Sandee Brawarsky

Jewish Week Wins Rockower Awards

06/22/2010
Staff Report

The Jewish Week garnered two first place awards and one second-place honor in the annual Simon Rockower Journalism contest sponsored by the American Jewish Press Association.

Editor and Publisher Gary Rosenblatt won top honors for his Between the Lines column, capturing the Louis Rapoport Award for Excellence in Commentary. The three columns dealt with the day school crisis, saying Kaddish and the controversy surrounding New York Times’ columnist Roger Cohen’s writing on Iran.

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From Boxing To The Bedouins

A roundup of new nonfiction titles.

Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic
06/16/2010
Binnie Klein’s memoir, “Blows to the Head"

 This season offers some remarkable new nonfiction titles, on some unexpected, previously unexplored topics. Readers can imagine — and try to understand — other lives, other times.

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Raising Children To Embrace Judaism: Authors Discuss Their Own Ambivalent Experiences

Submitted by Gary Rosenblatt on Wed, 05/26/2010 - 09:49

The struggle to raise an emotionally healthy child in a home where one parent is more religiously observant than the other was the subtext of a lively and revealing Jewish Week Forum last night with authors Judith Shulevitz (“The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time”) and Dani Shapiro (“Devotion: A Memoir”) at Cong. B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side.

More than 250 people attended the program.

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And On The Seventh Day...

Shulevitz shifts from Kierkegaard to the prophet Nehemia to the Gospel of Mark in “The Sabbath World.”

Judith Shulevitz’s ‘Sabbath World’ offers a thorough examination of Judaism’s weekly ritual.

05/18/2010
Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

In New York City, we have neither the siren that sounds in Israel on late Friday afternoons, nor the town criers who would yell “Shabbos” adamantly into the streets of Eastern European towns. But there’s a certain quality of light, the glow before twilight, which signals — confirmed by a glance at a clock — the onset of Shabbat, no matter the season.

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Editor’s Note

Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic
04/28/2010
lighting Shabbat candles at a DC-supported home for the aged for survivors of German concentration camps. Nice, France, 1951

 Chrystie Sherman took the cover photograph, “Shabbat,” in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, in 2002, as part of her “Lost Futures: Journeys into the Jewish Diaspora” project.  Her subject, dressed in a brocade Shabbat robe, opened the door of her family’s home to the photographer shortly before the onset of Shabbat. Later that evening, she hosted Sherman and 10 other guests for a traditional Bukharan Shabbat dinner of fragrant rice and lamb, in their courtyard under the stars. The young woman resembles the Sabbath bride of song.

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A Stranger Walks Onto An Israeli Bus...

04/27/2010
Sandee Brawarsky
Special To The Jewish Week

On a sunny Thursday morning during Israel’s February heat wave, I boarded the No. 63 bus in Givatayim, on my way to central Tel Aviv. I took a seat near the window to admire the white city. A few stops later, as the bus started to get crowded, a young black man got on and moved to take an empty seat near the driver.
 

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Yom HaShoah 2010: The Cello, The Dress And The Autograph Book

Three new books explore the Holocaust through the prism of everyday objects

Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic
04/15/2010
Time was out of the hands of labor camp inmates, but celloist Lev Aronson kept a life-saving beat in his head.

Mundane objects can be the containers of powerful stories. Those objects take on a degree of holiness when they are infused with memory and loss, and are the only tangible connection to lives and times that are no more.

Three new books related to the dark history of the Holocaust, are connected to objects that have become priceless and symbolic: a cello, a child’s dress and an autograph book.

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Young Eyes Capture The World

[Shadow] Max Kinchen (Jerusalem, Israel); [3 kids in doorway] Jamie Albert (Alibag, India);[Desert] Adam Sheinman Sahara Desert
04/13/2010
Sandee Brawarsky

Abride prays at the Kotel, seen from behind, in a poufy white dress and cascading veil; someone with tzitzit hanging out of a pair of jeans stands next to a Jewish memorial stone in Chalkida, Greece; a brick side of a building in disrepair includes the sign “Synagoga.”

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From Yemen To Monsey, A Freedom Journey

Yemeni men learning English

Yemenites here marking first Passover in America, but the adjustment isn't easy.

03/29/2010
Sandee Brawarsky
Special To The Jewish Week

 This is the first Passover when Temia and her daughters won't be grinding wheat by hand and baking matzah in special wood-burning ovens, as they did in Yemen. Instead, they'll be tasting their first matzahs sold in a box, celebrating the holiday in their new homes in upstate Rockland County.

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Challenged Adults Act Out — In A Good Way

Black Box Studios.

Improvisational exercises and role-playing games
‘teach life skills’ to those in Ohel program.

03/11/2010
Sandee Brawarsky
Special To The Jewish Week

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