Ackerman, Diane.
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story. W.W. Norton, 2007. Ackerman
retells the remarkable story of righteous gentiles Jan Zabinski, the director
of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who courageously sheltered 300 Jews
and Polish resisters.
Alter, Robert. The
Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary. W.W. Norton, 2007.
Alter’s beautiful translation is accompanied by his insightful and scholarly
commentary.
Aly, Gotz.
Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State.
Metropolitan Books, 2007. Historian Aly’s important and original contribution
to Holocaust research posits that Hitler gained support from the Germans by a
systematic program of theft and redistribution of wealth.
Antler,
Joyce. You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother.
Oxford University Press, 2007. This comprehensive and scholarly study of the
stereotype of the Jewish mother in American popular culture is an amusing and
enlightening read.
Ansh, Tamar. A
Taste of Challah: A Comprehensive Guide to Challah and Bread Baking.
Feldheim, 2007. More than just another cookbook, this sumptuously illustrated
guide contains everything you need to know about challah, with recipes that
range from simple to exotic.
Auslander,
Shalom. Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir. Riverhead, 2007.
Raised as an Orthodox Jew who describes his upbringing as "theological abuse,"
Auslander agonizes over whether to circumsize his soon-to-be-born son,
reconsiders his dysfunctional childhood, and struggles between temptation and
faith with scathing comic wit.
Benvenisti, Meron.
Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political
Life. Translated by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta. University of California
Press, 2007. The politician/ columnist/scholar mixes tales of his Salonika-born
Zionist father and his idyllic sabra youth with his controversial
interpretation of Israel's history and future.
Bernstein, Harry. The
Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers. Ballantine
Books, 2007. Written when the author was 93, this memoir is set in pre World
War I England, where the author’s working-class neighborhood was divided by an
invisible line between the Jewish side and the Christian side.
Biro, Adam.
One Must Also Be Hungarian. Translated by Catherine
Tihanyi.
University of Chicago Press, 2007. Written by a Hungarian-born French author
and publisher, this slim elegiac volume reflects on the 200-year history and
the memorable characters of a
Hungarian-Jewish family.
Blumberg,
Ilana. Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman among Books. University
of Nebraska Press, 2007. Blumberg’s well-written feminist memoir is an
intimate spiritual portrait of a young woman attracted to both Talmud study
and secular literature, and the limitations imposed by her position as an
Orthodox woman.
Buhle,
Paul, ed. Jews and American Popular Culture. (Praeger
Perspectives) Praeger, 2007. This
handsome three-volume reference set presents a scholarly, yet accessible,
survey of the history of Jewish involvement in American pop culture.
Chafets, Zev. A
Match Made In Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's
Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical
Alliance.
HarperCollins, 2007. A journalist with
impressive career credentials, Chafets travels across America to explore the
unlikely and uneasy alliance between Jews and evangelical Christians.
Elkins,
Dov Peretz. The Wisdom of Judaism: An Introduction to the Values of the
Talmud. Jewish Lights, 2007. Rabbi Elkins adds his commentary to the
commentaries, and focuses on the Talmud’s teachings for ethical human
behavior.
Finkelstein,
Norman H. American Jewish History: A JPS Guide. Jewish
Publication Society, 2007. Written for
the layperson, this engaging history book covers American Jewish history from
the discovery of America through the end of the 20th century.
Fishman,
Sylvia Barack. The Way Into the Varieties of Jewishness. (The
Way Into) Jewish Lights, 2007. The latest title in this series of accessible
guidebooks to Judaism presents an introduction to the many ways Jews
understand Jewishness and identify themselves and their communities.
Franks, Lucinda.
My Father's Secret War: A Memoir. Miramax, 2007. As her
elderly father slips into dementia, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lucinda
Franks discovers a long hidden part of his life.
Friedlander, Saul.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi
Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
HarperCollins, 2007. In the second volume
of his essential history of Nazi Germany, Friedlander provides a vivid
description of European Jewish life in its most tragic period.
Gold, Dore.
The Fight for
Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West,
and the Future of the Holy City.
Regnery Publishing, 2007. Authored by the former Israeli ambassador to the UN,
this book is a thoroughly researched, historically accurate account of the
history and politics of Jerusalem, but a very strident diatribe against the
dangers of Palestinian control over any piece of Jerusalem or its suburbs.
Gruber, Ruth.
Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her
Story. NY: Schocken, 2007. Ninety-five-year-old Ruth Gruber can still
tell a great story, and this time it is the story of her adventures becoming a
journalist and reporting the great events in the life of the Jewish people in
the 20th century.
Isaacson,
Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Acclaimed biographer Isaacson examines
the remarkable life of the famous scientist in this lucid account.
Kaplan, Beth.
Finding the Jewish
Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin.
Syracuse University Press,
2007. Beth Kaplan explores the contributions of her great-grandfather Jacob
Gordin, reformer and playwright, during the Golden Age of Yiddish Theater from
1891-1910.
Lagnado, Lucette. The
Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old
Cairo to the New World.
Ecco, 2007. Lagnado’s vivid portrait of her father is also an evocative elegy
to the cultural harmony among Cairo’s Jews, Arabs, and colonials during the
early 20th century.
Morinis, Alan.
Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar. Trumpeter,
2007. The Jewish spiritual tradition of Mussar, a set of teachings designed to
cultivate personal growth, is explained in this new book.
Newhouse,
Alana, Ed. A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of
the Forward. W.W. Norton, 2007.
This extraordinary volume features classic photographs of Lower East Side
pushcarts, Yiddish theater, labor rallies, and other gems published in The
Forward.
Ochs,
Vanessa. Inventing Jewish Ritual: New American Traditions.
Jewish Publication Society, 2007. The
author invites her readers to explore how Jewish practice can be more
meaningful through renewing, reshaping, and even creating new rituals, such as
blessings for newborn daughters, Miriam's cup, becoming an elder, and more.
Schorsch,
Ismar. Canon without Closure: Torah Commentaries. Aviv Press,
2007. Each commentary in this landmark collection by an influential leader and
scholar draws upon the author's wide breadth of Jewish scholarship, Talmudic
teachings, and inspirational personal insights.
Segev, Tom.
1967:
Israel, the War,
and the Year that Transformed the Middle East.
Translated by Jessica Cohen.
Metropolitan Books, 2007. The newest of
the hundreds of books published about the Six-Day War aims to put the event in
the broad context of international politics, while painting a complete picture
of Israel before and after the War.
Wilson,
Jonathan. Marc Chagall. (Jewish Encounters) Schocken, 2007.
Novelist Wilson illuminates the mysteries of Chagall’s works in a fresh and
lively way.
Wisse, Ruth
R. Jews and Power.
(Jewish Encounters) Schocken, 2007. The
noted author presents a radical new way of viewing the Jewish relation to
political power and describes the strategies, developed in the Diaspora, that
have led to failed policy in the Jewish state.
Zucotti, Susan. Holocaust Odysseys:
The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vesubie and Their Flight Through
France and Italy.
Yale University Press, 2007.
Zuccotti explores the dramatic stories of nine
Jewish families in 1943 who were displaced to this French mountain village and
their perseverance to survive
Vichy France and German-occupied
Italy.
FICTION
Andrzejewski,
Jerzy. Holy Week: A Novel of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
(Polish and Polish-American Studies) Ohio University Press, 2007. Published in
Polish in 1945 and newly translated into English, Andrzejewski’s novel
dramatically portrays the abandonment of the Jews to Nazi persecution by the
dominant Polish society in Warsaw.
Anton, Maggie.
Rashi's Daughters: Book II: Miriam. Plume, 2007. This second
book in the trilogy continues the portrayal of daily life for Jewish women in
Medieval France, as seen through the eyes of Miriam, midwife and headstrong
daughter of Talmud scholar Rabbi Salomon
ben Isaac (Rashi).
Appelfeld,
Aharon. All Whom I Have Loved. Translated by Aloma Halter.
Schocken Books, 2007. Appelfeld’s newest novel to be translated into English
tells the haunting story of nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld and his family in
Eastern Europe in the 1930’s.
Begley, Louis.
Matters of Honor. Knopf, 2007. In the 1950’s, three Harvard roommates
struggle with loyalty, integrity, and status pressures in school and in the
ensuing years. One of the roommates, Henry, is a Polish refugee who survived
World War II in hiding and continues to battle anti-Semitism at every turn.
Bloom, Amy. Away.
Random House, 2007. A young immigrant woman stops at nothing in her quest
across continents to find her daughter, whom she thought perished in a pogrom
that killed her husband and parents.
Chabon,
Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. HarperCollins, 2007.
What if Sitka Alaska became a Jewish
homeland, and not the British Mandate in Palestine? It is now six decades
later, and Sitka, which has grown prosperous under the Yiddish speaking Jews,
is reverting back to Alaska.
Danford, Natalie.
Inheritance. St. Martin's Press, 2007. This engaging first novel
takes readers from present-day America to Italy during World War II, as a
daughter learns her father's secrets after his death.
Elon, Emuna. If
You Awaken Love. Toby Press, 2007. Translated by David Hazony. Shlomtzion, a 40-year-old
interior designer living in Tel Aviv, has fled the Orthodox world after her
childhood sweetheart broke off their engagement because his rabbi refused them
his blessing. Now, years later, she is forced to confront her old flame and
re-examine her emotions and her religious and political beliefs.
Englander,
Nathan. The Ministry of Special Cases. Knopf, 2007.
In his first book since the short story
collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Englander explores the
erasure of identity among a Jewish family living in Buenos Aires in 1976, the
time of the country’s “dirty war,” when suspected political subversives were
kidnapped by the Argentine security forces and “disappeared.”
Etzioni-Halevy,
Eva. The
Garden of Ruth.
Plume, 2007. Etzioni-Halevy’s imaginative second novel focuses on the biblical
story of Ruth.
Havazelet, Ehud.
Bearing the Body. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007. Nathan Mirsky and
his father Sol, a surly Holocaust survivor, travel to San Francisco in an
effort to come to terms with the death of free-spirited Daniel, the estranged
brother and son whose complicated life and violent death force his survivors
to examine their own troubled histories.
Judah,
Sophie. Dropped from Heaven: Stories. Schocken, 2007. This debut
collection of stories illuminates the little known community of Bene Israel in
India.
Levi,
Primo. A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories. Translated by Ann
Goldstein
and Alessandra Bastagli.
W.W. Norton,
2007. The first new American collection of fiction by the Italian chemist and
Holocaust survivor gathers seventeen stories previously published in Italian
between 1949 and 1986.
Litman, Ellen.
The Last Chicken in
America: A Novel in Stories.
Norton, 2007. Set in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Litman joins a wave of recent
Soviet Jewish immigrant authors in portraying the lives of their fellow
refugees adapting (or not) to American life.
Lowenthal, Michael.
Charity Girl. Houghton
Mifflin, 2007. The Committee on Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding
Military Camps imprisons
Frieda Mintz, a
17-year-old Jewish shopgirl from Boston, when her first encounter with a
soldier turns from idealistic love into a nightmare of bureaucracy and medical
mistreatment during World War I.
Mekler, Eva.
The Polish Woman. Bridge Works Publishing, 2007. In
1967 Manhattan, 29-year old Karolina Staszek suddenly appears in Jewish
attorney Philip Landau's office, claiming to be
his long-lost cousin who was hidden by a Catholic family in Lublin, Poland,
during the Holocaust.
Mendelson, Charlotte.
When We Were Bad. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. To all appearances, the
Rubin family of London is perfect. However, the façade is about to crumble in
this humorous and sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis.
Modan, Rutu. Exit
Wounds. Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. Modan's first full-length
graphic novel centers on Koby, a taxi driver in Tel Aviv, and Numi, a young
soldier who draws Koby into her efforts to find Koby's father, her former
lover, who may have been a victim of a suicide bombing.
Nahai, Gina B.
Caspian Rain.
MacAdam Cage, 2007. This story of a haunted Jewish family in Tehran during the
last years of the shah focuses on the disastrous marriage of impoverished
Bahar and wealthy Omid.
Nassib, Selim. The
Palestinian Lover. Translated by Alison Anderson. Europa Editions, 2007.
Originally published in French, this sharply observed novel tells the love
story between a young Golda Meir and the son of a rich
Palestinian family.
Ragen, Naomi. The
Saturday Wife. St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Delilah Goldgrab is a Queen’s Yeshiva girl
who relinquishes her dream of living in luxury when she becomes a rebbitzin
and must face the challenges within her marriage and the modern Orthodox
community.
Rakoff, Alvin. Baldwin Street.
Bunim & Bannigan, 2007. Rakoff’s novel is set in Toronto during the
Depression, with a cast of characters who are members of the tightly-knit
Jewish immigrant community.
Reich, Tova.
My Holocaust. HarperCollins, 2007.
A scathing satire on the trivialization of the
Holocaust, Reich’s novel will infuriate more than a few groups of aspiring
victims.
Roth, Philip. Exit
Ghost. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. In this 9th installment of
the Zuckerman saga, Nathan deals with the ravages of age, an obsession with a
beautiful, wealthy young Texan, and a scandalous new biography of his mentor,
E.I. Lonoff, the subject of the first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer.
Schwarzschild, Edward.
The Family Diamond: Stories. Algonquin Books, 2007. Set in
Philadelphia, these nine scintillating stories by the author of Responsible
Men explore the bonds that both create and dissolve family relationships.
Segal, Lore.
Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Stories. New Press, 2007.
Segal’s wonderfully
realized stories center on Ilka Weisz and her relationship with
the dysfunctional family that is formed by her intellectual co-workers at the
Concordance think tank.
Silva, Daniel. The
Secret Servant. Putnam, 2007. Israeli operative Gabriel Allon returns in this entertaining
new thriller to fight terrorism and hunt down the kidnappers of the
goddaughter of the president of the United States.
Sofer, Dalia. The
Septembers of Shiraz.
Ecco, 2007. After Isaac Amin is arrested for the
"crime" of being Jewish in post-revolutionary Iran, he and his family endure
the nightmare that has transformed their country and made them outcasts. The
author's family fled Iran after the Islamist revolution and this riveting
first novel vibrates with the immediacy of lived experience.
Ulinich, Anya.
Petropolis.
Viking, 2007. Sasha Goldberg,
a bi-racial Jewish teenager living in Asbestos 2, escapes her dying Siberian
town and her overbearing mother to search for her father in America.
Yahia, Mona.
When the
Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad. Braziler, 2007. Winner
of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Fiction, this vivid and personal
story of growing up Jewish in Baghdad is set against the backdrop of political
upheaval and an increasingly fractured society.
Yizhar,
S. Preliminaries. Translated by
Nicholas de Lange. Toby Press, 2007. Written in 1991 and recently translated into
English, this autobiographical novel of a young boy growing up in
Palestine in the 20s and 30s marked
the final flowering of the great novelist’s oeuvre.
DVDs
Anti-Semitism in
the 21st century: The Resurgence.
Two Cats Production, 2006, 2007, DVD, 60 minutes. Presents research and
reports in a documentary format about the resurgence of anti-Semitism
worldwide. Of particular note is the rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric in the
political and public arenas as well as the mainstream media.
Forgiving Dr.
Mengele. First Run Features,
2007, DVD, 60 minutes. Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor takes the controversial
stance of publicly granting forgiveness to her Nazi persecutors. Kor and her
twin sister Miriam were selected by Dr. Josef Mengele to be subjects in his
cruel human experiments.
The Last Fighters.
Tel Aviv, 2006, DVD, 76 minutes.
Hebrew with English subtitles, Yiddish and Polish. This film documents the
memories of the last six surviving Warsaw Ghetto uprising fighters. Their
understanding of the events in retrospect 60 years later are different and far
more complex than what has settled into the collective memory.
Six Days in June.
WGBH Educational Foundation, 2007, DVD, 108 minutes. Distributed on the 40th
anniversary of the Six-Day War and based on new research and newly
declassified documents, this film brings a current perspective to the weeks
that preceded the war, its six days of fighting, and the aftermath.
West Bank
Story.
Ari Sandel, 2006, DVD, 22 minutes. A
musical comedy set in the fast-paced, fast-food world of competing falafel
stands in the West Bank. David, an Israeli soldier, falls
in love with the beautiful Palestinian cashier, Fatima, despite the animosity
between their families' dueling restaurants.
WEBSITES
Guilt
and Pleasure
www.guiltandpleasure.com Recent issues of this quarterly print magazine
feature stories by Shalom Auslander and
Lara
Vapnyar,
excerpts from new Jewish graphic novels, an article about an ultra-Orthodox
sect in Israel, and an essay that examines the classic book Godwrestling.
The publisher encourages readers of both the print and online formats to start
salons in their area in order to achieve the magazine’s goal of “making Jews
talk more.”
JBooks
www.jbooks.com Billing itself as the Online Jewish Book Community,
JBooks is a web magazine for Jewish book reviews, news, excerpts, and
more.
Sh’ma:
an Online Journal of Jewish Responsibility
www.shma.com A publication of Jewish Family & Life,
Sh’ma
contains thoughtful articles on topics such as private versus public prayer,
Jewish museums, and Israeli settlements.
COMPILED BY
Lee Haas,
Temple Emanu El
Merrily Hart,
Aaron Garber Library, Siegal College
Marcia Klein,
Beachwood Branch, Cuyahoga Public Library
Nina Rosner,
Beachwood Branch, Cuyahoga County Public Library
Bonnie Shapiro,
Jewish Education Center of Cleveland
Linda R. Silver,
The Jewish Valuesfinder
Wendy Wasman,
The Temple – Tifereth Israel & Fairmount Temple, Committee Chair
