Today’s the day! 107 years ago, in James Joyce’s fictional universe, Leopold Bloom wandered the streets of Dublin, unwittingly acting out the hero’s path in the Odyssey. And—as, I promise, you are being reminded for the very last time—tonight, at Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan, we will be celebrating Bloom, an Irishman of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, with readings, performances, and music. Do come!

Your suggested Bloomsday reading is frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Ron Rosenbaum’s recent paean to Ulysses‘s penultimate chapter (which is not, as he claims, the only chapter worth reading, but which is indeed one of the top three or five). Also, you can follow the whole novel on Twitter.

And, sure, a quiz: In the catechism chapter, two questions are answered with further questions. One of these answers is, “Who is M’intosh?” Well, who is M’intosh? First person to email me the correct (or an otherwise extremely persuasive) response gets a Nextbook Press volume of his or her choice.

So, two things:

1. Lit-geeks: Which is your favorite chapter of Ulysses? Mine is Chapter Six, “Hades,” which, naturally, finds Bloom attending a funeral. Leave your answers in the comments.

2. June 16: Save the date. Tablet Magazine will, once again, be putting the Bloom back in Bloomsday.

Is ‘Ulysses’ Overrated?
Earlier: Celebrate ‘Ulysses’ with Tablet Magazine

Setting aside that St. Pats was two weeks ago, I am disappointed.

The menu was an uninteresting course of Israeli wines, or Guinness and “traditional Irish fare” like steak and potatoes. We can only pray that Ambassador Oren sprang for a keg, because I’m pretty sure serving canned Guinness to the Irish ambassador counts as a declaration of war.

The entertainment was mildly more interesting since Oren and Gov. O’Malley performed with a Celtic-influenced Israeli band Evergreen. Oren playing a Bodhrán, or Irish frame drum, and yes, there is a video, and yes, you can see it below.

But I’m still not pleased, because there is already a Jewish-Irish cultural holiday: Bloomsday. A holiday to celebrate Leopold Bloom of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the most famous Irish Jew of all time. Not to mention there is already an organization—a magazine, if you will, perhaps one of Jewish news, ideas, life and culture—which throws an annual Bloomsday party to remember that Jewish Irishman, walking the streets of Dublin, unknowingly acting out the epics of old.

Ambassador, honored guests, let me invite you to Tablet Magazine’s next Bloomsday, because relying on steak and potatoes and an Israeli band playing Celtic music for diplomacy is a mug’s game. Peace between nations requires country songs inspired by Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, selections of the novel performed in Yiddish, and a full ensemble 15 minute Ulysses shpiel, to get you up to speed. Say yes.

Earlier: Happy St. Patty’s Day!

For now: Here is David Mandelbaum, of the New Yiddish Repertory Theater, and Alyssa Quint, who teaches Yiddish at Columbia, performing, first in English and then in Yiddish (translated by Caraid O’Brien), a scene between Leopold Bloom and an ex-girlfriend of his, Mrs. Breen.

• Contributing editor Ben Greenman, who will be joining us to celebrate, has made this an all-Ulysses day on his Letters With Character Website. (Also, congrats to Ben on being named a Big Jewcy.) [Letters With Character]

• Contributing editor Josh Cohen, who will also be joining us to celebrate, points out that every country has its own Ulysses. [Daily Beast]

• Our goal tonight is to reclaim Leopold Bloom for the Jews. But what about his wife, Molly, who was born Irish Catholic? An interesting, provocative post makes the case for Molly’s figurative—and maybe, even, literal?—Jewishness. [Sisterhood]

• After tonight’s event, turn up the dial for Radio Bloomsday, featuring Jerry Stiller, Alec Baldwin, and Caraid O’Brien (who translated the Yiddish section that will be featured tonight). [Radio Bloomsday]

• Bloom Tweets! [@LeopoldBloom]

• Bloom in Tweets! [VF.com]

• A nice round-up of various Bloomsday goings-on in New York (including, er, ours). [Paper Cuts]

• How Bloomsday is celebrated around the world. [HuffPo]

• And please revisit my interview with Professor Bruce Robbins on the essential Jewishness of Ulysses. [The Scroll]

See y’all tonight!

It’s not easy to imagine someone even glancing at Joshua Cohen’s 817-page Modernist epic novel Witz and mistaking it for a run-of-the-mill Holocaust memoir or Eastern-European-genealogical romp, of the type that lands on the desks of staffers at Jewish magazines several times per week. But, as though to make absolutely certain that no one gets misled by the w-pronounced-as-a-v in the title, Cohen (at 29, an already-accomplished novelist and essayist) opens Witz with a sort of moat of difficulty. All seeking entry into its main narrative must cross.

For the first 20 pages or so, we find ourselves in a cubistically rendered mincha service in what seems to be an observant Jewish quarter somewhere in the contemporary United States. Then, we cross “from the world of the father to that of the mother,” in Cohen’s words, and land, still confused, at the Shabbos dinner of Hanna and Israel Israelian and their twelve semi-interchangeable daughters. At the end of the meal, Hanna will give birth, right there on the kitchen table, to a son, Benjamin, who happens to come out of the womb already a little old Jewish man. Benjamin will wind up being the last Jew on earth, and the novel’s protagonist. But we don’t know any of that yet.

The Shabbos dinner is divided obliquely into seven parts, one for each of the days of creation. In the first part, images of light are everywhere: The Israelians’ “table, like the sun, almost set”; Israel, finishing up work at his New York law firm before rushing home to New Jersey by sundown, has “the Sabbath to the left of him, Sabbath to the right, but there’s no Sabbath where he’s sitting—the sun stayed above him, just waiting.” In the next part, God creates water: Eldest daughter Rubina, making her bed before the guests (“the Dunkelspiels, the Kestenbaums, the Lembergs, the Friedmans”) arrive, imagines “her bed’s less a bed than an ocean.” Etcetera.

Cohen is not the only contemporary writer to arrange an ambitious novel according to kabbalistic stratagems, but he may be the most committed to the task—like Ulysses, Witz is a book that cries out for an annotated edition.

Cohen also has a Joycean yen for devising strange new compound words—“cleanscooks,” “pushpulling,” “tossturn,” “matzahballs,” “challahknife”—as well as for internal monologues that take place on toilet seats: One guest, Mr. Feigenbaum, spends most of the meal in the bathroom trying to defecate.

In the seventh section—which would be when God rested, for those of you who were asleep during that Hebrew School class—the guests gather up their coats, checking the pockets to make sure the Israelian girls haven’t helped themselves to their wallets. They go home. And then, as though it were the normal conclusion to a Shabbos dinner, the world’s last Jew is born, “His glasses’ lenses, smudgy with fluid, that and His, nu, you know, too, which is hairy as well, the beard down below and apparently, can it be, already circumcised … .”

Caraid O’Brien was born in Ireland, but after moving to Massachusetts as a girl, she found herself drawn to works by Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. She followed that passion to become one of the foremost translators of Yiddish theater. But she’s still true to her roots, and tomorrow, June 16, she’ll host New York’s Radio Bloomsday—an annual reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses on WBAI. She’ll also perform the role of Molly Bloom in the broadcast. Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry spoke with O’Brien about the links between Irish and Yiddish literature, and about how a nice Irish girl became embroiled in Jewish culture.

To listen to Radio Bloomsday, tune into WBAI (99.5 FM in New York City) or WBAI.org on June 16 at 7 p.m.

Caraid O’Brien photo by Pablo Aguilar. Bloomsday 2008 by Drew Saunders; some rights reserved.