Ayn Rand x2

Posted by Naomi Firestone

This October, Doubleday and Oxford University Press are both releasing new titles on the life of Ayn Rand, best known as the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and the creator of Objectivism.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Jennifer Burns)

Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand’s work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. The book also traces the development of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968. Read More.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Anne C. Heller)

In this biography, Heller traces the controversial author’s life from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, Heller reveals previously unknown facts about Rand’s history and looks at Rand with new research and a fresh perspective. Read More.

Weekend News

Posted by Naomi Firestone

1) Congratulations to the 2008 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest Winners:

First place: Racelle Rosett for “Levi”

Second place: Judith Groudine Finkel for “Two by Four”

Third place: Amy Graubart Katz for “The Kiss”

To read more about the winners and for information about attending the free event honoring the winners, contest judge, Anita Diamant, at the JCC in San Francisco on November 1st, please click here.

2)Norman Gershman, author of Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II (Syracuse University Press), will be on CBS Sunday morning show with Charles Osgood on November 8th.

Eat Me

In her last posts, Jennifer Traig reorganized her library and looked at the changes from her past year. She has been guest-blogging all week for MJL and JBC.

I’ve been an observant Jew for the last twenty-five years, and I’d like to think it’s out of piety, but really, it’s for the food. With a few notable exceptions (gefilte fish, I’m talking to you), Judaism guarantees a good meal. The wise-ass summary of all Jewish holidays is pretty much right: they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.

So it goes without saying that I rank holidays solely by their traditional food offerings. Shavuot, of course, is number one, because you’re more or less commanded to eat cheesecake. Hanukkah means eight days of doughnuts, which makes it also number one. Yom Kippur is number seven hundred and twelve.

As for Rosh Hashanah, well, it’s not to be taken lightly. Rosh Hashanah foods are symbolic; what you eat is supposed to set the tone for the year. This is both good (apples and honey) and bad (fish heads).

Then there’s the menu the Talmud prescribes: “At the beginning of each year, each person should accustom himself to eat gourds, fenugreek, leeks, beets and dates.” We’re not supposed to eat them because they’re delicious (because they aren’t. Gourds?). It’s not how they taste, but how they sound. The names of these particular foods sound like the things we’re praying for this time of year: that our merits increase, that our enemies be vanquished.

In other words, we’re eating puns. Which was also the idea behind every Rosh Hashanah dinner I hosted in my twenties, each pun worse than the last. First came Rosh Mexicana, then Rosh Italiana (we ate rosh lasagna). Then Russia Shana (piroshki). From there it was all downhill, with themes like Rosh HaShande (guilty pleasures) and Rosh HaShania, a country-western menu in honor of Shania Twain.

This year, because my daughter doesn’t have teeth, it may well be Mush Hashana.

If I were a different person entirely, my menus would be coming from Hip Kosher, Ronnie Fein’s stunning, stylish cookbook of perfectly delicious foods. I want to eat everything in there. The recipes are clear and don’t look difficult at all. But I am a person who forgets to add fundamental ingredients, who mistakes the sugar for salt. I should not be trusted to do things like frizzle leeks or sauté balsamic-glazed pears.

I wish I were that person, but all the teshuvah in the world isn’t going to turn me into one just yet. So instead, I’ll be relying on the recipes of another Jewish chef: Kenny Shopsin’s Eat Me. Because I don’t think I can screw up his Macaroni and Cheese Pancakes. They sound like heaven, and if that sets the tone for my year, that’ll be a very good thing.

Jennifer Traig is the author, most recently, of Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of My Hypochondria, as well as Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, and Judaikitsch: Tchotchkes, Schmattes and Nosherei, and the editor of The Autobiographer’s Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir. She lives in Ann Arbor.

Brooklyn and its not-so-famous Mitzvah Girls

Posted by Libi Adler

Just picked up this book from our stacks called Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn by Ayala Fader. After skimming through it, I learned that Fader is an anthropologist who searched for subjects to write for her dissertation which later became the subject of this book. Her topic was femininity in Hasidic society. According to Fader, this book “is about the everyday projects of Hasidic women and girls as they strive to redefine what constitutes a moral society.”

This book focuses specifically on the women and girls of the Hasidic society in Brooklyn and their impact on daily life. Fader explains how contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with th1e secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Fader interviews and meets with many women and their children and learns slowly about their everyday lives, their practices, and the restrictions that they uphold in order to create a moral community.

As an anthropologist, there is always a concern when you study a society that your mere presence is going to cause a change in behavior in a positive or negative way. This has been an issue for many research studies done in the past. In the case of the Hasidic community, one that is close knit and very private, being an outsider is not an easy task. Reactivity is always a concern. This is also known as the observer effect whereby the knowledge of an outside presence causes a change in the behavior of the subjects. The community then wants to make a good impression; something that Jews have always strived to do in reaction to anti-Semitism. Fader does the opposite. She makes an effort to “accommodate to communal practices and not to be provocative…always conscious, especially in [her] work with young children, of [her] position as an outsider whose contact with the Gentile world was considered potentially polluting.”

Fader works to insert positive and negative experiences she had while visiting Boro Park in her research. She describes what it feels like to be a stranger in a community that has rules and regulations on each aspect of life, and how this phenomena affects the children. Do the women run the community or are the women run by the community? How much does the outside world affect the people of this community? All these and more are written in a very methodological way by Fader in this informative book.

Read the first chapter here.

The Book of Life Is Shelved in the Jefferson Wing

In her last post, Jennifer Traig looked at the changes from her past year. She is guest-blogging all week for MJL and JBC.

Recently my husband and I moved to a new house. Because we had to sort, pack, and transport an entire house worth’s of stuff while working fulltime, caring for our newborn, and functioning on four hours of sleep, we thought it would also be a good time to catalog and label our entire library.

So we did, and by we, I mean Rob. It was an enormous project. Although we rarely watch less than eight hours of TV a day, we like to think of ourselves as readers, too, and over the years we’ve acquired a lot of books. Rob alone has close to three thousand. My own books are fewer in number but wider in range, including such eclectic gems as The Twinkies Cookbook and Snoop Dogg’s Love Don’t Live Here No More: Book One of Doggy Tales.

A few hundred hours later, the P-Touch was smoking but every book was labeled and shelved in orderly rows. We’re still marveling at how neat it all is. Organization is new to us, our resolution for the year 5770. Before the move, a third of the books sat in mildewing boxes buried underneath the recycling on the back porch. The Chicago Manual of Style served as a coaster, the self-help books as ottomans. Maimonides was next to Miles Davis, and the collected works of William James were mixed in with back issues of Us Weekly where they belonged.

Now it’s more orderly. Rob labeled and arranged each title by its Library of Congress category number. This has led to some interesting juxtapositions. Because they are both works of personal nonfiction, The Essays of Montaigne ended up next to Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir. And we couldn’t help note with mild alarm that all our books on the Bible are, per Library of Congress designation, now labeled “BS.”

As for the Book of Life we’ll be talking about all this week, I don’t have a copy, but the Library of Congress does―quite a few, in fact. The Library catalog shows 84 different books by that title. Of these, thirteen are about the Bible (BS); two are about the occult (BF); one is about internal medicine (RC); and two are actually about death (BM). Another one includes contributions by Richard Pryor, Jack Nicholson, Tina Turner, and Madonna (PN). My favorite, by Hyman Molod, is about “the principles of clean eating.” That’s probably just a clunky translation of kashrut, but it does seem worth noting that the author holds a 1944 patent for something called a “poultry dipping system.”

Me, I’ll be sticking to apples and honey. G’mar hatimah tovah.

Jennifer Traig is the author, most recently, of Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of My Hypochondria, as well as Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, and Judaikitsch: Tchotchkes, Schmattes and Nosherei, and the editor of The Autobiographer’s Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir. She lives in Ann Arbor.