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The best Jewish books I read in 2023
(JTA) — When I spoke with novelist Elizabeth Graver in August about her novel “Kantika” — inspired by her own Turkish Jewish family — I asked her how she managed to breathe life into a tired genre like the Jewish family saga.
“I want the characters to be flawed and complex, and for the turns that they take to come out of their intersections with both history and their own very particular circumstances,” she told me.
The flawed and the complex; the historic and the particular. These are the qualities that I look for in a good book. Below are some of the Jewish books I read and enjoyed in 2023. Nearly all reflect Jewish reality before Oct. 7; I suspect next year’s list will include a slew of books dealing with the crisis in Israel or will be read through the lens of the war.
Nonfiction
Jonathan Rosen’s memoir, “The Best Minds: A Story Of Friendship, Madness, And The Tragedy Of Good Intentions,” deserves all the accolades it has received. The former arts editor of the Forward writes about his friendship with Michael Laudor, a Yale Law School graduate whose brilliance and schizophrenia made him a sort of poster child for the successful mainstreaming of the mentally ill until it all went tragically, shockingly wrong. It’s also a beautifully told story about growing up precocious and Jewish in suburban New Rochelle, New York, and how Judaism can be both a balm and an astringent for those under the throes of psychosis.
In “Happily,” fairy tales are the prompts for a series of dreamy and rigorous biographical essays by Sabrina Orah Mark on “motherhood, and marriage, and America, and weather, and loneliness, and failure, and inheritance, and love.” And, as the New York Times noted, Mark deals with raising two “Black Jewish boys in a time of rising antisemitism.”
I also enjoyed another collection of biographical essays, “Immigrant Baggage,” by Boston College professor Maxim Shrayer. A former Soviet refusenik who immigrated to the United States in 1987, Shrayer writes about life as a “translingual” father, husband and writer who finds wisdom and the absurd in all the languages that he speaks.
“Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History” is a page-turning literary detective story by Benjamin Balint, exploring the all-too-short life and unlikely legacy of enigmatic Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz. Balint’s book prompted me to finally read Schulz’s best-known book, the hallucinatory “The Street of Crocodiles,” and two contemporary works of fiction that draw on Schulz’s biography: “The Prague Orgy” by Philip Roth and “The Messiah of Stockholm” by Cynthia Ozick.
In “The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature,” Joshua Lambert debunks the myth that Jewish intellectuals had an iron grip on what was read and reviewed in the post-war years — even as he celebrates the era’s undeniable burst of Jewish creativity and influence. One of those influential figures was Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, whose charming, gossipy memoir, “Avid Reader,” I avidly read (actually, listened to: Gottlieb narrated the audiobook) after he died in June. That led me to Gottlieb’s 2013 biography, “Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt,” which helps the reader understand the appeal of the beloved French Jewish actress in the context of the theatrical conventions of her day.
Bernhardt’s florid stagecraft couldn’t have been more different from the naturalistic acting style that Isaac Butler describes in “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act.” The Jewish acting teachers Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and Harold Klurman play central roles in Butler’s engaging history of the modern theater.
And just before the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, I read “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” by the Jerusalem-based Jewish writer Nathan Thrall. The book, a challenging account of a deadly school bus crash in East Jerusalem, is a forensic examination of the inequalities and indignities that stateless Palestinians face on a daily basis. You don’t have to agree with Thrall’s politics to learn from the realities and complexities that he describes.
Fiction
Many of the short stories in Iddo Gefen’s collection “Jerusalem Beach” start with a high concept — What if a start-up could manufacture dreams? Or a radio could pick up the thoughts of passers-by? — but they are always grounded in the Israeli reality. Indeed, one of his concepts, about a geriatric soldier who returns to the front, foreshadowed a real-life event, when retired general Noam Tibon raced from Tel Aviv to Kibbutz Nahal Oz to rescue his son’s family from Hamas terrorists.
James McBride’s “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” was inspired by his own Jewish grandmother, who ran a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the 1930s and ’40s. McBride’s recreation of the place and time is a rollicking story of two communities coming together around a common, racist enemy.
I love how “The Golem of Brooklyn” starts with a summary of a novel that Adam Mansbach decided not to write, then literally lurches into a hilarious imagining of an avenging Jewish Frankenstein’s monster coming to life in one of the less-hip neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It’s a Jewish road trip novel that confronts the persistence of antisemitism.
If you are yearning for a sprawling satirical novel about a liberal Jewish family making spectacularly bad choices, then “Hope” by Andrew Ridker is the book for you. Set in Brookline, Massachusetts, “Hope” has good, smart fun with synagogue social justice committees, Birthright Israel trips and Obama-era optimism.
Authors
I interviewed a number of authors this year about their books:
Eric Alterman took a deep dive into the political and personal relationships between American Jews and Israel in “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.”
Jenny Caplan’s book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” deals with the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists relate to Judaism as a religion.
In “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew,” Jeremy Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
In “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War,” the religion reporter and writing professor Jeff Sharlet chronicled his recent journeys across America interviewing QAnon acolytes, Christian nationalists, proud misogynists, unrepentant January 6ers, armed militia men and strict anti-abortion activists — all still in thrall to Donald Trump.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s latest book, “Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy,” is about a generation of Jews and new Americans “bent on saving face and determined to be, if not exemplary, at least impeccably respectable.”
Rabbi Diane Fersko wrote “We Need to Talk About Antisemitism” in response to congregants who were experiencing anti-Jewish hatred as they never had before.
In “Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair,” art conservator Rosa Lowinger, uses the tools and materials of her profession — stone, tile, metal, marble — as metaphors to tell how her Jewish family came to Cuba and fled after the revolution, and what they found and lost when they settled in Miami.
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The post The best Jewish books I read in 2023 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US Senators Urge Secretary of Homeland Security to Secure Northern Border From Gaza Refugees
US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaking at a press conference about the United States restricting weapons for Israel, at the US Capitol, Washington, DC. Photo: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Six US senators sent a letter to US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas this week requesting that he increase security measures along the northern border in response to Canada accepting an influx of refugees from Gaza, the Palestinian enclave ruled by the terrorist group Hamas.
The six Republican lawmakers — Sens. Marco Rubio (FL), Ted Cruz (TX), Joni Ernst (IA), Tom Cotton (AK), Mike Braun (IN), and Josh Hawley (MO) — said they were “deeply concerned” that refugees from Gaza could sneak into the United States. The senators warned that allowing unvetted Palestinian refugees to cross the border poses a serious national security threat.
“On May 27, 2024, the Government of Canada announced its intent to increase the number of Gazans who will be allowed into their country under temporary special measures,” the senators wrote. “We are deeply concerned and request heightened scrutiny by the US Department of Homeland Security should any of them attempt to enter the United States at ports of entry as well as between ports of entry.”
After arriving in Canada, the Palestinian refugees will be given a “Refugee Travel Document,” which serves as a valid form of identification, the letter claimed, adding that US Citizenship and Immigration Services recognizes these documents as a valid substitute for a passport. The senators warned that “individuals with ties to terrorist groups” could potentially enter into the United States.
The letter argued that the US should maintain “common-sense terrorist screening and vetting” for any individual attempting to enter its borders from a foreign country. The lawmakers lamented that the Biden administration’s “”ax border enforcement” has rendered the country vulnerable to potential terrorist attacks. From April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024, the US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations intercepted over 233 suspected terrorists at the northern border, according to the letter.
“[T]he possibility of terrorists crossing the US-Canada border is deeply concerning given the deep penetration of Gazan society by Hamas,” the senators wrote. “It would be irresponsible for the US to not take necessary heightened precautions when foreigners attempt to enter the United States.”
On Oct. 7, Hamas launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its Oct. 7 invasion of and massacre of 1,200 people across southern Israel. The Palestinian terrorist group also kidnapped over 250 hostages.
In response, Israel launched defensive military operations in Gaza with the aim of freeing the hostages and permanently dislodging Hamas from the neighboring enclave.
The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the West Bank, still support Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel that started the ongoing war, and they would prefer a “day after” scenario in which Hamas remains in control of Gaza rather than the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, or other Arab countries, according to recent Palestinian polling. The same polling found that, when asked about support for Palestinian political parties and movements, a plurality chose Hamas.
US lawmakers are split along party lines as to whether the United States should accept refugees from Gaza. Republicans are largely opposed to importing refugees from Gaza, arguing that individuals from the war-torn enclave present “a national security risk” to the United States.” In May, Ernst and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sent US President Joe Biden a letter, urging him not to accept any refugees from Gaza.
In June, however, a group of 70 Democratic lawmakers sent Mayorkas a letter, requesting he create “pathways” for more refugees of the Israel-Hamas war to resettle in America.
The post US Senators Urge Secretary of Homeland Security to Secure Northern Border From Gaza Refugees first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Video of Masked Man Vowing ‘Rivers of Blood’ at Paris Olympics Over Israel Support Appears to Be Fake, of Russia Origin
Screenshot of a widely circulated video published on social media showing a masked man vowing that “rivers of blood will flow” at the 2024 Paris Olympics due to France’s support for Israel. According to reports, the video appears to be fake and of Russian origin.
A widely circulated video published on social media this week showing a masked man vowing that “rivers of blood will flow” at the 2024 Paris Olympics due to France’s support for Israel appears to be fake and of Russian origin, according to reports.
The video — published on Tuesday on social media networks including X/Twitter and Telegram — featured a keffiyeh-clad man with his face covered, delivering an Arabic-language address threatening France with violence due to the country’s alleged support for Israel amid its ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza.
Addressing “the people of France” and “French President [Emmanuel] Macron,” the masked individual said, “You supported the Zionist regime in its criminal war against the people of Palestine. You provided Zionists with weapons; you helped murder our brothers and sisters, our children.”
“You invited the Zionists to the Olympic games. You will pay for what you have done!” continued the man, who wore a shirt adorned with a Palestinian flag. “Rivers of blood will flow through the streets of Paris. This day is approaching, God willing. Allah is the greatest.”
The video, published on X/Twitter by the account @endzionism24 and retweeted by Palestinian activist Ihab Hassan, ended with the speaker holding a prop severed head complete with fake blood up for the camera.
He is not a Palestinian:
A video clip has surfaced showing an individual wearing a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag badge, threatening France with a “river of blood” at the Olympic Games.
It is glaringly obvious to any Arabic speaker that this person is not Arab; his dialect… pic.twitter.com/rwWGkkbiAi
— Ihab Hassan (@IhabHassane) July 23, 2024
Hassan and other social media users immediately noted that the man speaking was clearly not a native Arabic speaker, citing his reasonably fluent but awkward and occasionally incorrect pronunciation.
Many social media users aware of the mispronunciations seemed to blame Israel for the video, implying the clip was a false flag meant to fearmonger and demonize Palestinians and Muslims. They did not address the fact that Israel has access to hundreds of thousands of native Palestinian Arabic speakers who would sound far more convincing than the man in the video.
On Wednesday, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that “French secret services and their partners have not been able to authenticate the veracity of this video.”
According to researchers at Microsoft, however, the video appears to be part of a Russian-linked disinformation campaign meant to disrupt the Olympics, which began with the opening ceremony on Friday.
The researchers from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center told NBC News that the clip appears to have come from a Russian disinformation group known as Storm-1516, an outgrowth of Russia’s Internet Research Agency.
The latest clip was linked to a similar disinformation video falsely alleging that Ukraine had sent arms to Hamas — a claim for which there is no evidence. According to the researchers, the more recent video appears to be part of a Russian scare campaign meant to disrupt the Olympics.
The video came just days before France’s rail infrastructure was hit on Friday, ahead of the start of the Olympics, with widespread acts of vandalism including arson attacks, paralyzing travel to Paris from the rest of France and Europe just hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympics. French authorities described the acts as “criminal” and “malicious.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said that the sabotage of France’s high-speed rail network was directed by Iran, which Western intelligence agencies have for years labeled as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.
“The sabotage of railway infrastructure across France ahead of the Olympics was planned and executed under the influence of Iran’s axis of evil and radical Islam,” Katz wrote on X/Twitter. “As I warned my French counterpart [Stéphane Séjourné] this week, based on information held by Israel, Iranians are planning terrorist attacks against the Israeli delegation and all Olympic participants. Increased preventive measures must be taken to thwart their plot. The free world must stop Iran now — before it’s too late.”
Katz was referring to a letter he sent on Thursday to Séjourné raising alarm bells about what he described as a plan by Iran to attack Israel’s Olympic delegation.
Darmanin and French National Police both announced previously that they are taking increased security measures to ensure the safety of Israel’s Olympic delegation while they are in Paris amid mounting threats. These measures include providing them with round the clock security from French police. The Israeli delegation will also receive additional security details from Israel’s Shin Bet security agency during the Olympics.
The post Video of Masked Man Vowing ‘Rivers of Blood’ at Paris Olympics Over Israel Support Appears to Be Fake, of Russia Origin first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Top St. Louis Newspaper Endorses US Rep. Cori Bush’s Opponent, Argues Incumbent’s Israel Stance Is ‘Disqualifying’
US Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) raises her fist as US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses a pro-Hamas demonstration in Washington, DC. Photo: Reuters/Allison Bailey
The editorial board of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the largest daily newspaper in Missouri, has endorsed the opponent of US Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), pointing to the incumbent congresswoman’s lack of legislative accomplishments and stance on the Israel-Hamas war.
The Post-Dispatch argued that Bush’s position on Israel and the Gaza war should be “disqualifying” for any elected representative. The outlet took umbrage with Bush for equating a close democratic ally of the US with a genocidal terrorist organization.
“Israel’s conduct of the war has been far from perfect, but it remains a democracy fighting for survival against an evil terrorist organization. Bush’s tendency to equate both sides — and even to side with the terrorists, as when she cast one of just two House votes against a resolution to bar Hamas members from the US — should in itself be disqualifying for re-election,” the editorial board wrote.
Bush has established herself as one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress. Only nine days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 slaughter of roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel, Bush called for an “immediate ceasefire” between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. As the war dragged on, Bush’s rhetoric toward Israel sharpened, with the congresswoman accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide” in Gaza and “apartheid” in the West Bank. Bush has also accused Israel of inflicting a “famine” in Gaza without providing evidence.
Bush seems more interested in pandering to the far-left fringes of the progressive movement than serving her constituents, the Post-Dispatch argued. Bush’s membership in “The Squad” — a clique of far-left progressive, anti-establishment lawmakers in the House of Representatives — has rendered her completely incapable of “accomplishing anything” in the halls of Congress, according to the newspaper.
The editorial board urged its readers to vote for Wesley Bell, pointing to his moderated approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of his pragmatism and moral clarity.
“On Israel, Bell offers an appropriately measured stance, acknowledging the need to protect Gazan civilians and work toward a two-state solution, while supporting America’s closest ally in the Middle East,” the outlet wrote.
In contrast to Bush, Bell has expressed more sympathy to Israel’s military operations in Gaza, emphatically rejecting the notion that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing.”
Moreover, Bell has strengthened his ties with the Jewish community over the course of his campaign. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, donated a reported $5 million to Bell’s campaign through its United Democracy Project super PAC. A group of 30 St. Louis-area rabbis penned a letter endorsing Bell, accusing Bush of a “lack of decency, disregard for history, and for intentionally fueling antisemitism and hatred.” Bell also brought about an official “director of Jewish outreach” to increase turnout among the Jewish community.
A poll commissioned by McLaughlin & Associates and sponsored by the CCA Action Fund, a pro-Bell super PAC, showed Bell with a commanding 56 percent to 33 percent lead over Bush.
Supporters of Israel see the primary race as a prime opportunity to oust another opponent of the Jewish state from the halls of Congress. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a progressive lawmaker, lost his primary race to a pro-Israel challenger on June 25. Over the course of his reelection campaign, Bowman accused Israel of committing “genocide” and enacting “apartheid” against Palestinians. Bowman’s comments incensed Jewish constituents in the leafy suburbs of Westchester County, New York.
Furthermore, observers are looking to the race as a potential indicator of the Democratic electorate’s position on Israel. Opinions of the Jewish state among Democrats have soured in the months following Oct. 7, calling into question whether anti-Israel views are still a liability with American liberals.
The post Top St. Louis Newspaper Endorses US Rep. Cori Bush’s Opponent, Argues Incumbent’s Israel Stance Is ‘Disqualifying’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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