Mitch Albom speaks at 92nd St. Y

Posted by Libi Adler

Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing Mitch Albom speak at the 92nd Street Y as part of their lecture series. To a packed crowd of people, and over 23 Satellite locations around the country who sent in questions, Albom spoke about his latest book Have a Little Faith.

This book details what happens when Albom receives an unusual request: an eighty-two-year-old rabbi from Albom’s old hometown asks him to deliver his eulogy. So begins an eight-year journey of learning and bonding with the Rabbi. At the same time Albom meets another man, a pastor and reformed drug dealer and convict–who preaches to the poor and homeless in a decaying church with a hole in its roof. Through these two men, he learns the importance of faith in one’s life.

The lecture was very well presented, and as Albom himself said, he didn’t use any note cards to speak from. The audience could tell that he knew this subject well, and that the people he spoke about, the main characters in the book, really meant a lot to him and were big parts of his life. He was charismatic and very funny. Even though I had already read the book, I enjoyed hearing the stories from the mouth of the author, seeing his spin on it, and feeling what really affected him throughout his journey.

Definitely check out the book. Ten percent of the profits from this book will go to charity, including The Hole In The Roof Foundation, which helps refurbish places of worship that aid the homeless.

For a review and interview with Mitch Albom, check out the latest issue of Jewish Book World coming soon!

For more events and lectures at the 92nd St. Y click here.

Righteous Reads: Time-tested Picks for Young Adults

Micol Ostow, author of So Punk Rock (And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), is guest-blogging all week with MyJewishLearning and Jewish Book Council.

It occurs to me that after the somewhat irreverent tone of my last post, I may have given the impression that I’ve taken a very “out with the old, in with the new” attitude toward Jewish children’s literature. And while I do (clearly) appreciate authors who are incorporating religious and spiritual themes into fresh, modern narratives, obviously I didn’t become a young adult author myself within a vacuum. Every aspect of both my writing, and my vision of the kid-lit landscape is shaped by the books that influenced me when I was young.

As a child, I was a voracious reader. Truly, the printed word was practically a compulsion for me, almost a vice of sorts. In my darkest hours, it built to the point where my parents would literally beg me, in the summertime, to go outside, for the love of Hashem, and expose my sad, pallid skin to some fresh air and a little bit of Vitamin D. (I ignored them, of course.)

When left to my own devices, I gravitated, like so many girls, to the Little House series of books, or to Noel Streatfield’s “shoes” stories. It’s hard to get between a middle grade reader and her ballet, or her bonnets, after all. Later came what was almost a foregone conclusion: Judy Blume, and later still, Francine Pascal, whose Sweet Valley series set the tone for my own summer-camp romance fantasies.

For the record, my love life was never as juicy as the Wakefield twins’. Still, I was, after all, a Solomon Schechter student, and no matter how all-American my extracurricular reading aspired to be, Jewish literature permeated. I gained perspective on the Lower East Side tenement lifestyle (history, religion, and culture, all wrapped up in one!) from the five mischievous sisters of Sydney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family. I reconsidered my grandmother’s gefilte fish, a time-worn recipe passed down through many generations, after reading The Carp in the Bathtub (Barbara Cohen and Joan Halpern). (Don’t worry; my squeamishness was short-lived. The fact that we’ve resorted to store-bought now that my grandmother is no longer with us is one of the great disappointments of my adult life.) Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself was my first realization that the Holocaust was indeed a tragedy that reached beyond the academic, antiseptic environs of a school assembly.

The fantastic thing about being someone who reads a lot is that it often goes hand-in-hand with reading widely. And while of course I have my own proclivities and preferences, I’ve learned that you can’t take the Shalom Aleichem out of the girl.

Not completely, anyway. And frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m getting married soon, to a man who was raised with very similar religious values as my own. We recently sat down with our rabbi to discuss our vision for the Jewish household we plan to build together.

I immediately thought back to book fairs, library visits, and nights listening to my mother or father read to my brother and me. Certain practices, habits, and decisions are easy; you can bet that my contribution to our home will include a healthy dose of K’ton Ton. And then some.

Mical Ostow is a young adult writer living and working in New York City. If she were any more kosher, she’d be totally traif. Or so they say. Visit Micol at www.micolostow.com.

Zeek’s new website

Posted by Naomi Firestone

Congrats to our friends over at Zeek on their new website http://forward.zeek.com/.

Jo Ellen Kaiser, the editor of Zeek, writes:

The new website is part of a larger partnership with the Forward, the leading U.S. Jewish newspaper. The Forward will cosponsor many Zeek events, and will be advertising Zeek pieces on its home page. We are excited about collaborating with the Forward’s editorial staff on a range of stories — today, for example, Zeek runs a review of Rachel Shabi’s new book, while the Forward interviews Shabi herself. We hope that you will take a look at what the Forward has to offer, either on their website at www.forward.com or in print — they have a great special offer for Zeek readers.

Speaking of print, Zeek’s fall print issue has arrived. Focused on Israel, pieces by Zeek editor Joel Schalit, Shai Ginsburg, and Kevin Kahn-Harris ask how the Israeli-Palestinian struggle has impacted the relationship between U.S. Jews and Israeli Jews. You will also find a provocative interview of Judith Butler by Huffington Post regular Mark LeVine, and new fiction by Benjamin Tammuz and Etgar Keret. None of these pieces have appeared on our website, so subscribe now.

What do you think?

David Ostow: Punk Rock Visits the Holy Temple

David Ostow, the comic artist behind So Punk Rock (And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), and his sister, Micol Ostow, are guest-blogging all week with MyJewishLearning and Jewish Book Council.

These are the first two pages of a strip I’m currently drawing with the working title “In Defense of The Irrational: A Brief and Not Terribly Accurate History of Faith versus Reason.” Beyond my goal of making people laugh (the tone of the comic is very tongue-in-cheek), I hope that readers will find the comic strip -when complete- thought provoking.

Can a good case be made for maintaining religious ritual in our secular age? Sure, scientific research and technological innovation have brought us far from our primitive ancestors (with whom my comic begins). However,I think that just as ritual was a reflection of our ancestors’ bewilderment and wonder in a world full of mysteries, it can play the same role in our lives. Knowing that the universe started with a ‘big bang’ doesn’t make the concept of the universe any less ineffable. Quite to the contrary, it only adds to the mystery.

Click on each panel to read the full page!

David Ostow works at a design firm in New York City, illustrates on a freelance basis, and is the co-creator of So Punk Rock (And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother). Come back all week to see his and his sister Micol’s blogs.

Project Aladdin: Arabic and Farsi Translations of Key Holocaust Works

Posted by Naomi Firestone

Liel Leibovitz of TabletMag looks at Project Aladdin, a new initiative to publish Holocaust works in Farsi and Arabic:

The project, according to its founder, Abraham Radkin, was conceived in response to a steep rise in the volume of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying literature distributed in the Arab and Muslim world—and the rhetoric of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The first four works to be published through the initiative are:

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, Shlomo Venezia

Hitler and the Jews: The Path to Genocide, Phillipe Burrin

If This is a Man , Primo Levi

In March 2009, all four titles were offered for free online.

To read more about this project, please visit TabletMag here, the official website for the project here, or the library itself here.