REVIEWED By BRIAN HOROWITZ
Lawrence J. Epstein. The Dream of Zion: The Story of the First Zionist Congress. London Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. 172 pp. $36.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4422-5466-4.
The topic of this book is specific: the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. The hero of the event is Theodor...
Continue Reading ⇒
By VICTOR WISHNA
(JTA) — Chanukah is “late” this year (no disrespect to lunar-calendar literalists), which means winter will be well underway by the time those first lights are lit. What better time to curl up with a good book than when the weather outside is frightful, but the latkes...
Continue Reading ⇒
(JTA) — A Jewish author was shot and killed outside her Istanbul home by at least one assailant, a woman, Turkey’s main Jewish newspaper reported.
Beki İkala Erikli was shot three times Thursday evening outside her apartment building, according to the weekly Salom. The gunman fled.
Police were investigating security...
Continue Reading ⇒
Many of the past commentaries of Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, published weekly as “The Person in the Parsha” on the CCJN website for the past four years, are being released as part of a new book being issued by the Orthodox Union Press, published in conjunction with Maggid Books.
(JTA) — Here is a new fall season of Jewishy books, including the first novel since 5766 (by now almost 40-year-old) wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer — perhaps you’ve heard the buzz.
Presented below is JSF’s latest, plus nine other volumes, from the humorous to the humbling, that you’ll want on...
Continue Reading ⇒
By ALAN SMASON, Special to the CCJN
On February 15, 1981 rock music lost one of its early favorite sons, a guitarist who oversaw the transition of pop and folk music into a medium that featured electric amplification and extended solo blues performances. That man was Michael Bloomfield and his...
Continue Reading ⇒
Reviewed by ALAN SMASON, CCJN Editor
While the subject of ordaining women as rabbis still resonates very strongly today within the Orthodox community, the Reform movement has, with the ordination of Rabbi Sally Preisand in 1972, accepted women as rabbis. That is a historical fact. The story of her own...
Continue Reading ⇒
By REBECCA ROSENTHAL
(Kveller via JTA) — This summer, as I put my 8-year-old on the bus to sleepaway camp, he turned to his friend and said, “Let’s get on the bus quickly before our parents can say goodbye and be so embarrassing.”
As they ran toward the bus, I...
Continue Reading ⇒
(JTA) — Rabbi Maurice Lamm, the author of “The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning” and several other notable Jewish books, has died.
Lamm died Wednesday night “surrounded by his wife, children and grandchildren singing him to the heavens,” his granddaughter Lisa Lamm Pasternak said in a Facebook post. He...
Continue Reading ⇒
(JTA) — Israeli author Etgar Keret has been named the recipient of the 2016 Charles Bronfman Prize.
The prize recognizes Keret’s work “conveying Jewish values across cultures and imparting a humanitarian vision throughout the world,” the prize said in an announcement Wednesday.
The annual prize, which carries a $100,000 award,...
Continue Reading ⇒