You could argue that the above is a classic articulation of the principles laid out in the Feiler Faster Thesis, the doctrine, named for author Bruce Feiler, who is credited with fashioning it, which broadly implies that the pace of day-to-day life is sped up in the “digital age” of “telecommuting,” 24/7 news-cycles, and the like. The resonance makes sense given that the author of the article is, well, Bruce Feiler.

Still, with Thanksgiving only a few days away and Hanukkah in just over a week, it probably bears reminding that there are … eight days of Hanukkah.

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Time-Shifting Holidays [NYT]

Given how prolific he has been—his oeuvre includes two novels, a handful of plays, screenplays for Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders and Popeye, illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth and a dozen children’s books of his own, an Oscar-winning animated short, and, oh, yeah, more than 40 years’ worth of Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strips in the Village Voice—Jules Feiffer has published surprisingly little that deals in any explicit sense with Jewishness. Indeed, as he explains in his new memoir, Backing into Forward (Doubleday/Talese, March), as a kid he often thought he was an Episcopalian mistakenly switched at birth into a Jewish family, and as a parent he forgot to tell his daughter she was Jewish until she was six. Still, it would be hard to deny that his sharpest and most mordantly funny lines derive, directly or not, from Jewish sensibilities—and his rich, charming memoir offers up plenty of evidence for that contention.

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Occasionally spouting yes-man dialogue that sounds a little like something out of a Feiffer cartoon, Jeff Garlin plays Larry David’s agreeable manager and reliable crony on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a new book, My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, February), Garlin eschews the craft services spread on set, hoping to reduce both his weight and his environmental impact. In the process, he reaches out to some odd gurus—specifically, Ed Begley, Jr. and Richard Simmons—for suggestions, takes up Pilates, and annoys his wife. Among the challenges to his new diet: Rosh Hashanah. “Apples dipped in honey—apples, good; too much honey, bad.”

Garlin’s weight places him in a venerable tradition of plus-size Jewish comics that includes Buddy Hackett and Sophie Tucker. In a new book for kids, Jewish Comedy Stars: Classic to Cutting Edge (Kar Ben, March, 11+), Norman H. Finkelstein briefly surveys the rich history of the funniest members of the Chosen People, ranging chronologically from classic performers like George Jessel and the Three Stooges to more recent tummlers such as Adam Sandler and Sarah Silverman. It’s a rather ambitious project, when you think about it: how exactly does one discuss a comedienne like Silverman in child-appropriate language?

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Norman H. Finkelstein, the children’s book author, shares his first and last names with not one, but two contemporary American Jewish writers. One, a thoughtful poet with the middle initial “M.,” teaches at Xavier University. The other, an anti-Zionist polemicist with a tendency to footnote his own work more frequently than any other source, makes an appearance in Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (NYU, March). Nelson, self-proclaimed “tenured radical,” president of the American Association of University Professors, and advocate for shared governance in university administration, argues in his new book that DePaul University’s president erred in “unilaterally denying Norman [G.] Finkelstein his appeal rights for his tenure case”—a procedural irregularity that probably wasn’t necessary, since the flaws of Finkelstein’s work speak for themselves.

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Peter Birkenhead’s father, an erratic economics professor who taught at Brooklyn College in the late 1960s and 1970s, sounds like the sort of guy who might have enjoyed one of Norman G. Finkelstein’s furious tirades. A leftist and fan of the British empire, he insulted, threatened, and beat his wife and kids when he wasn’t busy tending to a collection of rifles. The younger Birkenhead, a journalist and actor who has performed in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, recounts his struggles with his dad and the first acting roles he took on in his father’s Massachusetts summer-stock theater, in Gonville: A Memoir (Free Press, March), infusing the tale with humor as well as plenty of self-reflection.

Not all fathers cast such a pall over their families, of course. Diagnosed with cancer when his daughters were young, and afraid his death would deprive them of a supportive male mentor, the journalist and author Bruce Feiler enlisted six men who had contributed meaningfully to his own Bildung to reprise their roles as his daughters aged. He introduces these men, and explains what he asked of them—as well as how he battled his cancer—in The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me (Morrow, April).

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Whether tyrannical or loving, generous or withholding, parents inevitably pass along at least their genes to their children, and in some unfortunate cases this genetic material already contains the seeds of tragedy. In Saving Henry: A Mother’s Journey (Hyperion, March), Laurie Strongin recounts the lengths she and her husband went to in the hopes of mitigating the effects of Fanconi anemia, one of several genetic diseases to which Ashkenazi Jews are especially prone, on their son Henry. In a story that made the national news, they attempted to bring to term a genetically matched embryo who could provide necessary stem cells for Henry. Their story doesn’t end happily—Henry died, bravely, at the age of 7—but suggests the extraordinary courage parents can muster in difficult situations.

Equally wide-ranging and diverse are the Americans for whom Moses was a household name and a moral touchstone. In their darkest days, the Pilgrims sought comfort by reading about Moses’ tribulations, Feiler tells us, as did the founding fathers for whom the “reluctant leader of Israelite slaves end[s] up as the favorite son.” An affection for Moses also ran in families: Henry Ward Beecher and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe were quite smitten with him. But then, so, too, were Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Luther King Jr. Feiler’s inventory of Moses’ fans and champions is so encompassing and expansive, you have to wonder whether there was anyone at all in America who did not cotton to the man.

Drawing on dozens of vignettes, the author goes further still, insisting that there’s hardly an American institution that has not been touched by Moses’ staff. Feiler is so taken with his subject, in fact, that he is moved to write in one of the book’s most eye-opening sentences that “Moses is our true founding father. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore.”

In his exuberant telling of Moses’ popularity and far-reaching impact on virtually every nook and cranny of American life, Feiler can’t help sounding a little like the author of The Da Vinci Code. He moves at breakneck speed and peppers his prose with lots of “aha”s. Cycling quickly through broad swaths of time and complex historical phenomena as if they were stops along the Tour de France, Feiler dispatches George Washington’s putative relationship with Moses, say, in a brisk couple of pages before moving on to something else entirely. His account accumulates encounters, quotes, and choice details, overwhelming the reader with a mountain of information.

And yet, there’s nary a footnote in sight. Instead, the book’s authority rests largely on Feiler himself. He puts his quest for Moses the American at the center of the narrative, seeking out thinkers like Peter Gomes, Jonathan Sarna, and Michael Walzer for tête-à-têtes about the biblical character’s impact on America; visiting museum curators; donning the costume that Charlton Heston wore when he played Moses in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; and even meeting with George W. Bush in the White House for a chat about Moses’ impact on the presidency.

After making my way through America’s Prophet, I don’t doubt that America—then, as now—found the Israelite leader to be a most congenial fellow, bending him to its own political, rhetorical, and symbolic uses. But the Moses who inhabits these pages ends up being so protean and malleable a figure that it’s hard to figure out where he begins and America ends. Feiler’s unabashed celebration of his subject, whom he likens at one point to a “kind of American Hamlet,” leaves little room for nuance, equivocation, and the sifting of sources. The hundreds of references to and perspectives on the man that animate the book end up sounding the same note: three cheers for Moses. The net effect is to flatten rather than clarify his appeal.

In the end, Feiler is so busy trumpeting America’s affinity for the biblical figure that you are left to wonder what the affinity actually proves. What does it say about this great big republic of ours that so many of its leaders made use of Moses and the Exodus story for their own ends—as a call to arms, a rallying point, a cautionary tale? Why did the United States clasp Moses to its bosom when so many other God-fearing nations did not? Where are we to draw the line between religion and politics or, for that matter, between religion and the public square? By the time we put down America’s Prophet, we’re none the wiser. But we sure can cite chapter and verse.

Jenna Weissman Joselit is a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University. She is currently at work on a book about America’s relationship to the Ten Commandments.

Two great things that taste great together: Moshe ben Amram and the United States of America: that’s the essence of Bruce Feiler’s America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story (William Morrow, October). Having shlepped through the Middle East for his bestselling Walking the Bible, Feiler stuck closer to home for this project, interviewing a colorful assortment of authorities, from the Reverend Peter Gomes to Rabbi Simcha Weinstein to Jonathan Sarna, about the Biblical figure he calls “our real founding father.” Feiler surveys the various uses to which Americans have put Exodus, from the Puritans to the Civil Rights movement, and does not shy away from patriotic shmaltz.

One modern Jewish leader went Moses one better: while the legendary stammerer sweet-talked the Israelites into a four-decade desert sojourn and eating whatever fell out of the sky, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson sent his own disciples to such potentially taxing destinations as Krasnoyarsk, Kinshasa, and Kentucky—and told them to put down roots there. In Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (Columbia, October), Elliot R. Wolfson, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism, explores Shneerson’s theology and ideology. An adept with abstruse and obscure notions, and with the most arcane of philosophical terminology, Wolfson focuses on the contradictions and paradoxes—“apophatic embodiment, semiotic materiality, hypernomian transvaluation, nondifferentiated alterity, and atemporal temporality”—in Shneerson’s thinking. That’s the sort of intellectual nimbleness it takes, apparently, to convince a star yeshiva student to set up shop in Pokhara or Bishkek.

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The United States offers at least as much to those who crave profits as it does to those who follow prophets. Marc Rich falls into the former camp: born in Belgium, he arrived in New York in 1942 with his parents at the age of eight, and soon set his sights on amassing a world-class fortune. He did so, in part, by trading commodities with Iran, Cuba, Angola, and South Africa; his convictions for such dealings and for tax evasion were famously pardoned by Bill Clinton. In The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich (St. Martin’s, October), Daniel Ammann calls the elusive billionaire’s story “both typically American and typically Jewish,” and describes Rich’s willingness to help out the Mossad on occasion through his extensive network of contacts in Iran and Syria.

Rich is the kind of capitalist Alissa Rosenbaum would have loved. Like him, she was a Jewish immigrant to the U.S.—born in St. Petersburg, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1926, as a young woman—and like him, she favored unfettered capitalism: “Money is the root of all good,” she famously quipped. Entrepreneurial enterprises did not make her name, though, but her novels, and the name they made was a pseudonym, Ayn Rand. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold more than 12 million copies, are more and less than literature—they’re the world’s most effective propaganda for the invisible hand as modern religion—and the narrator of Tobias Wolff’s Old School isn’t the only teen to have been bewitched, and then disappointed, by Rand’s work. Two new books explore Rand’s life and influence: one by journalist Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Nan A. Talese, October), and another by historian Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, October). Take your pick: it seems only fitting that two simultaneously published versions of Rand’s life story must battle it out in the free market. She wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

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In Henry Harland’s 1885 novel, As It Was Written, one character opines that “music is the art in which Jews excel.” Harland didn’t know the half of it. In the 20th century, Jews would utterly transform American pop, as David Lehman demonstrates in A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook/Schocken, October), the latest in the Jewish Encounters series published by Tablet’s parent company, Nextbook. As early as 1911, Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” portended the massive influence that Jewish songwriters would have through their efforts on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. Lehman, an accomplished poet, offers a personal take on these revolutionary tunes, while Tony Fletcher, a music critic, takes a wider view on the development of American songwriting in All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York, 1927–77 (Norton, October). Attending to the waxing and waning of a wide range of genres, from folk to punk to hip-hop, Fletcher does not particularly emphasize Jews’ achievements; still, in his telling, even decades after the heyday of the Gershwins, nice Jewish boys like Bob Dylan and Joey Ramone continued to write iconic American songs. One such musician, Pete Yarrow—one-third of Peter, Paul, and Mary, whose “Puff the Magic Dragon” keeps the spirit of the 1960s alive at summer camps—has been transforming his classic compositions into gorgeous picture books for the three- to seven-year-old demographic; the latest of these is Day Is Done (Sterling, October).

A few of Fletcher’s key players, like Toronto-born Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin’ Spoonful, weren’t even U.S. citizens. Another Canadian Jewish musician, Paul Shaffer, has risen from a childhood in remote Thunder Bay, Ontario, of all places, to the pinnacle of American television, where he serves indefatigably as David Letterman’s foil and straight man. Recounting his story with the help of David Ritz in We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives: A Swingin’ Showbiz Saga (Doubleday, October), Shaffer describes friendships with Cher and Sammy Davis, Jr., credits his Orthodox parents for exposing him to jazz, and calls Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited “the Talmud to the Torah of my life.”