The University of the Ghetto

Gloria Spielman‘s most recent book, Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime, is now available. Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime won a silver medal in the 2011 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards. Gloria will be blogging here all week for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning‘s Author Blog.

When I’m back in London there’s a building I like to visit.  If you’re an art lover and you’ve been to London you may know the place.  It’s the Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End.  But it’s not the art that I go for, it’s the building itself or rather its new-old addition – the former Whitechapel Library.

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NYC Event: Erika Dreifus (author of The Quiet Americans)

Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter
The Jewish Historical Society of New York will present “Looking Backward: History, the Holocaust, and Literary Writing in the Third Generation” on Sunday, November 13, 2011.

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Their (Our) Time Has Come

On Tuesday, Trina Robbins wrote about a Jewish woman who drew comics. She has been blogging all week for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning‘s Author Blog.
Last month I flew to Seattle to attend the first GeekGirlCon (but not the last!).  GeekGirlCon is for the Rest of Us; maybe not 99%, but definitely 52%, the women who have for so long been shut out of a male-dominated comics industry, and all the related male-dominated industries, like computers and gaming.

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Great Women, Cut Short

Trina Robbins is the author of the just-released Lily Renee: Escape Artist, the Jewish superhero comic book GoGirl, and tons of other books.

Today I’m recovering from my annual Worst Cold Ever, trying to take it easy with a book and hot chai — and I’m angry. The book I’m reading is Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, written in pencil in tiny cramped handwriting on the pages of a worn notebook while she was hiding from the Nazis in 1942. Nemirovsky was already a famous and successful author, but that didn’t matter to the Nazis, who eventually found her, arrested her, and murdered her in Auschwitz. Her two young daughters spent the war years in hiding, first in a convent, then moving from house to house. When they fled from the Vichy gendarmes Denise, the older daughter, took Nemirovsky’s notebook with her, not because she knew what was in it, but because it was something of her mother’s that she could keep. It was many years before the sisters could bring themselves to read the contents of the notebook, but when they did they realized that they had been carrying around their mother’s last novel, about Parisians fleeing the 1940 Nazi invasion.

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A Sukkah Occupies Wall Street

Last week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about Sukkot and social justice and asked discussed the importance of place. Her most recent book, Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On Guide to Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community (Jewish Lights), is now available.

As I write this blog post, I am preparing to teach at Occupy Wall Street on Monday. Following a successful Kol Nidrei service, a Jewish contingent there has constructed a sukkah — the temporary hut in which Jews traditionally eat — and even sleep — during Sukkot.

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