New books, films and music for all!

Here is a sampling of the new additions to our library:  

Books for Adults

NON-FICTION

Leigh, Jeremy.  Jewish Journeys.  Here's a review from the Independant Books website:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/jewish-journeys-by-jeremy-leigh-476256.html


Goldin, Judah. The Jewish expression

Modern scholars examine and interpret 3,000 years of Jewish literature and history. The essays study the actions and institutions of the Jewish people as well as their literary tradition. Included are essays on medieval poetry (Shalom Spiegel), Jewish thought and Jewish learning (Harry Austryn Wolfson and Louis Ginzberg); Spinoza (Leo Strauss); the Kaddish (S. Y. Agnon), and many more. Each essay reveals the diverse ways in which the Judaic tradition interacts with contemporary events, so that the Jewish expression remains vital and immediate.

Rodovsky, Jayson. Music for Shabbat Worship from the 70th URJ Biennial  November 4-8, 2009 Toronto, Ontario / Union for Reform Judaism, published by Transcontinental Music Publications.

Transcontinental Music Publications and the Union for Reform Judaism present a collection of all the congregational music sung during Biennial Shabbat worship. This diverse collection embraces the numerous musical styles heard in today’s Reform Jewish worship.


Steinsaltz, Adin.  Miracle of the seventh day : a guide to the spiritual meaning, significance, and weekly practice of the Jewish Sabbath /

Jacobs, A.J. The year of living biblically
Raised in a secular family but interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to stone adulterers. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes. Jacobs embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally: he tours a creationist museum and sings hymns with Amish; he dances with Hasidic Jews and does Scripture study with Jehovah's Witnesses. He wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle the 21st-century brain, and he discovers ancient wisdom of startling relevance.--From publisher description.


 Gelernter, David. Judaism : a way of being

Written for observant and non-observant Jews and anyone interested in religion, this book by the scholar David Gelernter seeks to answer the deceptively simple question: What is Judaism really about? Gelernter views Judaism as one of humanity’s most profound and sublimely beautiful achievements. But because Judaism is a way of life rather than a formal system of thought, it has been difficult for anyone but a practicing Jew to understand its unique intellectual and spiritual structure. Gelernter explores compelling questions, such as: How does Judaism’s obsession with life on earth versus the world-to-come separate it fundamentally from Christianity and Islam? Why do Jews believe in God, and how can they after the Holocaust? What makes Classical Judaism the most important intellectual development in Western history? Why does Judaism teach that, in the course of the Jewish people’s coming-of-age, God moved out of history and into the human mind, abandoning all power but the capacity to talk to each person from inside and thereby to influence events only indirectly? In discussing these and other questions, Gelernter seeks to lay out Jewish beliefs on four basic topics the sanctity of everyday life; man and God; the meaning of sexuality and family; good, evil, and the nature of God’s justice in a cruel world and to convey a profound and stirring sense of what it means to be Jewish.  From Yale University Press website.


Marcus, Ivan G.   Title: Rituals of childhood : Jewish acculturation in medieval Europe

In medieval times, when a Jewish boy of five began religious schooling, he was carried from home to a teacher and placed on the teacher's lap. He was then asked to recite the Hebrew alphabet and lick honey from the slate on which it was written, to eat magically inscribed cooked peeled eggs and cakes, to recite an incantation against a demon of forgetfulness, and then to go down to the riverbank with the teacher, where he was told that his future study of the Torah, like the rushing river, would never end. This book--Ivan Marcus's erudite and novel interpretation of this rite of passage--presents a new anthropological historical approach to Jewish culture and acculturation in medieval Christian Europe.

Marcus traces ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman elements in the rite and then analyzes it from different perspectives, making use of narrative, legal, poetic, ethnographic, and pictorial sources, as well as firsthand accounts. He then describes contemporary medieval Christian images and initiation rites--including the eucharist and the Madonna and child--as contexts within which to understand the ceremony. He is the first to investigate how medieval Jews were aware of, drew upon, and polemically transformed Christian religious symbols into Jewish counterimages in order to affirm the truth of Judaism and to make sense of living as Jews in an intensely Christian culture. From Yale University Press website.


Oelschlaeger, Max. Caring for creation : an ecumenical approach to the environmental crisis

 Many environmentalists believe that religion has been a major contributor to our ecological crisis, for Judeo-Christians have been taught that they have dominion over the earth and so do not consider themselves part of a biotic community. In this book a philosopher of environmental ethics acknowledges that religion may contribute to environmental problems but argues that religion can also play an important role in solving these problems that religion can provide an ethical context that will help people to become sensitive to the environment and to elect leaders who are genuinely responsive to the ecological crisis. Examining a broad range of Western religious traditions from conservative Christianity and orthodox Judaism to Goddess feminism and nature religion Max Oelschlaeger provides a sociolinguistic analysis of their creation stories and finds environmentally positive aspects in each of them. He asserts that religious discourse in the public arena can offer a way for such environmental issues as biodiversity, pollution, and population to be addressed outside the realm of special-interest politics. And he urges local churches to make "caring for creation" a theme for worship in their services; the majority of Americans, says Oelschlaeger, will discover an environmental ethic only through their religious faith. From the Yale University Press website:


Lotan, Jonathan. Learn to write the Hebrew script : aleph through the looking glass /

This quirky, unexpected, and utterly charming book offers a three-step method for learning to write Hebrew script, and the author has a gift for presenting the technical and abstract clearly and disarmingly."—The Jerusalem Report.


Levi ben Gershon. Commentary on Song of songs /

Gersonides (Rabbi Levi ben Gershom, 1288-1344), one of medieval Judaism's most interesting figures, was not only a philosopher, exegete, and halakhist but was also known for his contributions in the fields of astronomy and mathematics. In this new translation of Gersonides' Commentary on Song of Songs, Menachem Kellner brings to English-language readers a work that draws together many important strands and elements of Gersonides' thought: philosophical theology, philosophy of science, biblical exegesis, and Aristotle/Averroes commentary. With an informative introduction and thorough annotations, this volume focuses fresh attention on an important example of medieval Jewish biblical commentary and medieval philosophical thought.


Gersonides stood at the intersection of three worlds: he was a learned and devout Jew whose major philosophic and scientific teachers were Muslims and whose scientific colleagues were Christians. Applying his learning and brilliance to the Judaism he had inherited, Gersonides transformed it and passed along to his own students a Judaism that bore the stamp of his unique personality and of the Jewish-Muslim-Christian symbiosis he both represented and helped create. His philosophical commentary on Song of Songs reveals his belief that this poem is the only book in the Bible written to teach the ultimate truths of the universe to the elite while being of no outward benefit to the masses. From the Yale University Press website.


Benjamin, Marina. Last days in Babylon : The exile of Iraq's Jews,  the story of my family.

Through the events of her late maternal grandmother's life, British journalist Benjamin tells the saga of the Iraqi Jews, who arrived during the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles from Judea in the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. and were once Iraq's largest and wealthiest ethnic minority. Born in 1905 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, Regina Sehayek is a compelling character who lived in tumultuous times, witnessing as a child the British takeover of Baghdad and, as an adult, Arab nationalism and revolution. A moneychanger's bright and opinionated daughter, Regina was married off (and deflowered semipublicly as tradition dictated) to a virtual stranger, a prosperous merchant 30 years her senior whose ancestor was the Persian Jewish doctor for an 18th-century shah. Although indifferent to Zionism, Regina and her kin were victims of the rabid anti-Semitism that began to pervade Iraq in the 1930s. By 1950, the Jews' desperate situation forced a widowed Regina to thwart police and petty bureaucrats and flee, eventually settling her children in London. Benjamin (Rocket Dreams) honors her family by vivifying a once-thriving community that has dispersed worldwide, leaving only 12 souls struggling for survival in present-day war-torn Baghdad. Photos. (Oct. 3) From Publishers Weekly.  All rights reserved.


Burns, Michael Joseph.  Accepted and Welcome : The Unlikely Response of the Jesuits at Marquette University to Jewish Applicants during the Interwar Years, 1920-1940.

A Thesis in the Field of History for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies. Harvard University

During the interwar years - 1920-1940 - most American colleges and universities either firmly restricted or out-right barred the admittance of Jews to their student bodies. Two major American Catholic schools operated by the Jesuits - Saint Louis University in Saint Louis and Marquette University in Milwaukee, along with some other Catholic schools - did not hold up such a bar. Those schools considered only students' ability to perform academically, and did not consider religious preferences or national origin in their admission process. Because of their central locations in the American hearland, and with easy rail connections from all over the country, both Marquette and Saint Louis were popular among Jewish families. The focus of this thesis is on Marquette University.
Dodds, Jerrilyn. The arts of intimacy

FICTION

Albert, Elisa. The Book of Dahlia


Dahlia Finger, the heroine of this début novel, is a sarcastic, self-absorbed Jewish American Princess, twenty-nine years old and living in a desirable bungalow in Venice, California, bought for her by her lawyer father. She’s also, thanks to Albert’s control of tone and timing, one of the most likable characters in recent fiction, as self-aware about her bad habits (smoking pot, wallowing in hopelessness, refusing to engage with her broken family) as she is incapable of changing them, even when diagnosed with a "level four" tumor in the left temporal lobe of her brain. Basing her chapters on a self-help book that Dahlia buys ("It’s Up to You: The Cancer To-Do List"), Albert writes with the black humor of Lorrie Moore and a pathos that is uniquely her own, all the more blistering for being slyly invoked. From the New Yorker.


Kuper, Daniela. Hunger and thirst

Kuper conjures a vividly textured culture as the backdrop for the poignant, funny story of the Trouts, a 1950s Chicago Jewish family in which father Buddy is occasionally found lying drunk on the sidewalk and mother Irwina so worships culture, especially Chanel-style, that the first purchase for the apartment is a fountain whose blue water spouts from the mouths of fish and the not-so-private parts of angels. The women in the Trouts' building, compounded of equal parts chicken fat and regret, provide ongoing commentary on Buddy's drinking and Irwina's affectations: she wears a different dress every day, and with shoes that match! Daughter Joan is the pivotal character in a novel and a world in which the known is good, hidden stories are threatening, the elderly come from places whose boundaries and names changed too often to remember, and straw beach bags become first-aid kits for snakebite and loss of limb at the annual B'nai Zion picnic. You don't have to be Jewish to love it; it goes well beyond "oy." Whitney Scott. Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


YOUNG ADULTS

Abelove, Joan. Saying it out loud.

With the help of her best friend, sixteen-year-old Mindy sorts through her relationships with her solicitous mother and her detached father as she tries to come to terms with the fact that her mother is dying from a brain tumor.


 

FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL KIDS


Shapiro, Zachary. We're all in the same boat. A Noah's ark story. The author grew up at temple Israel and is now a rabbi in California.


LOOK AT ALL THESE HARRY HOUDINI BOOKS! YES, HE WAS JEWISH!


MacLeod.  Harry Houdini

Adler, David. A.  A picture book of Harry Houdini

Kimmel, Eric A. : A spotlight for Harry

For Hebrew students of all ages:
Hoose, Phillip.    Hey, Nemalah! Hebrew version of "Hey, ant!"  Hebrew, only, with vowels.


Wasserman, Sany. The sun's special blessing

Every twenty-eight years the sun returns to the exact spot it occupied at the time of creation. Mr. Jacobs tells his third grade class that when he was in third grade, his class buried a time capsule in 1981. As they buried their time capsule, his class recited the special blessing on the sun. Twenty-eight years later it's time for the 2009 third graders to bury their time capsule and celebrate this special occasion by reciting the prayer.



Snir, Mirik.  When I first held you : 


CDS:

We have many cds by singer/songwriter,  Rick Recht, who recently performed at Temple Israel, including:

Shabbat alive and Tov

and many more cds of Jewish folk, rock, rap jazz and more!


FILMS

At home in Utopia

Focuses on the United Workers Cooperative Colony, aka the Coops, the most grass-roots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, where many of the residents were Communists or sympathetic to the communist movement. Beginning as a stalwartly secular East European Jewish working class enclave, they were part of an international movement the power of which blows minds today. This film bears witness to lives lived with courage across the barriers of race, nation, language, convention, and sometimes even common sense.


The first basket

Examines both the role that Jewish players had in the evolution of basketball and the impact that it had on the assimilation of American Jews. Some of the players mentioned are Red Auerbach, Red Holzman, Dolph Schayes, Red Sarachek, Barney Sedran, Eddie Gottleib, Abe Saperstein, Ossie Schectman, Ralph Kaplowitz and Sammy Kaplan.


VISUAL ARCHIVES

Our visual archives has a growing collection of The Jewish Perspective, hosted by Rabbi Ronne Friedman. It's usually on Sunday mornings at 6:00 am. What, you've never seen it! Well now you can! You may borrow our library's copies. We also have recordings of temple lectures and other special events.