JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Benyamin Cohen debuts with #1 Jewish bestseller

By Daniel Sieradski · October 7, 2008

Former American Jewish Life editor Benyamin Cohen’s book, “My Jesus Year,” debuted today at #1 on Amazon.com’s Jewish bestseller list.  The book catalogs the year Cohen, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, spent visiting Southern churches while trying to figure out why he found synagogue so unfulfilling.

Publisher’s Weekly has called it “a delicious olio of guilt, longing, surprise, wonder, unease and of course humor.” You can order the book online here, but if you happen to pick it up in a bookstore, take a photo of the display and send it to Cohen.  He’ll pay you back with a shout-out on his blog.

Cohen also spent a half-hour with NPR’s Lynn Neary yesterday discussing the book.  You can tune in to a recording of the broadcast here.

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Oy, my aching feet

By Lisa Hostein · October 2, 2008

I wonder if the London Review of Books knew how timely its review of a new book, Jews and Shoes, would be - coming out during Rosh Hashanah, when we spend hours on our feet at shul, and before Yom Kippur, when we barely get to sit at all. The review of the book, a collection of essays edited by Edna Nahshon, provides a fascinating read on the various links between Jews and shoes - from Freud to flat-footedness to the Wandering Jew, with this introduction:

I supposed that a book called Jews and Shoes was going to be either a bumper book of Jewish jokes about schlepping and cobbling, or a severe cultural studies analysis of the nature and symbolic value of footwear in Jewish society through the ages. Aside from a mention of how Ferragamo got his start by popularising the strappy shoe for Hollywood lovelies after being commissioned by Cecil B. DeMille to make 12,000 sandals for the original 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, there is nothing to be found on high-end modern footwear. Jews and Shoes turns out indeed to be largely about schlepping and cobbling, but is entirely devoid of jokes.

The reviewer, however, displays a bit of ignorance when she starts out by saying she knows of no significant, modern-day Jewish shoe designer. Maybe Stuart Weitzman should send her a special High Holiday pair that will hold up well for Kol Nidre.

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Philip Roth goes back to school

By Ben Harris · September 16, 2008

The first wave of reviews of Philip Roth’s newest novel, “Indignation,” are out this week. The book – which tells the story of the son of a New Jersey kosher butcher who flees to a Midwestern college to escape his neurotic father – clearly covers some well-worn Rothian territory. But the reviews are largely deferential, as befits to the only living writer ever to be canonized by the Library of America.

Below is a quick roundup of the latest. Also worth checking are Q&As with Roth from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

• Jonathan Rosen (Slate): “I can’t help feeling that Roth is having a Judeo-Christian nightmare, possibly intensified by the rise of evangelical Christianity in America, which turns precious Rothian fluids into human stains. Or that he has discovered that since American culture has Jewish genes, there is for him no escape from the yoke of the Law.”


• Tim Rutten (L.A. Times):  “ ... an irritating, puzzling and fascinating bundle of mistakes, miscalculations and self-indulgences.”


• Louis Bayard (Salon) : “‘Indignation’ is almost comically well-titled: It’s an angry little morality play about the harm men can do.”


• Richard Eder (Boston Globe): “Nobody pyramids a one-damn-thing-after-the-next emotional catastrophe as soaringly as Roth.”


• Robert Allen Papinchak (Seattle Times): “… [an] intrepid novel of self-revelation, demands to be read in one sitting. It’s that good. It’s that audacious. It’s that compelling.”


• Yvonne Zipp (Christian Science Monitor): “… the tragic flounderings of a father and son that seem foreordained to send the boy straight to the fate from which they were intended to save him.”


• Bill Gallo (Rocky Mountain News): “… the much-celebrated and still much-misunderstood novelist Philip Roth cannot seem to shake the elegiac mood that’s engulfed him in the past decade. Perhaps he doesn’t want to.”

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Translating the Bible… into Hebrew

By Uriel Heilman · September 10, 2008

Ha’aretz reports on an effort underway in Israel to translate the Bible into modern Hebrew:

In Israel - which was established 60 years ago as the national home of the Jewish people, which “gave the world the eternal Book of Books” (according to the Declaration of Independence), and whose official languages, alongside Arabic, include that same Hebrew in which the Book of Books is written - a move is afoot to publish the Bible in contemporary Hebrew. In other words, to translate the Bible into Hebrew. To rewrite it, in the same language, using different words.

This is a private commercial endeavor launched by a veteran teacher of the Bible, Avraham Ahuvia, and publisher Rafi Mozes of Reches Educational Projects. The entire text is vocalized, and each verse appears in the original form alongside the translated version.

The Education Ministry cried foul upon hearing of the idea and hastily issued a directive banning use of the new translation in schools.

1 Comment | Share This | Education, Israel, Literature, Religion

Strictly Commercial

By Daniel Sieradski · August 26, 2008

Two funny-Jewy books, two funny-Jewy promotional videos.

The first, featuring Daily Show reporter John Oliver, comes from Hazonik and Daily Show staff writer Rob Kutner, and is for his new book “Apocalypse How,” which Jon Stewart, in an obviously objective and impartial manner, called, “A great read.”

Second is the advert for former American Jewish Life editor Benyamin Cohen’s “My Jesus Year,” which Publisher’s Weekly called “a delicious olio of guilt, longing, surprise, wonder, unease and of course humor” that has “universal appeal.”

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Adam Mansbach: Appreciation or appropriation?

By Sue Fishkoff · May 20, 2008

Kind of weird last Tuesday night listening to Adam Mansbach, a nice Jewish boy from Newton, MA, tell a bunch of white Jews at the San Francisco JCC he was a dope emcee who grew up listening to hip hop.

Sure, Jewish kids are fascinated by black culture, said the 32-year-old Berkeley author of “The End of the Jews,” his third novel about race, hip-hop, and alienated young Jews trying to find their place in the world. His second book, “Angry Black White Boy,” is taught in more than three dozen universities, and is in development as a feature film.

Mansbach talks fast, in a rhythmic, jazzy kind of patter that prompted one audience member to ask why he “talked black,” a suggestion Mansbach dismissed. “What does that even mean?” he asked.

“This book is about margins,” he told the crowd. “If we look at the Jewish community of the past, those artists we value most highly occupied those margins. That’s where creativity happens.”

Mansbach spoke about his own early attraction to black culture, when he’d ride the bus that brought black kids to his heavily Jewish suburban school back to their African American neighborhoods to hang out and listen to the music that meant more to him than the Hebrew school he was thrown out of. In a world where chain stores use hip-hop to sell everything from computers to running shoes, he wondered, where does one draw the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation?

Oh yeah, that scary title. Once he was at a bar mitzvah with his grandfather, a retired law professor and judge from the Bronx whom Mansbach calls “brilliant, a heavy dude.” The gentleman surveyed the scene, with the Mexican hats and the over-sized sunglasses and the cheesy games and the extravagant buffet, turned to his grandson and muttered, “it’s the end of the Jews.”

It’s not, of course. But it makes good cover copy.

An audio segment of the author in conversation with Dan Schifrin, writer-in-residence at the soon-to-open Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, follows:

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0 Comments | Share This | Literature, Podcast

Jews and Power

By Ben Harris · May 16, 2008

The Jewish culture folks over at Nextbook are putting on the latest installment of their Festivals of Ideas series Sunday in New York. Among the literati lined up to talk about Jews and Power: Cynthia Ozick, Shalom Auslander, Ruth Wisse, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

Nowhere on the Web page, however, is it noted the irony of the festival venue – The Times Center, the event space on the ground floor of the gleaming new headquarters of the New York Times. Whether you see the Times as the citadel of American Jewish power or as the symbol of Diaspora Jewish weakness, it’s an interesting choice.

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A brief interview with Nathan Englander

By Daniel Sieradski · May 14, 2008

Nathan Englander today at the President’s Conference

JTA’s Israel correspondent Dina Kraft speaks with author Nathan Englander who participated in a panel discussion on Jewish literature today at the President’s Conference in Jerusalem.

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0 Comments | Share This | Israel, Literature, Podcast

Coen Bros. to direct adaptation of Chabon’s ‘Policemen’s Union’

By Daniel Sieradski · February 12, 2008

The Coen Brothers, directors of classics such as The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou, as well as this year’s eight-time Academy Award nominee No Country for Old Men, will be directing a film adaptation of Michael Chabon’s brilliant novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.  The film will be produced by Scott Rudin.

OMG OMG OMG.  Cannot. Contain. Excitement.

Variety reports:

For their next collaboration, the “No Country for Old Men” team of Joel and Ethan Coen and producer Scott Rudin will transfer another Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s work into a film.

Columbia Pictures has acquired screen rights to the bestselling Michael Chabon novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” with the Coens writing, directing and producing with Rudin.

[...]

The Coens will turn their attention to the book after they shoot “A Serious Man” for Working Title and Focus.

(Hat tip to /film)

[Update] JTA news brief here.  Feature story to follow…

0 Comments | Share This | Film, Literature

Hey, Chabon: En garde

By Ami Eden · November 1, 2007

Michael Chabon had a piece this week in The Telegraph (not my blog, the British newspaper), discussing his discarded plan to name his new book “Jews With Swords.” Bet he wouldn’t mind taking a stab at Alexander Nazaryan, who ripped the book (actual title: “Gentlemen of the Road") in the Village Voice:

Chabon’s heavy-handed Hebrew pride might be excusable in an otherwise brisk narrative, but this slim volume packs considerable flab. Hemingway could summon Spain in a single sentence; Chabon spends 200 pages kicking around the Central Asian plain without digging beneath the sun-baked surface. The real culprit here is not Biljan but unabashed logorrhea, with clunkers like “the migraine blaze of day” and the “honeyed hand of a dream” turning every page into a sort of verbal ambush. It’s not unfair to wonder if Chabon, like his Victorian predecessors, was being paid by the word.

But stylistic indiscretions, however irritating, are secondary to Chabon’s inability to treat Jews with the humanity that has so often been denied to them. In Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the oversexed Alexander Portnoy sears unease into the page with prolonged riffs on masturbation. He may not shed light on the Holocaust, but Portnoy is far closer to flesh than any of the tortured abstractions peddled by the Jewish New Wave. Despite lofty intentions, the likes of Chabon and [Jonathan Safran Foer] are unwilling to examine history on its own harsh terms, parading the Jews as little more than evidence of their own nuanced sensitivity or refined moral palate. As such, their project is no less self-serving than Madonna’s public flaunting of the Kabbalah. But hey, at least the girl can sing.

Hey, Chabon, you going to take that? As you would put it: What are you – a Maccabee or a Motel Kamzoil?

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