Arts & Culture | Books

Past Imperfect?

06/26/2012 | Jerome A. Chanes | Special To The Jewish Week | Books

We Jews, traditionally, are an ahistoric people. That’s not to say that we don’t have a history; praise the Lord, we have plenty! But the rabbis of the Talmud did not see their job as doing history. For the rabbinic leaders and decisors of old, history was not front and center; the rabbinic leadership asked not “What happened?” but rather “How can we set a context, a chronological order, for the events in the Hebrew Bible and by extension for the halacha, the normative system that governs the life of the individual and the community?”

The Social-Justice Camera

06/12/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Books

The concept of “tikkun olam” — repairing the world — is a central tenet of Judaism. It is also, not infrequently, an excuse for critics like your humble servant to shoehorn texts and art that are not obviously Jewish into the pages of a Jewish newspaper. But there are times when the connection between Jewish identity, social justice work and the arts is so palpable that to ignore it would be more foolish than to proclaim it.

Strange Fruit

06/05/2012 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Books

The author Rich Cohen first heard about Samuel Zemurray in the late-1980s. Cohen was sitting in a sophomore class on American Jewish fiction at Tulane, and the professor gave a lecture about Zemurray, the longtime president of the United Fruit Company, and, in the early 20th century, one of the richest men in America.

The ‘Middle’ Movement Affirms, Updates Its Middle Path

05/08/2012 | Diane Cole | Special To The Jewish Week | Books

What does it mean to be an observant Jew in the 21st century? The question sounds deceptively simple, but the answer takes more than 30 rabbis and nearly 1,000 pages in the massive volume being published later this month by the Rabbinical Assembly of Judaism’s Conservative movement, “The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews.” That’s nearly twice the length of the book it updates, Rabbi Isaac Klein’s 1979 “A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice.” Has the world — or Judaism — changed that much in the 33 years in between the appearance of those books?

Writing Between Worlds

05/01/2012 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Books

When I ask Sayed Kashua about the roots of his humor, he says that he isn’t sure, but that it probably has something to do with his discovery, as an Israeli Arab attending a Jewish high school, that humor could protect him.

From Here To Absurdity

04/17/2012 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Books

Many of the best comedians have had deeply troubled pasts. But Moshe Kasher, a rising 32-year-old comic and author of a new memoir, “Kasher in the Rye,” takes the old adage to a new level.