Last Sunday, November 7, we had several activities to mark the three coinciding events. The next few sentences may seem complicated, but I wanted to make sure you have the whole background before I report on our events. Two of our lectures/discussions were organized around the Global Day of Jewish Learning. Our library is a member of the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL). AJL this year joined the “Library Snapshot Day” project, an advocacy initiative of the American Library Association (ALA). The California Library Association picked October 4 as the Library Snapshot Day in our state, but as we were closed that date we deiced to do it this Sunday, which was within the week long period of AJL’s recommendation of possible dates.
Our first planned event, a discussion with the older students of the religious school got postponed because of logistical reasons. The second one, story time with the second graders, started a little bit later than planned, because of their folk dancing class. The nine children and one madricha arrived to the library a few minutes after 11 AM and we read “It Could Always Be Worse” by Margot Zemach. They enjoyed the story and were active in the discussion about it, providing ideas how a situation could be worse or how the problem in the opening pages of the book could be solved. Six of the children borrowed books after the reading, one for each. We had four more visitors in the library till we closed at 12.30, not counting the teachers, all of them parents. Two of them borrowed a book each.
At 1 PM USY started its first social action/Tikkun Olam event of the year in the large classroom of the campus, they made brown bag lunches for the Kid Street Learning Center. At 2 PM, I joined them and lead a discussion under the title of “Is Facebook God?” Fortunately, as I suspected, they were all on Facebook so I didn’t have to introduce it to them. We took Maimonides 13 attributes of God and attempted to compare it to Facebook or at least discover connections to it. Most of the nine teens and their group leader seemed to enjoy the conversation which lasted about 45 minutes. At the end they were all keen to take home a copy of the handout (PDF, 105 kb) that listed the attributes and provided one Facebook related idea and a suggestion for each. Rick Concoff, the Chaverim director, also joined us for most of event. Here they are the happy teens, after the discussion, and before I left so they could go on to start planning their next event.
To close the day we had an other presentation at 7 PM, this time on “Jewish Learning Online“. We started a few minutes late as setting up the projector and copying the handouts took slightly longer than expected. The slide presentation (PDF, 1 MB) consisted of 18 slides, including the cover and 7 screenshots of websites. The handout (PDF, 65 kb) included all the URLs mentioned in the slideshow. The five people who showed up shared some of their favorite sites, particularly in the area that the presentation didn’t even attempt to cover: culture.
Ben Aronin‘s “The Secret of the Sabbath Fish” shares a folk tale about the how the first gefilte fish was ever made. According to this legend poor woman prepared it after prophet Elijah, in the guise of a fisherman, gave her a splendid fish and instructions: “Don’t fry it, Matushka. And don’t bake it. But as you prepare it, think about what has been happening to the Jewish people“. The story teaches three simple lessons:
Even if you are poor there are always poorer people who you can help.
The importance of being joyous and sharing joy on Sabbath.
The history of the Jewish people included a lot of suffering, but they continued to exist.
The book pages are not numbered, but the story and the images take up 42 pages themselves. Every page. Where you open the book you will find a drawing which fills almost a whole page and in some cases both pages. The text for each double page varies between 3 and 12 lines. Therefore the book is great for 3rd and 4th graders. They may also be more receptive to Shay Rieger‘s elegant, black and white charcoal drawings than smaller children who might require more colors to hold their attention.
The advantage of folktales is that they are ageless. So even thought this book was published in 1978 it doesn’t feel outdated, because it is missing any cultural references to the age it was prepared.
Did you know that the library has journals in its collection. For example the latest issue of The American Jewish Archives Journal just arrived. I will copy below its table of contents, in case you are interested in one or more of the articles in it. Yes, you can borrow journals too. This is ideal when you are in the mood of reading something new, but don’t have the time, patience or attention span for a whole book. The current issue of the journal includes:
“Revive, Renew, and Reestablish”: Mordecai Noah’s Ararat and the Limits of Biblical Imagination in the Early American Republic
Eran Shalev
pp. 1–20
On 15 September 1825, Mordecai Manuel Noah proclaimed himself “judge of Israel” in Ararat, a planned Hebrew city of refuge on the Niagara River in upstate New York. Originally hailed as an event in American constitutional and intellectual history, Noah’s scheme enjoyed a grandiose dedication—followed by abject failure. Ararat not only failed to capture the support of European Jews; its very foundation—a Hebrew-biblical state headed by Noah as “judge and governor”—was deemed subversive within the political and legal culture of the young United States. In this article, Shalev shows how, in light of the potent political Hebraism of its time, Ararat delineates the broad yet strict limits of the early American republic’s biblical imagination.
The Excommunication of Mordecai Kaplan
Zachary Silver
pp. 21–48
In June of 1945, a group of rabbis gathered in New York to burn the prayer book of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. This extreme measure was part of the
formal excommunication ceremony for Kaplan, who would go on to become the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Just one month after the Allies declared victory over the Nazis, in a country wrestling with definitions of its freedom, Agudat HaRabbanim burned a religious book to express its disgust with how an individual expressed his philosophy. Silver explores the particulars of the excommunication, responses to it, and the cultural context of postwar American Judaism.
Place of Birth
Rudolf B. Schmerl
pp. 49–67
An old correspondence file in the New York Public Library, dated from 1 January 1940 to 28 July 1941, reveals an ambiguity of identity not uncommon among Diaspora Jews. The correspondence was between a young David Riesman, who went on to become one of America’s most famous sociologists, and the author’s uncle, then an impoverished and desperate refugee from Nazi Germany trying to fit into assumptions about refugees worth helping. But in this case, the author’s uncle, born in Mexico and educated in Germany in Roman law, found that in the United States the one was almost tantamount to salvation, the other totally irrelevant.
Book Reviews
Jeanne E. Abrams, Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis Movement
reviewed by Ava F. Kahn
Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity
reviewed by Marni Davis
Ellen M. Eisenberg, The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal During World War II
reviewed by Greg Robinson
Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn, and William Toll, Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America’s Edge
reviewed by Hasia R. Diner
Dana Evan Kaplan, Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal
reviewed by Valerie Thaler
Ari Y. Kelman, Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States
reviewed by Lauren B. Strauss
Julian Preisler, Historic Synagogues of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley
reviewed by Linda Nesvisky
Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social & Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area
reviewed by Erik Greenberg
Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching in Times of War, 1800–2001
reviewed by Jessica Cooperman
The fist book club meeting of the season will be tomorrow at 10 AM. We will discuss Zoe Heller‘s novel, “The Believers.” Here is an interview with the author to jumpstart your thinking about the book:
Susanne Batzdorff wrote reviews of two new books that will be printed in the next AJL (Association of Jewish Libraries) newsletter, see below. She donated to the books to the library, so they will soon be available for borrowing.
Born in 1833 to a wealthy Jewish family in Russia, Wengeroff wrote her memoirs toward the end of the 19th century. In lavish detail she describes the life and times of the Jewish upper middle class family, with particularly loving, but at times critical attention to her own family dynamics. The observances of the holidays, especially the high holy days, Passover and Purim are described. The author reflects throughout upon the status of women and the changing mores with the advent of Haskalah, the Enlightenment and its impact upon parents and children in her family. This edition is unabridged and enhanced by more than one hundred pages of notes and a lengthy bibliography. A second volume is in preparation. Highly recommended as a scholarly but highly readable account by an articulate, intelligent woman.
Gad Dishi, an orthodox rabbi and teacher as well as a practicing attorney living in Israel, combines his fresh insights into the biblical Jacob story with an accessible style, so that there is something new and interesting for the reader with little background as well as for the scholar. The author demonstrates, by a thorough analysis of the biblical text, that much of what we have always believed is based on assumptions and not on facts, and he teaches the reader to go back to what is in fact contained in the text and to build one’s conclusions on that basis.
It is unfortunate that the book is riddled with grammatical and stylistic errors, which could have been eliminated by careful editing. Recommended for synagogue and university libraries.
The schedule for our book club has been finalized. Below you will find the dates of our discussions along with the titles of the books we will be reading.
2010
November 3: The Believers, by Zoe Heller
December 1: Nothing Sacred, by Douglas Rushkoff
2011
January 5: Ten Green Bottles, by Vivian J. Kaplan
February 2: Natasha, & other stories, by David Bezmozgis
March 2: Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain
April 6: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin
By all accounts, Leo Trepp was the world’s oldest European-born rabbi to have survived the Holocaust. With his death last weekend at age 97, he became the last.
A respected scholar, author, lecturer and promoter of interfaith understanding, Trepp called the Bay Area his home for many decades.
He played a role in the formation of three Northern California synagogues: Congrega-tion Beth El in Berkeley, Congregation Beth Ami in Santa Rosa and Temple Beth El in Eureka. For 40 years, he served as the Jewish chaplain at the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, and worked over the years to get the facility a Jewish chapel, which was named in his honor…
Our library has one book from him:
The complete book of Jewish observance
The description of the 370 pages long book 1980 is:
Here is a complete guide to Jewish observance in all its richness and diversity. More comprehensive than any other book on the subject, this encyclopedic guide presents Judaism in its totality.
With a view to enhancing life through the observance of Jewish tradition, Rabbi Leo Trepp discusses each practice as a part of a cycle – the cycle of the year, and the cycle of our lives. The customs, and the reasons behind them, are presented from the standpoint of each of the major branches of Judaism – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist.
Every aspect of Judaism is covered here:
The Prayers: The majestic Jewish prayers and what they mean – with key passages in both Hebrew and English. Dr. Trepp discusses the beliefs and values which these prayers express, and recalls the four thousand years of history that live within them.
Sabbath, Festivals and Fasts: How these are marked in the synagogue and the observant home – what to do, when to do it and why, and how these ceremonies have evolved since biblical and pre-biblical times.
Rituals: The rituals of the Jewish cycle from birth to Kaddish are fully described.
Customs, Traditions, Laws: A guide to the rules of Kashrut; how to make sense of the complicated Hebrew calendar, how to preside confidently at a family seder, how to don the traditional tallit and tefillin.
The Complete Book of Jewish Observance explains what each branch of Judaism teaches about sex, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, conversion and interfaith marriage. It describes privileges that are fought by Jewish women today but which were theirs by right in ancient Israel. It is full of little-known information: why Orthodoxy approves of the pill but rejects other forms of birth control, why it is a badge of honor to be descended from a convert, and why children of unmarried mothers are not illegitimate under Jewish law.
Comprehensive both as a practical guide and a general reference book, The Complete Book of Jewish Observance provides a wealth of information, for the practicing Jew seeking deeper understanding of his traidition, and for newcomers or non-Jews seeking basic knowledge and general understanding.
