A Story by Sholem Aleichem Translated by Curt Leviant 1. My gang of pals always called me Dunderhead. Was it because I refused to study? Well, that wasn’t the only reason. Truth is I didn’t want to study. Who does? Did they dub me Dunderhead on account of myContinue Reading
By Beth Kissileff, JTA World News Service (JTA) — Forget Iran and anti-Semitism. Lavie Tidhar and British fantasy author Rebecca Levene’s newly released short-story anthologies “Jews Versus Aliens” and “Jews Versus Zombies” (both published by Jurassic London, with all profits going to MOSAC, a British group that assists victims ofContinue Reading
By Rita Berman Frischer, Special to The Jewish Sound The Hebrew people may have schlepped on foot for 40 years, but modern transportation has updated traveling to and through the Promised Land. Kar-Ben Publishing marks this year’s Festival of Freedom, Passover, by featuring “Engineer Ari” and his intrepid train asContinue Reading
By Rita Berman Frischer, Special to The Jewish Sound A delightfully illustrated retelling of an old story provides us another slant on recycling, a graphic novel sensitively shows a French child her grandmother’s story of how she and her mother survived the Holocaust, and an imaginative take on the NoahContinue Reading
By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound Over the past six years, hundreds of families throughout the Puget Sound region have taken advantage of PJ Library, a program where small children receive a Jewish book each month in the mail. But because the program tops out at age 8, manyContinue Reading
By Rita Berman Frischer, Special to the Jewish Sound Whenever I think I’ve seen every possible spin on a Hanukkah book for kids, something new comes along. Just this morning I was singing “This Land is My Land” with a chorus of ex-hippie contemporaries, so you may understand why IContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, Jewish Sound Columnist Dear readers who read: For over a decade I have written these quarterly book reviews, reading or skimming 15 to 20 books over six weeks, and reporting back to you. But the time has arrived when I no longer have the time for that, soContinue Reading
By David Shayne, Special to JTNews “Haviva Reick: A Kibbutz Pioneer’s Mission and Fall behind Nazi Lines” by Zeev and Tehila Ofer (FAWNS, $16). Toward the end of World War II, the British and the Haganah (the underground army of pre-Israel Jewish Palestine) collaborated to train and insert some threeContinue Reading
By Rita Berman Frischer, Special to the Jewish Sound Sometimes it seems like a miracle how many different books on Hanukkah are out there. One of the newest and best is It’s A Miracle: A Hanukkah Storybook by Stephanie Spinner, illustrated by Jill McElmurry (Simon & Shuster/Aladdin; ages 4-8). AContinue Reading
Boris Kurbanov, Jewish Sound Correspondent It’s a noir world, or so the publishers at Akashic Books would have us think. Ever since the release of 2004’s best-selling “Brooklyn Noir,” the editors at the Brooklyn-based independent publisher have taken to traversing the globe, soliciting seamy and sometimes downright malicious tales fromContinue Reading
Rita Frischer Special to The Jewish Sound As the leaves turn, we turn — from summer’s indulgences to the crisp demands of fall as school resumes and our work schedules intensify. At the same time, Judaism asks us to turn inward as well. We practice teshuvah, returning to our bestContinue Reading
By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound For those of us that live in or grew up in Seattle, “The Boys in the Boat” (Viking Penguin, paper) is even more special than the tens of thousands of readers that last year made this book a silent bestseller, inspiring its paperbackContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, JewishSound Columnist Holocaust Sometimes the idea behind a book is as successful as the book itself, but sometimes the idea is more interesting than the end result. The story behind Dan J. Puckett’s “In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama’s Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust”Continue Reading
By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound Interested in knowing more about why there’s a war against Hamas in Gaza? Where ISIS came from and how it came about? Why there’s such an anti-Western bias throughout the Middle East? You could get a lot of that information from spending hoursContinue Reading
By Rita Berman Frischer, Special to The Jewish Sound As the grandmother of cross-cultural Jewish children, I’m especially interested in how this phenomenon plays out in Jewish Seattle, with its seemingly open doors and open minds. So when I recently received three children’s books for review, all dealing with howContinue Reading
By Boris Kurbanov, Special to The Jewish Sound When I was 14, my friend Yoni and I took in a Yankees game on a late spring night. As we watched Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Shawn Green — first-round draft pick, two-time All-Star, Jew — take batting practice in the humidContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, Jewish Sound Columnist Even when work is going well, personal problems always seem to rear up. At least that is how it goes for these female and Jewish protagonists — whether in the 21st or 16th centuries — featured in a crop of newly published novels. SharingContinue Reading
By Diana Brement, Jewish Sound Columnist Cookbooks One might assume that “Eating the Bible” by Rena Rossner (Skyhorse, cloth, $24.95) would give you recipes using garlic, leeks, melon, cucumbers and well-cooked meat — all foods mentioned in the Bible. But Rossner makes clear from the start that her intent wasContinue Reading
By Emily K. Alhadeff, Associate Editor, The Jewish Sound Jean (Mosseri) Naggar was 19 when her family received an expulsion notice. It was 1957 Cairo, in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, and Jews were fleeing Egypt en masse. The office they were to report to, ironically, was on aContinue Reading
By Rita Berman Frischer, Special to the Jewish Sound The Holocaust is a difficult topic for parents or teachers to introduce to children so they often turn to books for help. At first, such resources were rare and indirect. For example, “Terrible Things” in 1980, a picture book allegory, emphasizedContinue Reading
