To the best of my understanding, this avoidance had nothing to do with self-hatred. I simply figured, Why read what you know? I grew up in a Conservative Jewish home outside of Boston; I went to shul most Shabbats; I attended Jewish day school; I read the Torah and Haftorah at my Bat Mitzvah; I spoke Hebrew. I knew where my family came from—my mother from Peabody, Mass., and my father from Brooklyn, N.Y. I also knew their respective cheers: “Rickety rackety Tannery Town, who can hold Peabody down? Nobody!” my cheerleader mother would shout. For his part, my father taunted uptown rivals thusly: “Chazak v’Amatz: the Bronx should only plotz!” I liked my father’s stories about life in and around King’s Highway and Coney Island in the 1940s and ’50s, but I had no desire to read someone else’s.

Which brings me to The Chosen, Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel of two teenagers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who first meet as enemies on the baseball diamond but soon become close friends. I avoided it like the plague, because it was about both boys and Orthodox Jews. Danny Saunders, one of the boys, is the scion of a rabbinic dynasty. He’s a genius with a photographic memory and an esteemed father who speaks to him only when they study Talmud together. Yet as he grows older, Danny is increasingly drawn away from Torah, not directly to a life without observance, but to Freud. The other boy, Reuven Malter, also has a rabbi for a father, but the Malters are Modern Orthodox, and Reuven’s father is understanding and kind. The Malters are Zionists—nearly heretical in the eyes of Danny’s Hasidic father—and, far less egregious, they’re misnagdim—rationalists who look askance at the ecstatic inclinations of the Hasidic world.

If that story didn’t dissuade the younger me from reading the book, there was also the 1981 film adaptation to consider. No less a heartthrob than Robby Benson played Danny Saunders, and I was no Benson fan. His selling point—delicacy—had repelled me since Ice Castles. And it was Benson’s face that came into my mind’s eye whenever The Chosen came up.

I could cry to you now—Oh! How wrong I was! How I rue those years in which I denied myself the story of Saunders and Malter—the story of the Jews in America! For now I have read The Chosen. It starts out winningly, with a tense and gripping baseball scene, and while devouring it, I imagined recommending the novel to some nephews, aged 12 and 15, rabid baseball fans and regular shul-goers who scour the sports pages on a daily basis. I imagined marveling over the novel together, as we have over the otherworldly width of Dwight Howard’s shoulders and Johnny Depp’s Caribbean antics.

The hatred Potok builds between the two teams, rooted in their different religious proclivities, is epic. More than sports rivalry, he’s presenting an existential conflict, wrestling with faith, tradition, dogma, and vanquishing heretics. (Or, it just now occurs to me, maybe Potok’s point is that religion is sport, sport is religion, and both have towering stakes—that would be the most heretical thought of all.)

Will Danny and his team kill “the apikorsim,” the heretics? Will Reuven and his team field successfully against the monstrously violent batters with their sidecurls and Yiddish curses? The answers to those questions are irrelevant. What matters is the friendship forged between boys. There are light shadows of Romeo and Juliet—rival clans and a nurse, but while none of the characters die in The Chosen, they do grieve for the 6 million overseas. Potok goes far beyond baseball and friendship. He summarizes the history of modern Jewry. The Chosen is a lesson in the origins of Hasidism, the roots of modern Israel, and the tragedy of the Holocaust. For good measure, it also offers a primer on how students learn Talmud, with brief forays into the history of American Zionist activism after World War II, all of which is anchored in the Orthodox world of mid-century Williamsburg.

The Chosen lumbers and teaches. I’d wager my nephews would find it dull. Passages of conversation are stilted, particularly in scenes between sons and their fathers. In Danny’s case, his father is raising him in silence, an esoteric child-rearing technique adopted, Reuven’s father explains, by some Hasidim. Though the thorniness of Danny’s relationship with his father is extreme, it speaks of realistic tensions. Children grapple with the possibility of disappointing their parents. Parents pin hopes on their children and sometimes fail to mask their disapproval when that child takes another path. Those tensions drove me to the end of The Chosen, though it is unlikely that I would have appreciated them as a younger reader, less equipped to look at the complications of my own relationship with my parents.

I don’t live in the mid-century Williamsburg Potok describes. I live in early next century Clinton Hill, on an avenue dominated by enormous mansions that once housed the likes of Charles Pratt, the 19th-century philanthropist, and by apartment complexes built for naval-yard workers. I know of no shuls in this neighborhood (I have inquired), yet walking down the street recently, I’ve passed groups of Hasidim. Some of them were wearing shtreimels. Others seemed to have their pants tucked into their socks and their tziziot tucked out at their waists. They walked fast, pitching forward. Who are they? They remain as improbable to me in the flesh as in the fictional world Potok conjured.

For me, Russell Hoban’s genius was Frances in all her captivating predicaments. They weren’t zany or far-fetched. Her life was familiar. She stalled at bedtime. She subsisted on bread and jam. She sang self-pityingly to herself. She had a little sister, Gloria (so hilariously odd, my 5-year-old self thought; who named their child Gloria?). Drawn first by Garth Williams and then by Hoban’s wife, Lillian, Frances and her world didn’t explode in color on the page, as do the worlds of so many other favorite childhood characters. The palette of Frances’ life was more modest, certainly, but it was hardly empty. I identified with this badger, with her soft-spokenness and pickiness, though I didn’t know what a badger was back then. I had trouble sleeping, I had a younger sister, and while I didn’t care for jam, I loved toast—white bread smeared with cream cheese. Nothing else. For years it’s what I ate for breakfast and dinner and it’s an honest, happy wonder these bones of mine ever grew.

Russell Hoban, ‘Frances’ Author, Dies at 86 [NYT]

They also insisted I join them at church on Sunday. It was a Lutheran service and though they knew I was Jewish (and asked me what food I avoided, but nevertheless served me quiche with bits of sausage in it), it meant a lot to them to have join them. They wanted to share their joy in faith. I obliged; they had opened their home to me, after all. They said there was a Jew who lived nearby but it was obvious that, by and large, the area was not home to a significant community and, as far as I assumed, the history of the Jews in South Dakota was not nearly as long as the history of northern European Lutherans.

Then, this past weekend, I picked up The Little Bride, the debut novel by Anna Solomon, after having seen her, last week, read excerpts alongside the singer-songwriter Clare Burson. (They reprise their dual performance later this month at the JCC in Manhattan.) The novel tells the story of Minna Losk, a 16-year old mail-order-bride, purchased by a 40-year-old Jewish homesteader in the Dakota territory in the 1880s. (Perhaps the most prominent fictional Jew of that time in place is Sol Star of HBO’s Deadwood.) Though Jews in the desolate place where Minna lands are few and far between they do exist there—struggling to farm and endure the brutal winter just as their recently-arrived Christian neighbors are doing. She lives, with her new husband and his two sons, in a tiny mud house, which, I imagine, ends up in a state similar to the mud hut remains I saw in Roslyn. Minna’s is an unenviable life full of hardship and she understandably questions whether she’s better off in America after all.

Solomon’s novel is based on fact, as she herself reported in a Tablet Magazine article. The likes of Minna—Jews in the middle of what looks like nowhere homesteading, tilling, escaping persecution—existed. They were trying to build a new homeland, even if it was diasporic. This knowledge adds dimension to the predominant historical narrative that the journey of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States 100-plus years ago landed them in big cities. As Minna Losk’s story shows, the American dream can frequently be a living nightmare, and Lower East Side tenements were not the only hell.

Related: Pioneer Women [Tablet Magazine]
The Little Bride [B&N]

The collection of essays also grapples with more theological questions that ensue from great tragedy. What is to be done in the face of great evil? Is there a particular Jewish response to such calamity?

Rabbi Michael J. Broyde, the book’s editor and also a contributor, is a professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta and a member of the Beth Din of America. He spoke to Tablet last week about missing bodies, the powerful impact of the Vietnam Memorial, and Hurricane Irene.

After Sept. 11, so few bodies were recovered, and ascertaining death proved difficult. You write in your introductory essay that the central question posed by a calamity like this is how to divide up misery in a responsible way. What does that mean?

Every time a person disappears, there’s misery. There’s misery borne by the spouse. There’s misery borne by the rest of the family. And, in the background, there is the possibility that the person is still alive and misery is being borne by him.

I give the example of Tom Gordy, from World War II. He was captured in Guam, and they reported him dead to his wife. When World War II ended, he came out of Japanese prison and found his wife happily remarried to another. That created more misery. So, in situations where death is not certain, we need to be exceptionally careful to make sure that the person really is dead, because a fast, inaccurate declaration of death creates incredible misery.

In the case of Sept. 11, how many women got in touch with the Beth Din of America to help them verify whether their husbands were dead?

There were 10 or 11 such cases. At the World Trade Center, some people disappeared virtually without remains, or it was only months later that their remains were identified. In those situations, we go through a carefully labyrinthed process to verify that a person is dead.

What is the process to verify someone’s death?

In Jewish law, to verify death, you need one of three things. You need either testimonial evidence by witnesses that they saw the person die, or physical evidence of death, or the placement of a person in a place where death had to have occurred.

There was a prominent Israeli on the flight from Boston putatively to Los Angeles that crashed into the World Trade Center. No physical remains were found of this man—nobody on the plane had physical remains—and there were no witnesses to his death, but you could place him on the plane, and everybody on the plane died. That’s called, in the Talmudic literature, “being thrown into the furnace.” So, even though nobody saw the person die, and there are no physical remains, if two witnesses say he was thrown into the furnace, then he’s dead.

Why is it important to have this kind of certainty about someone’s death in terms of Jewish ritual and life?

Three reasons: The first is legal. People disappear who aren’t dead, and you shouldn’t allow people to be presumed dead based merely on their disappearance; it produces chaos when they come back.

The second reason is pastoral. Closure takes place through legal processes that declare death. And Jewish law has its own legal process.

The third reason is documentary. We as a society want to document these events. It’s part of preserving the legacy of people who sacrificed or were murdered in the course of tragedy. The powerful impact of the Vietnam Memorial is the 50,000 names carved on the wall. Tragedies are both individual and national. 9/11 was 3,000 individual tragedies and a national tragedy made up of 3,000 individual tragedies. We as a society have an interest in keeping track of those.

Ten years out, how do we make sense of Sept. 11 as Jews?

Tragedies are never-ending. Sept. 11 is not the worst tragedy that will hit us, and it hasn’t been the worst tragedy in the last 50 or 70 years. We continually remind ourselves of the need to be forward-looking ethical people evaluating reality around us to make sure we are responding correctly to bad things taking place.

So, we need to check in with ourselves on some moral level?

That’s right, and to remind ourselves that there’s another tragedy coming in the future. If we think this is the tragedy to end all tragedies, we are mistaken. I wish it were so.

I was reading yesterday’s New York Times and one of the people interviewed about Hurricane Irene said, “This is the worst hurricane ever; it’s never going to be like this again.” And I said, “No, no, no.” It’s not the hurricane to end all hurricanes. It’s a reflection of the fact that we were poorly prepared because we hadn’t looked correctly at the crystal ball of the future after the last hurricane hit. Hurricanes come; they just do. The question is how prepared we are for them. When a hurricane hits us and we’re terribly unprepared, we should not sit on the ground and cry. The correct answer is we need to write down on a piece of paper the 12 things we need to do to be prepared for the next hurricane, because the next hurricane is coming, I promise.

But Sept. 11 is not something you can predict, like a hurricane.

Just because you can’t predict the exact details doesn’t mean you can’t predict that it’s coming.

That seems awfully fatalistic.

On the contrary, it’s completely not fatalistic. It says if we prepare, the tragedy is diminished. When you prepare for hurricanes, you know what happens? They’re not very traumatic because the levees hold and the shelters work and the roads don’t flood. The fatalism is by pretending there’s nothing we can do. Preparation happens when you acknowledge that this is going to happen again.

So says Charlie, a recovering alcoholic and screenwriter in “The Moon Landing,” one of eight evocative tales of loss that make up Stuart Nadler’s moving debut story collection, The Book of Life. The characterization aptly describes many Nadler characters, men and women in New England whose surnames—Horowitz, Cohen, Reinstein—are the most consistently Jewish thing about them. The book’s title invokes Yom Kippur and its essential wish to defer death, but endings—whether of life, love, or dreams—are what tie together its piercing stories.

Take Charlie. He has returned to Chestnut Hill, a well-to-do Boston suburb, to help his younger brother dispose of their late parents’ belongings. Both parents were alcoholics, and they died within days of one another. Charlie resents having to return from the faraway shelter he has built for himself in Los Angeles so soon after his mother’s funeral. He bristles at being home, feels guilty about his long absence, and recalls a childhood moment in 1969, when his mother took him to New York City to watch the ticker-tape parade for the Apollo II astronauts. Buoyed by her own excitement, his mother caroused with a stranger, losing her small son, who waited on a park bench for her to find him, crying and deflecting inquiries from concerned passers-by. Charlie’s mother, overtaken by her own childhood fantasies, had acted out resentfully at the accumulating responsibilities of mid-century motherhood. Years later, at her funeral, Charlie’s father whispered a line from Yeats’ poem “When You Are Old.” It’s a poignant way, perhaps the only possible one in this family whose relationships have been fractured by addiction and avoidance, of communicating caring.

In the story “Visiting,” by contrast, Jonathan Cohen fails to even look his dying father in the eye when he drives north from Manhattan to visit the old man in Warwick, R.I. Jonathan brings along his own estranged teenaged son, Marc. In the forced togetherness of the car ride, the adolescent smirks at his father’s inadequacies, though the child’s knowledge of them comes by way of his mother, Jonathan’s ex-wife. Marc softens toward his father when he learns why Jonathan left home at 18, never again speaking to his father, a Holocaust survivor who made his way in America as a fisherman. Once in front of his childhood home, Jonathan refuses to get out of the car to say hello, even while he seems to hold his father in a curious high regard, as a man who possesses a dignity that Jonathan feels he himself has always lacked. What’s troubling is the idea that the dignity derives from his hardness and his suffering. Jonathan’s father may have more to his character than that, but Nadler is stingy about sharing it. Instead, we are left feeling lightly stung by Jonathan’s enduring and pitiable sense of awe and inferiority.

In the bulk of these stories, the characters are in mid-life or younger and the Jewishness of their lives is limited. They are assimilated, aware of a more traditional past. Occasionally, a character returns to tradition, as does the college-aged son in “Winter on the Sawtooth,” though his return demonstrates less new-found faith than rebellion and a desire to become desirable to a classmate who is herself observant. More often, members of Nadler’s cast attend a Rosh Hashanah dinner or a bris, but they don’t carry on daily or weekly rituals as a matter of habit, and their personal relationships are hardly determined by religious affiliation. Moreover, the fact of being Jewish is frequently synonymous here with being a person of privilege from the Northeast. This is not an outlandish association, but it does feel slightly worn to a reader, like me, who happens to be Jewish and from the Northeast. But what can you do—our reading of any book is informed by our personal histories and though hints of stereotype pop up in this collection, its overall strength renders that weakness entirely negligible.

The one piece in Nadler’s collection to take up faith directly is “Beyond Any Blessing,” the final story. A searing heartbreaker (as can be said, frankly, about many of the works in this gripping collection), it tells the story of Daniel Feldman, a young married man who has driven to Brookline, Mass., to help Sy, his 90-year-old grandfather. Sy is a rabbi whose congregation has been trying to evict him for 20 years from the synagogue-owned house he has occupied throughout his career. Seesawing between the present—which includes Daniel’s reunion with his first love, Shari Levinson—and scenes from a tragic childhood in which Daniel’s parents were killed on Cape Cod, the story follows the evolution of the complicated love and sense of mutual responsibility shared by the two men, while also ably portraying the humiliations endured by the elderly.

Nadler ends the story with Sy’s proof of God’s existence: his sighting, on a perfect summer day long ago, of two young lovers frolicking in the Charles River, the sun dappling the water and the wet rocks around them. That moment of purity and joy is proof, to Sy, of God, and the memory of that image is what he has returned to again and again. Danny has his doubts, but perhaps he wouldn’t be Jewish if he didn’t.

These shows are lousy with Jews, of course, and what these Jews communicate, beyond the fact that they deal with expensive properties and wealthy clients, is a vulgarity and love of money that at times embarrasses me. More than embarrassment, though, I worry that these shows affirm anti-Semitic stereotypes—Jews are good at business, they love money, they’re hustlers. With their aspiration for enduring manicures (I include the men from these shows herewith), the Jews on these shows, along with the likes of Patti Stanger, Jill Zarin, and who knows who else on what else, give lie to the idea that Jews are a “people of the book.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about the kind filled with checks.

Then, thankfully, I got hooked on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the best franchise in that robust Bravo empire. The cast of mostly African-American women is rounded out by Kim, the show’s only white woman. Not a Jew. Kim is a wig designer, lives in a gated community, has two seemingly normal daughters, a mane of blonde hair (one of her own creations?), and is now pursuing her “passion” to be a singer. She seems to greet nearly everyone with a loud, throaty, “Hello, love!” that screams hard living and dubious affection.

Kim is trashy. Before her friend’s wedding, on this week’s season finale, she gets her “titties” redone, invites her personal assistant to see how soft they are and then, hobbles into her dressing room where she uses a curling iron on her Rapunzle-like tresses while a cigarette dangles from her mouth. After her gum-chewing football-playing boyfriend picks her up, they make their way to the party, where she asks a waiter to hide a bottle of wine they’ve brought for their exclusive consumption, assuming the booze on hand will be inferior. Classy broad.

And I love her. Not because she’s affable. Not because she’s smart (though she does convincingly offer information on pregnancy, supporting her assertion that she studied nursing). I love Kim because she made me realize that Jews on reality television have no monopoly on garishness. They are not the only ones invoking stereotypes. Other peoples can and do, happily, deliciously, elicit my cry of: Oh! The Humanity!

This cohort, which also includes David Bezmozgis, whose long-awaited first novel, The Free World, will be published next year, Sana Krasikov, and others by and large undertake their projects with restraint. They are not tackling historical fiction; they are telling intimate stories of individuals whose lives have been turned upside down, or maybe in fact have been righted, by history. When such an approach succeeds, as in Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories, it underscores the poignancy of the narrative. When it fails, the tales veer toward maudlin—and fall back into cliché.

Nadia Kalman, who moved to the United States as a child with her family from the former Soviet Union, steps lively into this landscape. Her debut novel, The Cosmpolitans, skips between hilarious and bittersweet in its portrayal of the Ukrainian Jewish immigrant Molochniks, who live in Stamford, Conn., the B-list city of Kalman’s own immigrant youth. Between the parents—the hapless Osip and his no nonsense wife Stalina, named for the dictator as misguided protection against anti-Semitism—and their three daughters, the Molochniks straddle the expanse of fears, hopes, and resentments that immigrants so often experience. And, in Kalman’s hands, they do so with refreshing humor, helping expand the sub-genre in which Kalman will invariably be included. She swaps restraint for the farcical, without forfeiting intimacy or gravity, and the trade is delightful.

“I know now why American ladies say when we arrive, ‘Look, is shower.’ ‘Look, is toilet,’ ” fumes Stalina shortly after seeing a production of Fiddler on the Roof. “Why are they telling me with such big smiles? Are they engineers who built the toilet? No, they think this is the first toilet we ever see. They think we came out of shtetl fighting over if horse was mule. We were intelligentsia.” That lament—there, we were someone, but look at us now—recurs in The Cosmopolitans, but Kalman keeps it from becoming an elegy. Her prose is brisk, and its semi-satirical style, bordering at times on lampoon, invigorates material—erosion of tradition, generational tensions, star-crossed love (back to Fiddler, it seems)—that’s decidedly well-worn.

There are complications in the proceedings. Milla, the eldest daughter, is the target of heaping condescension from her in-laws, who convince the young couple to move into the maid’s room in their Upper West Side apartment. She lumbers fairly passively through marriage, motherhood, and separation all the while fantasizing about other women.

Yana, the middle sister, an idealistic Marxist-feminist Columbia student, abandons academia while falling for Pratik, a polite, affable Muslim exchange student whom Osip has invited to stay. The welcome mat is pulled once the family learns that a romantic relationship has bloomed, but by then it is too late to thwart it.

Then there is Katya, an unhappy wild child who drinks in order to quiet her unpredictable channeling of Leonid Brezhnev. He made his first appearance at 4 when, “a man’s voice burst from her chest, saying something about disobedience in Russia,” causing Stalina to call her “Moy Greh,” my sin, and only years later explaining why she would consider her daughter as such. Kalman doesn’t categorize Katya’s condition as mental illness, and absent that diagnosis, Brezhnev’s appearances come off as evidence of an extremely embarrassing, though very funny, supernatural presence that drives Katya toward harrowing self-destruction.

That’s before she cleans up and takes up with Roman, an immigrant ne’er-do-well who seems to have learned English from MTV (“fish is banging,” he declares in a compliment about dinner), shoplifts from Caldor, and entertains good-son fantasies that he can bring his junkie-mother (not always “a narcomanka, but she was always a hairdresser, which was bad enough, a girl from a good Jewish family”) to the States.

How does the “Russian soul” adapt in America? It’s a question that haunts much of the work produced by young writers from the FSU. The Moscow-born Irina Reyn takes it up explicitly in her Tolstoy-inspired novel, What Happened to Anna K. Kalman addresses it too. Here’s how: The “Russian soul” becomes a character in the form of a ratty old handkerchief that communes, almost exclusively, with Stalina. It is that kind of whimsical choice, a tonal shift, that sets her apart from Reyn and others. Brezhnev-like dybbuks and talking hankies suggest that Kalman, with her penchant for the charmingly absurd, owes a debt more to the contemporary likes of Etgar Keret in stories like “Fatso,” for instance, than to S. An-sky, so often credited with introducing dybbuks into literature, or even than to her peers in the sub-genre.

Certainly the stereotypes Kalman exploits—snobbish Manhattanites, provincial immigrants with imperfect commands of English—might rankle some readers. Others, like me, will find her efforts hum with a gaiety and an affection for her characters that make it possible to forget for a little while how profound, not to mention wrenching, displacement and persecution can be.

In her new novel, Great House, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, Krauss turns that elephant into a desk, a hulking piece of furniture (not to mention a hulking literary device) that insinuates itself into the lives of four separate narrators who offer, in alternating chapters, accounts of their lives, loves, and losses across the span of decades and continents. The desk links their stories, opening up questions and fantasies about its provenance and the mostly tragic fates of its custodians.

Though the desk connects them, what really hovers over Great House, and joins the characters in it, is the fate of the Jews in the 20th century. That means, of course, the Holocaust but not only that. Krauss considers Israel, a state that owes its birth, in part, to international guilt and its continued existence to the lives of its soldiers. She also weaves in Pinochet’s Chile, which claims the life of Daniel Varsky, a young poet we meet in the first chapter, though suffering at the hands of South American despots is not a fate principally associated with Jews.

For Krauss, the terrain in Great House—refugees, dispossession, love, regret, death—is not unfamiliar (nor are some of her allusions—to historian Emmanuel Ringelblum and poet Nicanor Parra, for instance). These same elements gave The History of Love its heft. Yet there was, in that earlier novel, a sense of hope that enlivened the interwoven stories of an old refugee in Manhattan and a teenager in Brooklyn trying, among other things, to recapture a vivid sense of her deceased father, an Israeli. Whimsical moments in The History of Love balanced its serious undercurrent.

Great House, regrettably, lacks lightness, and the omission of any such breath is tough to endure. Characters’ monologue-like testimonies are engrossing, certainly, and full of pathos. The cast is passionate, but their emotions rarely stretch anywhere near exuberance, as if even the briefest display of something unrelated to despair would keep this from being a serious novel. Instead, Great House is sometimes strained by its seriousness and is further freighted by erudite references to the likes of Yehuda Amichai, Judah Halevi, and Yochanan Ben Zakkai, among others.

More often, though, Krauss moves nimbly between her characters: Nadia is a writer and potentially unreliable narrator who met Varsky when she was a young woman and, as she ages, retreats into herself; Aaron, an elderly Israeli widower, is grieving at once over his recently deceased wife and over his long-fraught relationship with a son, Dov, back from England for the funeral; there is Arthur, the professor husband of Lotte Berg, a German-born writer who fled the Nazis on a Kindertransport chaperone; and Isabel, a depressed young American in England who falls in love with an Israeli expat who lives with his sister. For a good while, the siblings are under the thumb of their father, a mysterious and emotionally distant antiques dealer, the son of Holocaust victims, who hunts down furniture looted by Germans during the war in order to return it to those who survived the pillaging.

In each narrative, Krauss raises provocative questions about the nature of relationships. Ever mindful of Lotte’s past, Arthur never dares inquire about previous lovers, her murdered family, or her seeming affection for Varsky, who comes calling because he’s taken with her work. After her death, Arthur becomes troubled by his ignorance and by related doubts about their marriage. Was it his neediness that allowed him to comply with being shut out? He’s tortured by a perceived taunt—you can love me, but you can’t entirely know me—and by unease over a host of unknowns, including the extent of her own affection for him. Though he tells us he “told her that no one could have been happier together than we had been,” his restrained tone casts doubt on the statement.

In Aaron’s case, Krauss explores how and when child-parent relationships go astray. Both father, who sees his own end galloping toward him, and son, Dov, are mule-headed, and their life has been more or less a battle of wills. Add to this dynamic the fact of Dov’s survivor’s guilt; he made it out of Sinai during the Yom Kippur War while his commander, the son of survivors, was less fortunate. Nearly unspeakable questions arise: How violent is the heartbreak when a parent outlives a child? How staggering is the blow when a child realizes that he too will die? When Dov, as a little boy, asks if that will be his fate, Aaron tells the truth. “And because, no matter how you suffered, deep inside you were still an animal like any other who wants to live, feel the sun, and be free, you said, But I don’t want to die. The terrible injustice of it filled you. And you looked at me as if I were responsible.”

On occasion, similar details appear in separate stories. Both Nadia and Isabel, whose unhappiness, not to mention voice, are so alike they could be kin, come upon small children who take on ghostly qualities, evoking innocence, tenderness, motherhood, and the alien quality of a foreign body dependent but also sometimes parasitic. The intermingling of themes and personas underscores the idea that though an individual’s story is vivid and singular to the person experiencing it, to the outsider one person’s fate is similar to another’s.

It happens that while reading Great House, I came upon “The Guest House,” by the medieval Persian poet Rumi. “This being human is a guest house./ Every morning a new arrival” the poem begins, and the newcomers are joy, depression, and other elements in the spectrum of emotion. What an apt complement to Krauss’ sweeping tale, which suggests that despair, though lonely, is not unique. In Great House, though, it is not the state of being human which surrounds us, but the weighty bookends of birth and death.

“Dr. Einstein with his underpants on display is not consummate with and causes injury to [the university's] carefully guarded rights in the image and likeness of the famous scientist, political activist, and humanitarian,” a Hebrew U. lawyer says. Though we will agree: Ideas are sexy too!

The university owns the rights to Einstein’s image and guards them vigilantly—most of the time. Several years ago, it tangled in court with California-based Electronic Arts over a video game that imagined Einstein dueling with Hitler. On the other hand, it has been willing to sell Einstein’s image to help hawk computers, cameras, and, of course, Coca-Cola.

Full ad below the jump. Warning: It’s utterly ridiculous.

Israeli University Sues General Motors Over Ad Involving Einstein [Motor Trend]
Related: Einstein (the Demon Slayer) Lands in Court [NYT]

In addition to its annual conference, AJOP is hosting a special kiruv conference for women in the movement this week in Ohio. Miriam Lowenbraun, the wife of AJOP’s director, Rabbi Yitzchok Lowenbraun, has been working in kiruv since she was a child—her father was a rabbi—and her home now is ground zero for her husband’s recruitment efforts.

Ever mindful of the need for outreach, as I interviewed Lowenbraun, she suggested that I listen to rabbinic lectures on tape, recommended a fashionable rebbetzin with whom I might connect, and invited me to spend a Shabbat in Baltimore with her family.

Why have a separate convention for women? Do they have unique issues in their kiruv work?

Women face different challenges. Men are outwardly focused in the community, and women focus on their homes and bringing people into them. In most communities, the homes are the center of operation; you invite people for Shabbos, and people make connections there. Your home becomes the example of what a Jewish, Torah observant, home should be like.

A woman has to balance what’s going on in terms of the people coming to her home and her family’s needs. How do you balance the Shabbos table where you have guests who may need one thing and your own children who need attention?

Women also have to figure out how to present themselves as Orthodox and within the confines of Torah, but still be relatable, with it, and modern. In terms of physical appearance, how do you look good, but maintain the traditional Torah guidelines as far as how one dresses? Also, women have to know what’s going on in the world if people are coming into their homes and having discussions, and for women who are involved with children and daily issues, it’s more of challenge than it is for the men who tend to be more academically oriented.

What are the current issues generally that people working in kiruv face?

Assimilation is tremendous. And in our time it is very hard to find Jews; at one time you could identify Jews even if they weren’t religious because they were involved in a synagogue to some extent. Now there are people who don’t even know they are Jewish, people for whom Yom Kippur doesn’t even enter their life space. And there are many people who think they are Jewish who are not, people who may not be Jewish because their mother may not be Jewish. There are many people in America for whom it’s not an issue—they are so distant already from Judaism. And we are losing kids from Orthodox homes; this is a growing issue that needs to be addressed.

Why is kiruv important—if we all follow our own path, why must it be one of observance?

It depends on what your values are. If I believe that Torah is the core of all existence, and surely of all Jewish existence, and it’s the best life for Jews, and there are Jews who don’t even know the Torah exists, it’s incumbent upon me to reach out and expose them to it. What if someone told you you had a diamond in your family and you never saw it, why would you believe it? It might be hearsay. But if you saw it, you might have different attitude. If I know I have such a special treasure and I love my fellow Jew why would I not want to at least show them the diamond and if they choose to examine it they can? You don’t have free choice if you’ve never seen it.

Is kiruv something that has always been a part of Jewish life or is it a modern phenomenon?

As long as there have been Jews there have been Jews who have strayed, and the community has tried to reach out for them. In the 1700s and 1800s, the Haskalah, an anti-religious movement, tried to emancipate Jews intellectually, and it created a lot of problems, although I don’t think they were on the scale they are today. The phenomenon of losing Jews is not a new one, but the way we try to be more organized in how we reach out to people is a more modern thing. Technology has a lot to do with it. The world has become so small, and the recognition of the problem is better. During the Haskalah there were a lot of Jews who left Orthodoxy too, but they didn’t know about it everywhere. Now you know everything going on the minute it happens.

People are more aware of what the problems are, and there’s a concerted effort to address those problems in a more organized manner. Places like Etz Chaim in Baltimore are exclusively kiruv centers geared to reaching out and making classes available to people who are not affiliated. I don’t know that there were places like that before. The yeshiva movement began in Lithuania as a way to try to stem assimilation and help Orthodox Jews remain attached to Torah. But the biggest yeshiva in Europe had maybe 400 students, and now we have yeshivas with thousands.

I guess Facebook falls into that ‘more organized’ category. At the Women in Kiruv conference, there are two sessions about it.

They’re about how to use the technology for reaching out. It’s not about the halacha or hashgacha of using Facebook, but just practical.

But there are some people who don’t want to go on Facebook and don’t want to be open to just anyone, so AJOP also has their own internal Facebook-style program on our website for people to create their own groups without having to be exposed to the world.

Is kiruv different from the proselytizing other religions undertake?

We don’t missionarize [sic], we reach out to people. A missionary wants someone to be just like they are and do what they do. Outreach opens a door to Torah for people, but everyone has to find their own way in. No two people’s contribution is alike; everyone is unique, and missionaries want everyone to be the same and want everyone to believe in their thing. Other outreach groups reach out to all different religions and want everyone to become their religion; we believe that everyone in the world over can reach G-d in their own way. We only reach out to Jews.

You say that people involved in kiruv don’t necessarily want everyone to be like them, but there are some limits. Professionals in kiruv never encourage women to become rabbis for instance.

Many times people will come from an unaffiliated background, and their first step is towards Conservative Judaism. When people are trying to explore what Torah is, they go through different stages. Personally, as an outreach person, I would like people I reach to connect in their own way, at their own time, and to connect in an authentic way. Everyone has his or her own process of growth and timetable. Everyone has to find their own way and develop their own relationship to G-d. Torah is a process—it’s the work and the process that’s important. Some people think you are trying to make people frum and make people over, but that’s not the goal of authentic outreach; the goal is to be a resource on everyone’s individual journey.

Samantha M. Shapiro is a writer based in New York City.

Bob Dylan [The Big Issue]

In the course of her piece, Cohen puts forth Sand’s assertion that Jews and Palestinians share DNA and notes that “early Zionists and Arab nationalists touted the blood relationship as the basis of a potential alliance in their respective struggles for independence.” That kinship claim was later dropped, she observes, when it failed to help achieve political goals. Similarly, Sand retreads the idea (never proven and more or less accepted as myth) that the Jews descended from the Khazars, a group in the Caucasus which allegedly converted to Judaism in the 8th century, in order to suggest that the Jews can’t claim Israel as an ancestral home.

Ultimately Sand’s book, and others like it, forces us to grapple with the question of why some misconceptions gain traction and others do not. “A mingling of myth, memory, truth and aspiration,” writes Cohen, “envelopes Jewish history, which is, to begin with, based on scarce and confusing archaeological and archival records…. He is doing precisely what he accuses the Zionists of—shaping the material to fit a narrative.”

Book Calls Jewish People an ‘Invention’ [NYT]
Related: Inventing Israel [Tablet]

Jewish Mother Russia [Slate]

Exclusive: easyJet Grounds In-flight Magazine After Holocaust Gaffe [New Statesman via The Awl]

New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, however, remains firmly supportive of settlement consturction. He told the New York Times this week that he wants to buy a new pad in East Jerusalem. On a visit to Israel with about 50 other Americans, Hikind said restricting where Jews can build homes “is segregation” and that Obama’s no-settlement-expansion position means Jews “cannot build a toilet” in the West Bank. There are many kinds of arguments a person could make against Hikind’s intended purchase, but given that Thanksgiving’s around corner (and that Hikind introduced the bathroom rhetoric in this case)—we’ll make a patriotic one: the American economy is still in the crapper, why not spend the dollars here?

China Criticizes New Israeli Move on Settlements [Ynet]
Real Estate Shopping Is Used as Political Theater on Jerusalem’s Contested Ground [NYT]
Hikind Steps Into West Bank Settlement Row With Housing Plan [Jewish Week]

Roth is in good company—Israel’s Amos Oz is also a finalist for his book Rhyming Life and Death, as is the musician Nick Cave, whose second novel, The Death of Bunny Monroe, came out earlier this year. There’s one woman, Sanjida O’Connell, among the 10, a disparity which begets the question of whether women authors write sex scenes less often than men or simply less poorly.

Bad Sex Award Shortlist Pits Philip Roth Against Stiff Competition [Guardian]

Elsewhere in the holy city, police detained a woman who wore a tallit at the Western Wall. Nofrat Frenkel was taking part in a prayer service organized by Women of the Wall, a group that gathers at the start of each Hebrew month for communal prayers at the Kotel. Last week, group members faced the ire of the Sephardic spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who called them “stupid.” Frenkel was detained for violating dress codes, according to the BBC, though we like to think those codes were put in place to stop bikini-clad ladies from sidling up to the wall’s crevices where they might stick in notes asking for the means to properly clothe themselves.

Intel to Employ Only Non-Jews at Jerusalem Plant on Shabbat [Haaretz]
Jewish Woman Arrested Over Shawl [BBC]
Earlier: Orthodox Rioters Take on Intel [Tablet]

But all that good-for-you-ness doesn’t come cheap. A monthly delivery of a weekly challah costs $36, while $88 gets you three challahs a week for the month. Business is building, slowly, Bronk said. “I’m doing most of the advertising by word of mouth and some flyering,” she said by phone, acknowledging that she’d also advertised on Craigslist. So far three committed buyers have signed up for her services; they’ve all declined to order the vegan or spelt versions. “I’m a little bit surprised that I’ve only gotten orders for the traditional challah so far,” she said, adding that friends whose advice she solicited before beginning the challah-service found alternative types of challah appealing. “Maybe the people in my area have more conventional eating taste.”

Barkat voices his support for Intel [JPost]
Ultra Orthodox Jews Storm Intel Plant [True/Slant]

Radical Lawyer’s Appeal (and Rebuttal) [NYT]

Emily and Sarah Kunstler, Filmmakers [Gothamist]
Daughters of Infamous Lawyer Assess his Legacy in ‘Kunstler’ [Jweekly]

Some folks he met remember relatives lighting Friday night candles, attending religious services on Saturday not Sunday, and avoiding shellfish and pork—practices they thought were local customs, not Jewish ones, until they learned they were part of this semi-obscure demographic. Ross also met a Catholic priest who took a DNA test that confirms he descends from the priestly caste of kohanim and a rabbi who oversees the conversions of Crypto-Jews back to traditional Judaism so they can, under Israel’s law of return, move there and create, Ross writes, “a sort of anti-Muslim neutron bomb”—that is, populate the country.

There are a few problems in Ross’s piece. He admits to having projected onto Crypto-Jews a “needful hope in their existence,” but never fully explores the source of that need. Though generally meticulous in defining Hebrew terms, going as far as calling the tzitzit by its proper name, tallit katan (small prayer shawl), he gets Judaism’s essential prayer, the Shema, wrong, misquoting its first words as “Hashem yisrael” rather than, “Shema yisrael.” (We concede that could’ve been a typo overlooked by a negligent fact-checker.) Finally, though, by reporting on a Messianic Jew who wears a yarmulke embroidered with the Hebrew words “Yeshua Ha’mashiach” (Jesus the Messiah) alongside the stories of real descendants of those forced to convert to Catholicism, Ross undermines the seriousness of his piece. He lumps legitimate historical claims and personal histories in with what seems to us to be little more than religious quackery, casting a somewhat cynical light on his whole enterprise.

UPDATE, November 16: Theodore Ross writes: “Just wanted to briefly respond to Sara Ivry’s blog post on my article ‘Shalom on the Range’ (‘Harper’s writer finds U.S. Crypto-Jews”). Sara correctly noticed the inaccuracy of the rendering of the Shema in the article. However, in defense of my stalwart fact-checker, I feel compelled to point out that the version used in the piece, with the word ‘Hashem’ rather than ‘Shema,’ is exactly the prayer as delivered by Father William Sanchez. It was my belief that readers would catch the mistake and enjoy the small joke of a Catholic priest leading me in a Jewish prayer and getting it wrong.”

Shalom on the Range [Harper’s]

Goldberg, who is also a Tablet Magazine contributing editor, objected to the faith-based corralling and posted what Baum calls a hostile attack on his Atlantic blog. Baum “may have revealed himself to be an ‘As-a-Jew,’ a particular Semitical sub-type,” Goldberg wrote. “As-a-Jews are people who invoke their heritage only when they feel a need to dump on another Jew, or a Jewish organization, or the Jewish state. It’s a low practice.”

Calling Goldberg’s post “despicable,” “vicious,” and “smarmy,” Baum confessed to us that he frankly didn’t understand it. “Yes, I am a Jew. I am appealing to other Jews to put pressure on a Jewish member of the Senate as Jews. I don’t know what a ‘Jew-type’ is,” he said. “If he supports Senator Lieberman’s position on health care, he should say so. But I don’t really know what he’s objecting to, unless he’s objecting to any kind of identity politics, in which case, that train’s done left the station.”

Reached by phone, Goldberg stated bluntly that he’s “for a single payer system. I’m for completely removing the profit motive,” and further explained that his post has nothing to do with Senator Lieberman or health care. What appalls him is Baum’s “ethnic bullying” with its implication that there is only one Jewish point of view on health care; such an approach diminishes Judaism, Goldberg said. Baum, he continued, is using his “blood ties to an ancient tribe to make a self-righteous point. You can’t have it both ways. Either you’re a member of the tribe and you live that membership in a kind of way or you don’t believe it’s a tie that binds and you don’t live in a way that suggests it’s a tie that binds. But to invoke your blood connection to Joe Lieberman seems kind of atavistic,” Goldberg said. “You can’t be Noam Chomsky and Abe Foxman in the same email.”

The Ineffable Dan Baum’s Latest Project [Atlantic]

Isaacson calls the rivalry “an old-fashioned power struggle” and “a clash of personalities” that wound up pitting prosperous, assimilated American Jews against less refined, working-class European ones. Though glad that Einstein was in the States making the rounds, the American contingent tried to persuade him to downplay talk of money—both raising it for Israel and asking for it in terms of delivering lectures—and instead urged him to make believe he was here to talk relativity. And though the likes of Arthur Hays Sulzberger refused invitations to meet the future Nobel laureate, he was greeted, according to Isaacson, by immigrant throngs on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, causing him to later write to a friend, “I had to let myself be shown around like a prize ox.… It’s a miracle that I endured it. But now it’s finished and what remains is the fine feeling of having done something truly good and of having worked for the Jewish cause despite all the protests by Jews and non-Jews—most of our fellow tribesmen are smarter than they are courageous.”

How Einstein Divided America’s Jews [Atlantic Online]

Qatar would let Israel attend World Cup [Reuters]

An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers? [NYT]
Related: Hot for Teacher [Tablet]

Speculation varies as to why women generally are so conspicuously absent from leadership posts; some believe it has to do with the fact that women more often than men take off time from their careers to raise families and that they may be less aggressive about professional advancement and pay hikes. But why Jewish organizations seem to demonstrate an even larger gender disparity is unclear. One factor, write Jane Eisner and Devra Ferst, is “what communal insiders describe as the familial, sometimes paternalistic nature of Jewish organizations.” In other words—good old-fashioned, father-knows-best sexism.

Jewish Women Lag Behind Men in Promotion and Pay [Forward]

About That Heidi Klum Post [Forward]
Earlier: Is Heidi Klum a Nazi ‘Project Runway’ Host?

Shyne Speaks [7 News Belize]

We’ll leave the charges that Friedman’s post is racist to her commenters.

‘In or Out’: Why Heidi Klum Makes Me Nervous [Forward]

Then there’s Y-Love, the Orthodox African-American rapper, who recalls seeing “a TV commercial that said ‘Happy Passover from your friends at Channel 2’” when he was a wee boy of 7. It blew his mind so utterly he subsequently proclaimed, “Mommy, I want to be Jewish.” Is that all it takes? Golly—imagine the mess that could’ve been avoided had Ogilvy & Mather been around during the Crusades.

The New Jewish Convert [Moment]

Obama to Speak at UJC [JTA]

The Humbling has a scene in which the protagonist’s love interest, a “predatory, threatening lesbian,” as Brown describes her, straps on a green dildo, mention of which causes Brown to laugh nervously and Roth to take a sip of water. Awkward gestures aside, Roth sees this love interest as no more predatory than any of us and notes that writing such a scene was “no harder than writing a sex scene with a woman without a green dildo. Most of my sex scenes have been without women with green dildoes.” The objective in any sex scene, he says, is that “you don’t want to repeat yourself for one, you don’t want to fall into clichés for another. You don’t want to be licentious, really.” No, not really, though it can’t hurt book sales and movie options for adaptations starring the likes of Ben Kingsley and Anthony Hopkins.

Philip Roth Unbound [Daily Beast]

“Being raised in North London in the 1970s was much kinder than South Africa in the ’50s,” observes the actress, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Hotel Rwanda. “But it was helpful to understand what it is like to have a family that is a different color than you—and to question your heritage when people say, ‘That can’t possibly be your mum.’”

Jewish Actress Sophie Okonedo Explores Biracial Identity [Jewish Journal]

The leader of a group known as the Association of Friends of the Sons of Torah for Gilad Shalit quickly challenged the Neturei Karta declaration, saying “a Jewish soldier who has dedicated his life for the entire nation of Israel is observing one of the biggest mitzvoth. It is outrageous ingratitude to claim that there is no obligation to redeem him.” Which seems to us to make a bit more sense.

Neturei Karta: Returning Shalit Not a Commandment [Ynet]
Earlier: Gilad Shalit Is Alive

At Knicks Exhibition, Rabbi Intervenes When Maccabi Coach Won’t Leave [NYT]

And if you want to see Sax talk about the deli in person, check him out next Wednesday in Washington as part of our Jewish Body Week.

The Ethnic Food Chain [WSJ]
David Sax Talks About Saving the Deli and the Enduring Appeal of Hot, Fatty Meat [Village Voice]
At Jewish Delis, Times Are as Lean as Good Corned Beef [NYT]
A Mission To Save Real Jewish Delis, A Dying Breed [NPR]
Earlier:
Meat Up [Tablet]

Right now accessing the page is proving impossible (and for those us who want to see it, incredibly frustrating); though it’s gained more than 1,300 fans since launching, the page has been temporarily disabled. But if you’re hellbent on finding out what kind of presence that particular concentration camp has on Facebook, know that the search term “Auschwitz” currently yields 699 unofficial pages.

Auschwitz Launches Facebook Site [BBC]
Auschwitz Lauches Facebook Page [Guardian]

Predictably, stodgy viewers found Silverman’s approach offensive (come on, people—“house that is a city”—is sheer! comic! gold!). Among the scolds is Catholic League president Bill Donohue, quoted in an article in America, a Catholic weekly. He says Silverman is being anti-Catholic and that her “filthy diatribe would never be allowed if the chosen target were the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and the state of Israel.” Really? Donohue’s obviously not following the comedian on Twitter, where she spares nobody, least of all her own kind, from insult. To wit: “Saw A Serious Man last night — a disgusting yet accuate portrait of us grossy jews down to, like our thicker-ish saliva.”

Sarah Silverman: Sell the Vatican? [America]

Arnon Milchan Moving Back to Israel [Globes]

Ultra-Orthodox Women Go to Work [World Vision Report]

Outdated, sure, but rarely dull.

Michael Chabon: The Pleasures and Regrets of ‘Manhood’ [NPR]

Redgrave, cowriting with artist Julian Schnabel and screenwriter and playwright Martin Sherman, takes umbrage at the declaration’s use of the phrase “apartheid regime,” and clarifies, “We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government. Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter.” The three go on to question the declaration’s subtext that Tel Aviv should not exist and note that a great many Israelis are similarly critical of their government’s policies toward the Palestinians, “none more so than the Tel Aviv creative community,” they assert. “These citizens of Tel Aviv and their organizations and their cultural outlets should be applauded and encouraged. Their presence and their continued activity is reason alone to celebrate their city…. If attitudes are hardened on both sides, if those who are fighting within their own communities for peace are insulted, where then is the hope? The point finally is not to grandstand but to inch toward a two-state solution and a world in which both nations can exist, perhaps not lovingly, but at least in peace.”

Amen.

Let Israeli Films Be Shown [NYRB]
Earlier: Jane Fonda Is Sorry

At Least 139 of the Forbes 400 Are Jewish [JTA]
The Forbes 400 [Forbes]

Diamant says the Palmach’s role in Atlit is unfamiliar to many history buffs, as it’s overshadowed by other circumstances. “After this they started bombing train tracks and doing more overt military resistance to the British occupation, as it was known then. Part of the reason we don’t know about it is that I think the Holocaust is still such a huge shadow, and it’s still something we focus on. This is a relatively tender interlude. It’s not the founding of the state, and it’s not the Holocaust.”

Day After Night was published last month.

A Post-Holocaust Tale of Freedom Deferred [CNN]

William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79 [NYT]
Wlliam Safire, New York Times Columnist, Dies at 79 [JTA]
A Colleague’s Remembrance [Forbes]

Years ago, the Coens told The New York Times for Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section, they wanted to make a movie about a bar mitzvah boy who studies with a very old rabbi, “a Semitic Wizard of Oz,” says Ethan Coen. “He never spoke, but he had great charisma.” (In A Serious Man, the son studies for his bar mitzvah by listening to “Rabbi Youssele Rosenblatt Chants Your Haftorah Portion, Volume 12.”) The brothers says beyond the fact that their own father was a professor and that, like the boy in the film, they too had an affinity for the sitcom F Troop and a distaste for Hebrew school, the story is not autobiographical.

As for the Yiddish beginning, Ethan Coen explained it at a preview in Minneapolis: “You look at a shtetl, and you go, ‘Right—Jews in a shtetl.’ And then you look at the prairie in Minnesota and you kind of think—or we kind of think, with some perspective on it, having moved out, ‘What are we doing there?’ It just seems odd.” Added Joel Coen: “Mel Brooks once had a song called ‘Jews in Space.’ I guess that’s sort of the idea.”

Biblical Adversity in a ’60s Suburb [NYT]
The Coen Brothers Talk—Reluctantly—About Talking [MinnPost]
The Coen Brothers’ ‘A Serious Man’: More Jewish Than Matzo Balls? [LA Times]

Michael Jackson: Adolf Hitler was a ‘genius’ at showmanship [Daily Mail]

Amos Oz Tops Betting for Nobel Literature Prize [Monsters and Critics]