By Diana Brement, JTNews Correspondent
Religion and Spirituality
We ended our last reviews in Nov. 2002, with a mention of a new compilation of the Zohar by Rav P.S. Berg, director of the Kabbalah Centre. This international organization brings the wisdom of Kabbalah (Jewish mystical texts) to the general public, including such scholarly luminaries as Madonna, Roseanne and Sandra (Bernhard, that is).
Michael Berg is Rav Berg’s son, also a Kabbalah Centre instructor and author, whose latest book is The Secret: Unlocking the Source of Joy & Fulfillment (Kabbalah Publishing, $12.95 hardcover). This little book of parables reveals “the secret” that giving is better than getting. Berg’s previous best-seller, The Way, is now in paperback (Wiley, $14.95 softcover).
Wiley also brings us Kabbalah Month by Month, by Melinda Ribner ($22.95 hardcover). Organized around the Jewish calendar, the author offers meditations and visualizations for each lunar cycle. Ribner is the founder of the Jewish Meditation Circle in New York and has been a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement.
In The Journey Home: Discovering the Deep Spiritual Wisdom of Jewish Tradition, (Beacon, $25 hardcover) Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman laments that “spirituality” has come to imply occult practices and beliefs. Or else, complains this professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, it is seen as the purview of other religions, especially Christianity, or Buddhism.
For Hoffman, there is a clear answer to Jewish spiritual needs in Judaism, explained in chapters about blessings, Torah study, Israel and more. If New Age talk makes you roll your eyes, Hoffman’s approach may be the antidote to the “intellectual pabulum that passes for truth these days.”
The Rabbi As Symbolic Exemplar (Haworth, $49.95 hard, $29.95 soft) by Rabbi Jack H. Bloom, Ph.D., is part autobiography, part instruction manual. Aimed at today’s pulpit rabbis, this practicing psychologist offers advice for managing this demanding career.
Jewish Life
Tales of life in Israel today are poignantly told by leading Israeli journalist Igal Sarna. Sarna was a former tank commander in the Yom Kippur War and founder of Peace Now. In the introduction to The Man Who Fell Into A Puddle, (Pantheon, $23 hardcover) Sarna relates his eight-year-old daughter’s preoccupation with death. “We’re lucky no one from our family was killed,” she tells her father. These stories of modern Israelis reveal personal suffering at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate, (Public Affairs in Paper, $16 softcover) Neil Baldwin explores how the pioneering industrialist became an obsessive anti-Semite and the Jewish community’s reaction to it.
With its history of Jews in comedy, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (Public Affairs in Paper, $15 softcover) by Lawrence J. Epstein, amuses and edifies. Epstein explains how America’s openness gave rise to a- new form of entertainment. Jokes included.
UAHC Press offers two large format paperbacks for young people. The Atlas of Great Jewish Communities, by Sondra Leiman with Rabbi Carole B. Balin, is essentially a concise history filled with pictures and maps ($12). Scott Aaron’s Jewish U: A Contemporary Guide for the Jewish College Student ($9.95) is not a guide to colleges, but a guide to Jewish behavior at college, offering food for thought on whether to choose a Jewish roommate, observing holidays and ethical decision making around sexual activity.
Holocaust
There is never a shortage of new books on the Holocaust. Just out, or soon-to-be-released, are: My Canary Yellow Star by Eva Wiseman and Finding Sophie by Irene N. Watts, two historical novels for young people (Tundra Books). Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust by Bellingham author Toby Sonneman explores commonalities of Jews and Gypsies (University of Hertfordshire). The Defiant: A True Story of Escape, Survival & Resistance by Shalom Yoran (SquareOne) is a new memoir.
Scholarly works include War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust by Doris L. Bergen (Rowman & Littlefield), The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919–1945 by Richard Steigmann-Gall, due in April from Cambridge University Press, and the third edition of Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust by Annette Insdorf, also from Cambridge.
Fiction
Your Mouth is Lovely by Nancy Richler (Ecco/Harper Collins, $29.95 hardcover), concerns Miriam, a young Russian revolutionary, imprisoned in Siberia in 1911. Forced to give up her daughter at birth, she recollects her difficult childhood in a Belarus shtetl for the child she will never see.
Lila Moscowitz is a poet in Bonnie Kirshenbaum’s Pure Poetry (Simon & Schuster, $22 hardcover) — famous for writing about sex.
She is so famous she even warrants a two-page spread in People magazine. (If you’re not laughing, you’re not a poet.) She is so neurotic she manages to get through her upcoming 38th birthday only with the help of her cross-dressing psychotherapist. A fast read, and very New York.
Admirers of the beautiful and otherworldly writing of physician-novelist Aryeh Lev Stollman can look forward to his collection of short stories due for release this month. The Dialogues of Time and Entropy (Riverhead, $24.95 hardcover) visits Stollman’s familiar themes and settings, traveling between art, science and religion in a world often seen through the veil of a child’s mind.
Also scheduled for publication this March is David Liss’ new novel The Coffee Trader (Random House, $24.95 hardcover). In 17th century Amsterdam, the worlds of coffee — a new commodity — and newly arrived Portuguese Jews come together when an odd business partnership is formed between a minor Jewish speculator and a beautiful Dutch widow.
Liss’ previous book was A Conspiracy of Paper, the story of 18th-century London’s new stock market.