final chapter on the most important literary series of our time with a steady hand. Contemporary readers have invested considerable time in these books. Novelist Tova Mirvis, for instance, is a great fan of the Zuckerman saga, and she files her report here.

Zuckerman's finale fills me with a weird sort of despair. We witness the end of the Zuckermania and acknowledge the moratlity of not just Roth buth a certain kind of writing, a certain type of literary ambition. Who will take up where Roth left off? Who will aim that high--and hit the target so consistently? I just don't know. But in the absence of an answer, JBooks.com attempts to understand the nature of Jewish literary ambition.

We talked, for instance, to Joseph Epstein. He called Roth "an immensely talented man with very little to say" and said that Saul Bellow "might have been better had his ambition been less and had he cut out all the vaporous soul talk in his fiction. He would done well, too, if he hadn't made the heroes so obviously modeled on himself seem so large-hearted and virtuous."

Stephen G. Kellman, author of a recent book on Henry Roth, weighs in on ambition and literary biography. A large measure of Exit Ghost centers on a young hard-charging biographer who fills Zuckerman with fear and loathing.

In the Hall of Fame of ambition sits Gertrude Stein, whom Janet Malcom dissects in her latest volume, Two Lives. Jesse Tisch has the story on the woman who lived without men, America, or commas.

Novelist and critic Melvin Jules Bukiet knows a thing or two about authors who swing for the literary fences. Therefore we asked him to compile and annotate a list of his some of his favorites. Click here and look in the lower-right-hand column.

Then one from Secular Culture & Ideas, the journal sponsored by the Posen Foundation: Ilan Stavans discusses modern, secular concepts of Jewish love.

Now for a discussion. Is all this drama about old Zuckerman real to you? Or is it a needless exaggeration? Have we perhaps made too much of Roth's books? Or would you suggest that there's a writer out there who has already surpassed his achievement? Let's hear what you think. We're all ears.

Happy reading.


--Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

September 21, 2007

Dear Readers,

JBooks begs your forgiveness. We're serious about getting into the High Holiday spirit. If we have annoyed you with an insensitive quip, run a piece that offended your sensibilities (Jewish or Literary), or even slipped in the odd ugly typo: Sorry. The point of this site is to educate and entertain, and if there were moments last year when we failed to do so--you have our completely sincere apologies.

That said, we think this issue, our literary look at the High Holidays, will truly please you, and help us kick off the New Year nicely. Consider:

Robert Alter, the legendary translator, opens up about his motivations for translating the Psalms. It's superbly honest essay--strongly recommended.

Two-time National Book Award nominee Alicia Ostriker peers deeply into the Jonah story. A highly readable bit of explication, just in time for the Yom Kippur services.

Speaking of which, in this article Beliefnet books editor Becky Philips gives the low-down on which books to sneak into synagogue to make your Yom Kippur more meaningful.

This is a classic from the Avi Chai Bookshelf: Novelist Rachel Kadish ruminates on taschlich. A subtle, soulful essay.

Rabbi Mordecai Finley advises on how to deal with the evil people in your life.

And from the Secular Culture & Ideas journal, here's a smart essay by the late Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine on the historical formation of secular Humanistic Judaism.


Happy reading, and Shana Tova.


--Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

September 7, 2007

Dear Readers,

Prepare for a terrific new issue of Secular Culture & Ideas, the online journal sponsored by the Posen Foundation. The title: "Making Judaism Modern." You're sure to enjoy this intriguing content.

Ken Gordon, Editor, JBooks.com

___

Dear Readers,

For this issue of Secular Culture & Ideas, we take a close look at “Making Judaism Modern.” At universities and colleges in North America and Israel, unique courses in Jewish secularism are being offered for the first time. The Posen Foundation supports the development of these academic programs, which examine the secularization of the Jewish experience.

In this issue we bring to you thought-provoking articles that appear on course syllabi, as well as several selections from other secular writers. These works speak to the question of what it means to be a Jew in the contemporary world.

So what is “modern?” It has many definitions whether simply “contemporary” or “recent.” But “modern” has been part of the continuum of Jewish history, the culmination of years of rigorous intellectual thought and debate about the nature of Jewish life.

This issue starts with an exclusive video with Israel Prize winner Amos Oz, a novelist, activist, and maverick thinker. In it he addresses Judaism as a culture, sharing insight into modern Jewish identity.

In an essay adapted from his groundbreaking anthology Cultures of the Jews, Dr. David Biale tackles the question of modernity with admirable straightforwardness. “What is modern about modern Jewish culture?” asks Dr. Biale, the Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Davis.

In New Jews, Caryn Aviv and David Shneer argue that the idea of exile and displacement is outdated. Their case is summed up in their book’s provocative subtitle: The End of the Jewish Diaspora.

Rabbi Peter H. Schweitzer presents an article about the modern secular Jewish existence, in “Secular Jewish Ritual.” He expands on the ways that Jews can participate in observance of Jewish festivals and life cycle events while embracing and enhancing their secular Jewish identity. 

Feminist and activist Lea Shakdiel, a professor at Ben Gurion University, discusses a resurgence of tikkun olam, the world-healing ethos as part of  the secular Jewish identity.

Of course, we don’t mean to pose a single definition of “modern.” But the articles in this issue present some of the ways that Judaism is made modern in thought, action, and celebration.

Sincerely,

The Editors of Secular Culture & Ideas