Next time you’re sitting under an incandescent light bulb, think about this: In 1911, Thomas Edison asked, “Do you want to know my definition of a successful invention? It is something that is so practical that a Polish Jew will buy it.” The Quotable Edison (University Press of Florida, March), edited by Michele Wehrwein Albion, includes that tidbit along with a few other of the inventor’s musings on the chosen people. The Wiz of Menlo Park had a fascinating explanation for what he described as “the almost supernatural business instinct of the Jew”: “Women have, from the beginning, taken part in Jewish councils; Jewish women have shared, always, in the pursuits of Jewish men; especially have they been permitted to play their part in business management. The result is that the Jewish child receives commercial acumen not only from the father’s but from the mother’s side.”

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It’s not clear where exactly Edison was getting his information, but he may have had a point in the limited sense that at least since the time of Glückel of Hameln, some Jewish women have had opportunities to be breadwinners for their families. Does this undermine the claim Rabbi Elyse Goldstein makes, in her essay “The Pink Tallit,” that until recently “the patriarchy has defined us”—Jewish women, that is—“as child bearers, child rearers, caregivers”? Not much. The new paperback edition of a collection of essays Goldstein edited in 2008—titled New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future (Jewish Lights, March), its contributors include such religious leaders as Tirzah Firestone, Jill Jacobs, and Danya Ruttenberg—reminds us just how far Jewish women have come. As Goldstein phrases it in her introduction, “Growing up in the 1960s, the notion of a woman rabbi, a woman Israeli Supreme Court judge, or an Orthodox synagogue where women read the Torah from their side of the mechitzah … were impossible dreams, even ridiculous scenarios.”

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Something else that would’ve been unimaginable, most places, before the women’s movement: a woman not taking her husband’s name when they married. Now keeping one’s name has become socially acceptable, but the practice of taking one’s husband’s name still hasn’t become the sort of comic anachronism giddily exploited by Mad Men. Israeli sociologists Orly Benjamin and Michal Rom set out to understand what factors contribute to Israeli women’s decisions about taking and keeping names today, in view of the particular gender dynamics of their nation, in Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel: Women’s Marital Names (Palgrave, May).

***

In some areas, Jewish men and women have achieved something like equality: When Leah Koenig remarks that her focus in The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook: Daily Meals for the Contemporary Jewish Kitchen (Universe, March) is not on “bubbe food,” part of what she seems to mean—given the gender neutral language with which she refers to her readers—is that zaydes, and potential zaydes of the future, should also get in on the action. If that sounds a little strange for a cookbook from the Women’s Zionist Organization, clearly you haven’t heard enough about the Hadassah Associates.

Not that Jewish men in the kitchen is an entirely new phenomenon. Apparently, aside from serving as executive producer of St. Elsewhere and directing an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, Bruce Paltrow also taught his daughter to cook, or at least that’s the premise of My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness (Grand Central, April), authored by the Academy-Award-winning, Huey-Lewis-duet-partnering, three-time-SNL-hosting beauty that Rabbi Tsvi Paltrowitch, the Gaon of Nitzy-Novgorod, could not possibly have imagined would be his great-great-great-granddaughter.

***

If Gwyneth seems almost miraculously well-adjusted despite a childhood among Hollywood types, think how much more difficult things must have been for Molly Jong-Fast, born half a decade after her mother contributed the term “zipless fuck,” indelibly, to the international vernacular. There were benefits, too, to being raised to think of herself as “first and foremost a Jewish neurotic,” as Jong-Fast recalled in her 2005 memoir: “Rich kids in Manhattan who aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer are considered dyslexic: they are sent to tutors who do their homework and (best-case scenario) give them candy.” In The Social Climber’s Handbook (Villard, April), Jong-Fast tells the bouncy fictional tale of Daisy Greenbaum, an Upper East Side socialite and occasional killer of Wall Street execs.

***

Like Daisy, Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) reacted intensely to the excesses of capitalism; unlike her, Luxemberg did so as a Marxist theorist. Born in Zamosc, she made her mark in German Communist circles, and the Jewishness of her family mattered less to her than their support for her revolutionary activities; her father bailed her out of jail in 1906. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, February), edited by Annelies Laschitza, Georg Adler, and Peter Hudis, includes everything from Luxemberg’s youthful mash notes to her theoretical arguments, as well as her uncanny prediction of “pogroms against Jews in Germany.”

***

Doubt that science fiction remains something of a boys’ club? Google “sci-fi women” and see what you get (“Hottest Sci-Fi Girls,” “The Top 13 Hottest Sci-Fi Women Ever,” and so on, ad nauseam). On the other hand, it would be unthinkable these days to publish a collection like People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy (Prime, March)—which includes Michael Chabon’s 2005 Nextbook lecture “Golems I Have Known” and a story by Neil Gaiman—without contributions from women, such as Jane Yolen and Tamar Yellin, too. Especially since one of the book’s editors is Rachel Swirsky, an Iowa Writer’s Workshop student, WisCon chronicler, and maintainer of a “blog of a feminist writer.” Let’s hope that soon her site will be the first hit for those Googling “Jewish sci-fi women.”

*Correction, November 30: This post originally stated that the Muslim holiday Tabaski marked Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac.

The subject of Danya Ruttenberg’s anthology, The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (NYU, June) isn’t exactly a new one: earlier collections on the topic have included Jews & Sex (2008) and Jewish Explorations of Sexuality (1995). To be fair, Ruttenberg, a dynamic young rabbi and memoirist, takes a different tack than her predecessors, including not only academics but also activists like Jewish Renewal stalwart Arthur Waskow and Orthodox feminist Haviva Ner-David. Ruttenberg groups the essays under rubrics of “I-It,” “I-Thou,” and “We-Thou” relationships, which might sound a little kinky, but is really just her way of echoing Martin Buber and of suggesting how variously Jews in different times and places relate to their sexuality.

Useful as this collection might be, perhaps the reason that anthologies proliferate on this topic (apart from the equation, irresistible to publishers, of Sex Sells + Jews Buy Books), is that it would take a massive encyclopedia to cover the history of Jewish sexual practices and attitudes comprehensively. Even a seemingly tiny subtopic, like levirate marriage—the responsibility of a man to marry his brother’s widow, familiar, if at all, from the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz—benefits from book-length attention. Or so proposes Dvora E. Weisberg in Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism (Brandeis, May), which leverages that somewhat obscure practice to illuminate the structure of families and the politics of women’s sexuality among the Israelites. Similarly, Gwynn Kessler’s Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Penn, June) addresses some fascinating issues of sexuality and biology that crop up in the Talmud’s stories. What does it mean, in our age of 3D sonograms, in vitro fertilization, and Roe v. Wade, that Jewish fetuses were said to participate in the exodus from Egypt?

Politically and morally fraught as fetuses may be for us, a new collection of essays edited by Amy Neustein takes up an even thornier subject: the sexual abuse of children by leaders of Jewish schools and synagogues. Neustein’s Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals (Brandeis, May) bears a respectable imprimatur and includes contributions from sociologists, psychologists, and other professionals, but that won’t stop some readers from feeling that the book constitutes a shande far di goyim, an airing of Jews’ dirty laundry where non-Jews can see it. Such fears aren’t completely unfounded. In the early 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for anti-Semites like Telemachus Timayensis to accuse Jews of an insatiable urge for child molestation. Theodore Dreiser’s bizarre play, The Hand of the Potter (1918), dramatizes those visions, but ultimately suggests that Jews are no more prone to perversion than anyone else. That message should be kept in mind whenever Jews demonstrate sexually transgressive behavior—as in the recent case, in Montreal, of a former B’nai B’rith official’s arrest for possession of child pornography. And when it comes to the protection of children from abuse, it should be agreed that the real scandal would be to remain silent.

One would hope that Leonard Zeskind was not pleased by the perfect marketing opportunity that presented itself just weeks after the release of his new book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (FSG, May). Zeskind offers the most thorough, detailed history and analysis to date of white supremacist movements in the U.S., and the recent shooting at the Holocaust Museum makes his research more relevant than ever. The coincidence between the publication date and the attack would be downright eerie—Zeskind has been working on the book for more than fifteen years and received a MacArthur Fellowship for his efforts back in 1998—if it weren’t for the disheartening sense that radical right-wing violence has become more and more common in the U.S. in recent years.

One might think that the history of the Holocaust has all already been written and published. It hasn’t. Scholars and historians continue to mine archives and gather evidence, and the results continue to appear in bookstores. Two recent examples include the second volume of The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, an American diplomat and advocate for Jewish refugees, and the first volume of a projected seven-volume Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (both Indiana, May). The publication of such histories and documents remains necessary because of the sheer scale of the catastrophe. How else to understand the dizzying scope of the 20,000 internment facilities set up by the Nazis—many, many more than the handful of camp names we tend to associate with l’univers concentrationnaire—than with an exhaustive encyclopedia, the first volume of which alone clocks in at over 1,700 pages?

In terms of the survivors of those camps, too, even with over 4,300 testimonies already gathered on video in New Haven, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. That’s why we’ll continue to see books like This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak (Kentucky, May) and Avinaom Patt’s Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State, May), which describes the hundreds of kibbutzim and agricultural training settlements in American-occupied Germany after the war, staffed by young survivors who fixed their hopes on Zionism. Whether they traveled to the American heartland or to the Land of Milk and Honey, the displaced persons, as they used to be called, have always had crucial stories to tell.

Much less pressing, and considerably goofier, are the memoirs of American schlemiels who overcome their immaturity to become mensches, or at least grown-ups. Andy Raskin’s The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life (Gotham, June) features a Long Island native who decides he can overcome the resistance to romantic commitment that he developed in his Jewish childhood by seeking the counsel of Momofuku Ando, the fabled 96-year-old inventor of Japan’s popular noodle soup brand. Closer to home, Sam Apple, in American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland (Ballantine, June), gazes at his navel and beyond, contemplating his own bris, and consulting a bevy of pseudo-experts, as he comes to terms with his own role as a father. The literary critic Ruth Wisse has remarked that American Jewish writers often struggle to see themselves as fathers, because they feel unable or unworthy to perpetuate the traditions of their ancestors, and Raskin might be a case in point. But for Apple, whose father Max has written charming memoirs, including Roommates (1994), writing his way into parenthood continues the family tradition.

Danya Ruttenberg grew up in a mostly non-practicing Jewish family in suburban Chicago, immersed herself as a teenager in the vibrant subcultures of punk rock and political activism, studied religion in college from a detached scholarly distance, and spent much of her twenties flitting amongst bars, art parties, and an eccentric cast of characters in San Francisco. While living there, she became a freelance writer whose work (often about religion) was published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, and edited Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press, 2001), an anthology of essays by Jewish women in their twenties and thirties. In the midst of all this, Ruttenberg began a long and deeply personal process of grappling with God and religious observance. It was a path filled with resistance and uncertainty, punctuated by moments of inspiration that eventually led her to embrace the rigors of Jewish learning and practice. This past May, she was ordained as a rabbi.

Ruttenberg, now thirty-three, chronicles her spiritual awakening in her candid and engaging new memoir, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon, 2008). She spoke to Nextbook about overcoming religion’s bad reputation, the radical act of keeping Shabbat, and the potential for a more complicated understanding of God.

What was your motivation for writing this book?

When I was going through intense spiritual searching, I was reading a lot of stories of other people who had gone through this—St. Theresa and all these folks—and began to notice patterns. At the same time, living in commercialized American culture, religion is given a bad name. I think a lot of liberals see religion as this place you go if you’re too scared to think for yourself. “Spirituality” has become this huge product that’s all about self-gratification and feel-good experiences. What I was going through was not fun. It did not always feel good. It was hard work and sometimes really painful. I hadn’t seen a recent book out there that talked about the tough part of spiritual awakening. It’s part of the process that’s missing from our discourse today, because we’re so geared toward instant gratification and averse to pain. That seemed worth articulating in a clear way.

How do you think that religion came to have such a bad name? It’s almost as if “God” is a dirty word, especially among the liberal, intellectual class.

For a lot of us who came of age in the ‘80s, seeing the religious right ascend to power, it became easy to correlate being religious with censoring films and CDs, anti-abortion work, and all this sort of mind control. And for those of us who didn’t get anything more sophisticated in our lackluster religious upbringings, it seemed easy to think of God as this man up in the sky with a thunderbolt who’s going to zap you. Anybody with any power of critical thinking can say, “I’m more sophisticated than that. I don’t really need some pretend mommy or daddy to give me motivation.” If nobody ever told you that history’s understanding of divinity has been much more complex than that, I understand how religion got such a bad name.

Also, the commercialization of spirituality made it this self-indulgent thing that doesn’t have any substance, but is just something people can do to make themselves feel better about their own lives. If you put those two things together, the creepy fundamentalists on one side, and the insipid New Age people on the other, then two or three thousand years of nuanced religious discourse and sophisticated theology goes out the window. Which is a pity, because most of religious history was written by really smart people who ask really smart questions, like some of the same ones we ask: How can there be a God if horrible things happen? And, how do we understand justice?

What was your social experience like as you became more religious?

At the beginning, I had a lot of shame because I’d internalized this notion that sophisticated, intellectual people aren’t religious. After college, I was visiting the East Coast and wound up in Providence. I knocked on the door of one of my old religious studies professors and we went out to lunch. I mentioned that I’d been hanging out in synagogue a little bit, and in this very snide voice he said, “Oh, you’re going to become pious.” I remember feeling embarrassed. I’d been trained to be a good scholar, but you weren’t actually supposed to believe anything about the religion you were studying. For a little while, I tried to keep my practice on the down-low. I’d go out for sushi with friends and just wouldn’t have the shrimp, and wouldn’t say anything about it. Slowly, as I became more committed to my practice and began to understand that this was going to be the priority in my life, it seemed absurd that I would hang around people who didn’t respect what I was doing. Fortunately, my closest friends were always great and very understanding.

The book you edited, and to which I was a contributor—Yentl’s Revenge—had a sort of sassy Jewish rebel tone, filled with young women asserting unconventional Jewish identities. I wonder how that book figures into where you are now?

A lot of the impetus for doing Yentl’s Revenge was a sense that there were people like me who had similar questions and struggles, who were looking to make Judaism their home but hadn’t yet figured out what that home looked like. When I started to call up bookstores to set up gigs, everyone I talked to was a Jewish woman in her twenties who wanted to tell me her story, and was trying to figure out if she could be both Jewish and…whatever the “and” was. I edited the anthology because I was trying to figure out how to integrate all this stuff in my own life. The process of doing the book was the first moment of being able to stake out my own place in Jewish life. In the seven years since then, I’ve discovered that there is actually quite a bit of Jewish life that has a place for me in it. I guess some of it has really just been about perseverance and determination. I kept sticking around until Judaism and I could find the right wavelength.

I enjoyed a certain amount of nostalgia reading about your punk rock coming-of-age—it made me think that maybe we’re a whole hidden scene of former punk girls turned religious seekers. What part of punk have you carried with you, post-adolescence?

When I was hanging around the punk rock kids, there would be moments when the music would take over and the “small Danya” could let go and go into something bigger—maybe the music, maybe something more than that. There was a feeling of immolation and transcendence. As an adult who became interested in spirituality and prayer, that was, in some ways, the place I was trying to return to, that feeling of allowing the small self to fall away and become part of something bigger, which is a central part of spiritual practice.

Your descriptions of beginning to observe Shabbat were really insightful. Referencing a Talmudic idea, you write, “in the World to Come, I suppose, we are more fully ourselves than we are able to be in the current world, where all we seem to do is go and make and rush to achieve.”

In our day and age, asking someone to spend one day off the Blackberry, off email, off TV, off of money, and focusing rather on the fundamental aspects of being a human being—resting, singing, eating meals with friends, having long conversations, taking walks, prayer, doing things that nourish our deepest selves—is radical. It was no surprise to me when, five or six months ago, people—secular non-Jews—started talking about having one night a week that they were going to turn off their Blackberries and not check email. It speaks to this desperation people have gotten to, unable to just be anymore. Being in the present moment can be terrifying. If you’re running around, maybe you don’t notice that you’re angry or terrified. You manage to avoid whatever you’re trying to avoid very successfully. The minute you try to sit still for a whole day, you begin to notice where you are, and that can have frightening implications for the walls you build up. I think we resist that at all costs.

You wrote about hoping early on in your journey that you’d rid yourself of fear and uncertainty through religious illumination. What happened to that?

I was very engaged in this whole notion of enlightenment—the Buddhist tradition has a lot to say about there being one experience that changes everything. I did have one experience during meditation, in the spring of 2000, that changed a lot of things—I had a very visceral, palpable view of the way everything is interconnected. But it didn’t change everything. I was still me on the other side. I think spiritual practice helps me be kinder and gentler with myself, but the existential questions never totally go away. As long as we’re still people, we’re going to have moments of terror and we’re going to be afraid to be lonely. The question is, what context do we put those feelings in, and how do we work through them?

How does Jewish practice contextualize those feelings?

Jewish practice is, in essence, a series of gestures that help realign our focus toward service of the divine. When we pray, perform a mitzvah, say a blessing, or change our behavior in any way, we are remembering: “Oh yeah—God.” We’re remembering on some level, whether or not it’s conscious, that the point of all of this is service, not personal fulfillment. It’s not about me getting everything I want, but rather about me being part of a much bigger, interconnected plane of existence or organism. Call them mindfulness gestures. That’s why the daily practice piece is so important. You meditate, or pray, or keep Shabbat once and nothing changes. But do it often enough and you start to think about it when you’re not even doing the thing.

What do you think the future holds for deeper ideas about God and religion, especially Judaism?

I don’t know. Nobody really knows. Certainly the recent flurry of books on atheism speaks to the fact that a lot of people still haven’t gotten the memo that there is such thing as nuanced religious discourse and different ways of talking about God. There are a lot of people who still see the man up on the mountain with the thunderbolt. I do think that over the last ten years we’ve seen a renewed interest in God among a very specific Jewish set. There’s this passionate, engaged, creative minority of religious Jews our age who are doing independent minyanim, writing, thinking, and doing exciting work. And there’s a schism between them and the sort of next-level superficial Jewish culture expressed as clever T-shirt slogans or snarky comments about what it was like at camp. That’s where Jewish identity is still in its most shallow incarnation. I hope the depth wins out.