MyJewishBooks Online

Our Shelves
Click a Heading to
see our selections

SUMMER 2021 BOOK SUGGESTIONS

Home

WHAT'S NEW?
Summer 2021
Spring 2021
Winter 2021
Fall 2020
Summer 2020
Spring 2020
Winter 2020
Fall 2019
Summer 2019
Spring 2019
Winter 2019
Fall 2018
Summer 2018
Spring 2018
Winter 2018
Fall 2017
Summer 2017
Spring 2017
Winter 2017

Welcome to MyJewishBooks.com Summer 2021 Suggestions

OUR JULY 2021 UPDATE
Some SUMMER 2021 Book Releases/Recommendations Below

Be sure to visit our other pages for releases during the past SPRING 2021,
releases during the past WINTER 2021,
releases during the past Fall 2020,
releases for Summer 2020,
releases for Spring 2020,
releases for Winter 2020,
releases for Autumn 2019,
or browse all the rest of our pages (oFrah, Passover, Hanukkah, MLK books, Tu b'shvat books, and more).

MAZEL TOV TO THE WINNERS OF THE 2020 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS. CLICK HERE FOR A LIST OF WINNERS AND FINALISTS and links to book covers and readings

That Summer:
A Novel
Part 2 in the Cape Cod Trilogy
by Jennifer Weiner
(pronounced whiner) May 11, 2021
Altria Books

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Summer comes another timely and deliciously twisty novel of intrigue, secrets, and the transformative power of female friendship. Hint hint... Ms. Weiner wrote this novel during #MeToo, The Kavanaugh hearing, testifying about a rape that happened years ago during high school, and having her daughter apply for a job and remembering how Weiner's first job was filled with incidents of harassment.

Daisy Shoemaker can’t sleep. With a thriving cooking business, full schedule of volunteer work, and a beautiful home in the Philadelphia suburbs, she should be content. But her teenage daughter can be a handful, her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial, and she has lots of acquaintances, but no real friends. Still, Daisy knows she’s got it good. So why is she up all night?

While Daisy tries to identify the root of her dissatisfaction, she’s also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. While Daisy’s driving carpools, Diana is chairing meetings. While Daisy’s making dinner, Diana’s making plans to reorganize corporations. Diana’s glamorous, sophisticated, single-lady life is miles away from Daisy’s simpler existence. When an apology leads to an invitation, the two women meet and become friends. But, as they get closer, we learn that their connection was not completely accidental. Who IS this other woman, and what does she want with Daisy?

From the manicured Main Line of Philadelphia to the wild landscape of the Outer Cape, written with Jennifer Weiner’s signature wit and sharp observations, That Summer is a story about surviving our pasts, confronting our futures, and the sustaining bonds of friendship.

The Plight of Jewish Deserted Wives, 1851–1900:
A Social History of East European Agunah
by Haim Sperber
(Western Galilee College)
JUNE 1, 2021

Agunot (Agunah, sing., meaning ‘anchored’ in Hebrew) is a Jewish term describing women who cannot remarry because their husband has disappeared. According to Jewish law (Halacha) a woman can get out of the marriage only if the husband releases her by granting a divorce writ (Get), if he dies, or if his whereabouts is not known. Women whose husbands cannot be located, and who have not been granted a Get, are considered Agunot. The Agunah phenomenon was of major concern in East European Jewry and much referred to in Hebrew and Yiddish media and fiction.

Most nineteenth-century Agunot cases came from Eastern Europe, where most Jews resided (twentieth-century Agunot were primarily in North America, and will be the subject of a forthcoming book).

Seven variations of Agunot have been identified: Deserted wives; women who refused to receive, or were not granted, a Get; widowed women whose brothers-in-law refused to grant them permission to marry someone else (Halitza); women whose husbands’ remains were not found; improperly or incorrectly written Gets; women whose husbands became mentally ill and were not competent to grant a Get; women refused a Get by husbands who had converted to Christianity or Islam.

The book explores the reasons for desertion and the plight of the left-alone wife. Key is the change from a legal issue to a social one, with changing attitudes to philanthropy and public opinion at the fore of explanation. A statistical database of circa 5000 identified Agunot is to be published simultaneously in a separate companion volume.

Hasidism, Suffering, and Renewal:
The Prewar and Holocaust Legacy
of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira
(SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Thought)
Edited by Don Seeman, Daniel Reiser,
Ariel Evan Mayse
JUNE 1, 2021
SUNY PRESS

Reconsiders the legacy of an important Hasidic mystic, leader, and educator who confronted the dilemmas of modernity after World War I and whose writing constitutes a unique testimony to religious experience and its rupture in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (1889–1943) was a remarkable Hasidic mystic, leader, and educator. He confronted the secularization and dislocation of Polish Jews after World War I, the failure of the traditional educational system, and the devastation of the Holocaust, in which he lost all his close family and eventually his own life.

Thanks to a new critical edition of his Warsaw Ghetto sermons, scholars have begun to reassess the relationship between Shapira’s literary and educational attainments, his prewar mysticism, and his Holocaust experience, and to reexamine the question of faith-or its collapse-in the Warsaw Ghetto. This interdisciplinary volume, the first such work devoted to a twentieth-century Hasidic leader, integrates social and intellectual history along with theological, literary, and anthropological analyses of Shapira’s legacy. It raises theoretical and methodological questions related to the study of Jewish thought and mysticism, but also contributes to contemporary conversations about topics such as spiritual renewal and radical religious experience, the literature of suffering, and perhaps most pressingly, the question of faith and meaning-or their rupture-in the wake of genocide.

YEARBOOK
Essays by
SETH ROGEN
May 11, 2021
Crown

A collection of funny personal essays from one of the writers of Superbad and Pineapple Express and one of the producers of The Disaster Artist, Neighbors, and The Boys. (All of these words have been added to help this book show up in people’s searches using the wonders of algorithmic technology. Thanks for bearing with us!) Hi! I’m Seth! I was asked to describe my book, Yearbook, for the inside flap (which is a gross phrase) and for websites and shit like that, so… here it goes!!!

Yearbook is a collection of true stories that I desperately hope are just funny at worst, and life-changingly amazing at best. (I understand that it’s likely the former, which is a fancy “book” way of saying “the first one.”)

I talk about my grandparents, doing stand-up comedy as a teenager, bar mitzvahs, and Jewish summer camp, and tell way more stories about doing drugs than my mother would like. I also talk about some of my adventures in Los Angeles, and surely say things about other famous people that will create a wildly awkward conversation for me at a party one day.

I hope you enjoy the book should you buy it, and if you don’t enjoy it, I’m sorry. If you ever see me on the street and explain the situation, I’ll do my best to make it up to you.

Florence Adler Swims Forever:
A Novel
by Rachel Beanland
JUNE 1, 2021
NOW IN PAPERBACK FOR SUMMER 2021
SIMON & SCHUSTER

“The perfect summer read” (USA TODAY) begins with a shocking tragedy that results in three generations of the Adler family grappling with heartbreak, romance, and the weight of family secrets over the course of one summer.

*A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * One of USA TODAY’s “Best Books of 2020” * One of Good Morning America’s “25 Novels You'll Want to Read This Summer” * One of Parade’s “26 Best Books to Read This Summer”

Atlantic City, 1934. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to “America’s Playground” and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home.

Now, Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams.

Esther only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond her control: there’s Fannie’s risky pregnancy—not to mention her always-scheming husband, Isaac—and the fact that the handsome heir of a hotel notorious for its anti-Semitic policies, seems to be in love with Florence.

When tragedy strikes, Esther makes the shocking decision to hide the truth—at least until Fannie’s baby is born—and pulls the family into an elaborate web of secret-keeping and lies, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface that reveal how quickly the act of protecting those we love can turn into betrayal.

“Readers of Emma Straub and Curtis Sittenfeld will devour this richly drawn debut family saga” (Library Journal) that’s based on a true story and is a breathtaking portrayal of how the human spirit can endure—and even thrive—after tragedy.

Lament for a Father:
The Journey to Understanding
and Forgiveness
by Marvin Olasky
(Elder, Presbyterian Church of America)
JUNE 1, 2021
c Marvin played catch with his father, Eli Olasky, only once – it didn't end well.

Eli never laughed, rarely spoke with his son, and was periodically lambasted by his wife for his lack of ambition. How had a Harvard graduate failed to achieve all that he had once hoped for?

Now an experienced investigative journalist, Marvin Olasky uncovers the true story of his father's past in his most personal work to date--facing Eli's pain and his own in order to understand and forgive. He follows Eli from his Orthodox Jewish childhood in Boston to his days as a commuter student at Harvard to his traumatic experiences in Germany following World War II to his embrace of Reconstructionist Judaism, describing a "spiritual and psychological death by one thousand cuts"--and discovering what he owes to his parents.

The Girls in the Attic
A novel
by Marius Gabriel
Lake Union
JUNE 1, 2021

The bestselling author of The Designer presents a sweeping story of blind faith, family allegiance and how love makes one man question everything he thought he knew.

Max Wolff is a committed soldier of the Reich. So when he is sent home wounded, only to discover that his mother is sheltering two young Jewish women in their home, he is outraged.

His mother’s act of mercy is a gross betrayal of everything Max stands for. He has dedicated his life to Nazism, fighting to atone for the shame of his anti-Hitler father’s imprisonment. It’s his duty to turn the sisters over to the Gestapo. But he hesitates, and the longer Max fails to do his duty, the harder it becomes.

When Allied bombers fill the skies of Germany, Max is forced to abandon all dogma and face the brutality of war in order to defend precious lives. But what will it cost him?

NOW IN PAPERBACK

Today Tonight Tomorrow
by Rachel Lynn Solomon
A YA NOVEL
JUNE 1, 2021
SIMON & SCHUSTER

Today, she hates him.

It’s the last day of senior year. Rowan Roth and Neil McNair have been bitter rivals for all of high school, clashing on test scores, student council elections, and even gym class pull-up contests. While Rowan, who secretly wants to write romance novels, is anxious about the future, she’d love to beat her infuriating nemesis one last time.

Tonight, she puts up with him.

When Neil is named valedictorian, Rowan has only one chance at victory: Howl, a senior class game that takes them all over Seattle, a farewell tour of the city she loves. But after learning a group of seniors is out to get them, she and Neil reluctantly decide to team up until they’re the last players left—and then they’ll destroy each other.

As Rowan spends more time with Neil, she realizes he’s much more than the awkward linguistics nerd she’s sparred with for the past four years. And, perhaps, this boy she claims to despise might actually be the boy of her dreams.

Tomorrow…maybe she’s already fallen for him.

We Can't Keep Meeting Like This
by Rachel Lynn Solomon
A YA NOVEL
JUNE 8, 2021
SIMON & SCHUSTER

A wedding harpist disillusioned with love and a hopeless romantic cater-waiter flirt and fight their way through a summer of weddings in this effervescent romantic comedy from the acclaimed author of Today Tonight Tomorrow.

Quinn Berkowitz and Tarek Mansour’s families have been in business together for years: Quinn’s parents are wedding planners, and Tarek’s own a catering company. At the end of last summer, Quinn confessed her crush on him in the form of a rambling email—and then he left for college without a response.

Quinn has been dreading seeing him again almost as much as she dreads another summer playing the harp for her parents’ weddings. When he shows up at the first wedding of the summer, looking cuter than ever after a year apart, they clash immediately. Tarek’s always loved the grand gestures in weddings—the flashier, the better—while Quinn can’t see them as anything but fake. Even as they can’t seem to have one civil conversation, Quinn’s thrown together with Tarek wedding after wedding, from performing a daring cake rescue to filling in for a missing bridesmaid and groomsman.

Quinn can’t deny her feelings for him are still there, especially after she learns the truth about his silence, opens up about her own fears, and begins learning the art of harp-making from an enigmatic teacher.

Maybe love isn’t the enemy after all—and maybe allowing herself to fall is the most honest thing Quinn’s ever done.

The Wolf and the Woodsman:
A Novel
by Ava Reid
JUNE 8, 2021
HARPER VOYAGER

In the vein of Naomi Novik’s New York Times bestseller Spinning Silver and Katherine Arden’s national bestseller The Bear and the Nightingale, this unforgettable debut— inspired by Hungarian history and Jewish mythology—follows a young pagan woman with hidden powers and a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen as they form an unlikely alliance to thwart a tyrant.

In her forest-veiled pagan village, Évike is the only woman without power, making her an outcast clearly abandoned by the gods. The villagers blame her corrupted bloodline—her father was a Yehuli man, one of the much-loathed servants of the fanatical king. When soldiers arrive from the Holy Order of Woodsmen to claim a pagan girl for the king’s blood sacrifice, Évike is betrayed by her fellow villagers and surrendered.

But when monsters attack the Woodsmen and their captive en route, slaughtering everyone but Évike and the cold, one-eyed captain, they have no choice but to rely on each other. Except he’s no ordinary Woodsman—he’s the disgraced prince, Gáspár Bárány, whose father needs pagan magic to consolidate his power. Gáspár fears that his cruelly zealous brother plans to seize the throne and instigate a violent reign that would damn the pagans and the Yehuli alike. As the son of a reviled foreign queen, Gáspár understands what it’s like to be an outcast, and he and Évike make a tenuous pact to stop his brother.

As their mission takes them from the bitter northern tundra to the smog-choked capital, their mutual loathing slowly turns to affection, bound by a shared history of alienation and oppression. However, trust can easily turn to betrayal, and as Évike reconnects with her estranged father and discovers her own hidden magic, she and Gáspár need to decide whose side they’re on, and what they’re willing to give up for a nation that never cared for them at all.

ETHEL ROSENBERG
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
BY ANNE SEBBA
JUNE 8, 2021
ST MARTIN'S

New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba's moving biography of Ethel Rosenberg, the wife and mother whose execution for espionage-related crimes defined the Cold War and horrified the world.

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother.

This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than thirty years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then. Ethel was a bright girl who might have fulfilled her personal dream of becoming an opera singer, but instead found herself struggling with the social mores of the 1950’s. She longed to be a good wife and perfect mother, while battling the political paranoia of the McCarthy era, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a mother who never valued her. Because of her profound love for and loyalty to her husband, she refused to incriminate him, despite government pressure on her to do so. Instead, she courageously faced the death penalty for a crime she hadn’t committed, orphaning her children.

Seventy years after her trial, this is the first time Ethel’s story has been told with the full use of the dramatic and tragic prison letters she exchanged with her husband, her lawyer and her psychotherapist over a three-year period, two of them in solitary confinement. Hers is the resonant story of what happens when a government motivated by fear tramples on the rights of its citizens.

HERE, RIGHT MATTERS
An American Story
A Memoir
Alexander S. Vindman,
Ret Lt. Colonel, U.S. Army
Harper Books
JUNE 15, 2021
MOVED TO AUGUST 3, 2021

Former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman tells the story of his childhood as a Ukranian immigrant in Brooklyn, his choice to pursue a career in service of his new home in war and at the highest levels of the National Security Council, and his decision to report the infamous phone call that led to a presidential impeachment.

0900, Thursday, July 25, 2019: President Trump called Ukraine’s President Zelensky, supposedly to congratulate him on his recent victory. In the months to follow, the American public would learn what only Alexander Vindman was courageous enough to bring to light: on that call, the President of the United States extorted a foreign ally to bring down a political challenger at home. Vindman’s actions would lead to Trump’s impeachment. It would also lead to the end of Vindman’s decorated career in the US Army, in retribution for his public testimony before Congress.

Here, Right Matters is the story of Vindman’s family, his career, and the moment of truth he faced for his nation. As an immigrant, raised by a father who fled the Soviet Union in pursuit of a better life for his children, Vindman learned about respect for truth and fact throughout his education and military training in his new home country. Speaking up about what happened on July 25th was never a choice: it was Vindman’s duty, as a naturalized citizen and member of the armed forces. And far louder than the partisan attacks he endured in the wake of his testimony was an extraordinary chorus of support from citizens who were collectively intent on reaffirming an abiding American commitment to integrity.

In the face of a sure-fire career derailment and public excoriation, Vindman heeded the lessons from the people and institutions who instilled in him the moral compass and the courage to act decisively. Like so many other American immigrant families, the Vindmans had to learn to build a life from scratch and take big risks to achieve important goals. Here, Right Matters is about the quiet heroes who keep us safe; but, above all, it is a call to arms for those of us who refuse to let America betray its true self.

Morningside Heights:
A Novel
by Joshua Henkin
JUNE 15, 2021
PANTHEON
STARRED REVIEW

A tender, powerful, and big-hearted novel about love in the face of loss, from the award-winning author of The World Without You and Matrimony

When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976 after graduating from Yale, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. She is escaping the strict Orthodox Jewish family in Ohio. When she falls in love with Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated.

Thirty years later, in 2006, something is wrong with Spence, now 57. The Great Man can’t concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. It is most likely early onset Alzheimer's. With their daughter Sarah away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own. One day, feeling particularly isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives (he did spend two years with them as a teen, and loved his father and hip step mother). Arlo Zackheim, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father’s last, best hope (his mother, was a narcissistic vagabond who left Arlo with a deep void, always seeking love.

Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It’s about the love between women and men and children and parents, about the things we give up in the face of adversity, about what endures when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.

Henkin, in real life, grew up in Morningside Heights, the son of academics. He attended Ramaz on the UES, just a neighborhood, but at that time, a world away. His father has Alzheimer's, but not early onset. His mother, a caregiver to his father, attended a caregiver support group at the JCC in Manhattan, which sparked an idea for the novel. Henkin’s is a grandson of Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin. Henkin;s parents had a mixed marriage... haha... his father was frum, his mother Reform.

Decoding Greatness:
How the Best in the
World Reverse Engineer Success
by Ron Friedman
JUNE 15, 2021
SIMON & SCHUSTER

For readers of Atomic Habits, Deep Work, and Peak comes a game-changing approach to mastering new skills and succeeding faster.

For generations, we’ve been taught there are two ways to succeed—either from talent or practice. In Decoding Greatness, award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman illuminates a powerful third path—one that has quietly launched icons in a wide range of fields, from artists, writers, and chefs, to athletes, inventors, and entrepreneurs: reverse engineering.

To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure. It’s the ability to taste an intoxicating dish and deduce its recipe, to listen to a beautiful song and discern its chord progression, to watch a horror film and grasp its narrative arc.

Using eye-opening examples of top performers—from Agatha Christie to Andy Warhol, Barack Obama to Serena Williams—and groundbreaking research on pattern recognition, skill acquisition, and creative genius, Friedman reveals the staggering power of reverse engineering and teaches you how to harness this vital skill for yourself.

You’ll learn how to take apart models you admire, pinpoint precisely what makes them work, and apply that knowledge to develop novel ideas, methods, and products that are uniquely your own. Along the way, you’ll meet the culinary detective who exposes top-secret recipes, the burglar who can visit a bank and recreate its blueprints, and the celebrated artist who reverse engineered his way to the top of his profession without any formal education.

You don’t have to be a genius to achieve greatness, but you do need a method for getting there. Bursting with unforgettable stories and actionable strategies, Decoding Greatness is an indispensable guide to learning from the best, improving your skills, and sparking breakthrough ideas.

GAZOZ
The Art of Making Magical,
Seasonal Sparkling Drinks
by Benny Briga (Café Levinsky 41)
and Queen of the Shuk, Adeena Sussman
JUNE 1, 2021
ARTISAN BOOKS

ZERO ALCOHOL, 100% DELICIOUSNESS
Starting with plain sparkling soda, a gazoz layers in fresh fruits and flowers, aromatic herbs and spices, ferments, syrups, and other artisanal ingredients, all to create a beautiful marriage of flavor and fizz.

In Gazoz, discover recipes for stone fruit gazoz, citrus gazoz, even “milkshake” gazoz using nut butters. The possibilities are endless, the results amazing. It’s the best nonalcoholic drink you’ve ever tasted, and by far the most fun to make.

Envisioned as more of a road map than a classic cookbook, this book gives you the tools to assemble gazoz drinks. [Briga and Sussman] set you free to make them in your own style. You like probiotics? Add kombucha. Looking for some zing and extra antioxidants? Mix in fresh ginger or turmeric purees. . . . How to fully enjoy a glass of gazoz: look at its beauty, inhale its aroma, sip it through a straw, and then eat the fruit at the bottom of the glass. —The Forward
“In Gazoz, you will be transported to the Levinsky Market, sitting on the back of Benny’s vintage pickup truck, sipping on one of his perfect potions.” —Michael Solomonov

The Hidden Beauty of
Seeds & Fruits:
The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss
by Levon Biss
SPRING 2021
Harry N.Abrams

You probably recall the amazing photos by award winning London based photographer Leon Biss at the Tel Aviv Steinhardt Natural History Museum.
Now take a look at these seeds, even if you dont buy the book... page through it online

A highly original collection of high magnification photographs that unlock the hidden beauty of seeds and fruit, from the author of Microsculpture

The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits is a photographic study that celebrates the wonders of nature and science in mind-blowing magnification. Levon Biss’ striking photography captures the breathtaking and beautiful details of the world of carpology, the study of seeds and fruits. Each picture reveals minute features and textures that are normally invisible to the naked eye, providing the audience with an insight into strange and often bizarre adaptations that have evolved over thousands of years. After spending months searching through the carpological collection at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Biss selected over a hundred striking samples to be featured in this book. Captioned with scientific text that provides the backstory for each specimen, The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits is guaranteed to amaze, entertain, and educate.

Holocaust Holiday:
One Family's Descent into
Genocide Memory Hell
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Spring 2021
Wicked Son Press

Once upon a time, a father shlepped his reluctant children around Europe on a hard-charging tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in order to impress on them the profound evil of Hitler’s war against the Jews and the importance of combating genocide. In 2017, the rabbi to celebrities, Shmuley Boteach, decided to take his family on a European holiday, but not the kind made famous by National Lampoon and Chevy Chase.

But instead of seeing the sights of London or Paris, he took his reluctant — and at times complaining — children to Auschwitz, Treblinka, the area of the former Warsaw Ghetto, and many other sites associated with Hitler’s genocidal war against the Jews.

His purpose was to impressupon them the full horror of the Holocaust so they would know and remember it. In the process, he and his children learn a great deal about the scope and nature of the European genocide and the continuing effects of hatred and anti-Semitism. The resulting memoir is travelogue, memoir and history —fascinating, terrifying, frustrating, humorous, and tragic.

Day the Klan Came to Town
by Bill Campbell
Bizhan Khodabandeh (Illustrator)
P. Djeli Clark (Foreword)
JUNE 15, 2021
PM PRESS (GRAPHIC)

The time in 1923 when Jews, Catholics and others fought the Klan in suburban Pbg

The year is 1923. The Ku Klux Klan is at the height of its power in the US as membership swells into the millions and they expand beyond their original southern borders. As they grow, so do their targets. As they continue their campaigns of terror against African Americans, their list now includes Catholics and Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, all in the name of “white supremacy.” But they are no longer considered a terrorist organization. By adding the messages of moral decency, family values, and temperance, the Klan has slapped on a thin veneer of respectability and has become a “civic organization,” attracting ordinary citizens, law enforcement, and politicians to their particular brand of white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant “Americanism.”

Pennsylvania enthusiastically joined that wave. That was when the Grand Dragon of Pennsylvania decided to display the Klan’s newfound power in a show of force. He chose a small town outside of Pittsburgh named after Andrew Carnegie; a small, unassuming borough full of “Catholics and Jews,” the perfect place to teach these immigrants “a lesson.” Some thirty thousand members of the Klan gathered from as far as Kentucky for “Karnegie Day.” After initiating new members, they armed themselves with torches and guns to descend upon the town to show them exactly what Americanism was all about.

The Day the Klan Came to Town is a fictionalized retelling of the riot, focusing on a Sicilian immigrant, Primo Salerno. He is not a leader; he’s a man with a troubled past. He was pulled from the sulfur mines of Sicily as a teen to fight in the First World War. Afterward, he became the focus of a local fascist and was forced to emigrate to the United States. He doesn’t want to fight but feels that he may have no choice. The entire town needs him—and indeed everybody—to make a stand.

Fearless:
The New Rules for Unlocking
Creativity, Courage, and Success
by Rebecca Minkoff
JUNE 15, 2021
HaperCollins Leadership

Take your rightful place in the driver’s seat of your own life and career through the focused and fearless strategies that only highly respected, incredibly successful luxury fashion mogul and social activist Rebecca Minkoff could lay out in these pages.

Rebecca Minkoff built a fashion empire through hard work and a relentless drive to live her dream. It wasn’t easy and took tremendous resolve to remain hungry and persevere. By never giving up, she has created a space for herself on the shelves of luxury department stores across the world.

From Rebecca’s experience, readers will learn how to:
Take on challenges they initially didn’t know how to complete, using Rebecca’s fearless approach to push themselves to meet each and every one.
Overcome the fear and trials female entrepreneurs often face.
Break the rules and find success in places they previously thought to be inaccessible.
Reach their goals, no matter how unattainable they may seem.

In this book, Rebecca shares her own stories and teaches readers how she was able to reach her goals to become the successful fashion designer she is today. SHE MENTIONS HER JEWISH BACKGROUND, BUT ALSO HER STUDY OF SCIENTOLOGY BOOKS WHICH help her “stay centered.” She shows that if you remain hungry, work hard, and face the unspoken rules that have held women back for centuries, you can make success happen for yourself.

THESE ARE THE DEVELOPMENTS
OF THE HUMAN
BY ETHAN DANIEL DAVIDSON
JUNE 15, 2021
self published
Contact Ethan's website for a copy

These are the Developments of the Human is a fascinating compilation of wisdom and insights that Ethan Daniel Davidson captured over years of various chavrusas (study partnerships of Jewish text) with rabbis and other learners from across the world. He has studied with many people across the spectrum and was even once a student at JTS briefly.

Ethan weaves together sketches of personal anecdotes and Jewish philosophy with stories of his adventures as a lumberjack in a remote Alaskan village, his journeys sailing the world on cargo ships, and his six years on the road as a musician.

The reader is left with more questions than answers about the forces that shape our growth into adulthood, our constant personal evolution, and how we might, or might not, return “home.”

You can watch is talk at JTS on Youtube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c-l7PJue_4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjmkQkL20h4

I am pretty sure you can get a copy of the book for free from the author's website. The author is the son of the late philanthropist, William Davidson of Detroit, see also William Davidson Foundation (WDF), Safaria, the Davidson Archeaological Park in Israel, the Detroit Pistons, Tampa Bay Lightning, the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at Jewish Theological Seminary, the William Davidson Institute of Science Education at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan.

Girl Left Behind
by Judy Temes
Nancy Nimoy
JUNE 15, 2021

At age five, Judy Temes was living with her parents and brother in a small town near Hungary's southern border. Unlike most, the family had comforts: a roomy apartment, a television, even a vacation home. What more could anyone want? But for her father, a doctor and a survivor of the Holocaust, living among the people who stood by as his family was taken to their deaths in cattle cars had become untenable.

On a summer night in 1969, the family packed the car for what was supposed to be a vacation to Vienna. Only this was no vacation. They were escaping Hungary's totalitarian regime, using tourist visas that allowed entry into a Western country. Such visas, however, came at a high price. One child had to be left behind. This was the government's way to ensure that citizens who left the country would return.

The child left behind was "Juditka," who would go on to live with her grandmother in a tiny lakeside Hungarian village. When, if ever, would she see her family again? No one knew.

Preventable:
The Inside Story of How Leadership
Failures, Politics, and Selfishness
Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response
by Andy Slavitt
JUNE 15, 2021
St. Martin's Press

“Painfully good. The book could have been called, ‘Outrageous.’ The story Andy Slavitt tells is not just about Trump’s monumental failures but also about the deeper ones that started long before, with our health system, our politics, and more.” --Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal

The definitive, behind-the-scenes look at the U.S. Coronavirus crisis from one of the most recognizable and influential voices in healthcare

From former head of Obamacare Andy Slavitt, Preventable is the definitive inside account of the United States' failed response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Slavitt chronicles what he saw and how much could have been prevented -- an unflinching investigation of the cultural, political, and economic drivers that led to unnecessary loss of life.

With unparalleled access to the key players throughout the government on both sides of the aisle, the principal public figures, as well as the people working on the frontline involved in fighting the virus, Slavitt brings you into the room as fateful decisions are made and focuses on the people at the center of the political system, health care system, patients, and caregivers. The story that emerges is one of a country in which -- despite the heroics of many -- bad leadership, political and cultural fractures, and an unwillingness to sustain sacrifice light a fuse that is difficult to extinguish.

Written in the tradition of The Big Short, Preventable continues Andy Slavitt’s important work of addressing the uncomfortable realities that brought America to this place. And, he puts forth the solutions that will prevent us from being here again, ensuring a better, stronger country for everyone.

Cultish:
The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
JUNE 15, 2021
HARPER WAVE

The author of the widely praised Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the ultimate form of power.

What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Many American cults are quite anti-Semitic.

Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.

Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.

BTW.... the author's parents were scientists and athiests. But the author and family did attend an very Reform synagogue, but for the social/cultural aspects of Judaism. (Her father had been in a cult)

The Outlier:
The Unfinished Presidency
of Jimmy Carter
by Kai Bird
JUNE 15, 2021

An essential re-evaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of Jimmy Carter’s presidential legacy—from the expert biographer and Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American Prometheus

Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird expertly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history.

As president, Carter was not merely an outsider; he was an outlier. He was the only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, and his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. This outlier brought to the White House a rare mix of humility, candor, and unnerving self-confidence that neither Washington nor America was ready to embrace. Decades before today’s public reckoning with the vast gulf between America’s ethos and its actions, Carter looked out on a nation torn by race and demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters recoiled. The cost of his unshakable belief in doing the right thing would be losing his re-election bid—and witnessing the ascendance of Reagan.

In these remarkable pages, Bird traces the arc of Carter’s administration, from his aggressive domestic agenda to his controversial foreign policy record, taking readers inside the Oval Office and through Carter’s battles with both a political establishment and a Washington press corps that proved as adversarial as any foreign power. Bird shows how issues still hotly debated today—from national health care to growing inequality and racism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—burned at the heart of Carter’s America, and consumed a president who found a moral duty in solving them.

Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The Outlier is the definitive account of an enigmatic presidency—both as it really happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.

Inventing Latinos:
A New Story of
American Racism
by Laura E. Gómez
(UCLA, Chicano/Chicana Studies
The New Press

Jewish leaders – a must read.
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR
A timely and groundbreaking argument that all Americans must grapple with Latinos' dynamic racial identity—because it impacts everything we think we know about race in America
Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture‚ yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos‚ Laura Gómez‚ a leading expert on race‚ law‚ and society‚ illuminates the fascinating race-making‚ unmaking‚ and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries‚ leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today.

Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades‚ Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that‚ taken together‚ have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It's no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation's dirty deeds‚ leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations.

In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation‚ Gómez provides essential context for today's most pressing political and public debates—representation‚ voice‚ interpretation‚ and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies‚ elections‚ current events‚ and more.

The Netanyahus
A Novel
by Joshua Cohen
NY Review Bks
JUNE 22, 2021

A job interview goes awry for the exiled patriarch of Israel's First Family in this novel from one of contemporary fiction's most brilliant and audacious writers.

From the author of 2017 novel MOVING KINGS, about post-IDF Israelis working in the moving truck industry... a funny novel based on a comment by the late Yale professor Harold Bloom, who once showed Netanyahu around campus.

Let's pretend that there was a famous Israeli professor who came to the USA to teach and brought his family. He is interviewing for a position at Corbin College in not-quite-upstate New York. In is Winter 1960, Eisenhower is president, Kennedy and Nixon will be running for the White House. Sexual rebellion is nascent, times they are a changing. Ruben Blum, a retired professor, a Jewish historian — but - as he will stress - NOT an historian of the Jews — is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. Professor Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview. Netanyahu brings his family (the Yahu's as Blum will call them with derision), unexpectedly. Blum (the campus Jew) must play host to them in Corbindale, and their body noises and diapers, reluctantly. Blum by the way is a Jew of poor heritage, while his wife (Edith)'s family are of elite German Jewish stock. (In real life, Professor Netanyahu taught at Dropsie in Philly in 1959). Corbin is that type of school like Alfred where comedian Robert Klein studied, where when he played Shylock on stage, people yelled Jewboy. The Netanyahu's (Benzion, Tzila, Yonatan, Benjamin, Iddo) - obsessed with the Inquisition and a world of Jew hatred - proceed to lay waste in an undignified way to Blum's American complacencies. Imagine having a daughter who hates her big Jewish nose interacting with a proud Israeli family who see Jewish history as 2000 years of holocausts. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, "The Netanyahus" is an inventive, comedy of blending, identity, and politics.

Fault Lines:
Exploring the complicated place
of Progressive American Jewish Zionism
Edited by Rabbi Menachem Creditor
with Amanda Berman, Marc Dollinger,
Leah Solomon, Zack Bodner,
Yossi Klein Halevi, Einat Wilf,
Elisha Wiesel, Matti Friedman,
and Julia Daitz
JUNE 22, 2021

It can be very lonely to stand in the world as an advocate for multiple commitments many consider incompatible. One such hybrid stance is Progressive Zionism, deemed racist by many American Progressives and considered suspect (or naïve) by many American Zionists. Those zero-sum approaches of extremist politics and "cancel culture" make even less imaginable a better day for Israelis and Palestinians, for Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews, and for Jewish Republicans and Jewish Democrats. Zionism commits to Theodor Herzl's two-fold vision: securing the right of the Jewish people to a state of our own AND building a national home worthy of Judaism's multi-millennia ethical legacy. The diverse voices collected in "Fault Lines" explore the unique and often-lonely experience of American Jews within all the worlds they consider home.

The JEWISH INSIDER WROTE --- The idea behind Fault Lines: Exploring the Complicated Place of Progressive American Jewish Zionism, which Creditor edited alongside Zionness Executive Director Amanda Berman, was to allow members of the Jewish community to grapple, collectively, with the increasing difficulty of being a Zionist in progressive spaces. “Why should people continue to feel lonely when it's a very obvious problem?” Creditor asked. The book contains four dozen essays, half of which are original; the rest were reprinted from other publications or taken from speeches or sermons given by the book’s contributors over the past couple of years. Writers include rabbis, journalists, nonprofit professionals and activists; organizations represented include the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women and the pro-Israel LGBTQ organization A Wider Bridge, along with major Reform and Conservative congregations around the country. “The presumption from anti-Zionists in the progressive world is that you cannot be a good person and love Israel, and that's just wrong,” Creditor said. While Rabbi Creditor hopes the book might inspire progressive politicians to engage in dialogue on these topics, his desired audience is the Jewish community. “I want to support those who are showing up with courage as Zionists in progressive spaces, for them to feel the camaraderie and community of those who are experiencing similar struggles,” said Creditor. He also wants to remind right-leaning pro-Israel advocates that progressives — including those who might criticize, but deeply love, the Jewish state — are, in fact, Zionists. “Certain conservative Zionist circles typically judge progressive Zionists as naive or disloyal. Those are the same arguments, the same aspersions that progressive Zionists receive from progressive circles.”

The Hitler Years:
Triumph, 1933-1939
by Frank McDonough
St. Martin's Press
JUNE 22, 2021

From historian Frank McDonough, the first volume of a new chronicle of the Third Reich under Hitler.

On January 30th, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the German Chancellor of a coalition government by President Hindenburg. Within a few months he had installed a dictatorship, jailing and killing his opponents, terrorizing the rest of the population and driving Jews out of public life.

As the world suffered from the Great Depression, Hitler embarked on a crash program of militaristic Keynesianism, reviving the economy and achieving full employment through massive public works, and vast armaments spending as he prepapred for war.

Hitler canceled Germany's foreign debts and did not pay reparations.

Over the course of the years from 1933 to 1939, Hitler won over most of the population to his vision of a renewed Reich. In these years of domestic triumph, cunning maneuvers, pitting neighboring powers against each other and biding his time, we see Hitler preparing for the moment that would realize his ambition.

But what drove Hitler's success was also to be the fatal flaw of his regime: a relentless belief in war as the motor of greatness, a dream of vast conquests in Eastern Europe and his fanatical racism.

THE VIXEN
A Novel
by Francine Prose
Harper
JUNE 29, 2021

“Francine Prose is a powerhouse. The Vixen will fascinate and complicate the histories that haunt our present moments. Like Coney Island’s Cyclone, this story tumbles and tangles a reader’s grip of reality. It’s told with the heart, humor and daring of a true artist. Prose’s Vixen is a triumph and a trip though the solid magic that books make real.”—Samantha Hunt

“A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive.”—Maria Semple

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose returns with a dazzling new novel set in the glamorous world of 1950s New York publishing, the story of a young man tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—an assignment that will reveal the true cost of entering that seductive, dangerous new world.

It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam (a WASPy Jew with the name of a publishing house), a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island (He was hired specifically since he is Jewish and a greenie newbie to publishing, since no one else would take this job to edit a crappy novel).

But Simon’s first assignment — editing “The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic,” a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm’s failing finances —makes him question the cost of admission. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. His parents mourn Ethel’s death.

Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. As mysteries deepen, as the confluence of sex, money, politics and power spirals out of Simon’s control, he must face what he’s lost by exchanging the loving safety of his middle-class Jewish parents’ Coney Island apartment for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss, the legendary Warren Landry. Gradually Simon realizes that the people around him are not what they seem, that everyone is keeping secrets, that ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot—and that these crises may steer him toward a brighter future.

At once domestic and political, contemporary and historic, funny and heartbreaking, enlivened by surprising plot turns and passages from Anya’s hilariously bad novel, The Vixen illuminates a period of history with eerily striking similarities to the current moment. Meanwhile it asks timeless questions: How do we balance ambition and conscience? What do social mobility and cultural assimilation require us to sacrifice? How do we develop an authentic self, discover a vocation, and learn to live with the mysteries of love, family, art, life and loss?

The Cruelty Is the Point:
The Past, Present, and
Future of Trump's America
by Adam Serwer
The Atlantic
One World
JUNE 29, 2021

From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a damning case that cruelty is not merely an unfortunate byproduct of the Trump administration but its main objective and the central theme of the American project.

“No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Trump summoned the most treacherous forces in American history and conducted them with the ease of a grand maestro.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP JUST FAILED TO UNDERSTAND WHY JEWISH VOTERS DID NOT SUPPORT HIM after all he did for Israel.

Like many of us, Adam Serwer didn’t know that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election. But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump’s victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished.

In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump’s rise—including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be.

While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer’s writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn’t happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible. Without acknowledging and confronting these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to another ambitious demagogue.

From Sarah to Sydney:
The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family
by June Cummins, Alexandra Dunietz
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
JUNE 22, 2021

This "thoughtful, timely, and comprehensive biography" (Jennifer Weiner, New York Times) of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor highlights her dramatic influence on American children’s literature

"Delv[es] deeply into historical context, including Jewish immigrant experiences. . . . An uncommonly intimate portrait. . . . Deeply empathetic."—Elissa Gershowitz, Horn Book

This is the first and only biography of Sydney Taylor (1904–1978), author of the award-winning All-of-a-Kind Family series of books, the first juvenile novels published by a mainstream publisher to feature Jewish children characters. The family—based on Taylor’s own as a child—includes five sisters, each two years apart, dressed alike by their fastidious immigrant mother so they all look the same: all-of-a-kind. The four other sisters’ names were the same in the books as in their real lives; only the real-life Sarah changed hers to the boyish Sydney while she was in high school. Cummins elucidates the deep connections between the progressive Taylor’s books and American Jewish experiences, arguing that Taylor was deeply influential in the development of national Jewish identity. This biography conveys the vital importance of children’s books in the transmission of Jewish culture and the preservation of ethnic heritage.

Becoming Trader Joe:
How I Did Business My Way
and Still Beat the Big Guys
by Joe Coulombe with Patty Civalleri
Harper Collins
JUNE 22, 2021

Build an iconic shopping experience that your customers love—and a work environment that your employees love being a part of—using this blueprint from Trader Joe’s visionary founder, Joe Coulombe.

Infuse your organization with a distinct personality and culture that draws customers in a way that simply competing on price cannot.

Joe Coulombe founded what would become Trader Joe’s in the late 1960s and helped shape it into the beloved, quirky food chain it is today. Realizing early on that he could not compete and win by playing the same game his bigger competitors were playing, he decided to build a store for educated people of somewhat modest means. He brought in unusual products from around the world and promoted them in the Fearless Flyer, providing customers with background on how they were sourced and their nutritional value. He also gave the stores a tiki theme to reinforce the exotic trader ship concept with employees wearing Hawaiian shirts.

In this way, Joe laid down a blueprint for other business owners to follow to build their own unique shopping experience that customers love, and a work environment that employees love being a part of.

In Becoming Trader Joe, Joe shares the lessons he learned by challenging the status quo and rethinking the way a business operates. He shows readers of all types:

How moving from a pure analytical approach to a more creative, problem-solving approach can drive innovation; How finding an affluent niche of passionate customers can be a better strategy than competing on price and volume; How questioning all aspects of the way you do business leads to powerful results. How to build a business around your values and identity.

The Constitution of Knowledge:
A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Brookings
JUNE 22, 2021

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn’t even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.

In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth.

By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.

Rauch, the author, is a scholar at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC. He is a proud athiest Jewish gay man. He is an Apetheist, he tells audiences. In the words of Bertrand Russell: Religion is irrational; we’d be better off without it.

The Great Dissenter
The Story of John Marshall Harlan,
America's Judicial Hero
by Peter S. Canellos
The Atlantic
One World
JUNE 2021
Simon & Schuster
Today, a former slave owner, he would be canceled, but his dissents are now the current law of the land. Was he the Ruth Bader of his time?

The definitive, sweeping biography of an American hero who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.

They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, it was John Marshall Harlan’s words that helped end segregation, and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom.

But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court.

At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. As case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the United States.

Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”—and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.

Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is an epic rendering of the American legal system’s greatest failures and most inspiring successes.

Linda McCartney's Family Kitchen:
Over 90 Plant-Based Recipes to
Save the Planet and Nourish the Soul
by the late Linda McCartney
Paul McCartney, Stella McCartney,
and Mary McCartney
Little, Brown
JUNE 29, 2021

Over thirty years ago, Linda McCartney first blazed the trail for meat-free cooking, and around the table of the family home in East Sussex, she shared the pleasure that eating compassionately could bring. Now Paul, Mary and Stella bring Linda's kitchen up to date, re-inventing her best-loved recipes for the plant-based cook, alongside their favorite family stories and the dishes that they now eat at home.

The original food pioneer and photographer, Linda McCartney believed in great tasting, wholesome, meat-free food, and embraced kindness and compassion in everything she did. She was raised in Scarsdale, NY (Her father was Lee (Epstein)Eastman and mother Louise Lindner). Her legacy lives on in Linda McCartney's Family Kitchen, a collection of 100 simple, fresh and inventive plant-based recipes that fit perfectly with how we want to eat now.

In Linda McCartney's Family Kitchen, Paul, Mary and Stella have re-imagined Linda's classic recipes, bringing them up to date for the modern, plant-based cook. Because how we eat is changing, with more and more people choosing a meat- and dairy-free diet, even if only for one or two days a week.

Alongside family favorites such as Pancakes, Chilled Avocado and Chili Soup, Aubergine Caponata and Shepherd's Pie, Paul, Mary and Stella share the dishes they cook most at home: Pad Thai, Pulled Jackfruit Burgers, Italian Tomato and Bread Salad and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cookies to name just a few of the simple, nourishing and sustainable recipes included in this stylish book.

Complete with personal stories and intimate family photos spanning three decades, is not only good for you, but for the planet too.

Fair Pay:
How to Get a Raise,
Close the Wage Gap,
and Build Stronger Businesses
by David Buckmaster
HarperBusiness
JUNE 29, 2021

An expert takes on the crisis of income inequality, addressing the problems with our current compensation model, demystifying pay practices, and providing practical information employees can use when negotiating their salaries and discussing how we can close the gender and racial pay gap.

American workers are suffering economically and fewer are earning a living wage. The situation is only worsening. We do not have a common language to talk about pay, how it works at most companies, or a cohesive set of practical solutions for making pay more fair. Most blame the greed of America’s executive class, the ineptitude of government, or a general lack of personal motivation.

But the negative effects of income inequality are a problem that can be solved. We don’t have to choose between effective government policy and the free market, between the working class and the job creators, or between socialism and capitalism, David Buckmaster, the Director of Global Compensation for Nike, argues. We do not have to give up on fixing what people are paid. Ideas like Universal Basic Income will not be enough to avoid the severe cultural disruption coming our way.

Buckmaster examines income inequality through the design and distribution of income itself. He explains why businesses are producing no meaningful wage growth, regardless of the unemployment rate and despite sitting on record piles of cash and the lowest tax rates[0] in a generation . He pulls back the curtain on how corporations make decisions about wages and provides practical solutions—as well as the corporate language—workers need to get the best results when talking about money with a boss.

The way pay works now will not overcome our most persistent pay challenges, including low and stagnant wages, unequal pay by race and gender, and executive pay levels untethered from the realities of the average worker. The compensation system is working as designed, but that system is broken.

Fair Pay opens the corporate black box of pay decisions to show why businesses pay what they pay and how to make them pay more.

The Cult of We:
WeWork, Adam Neumann, and
the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell
JUNE 1, 2021
Crown
The definitive inside story of WeWork, its audacious founder, and what the company's epic unraveling exposes about Silicon Valley's delusions and the financial system's desperate hunger to cash in--from the Wall Street Journal reporters whose scoops hastened the company's downfall.

In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion--at least on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the 6-foot-five Neumann, who grew up in part on a kibbutz, looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation, with its fluid jobs and lax office culture. He called it WeWork. Though the company was merely subleasing "amenity"-filled office space to freelancers and small startups, Neumann marketed it like a revolutionary product--and investors swooned.

As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann's ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn't just an office space provider, he boasted. It would build schools, create WeWork cities, even colonize Mars. Could he, Neumann wondered from the ice bath he'd installed in his office, become the first trillionaire or a world leader? In pursuit of its founder's grandiose vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital. In late 2019, just weeks before WeWork's highly publicized IPO, a Hail Mary effort to raise cash, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company--but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.

Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork's extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks, from a Japanese billionaire with designs on becoming the Warren Buffet of tech, to leaders at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who seemed intoxicated by a Silicon Valley culture where sensible business models lost out to youthful CEOs who promised "disruption." Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley "unicorns"? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive account of WeWork's unraveling.

Billion Dollar Loser:
The Epic Rise and Spectacular
Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
JULY 6, 2021
NOW IN PAPERBACK
BACK BAY BKS

A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller: This "vivid" inside story of WeWork and its CEO tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history (Ken Auletta).

Christened a potential savior of Silicon Valley's startup culture, Adam Neumann was set to take WeWork, his office share company disrupting the commercial real estate market, public, cash out on the company's forty-seven billion dollar valuation, and break the string of major startups unable to deliver to shareholders. But as employees knew, and investors soon found out, WeWork's capital was built on promises that the company was more than a real estate purveyor, that in fact it was a transformational technology company.

Veteran journalist Reeves Weideman dives deep into WeWork and it CEO's astronomical rise, from the marijuana and tequila-filled board rooms to cult-like company summer camps and consciousness-raising with Anthony Kiedis, the pop-Kabbalah ideas espoused by the founders (the debt financing was $702 million, which was Adam's age (39) multiplied by chai (18)... maybe they should have multiplied it by drek??)

Billion Dollar Loser is a character-driven business narrative that captures, through the fascinating psyche of a billionaire founder and his wife and co-founder, the slippery state of global capitalism.

The book everyone you know will read this Summer
The cross between the Devil Wears Prada and Get Out
Will the publisher recoup its 7 figure advance?
From what we hear.. readers either love it, or find its premise awful and silly

The Other Black Girl:
A Novel
by Zakiya Dalila Harris
JUNE 1, 2021
ATRIA BOOKS

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Time, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Entertainment Weekly, Marie Claire, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Parade, Goodreads, Fortune, and BBC

Urgent, propulsive, and sharp as a knife, The Other Black Girl is an electric debut about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing.

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.

Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.

It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career. A whip-smart and dynamic thriller and sly social commentary that is perfect for anyone who has ever felt manipulated, threatened, or overlooked in the workplace,

The Confidence Men:
How Two Prisoners of War Engineered
the Most Remarkable Escape in History
by Margalit Fox
JUNE 1, 2021
RANDOM HOUSE

The astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp (Yozgad) during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Waters Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom.

A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause—and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War,” Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives. (The wrote books decades ago about their adventure. See The Road to En-dor (Jones) and The Spook and the Commandant (Hill).

Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
Note: Harry Jones... not to be confused with the Harry Jones who was U.S. Consul General in Tel Aviv

The Engagement:
America's Quarter-Century Struggle
Over Same-Sex Marriage
by Sasha Issenberg
(UCLA)
JUNE 1, 2021
PANTHEON

The riveting story of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the United States—the most significant civil rights breakthrough of the new millennium

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage’s unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

It is a story that begins in Hawaii in 1990, when a rivalry among local activists triggered a sequence of events that forced the state to justify excluding gay couples from marriage. In the White House, one president signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which elevated the matter to a national issue, and his successor tried to write it into the Constitution. Over twenty-five years, the debate played out across the country, from the first legal same-sex weddings in Massachusetts to the epic face-off over California’s Proposition 8 and, finally, to the landmark Supreme Court decisions of United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges. From churches to hedge funds, no corner of American life went untouched.

This richly detailed narrative follows the coast-to-coast conflict through courtrooms and war rooms, bedrooms and boardrooms, to shed light on every aspect of a political and legal controversy that divided Americans like no other. Following a cast of characters that includes those who sought their own right to wed, those who fought to protect the traditional definition of marriage, and those who changed their minds about it, The Engagement is certain to become a seminal book on the modern culture wars.

How the Word Is Passed:
A Reckoning with the History of
Slavery Across America
by Clint Smith
(Atlantic Magazine)
JUNE 1, 2021
LITTLE, BROWN

You probably know poet/writer Clint Smith for his poem about the Cicada and the Black Boy, on how cicadas learned to show their face every 17 years and got wings, longer than some teens live in American cities.

Imagine growing up and walking to school where the school and streets are named for Confederate Generals and slave owners. Imagine if you were Jewish and grew up in a town where there were statues and celebrations for Reverend/Father Coughlin or Henry Ford or worse.

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.

The Second:
Race and Guns in a
Fatally Unequal America
by Carol Anderson
(Emory)
JUNE 1, 2021
BLOOMSBURY

From the New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, an unflinching, critical new look at the Second Amendment--and how it has been engineered to deny the rights of African Americans since its inception.

In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished.

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

The Rational Bible:
Deuteronomy
by Dennis Prager
June 8, 2021
Moved to September 14, 2021
Regnery

From the co author of Questions People Ask About Judaism, author of over a dozen other other books, and syndicated radio talk show host, come his latest volume in a series on bible commentary.

Is the Bible, the most influential book in world history, still relevant? Why do people dismiss it as being irrelevant, irrational, immoral, or all of these things?

This explanation of the Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible, will demonstrate how it remains profoundly relevant—both to the great issues of our day and to each individual life.

Do you doubt the existence of God because you think believing in God is irrational? This book will cause you to reexamine your doubts.

The title of this commentary is The Rational Bible because its approach is entirely reason-based. The reader is never asked to accept anything on faith alone. In Dennis Prager’s words, “If something I write is not rational, I have not done my job.”

The Rational Bible is the fruit of Prager’s forty years of teaching to people of every faith and no faith at all. On virtually every page, you will discover how the text relates to the contemporary world in general and to you on a personal level.

His goal: to change your mind, and, as a result, to change your life.

The Hidden Palace:
A Novel of the Golem
and the Jinni
by Helene Wecker
Book 2 of 2: The Golem and the Jinni
June 8, 2021
Harper

In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I— the long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Golem and the Jinni—Helene Wecker revisits her beloved characters Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world.

Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, who can hear the thoughts and longings of those around her and feels compelled by her nature to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a restless creature of fire, once free to roam the desert but now imprisoned in the shape of a man. Fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and try to pass as human—just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Brought together under calamitous circumstances, their lives are now entwined—but they’re not yet certain of what they mean to each other.

Both Chava and Ahmad have changed the lives of the people around them. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets Dima, a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele—not knowing that she’s about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector.

Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their opposing natures and desires eventually tear them apart—especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other beings like themselves?

Life on the Line:
Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic
by Emma Goldberg
(NYTIMES, Yale, Cambridge, Heschel)
June 8, 2021
HARPER

The gripping account of six young doctors enlisted to fight COVID-19, an engrossing, eye-opening book in the tradition of both Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial and Scott Turow’s One L.

In March 2020, soon-to-graduate medical students in New York City were nervously awaiting “match day” when they would learn where they would begin their residencies. Only a week later, these young physicians learned that they would be sent to the front lines of the desperate battle to save lives as the coronavirus plunged the city into crisis.

Taking the Hippocratic Oath via Zoom, these new doctors were sent into iconic New York hospitals including Bellevue and Montefiore, the epicenters of the epicenter. In this powerful book, New York Times journalist Emma Goldberg offers an up-close portrait of six bright yet inexperienced health professionals, each of whom defies a stereotype about who gets to don a doctor’s white coat. Goldberg illuminates how the pandemic redefines what it means for them to undergo this trial by fire as caregivers, colleagues, classmates, friends, romantic partners and concerned family members.

Woven together from in-depth interviews with the doctors, their notes, and Goldberg’s own extensive reporting, this page-turning narrative is an unforgettable depiction of a crisis unfolding in real time and a timeless and unique chronicle of the rite of passage of young doctors.

Included in the profiles is “SAM.” Sam entered the medical field due to the fights against HIV/AIDS. A member of CBST – Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in Manhattan, Sam met his bf at the synagogue's gay activism march. Also profiled is “ELANA.” A graduate of Yeshiva University, she pondered whether to work against COVID over Shabbat.

A LOOK BACK AT SOME SPRING BOOKS (See also our Spring page)

Crying in H Mart:
A Memoir
by Michelle Zauner
April 20, 2021
KNOPF

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American and Jewish, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Two Against Hitler:
The Daring Mission to Save
Europe's Opera Stars from the Nazis
by Isabel Vincent
May 4, 2021
DELAYED TIL SUMMER 2021
Hachette

An extraordinary account of two British sisters whose obsession with opera became a cover for their roles in helping Jewish refugees flee the Nazis during World War II--a true story that is one part Schindler's List, one part The Sound of Music and all but forgotten, until now.

Born in the early 1900s in small-town England, the Cook sisters--Ida, a budding romance novelist, and Louise, a civil service typist-were single, like many in the Great War generation. They devoted their free time to their passion for opera, making frequent pilgrimages in the 1930s to Germany and Austria to see their favorite stars, many of them Jewish.

Along with the charismatic Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss (a favorite of Hitler's), the Cooks helped form a cabal of opera world insiders who worked in secrecy to save Jews from Hitler between 1937 and the outbreak of World War II. With their seemingly oblivious disposition and gaudy attire, the sisters eluded suspicion of Nazi spies, eventually helping over two dozen Jewish members of the opera community find safe passage to London--men and women who otherwise would have likely perished in the Holocaust.

Based on original research and packed with vivid details--many revealed here for the first time--Isabel Vincent's Two Against Hitler will join the ranks of bestselling books like Code Girls and Hidden Figures in shining the spotlight on the extraordinary contributions of women in wartime.

The Woman with the Blue Star:
A Novel Paperback
by Pam Jenoff
May 4, 2021
Park Row

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris comes a riveting tale of unfathomable sacrifice and unlikely friendship during World War II.

1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amid the horrors of the Kraków Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous sewers beneath the city. One day Sadie looks up through a grate and sees a girl about her own age buying flowers.

Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. Scorned by her friends and longing for her fiancé, who has gone off to war, Ella wanders Kraków restlessly. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it’s a girl hiding.

Ella begins to aid Sadie and the two become close, but as the dangers of the war worsen, their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds. Inspired by harrowing true stories, The Woman with the Blue Star is an emotional testament to the power of friendship and the extraordinary strength of the human will to survive.

Mergers and Acquisitions:
Or, Everything I Know About Love
I Learned on the Wedding Pages
by Cate Doty
former editor,
The New York Times Vows pages
May 4, 2021
Putnam

A compulsively readable behind-the-scenes memoir that takes readers inside the weddings section of The New York Times--the good, bad, and just plain weird--through the eyes of a young reporter just as she's falling in love herself.

Growing up in the south, where tradition reigns supreme, Cate Doty thought about weddings . . . a lot. She catered for them, she attended many, she imagined her own. So, when she moved to New York City in pursuit of love--and to write for The New York Times--she finds her natural home in the wedding section, a first step to her own happily-ever-after, surely. Soon Cate is thrown into the cutthroat world of the metropolitan society pages, experiencing the lengths couples go to have their announcements accepted and the lengths the writers go in fact-checking their stories; the surprising, status-signaling details that matter most to brides and grooms; and the politics of the paper at a time of vast cultural and industry changes.

Reporting weekly on couples whose relationships seem enviable--or eye-roll worthy--and dealing with WASPy grandparents and last-minute snafus, Cate is surrounded by love, or what we're told to believe is love. But when she starts to take the leap herself, she begins to ask her own questions about what it means to truly commit...

Warm, witty, and keenly observed, Mergers and Acquisitions is an enthralling dive into one of society's most esteemed institutions, its creators and subjects, and a young woman's coming-of-age.

<

Love Like Water,
Love Like Fire
by Mikhail Iossel
May 4, 2021
Bellevue Literary Press

“Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is an extraordinary book: funny and profound, moving and provocative. Rarely has life in the former USSR (or anywhere, for that matter) been portrayed with such a rich admixture of soaring observation and finely rendered detail. This is a gorgeously constructed collection by one of our wittiest and most insightful writers.” -Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

“Mikhail Iossel is a genius, a comic visionary in the tradition of Gogol, Keret, Barthelme, and Saunders. Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is a book of surprises and delights.” -Brian Morton, author of Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon

From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons.

Unsparing and poignant, Mikhail Iossel’s twenty stories of Soviet childhood and adulthood, dissidence and subsequent immigration, are filled with wit and humor even as they describe the daily absurdities of a fickle and often perilous reality.

Mikhail Iossel immigrated to the United States in 1986 from the former USSR and is an associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

A Fortress in Brooklyn:
Race, Real Estate, and the
Making of Hasidic Williamsburg
by Nathaniel Deutsch
Michael Casper
May 11, 2021
Yale University Press

The epic story of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn

Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors – primarily Satmar Hasidim - encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification.

Although Satmar Hasidim consider themselves unchanging and traditional, cutoff like a fortress from outside influences, the book shows how they, in fact, changed. They learned to use their voting power, to leverage government programs for housing and income, to be named a disadvantaged minority to get taxpayer funds and federal assistance.. They combined efforts with other area groups to lobby for funds and benefits. The book shows that other Jewish groups in NYC pursued higher education professional careers, while the Satmar relied on apparel and diamonds, two industries in decline. But as artists moved to Williamsburg, the Satmar were able to get lucky from real estate investments, but open themselves up to outsiders as neighbors. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim appeared to avoid assimilation, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.

Of course, …. had it not been for the gentrification of Williamsburg and increased real estate values, would the community be like residents of Brownsville

THE LOST NOVEL....

THE PASSENGER
BY ULRICH ALEXANDER BOSCHWITZ
Translated from German by Philip Boehm
April 13, 2021
Metropolitan

Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany

Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train.

And then another. And another . . . until his flight becomes a frantic odyssey across Germany, as he searches first for information, then for help, and finally for escape. His travels bring him face-to-face with waiters and conductors, officials and fellow outcasts, seductive women and vicious thieves, a few of whom disapprove of the regime while the rest embrace it wholeheartedly.

Clinging to his existence as it was just days before, Silbermann refuses to believe what is happening even as he is beset by opportunists, betrayed by associates, and bereft of family, friends, and fortune. As his world collapses around him, he is forced to concede that his nightmare is all too real.

Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control.

Sephardi:
Cooking the History.
Recipes of the Jews of Spain
and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century Onwards
by Chef Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Phd
May 11, 2021
Cherry Orchard Books

In this extraordinary cookbook, chef and scholar Hélène Jawhara-Piñer combines rich culinary history and Jewish heritage to serve up over fifty culturally significant recipes. Steeped in the history of the Sephardic Jews (Jews of Spain) and their diaspora, these recipes are expertly collected from such diverse sources as medieval cookbooks, Inquisition trials, medical treatises, poems, and literature. Original sources ranging from the thirteenth century onwards and written in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Occitan, Italian, and Hebrew, are here presented in English translation, bearing witness to the culinary diversity of the Sephardim, who brought their cuisine with them and kept it alive wherever they went. Jawhara-Piñer provides enlightening commentary for each recipe, revealing underlying societal issues from anti-Semitism to social order. In addition, the author provides several of her own recipes inspired by her research and academic studies.

Each creation and bite of the dishes herein are guaranteed to transport the reader to the most deeply moving and intriguing aspects of Jewish history. Jawhara-Piñer reminds us that eating is a way to commemorate the past.

BAVEL
Modern Recipes Inspired by the Middle East
[A Cookbook]
by Ori Menashe,
Genevieve Gergis, Lesley Suter
May 25, 2021
Ten Speed Press

From the acclaimed chefs behind award-winning Los Angeles restaurant Bavel comes a gorgeous cookbook featuring personal stories and more than eighty recipes that celebrate the diversity of Middle Eastern cuisines.

“Ori and Genevieve manage to pull off a style of cooking that is both familiar (and therefore comforting) but also new (and therefore fresh and exciting). This is the sort of food I could live on.”—Yotam Ottolenghi

When chef Ori Menashe and pastry chef Genevieve Gergis opened their first Los Angeles restaurant, Bestia, the city fell in love. By the time they launched their second restaurant, Bavel, the love affair had expanded to cooks and food lovers nationwide. Bavel, the cookbook, invites home cooks to explore the broad and varied cuisines of the Middle East through fragrant spice blends; sublime zhougs, tahini, labneh, and hummus; rainbows of crisp-pickled vegetables; tender, oven-baked flatbreads; fall-off-the-bone meats and tagines; buttery pastries and tarts; and so much more.

Bavel—pronounced bah-VELLE, the Hebrew name for Babel—is a metaphor for the myriad cultural, spiritual, and political differences that divide us. The food of Bavel tells the many stories of the countries defined as “the Middle East.” These recipes are influenced by the flavors and techniques from all corners of the region, and many, such as Tomato with Smoked Harissa, Turmeric Chicken with Toum, and Date-Walnut Tart, are inspired by Menashe’s Israeli upbringing and Gergis’s Egyptian roots. Bavel celebrates the freedom to cook what we love without loyalty to any specific country, and represents a world before the region was divided into separate nations. This is cooking without borders.

Last Summer at the Golden Hotel
by Elyssa Friedland
May 18, 2021
Berkley

A family reunion for the ages when two clans convene for the summer at their beloved getaway in the Catskills—perfect for fans of Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—from the acclaimed author of The Floating Feldmans.

In its heyday, The Golden Hotel was the crown jewel of the hotter-than-hot Catskills vacation scene. For more than sixty years, the Goldman and Weingold families – best friends and business partners – have presided over this glamorous resort which served as a second home for well-heeled guests and celebrities. But the Catskills are not what they used to be – and neither is the relationship between the Goldmanqqqqs and the Weingolds. As the facilities and management begin to fall apart, a tempting offer to sell forces the two families together again to make a heart-wrenching decision. Can they save their beloved Golden or is it too late?

Long-buried secrets emerge, new dramas and financial scandal erupt, and everyone from the traditional grandparents to the millennial grandchildren wants a say in the hotel’s future. Business and pleasure clash in this fast-paced, hilarious, nostalgia-filled story, where the hotel owners rediscover the magic of a bygone era of nonstop fun even as they grapple with what may be their last resort.

NOISE
A Flaw in Human Judgment
by Daniel Kahneman,
Olivier Sibony, and
Cass R. Sunstein
May 18, 2021
Little, Brown

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, coauthor of Nudge, and author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, Noise is a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, "full of novel insights, rigorous evidence, engaging writing, and practical applications” (Adam Grant).

Imagine a rabbi gives you advice, but it would be different if given in the afternoon or morning.
Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients — or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. The only difference is the day of the week.

What if when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone.

These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions.

Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment—and what we can do about it.

THE REAL LIFE BRITISH INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

X TROOP
The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II
by Leah Garrett
May 25, 2021
HMH

"Brilliantly researched, utterly gripping history: the first full account of a remarkable group of Jewish refugees—a top-secret band of brothers—who waged war on Hitler."—Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of The Longest Winter and TheLiberator

The incredible World War II saga of the German-Jewish commandos who fought in Britain’s most secretive special-forces unit—but whose story has gone untold until now

June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes—their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad.

Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp—the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time, X Troop tells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis.

“Garrett’s detective work is stunning, and her storytelling is masterful. This is an original account of Jewish rescue, resistance, and revenge.”—Wendy Lower, author of The Ravine and National Book Award finalist Hitler’s Furies

LETTERS TO CAMONDO
BY EDMUND De WAAL
May 11, 2021
FS&G

A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de Camondo

Letters to Camondo is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de Camondo, the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in Paris, now the Musée Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art.

The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, “the Rothschilds of the East,” who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle Époque high society, as well as being targets of antisemitism-much like de Waal's relations, the Ephrussi family, to whom they were connected. Moise de Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with art for his son, Nissim; after Nissim was killed in the First World War, the house was bequeathed to the French state. Eventually, the Camondos were murdered by the Nazis.

After de Waal, one of the world’s greatest ceramic artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.

Mary Jane:
A Novel
by Jessica Anya Blau
May 11, 2021
CUSTOM HOUSE

In 1970s Baltimore, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her family’s subscription to the Broadway Showtunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. In a respectable house. The 5 year old she cares for is IZZY CONE, who shouts in ALL CAPS. MRS CONE doesnt wear a bra (it is 1975). DR CONE is a psychiatrist and is Jewish. Mary Jane's father says Jews are “another breed of human.”

The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, Impeachment: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): the doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.

Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be.

JULY 2021 BOOK RELEASES
JULY 2021 BOOK RELEASES
JULY 2021 BOOK RELEASES

The Forest of Vanishing Stars:
A Novel
by Kristin Harmel
JULY 6, 2021
GALLERY BOOKS

The New York Times bestselling author of the “heart-stopping tale of survival and heroism” (People) The Book of Lost Names returns with an evocative coming-of-age World War II story about a young woman who uses her knowledge of the wilderness to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis—until a secret from her past threatens everything.

After being stolen from her wealthy German parents and raised in the unforgiving wilderness of eastern Europe, a young woman finds herself alone in 1941 after her kidnapper dies. Her solitary existence is interrupted, however, when she happens upon a group of Jews fleeing the Nazi terror. Stunned to learn what’s happening in the outside world, she vows to teach the group all she can about surviving in the forest—and in turn, they teach her some surprising lessons about opening her heart after years of isolation. But when she is betrayed and escapes into a German-occupied village, her past and present come together in a shocking collision that could change everything.

Inspired by incredible true stories of survival against staggering odds, and suffused with the journey-from-the-wilderness elements that made Where the Crawdads Sing a worldwide phenomenon, The Forest of Vanishing Stars is a heart-wrenching and suspenseful novel from the #1 internationally bestselling author whose writing has been hailed as “sweeping and magnificent” (Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author), “immersive and evocative” (Publishers Weekly), and “gripping” (Tampa Bay Times).

The Happiest Man on Earth
by Eddie Jaku
JULY 6, 2021
Macmillian Australia

Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you. Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested, and taken to a concentration camp. Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on a Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country. Because he survived, Eddie made the vow to smile every day. He pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best possible life. He now believes he is the "happiest man on earth." Published as Eddie turns 100, this is a powerful, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful memoir of how happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.

First Friends:
The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected)
People Who Shaped Our Presidents
by Gary Ginsberg
(George magazine)
JULY 6, 2021
TWELVE

When Ginsberg heard that POTUS TRUMP had no friends who would tell it to him straight, he thought of a book idea... the kitchen cabinet friends that Presidents have have had to tell them the truth.

In the bestselling tradition of The Presidents Club and Presidential Courage, White House history as told through the stories of the best friends and closest confidants of American presidents.

Here are the riveting histories of myriad presidential friendships, among them: Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed: They shared a bed for four years during which Speed saved his friend from a crippling depression. Two decades later the friends worked together to save the Union.

Harry Truman had Eddie Jacobson, the haberdasher: When Truman wavered on whether to recognize the State of Israel in 1948, his lifelong friend and former business partner intervened at just the right moment with just the right words to steer the president’s decision.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley: Unassuming and overlooked during her lifetime, Daisy Suckley was in reality FDR’s most trusted, constant confidant, the respite for a lonely and overworked President navigating the Great Depression and World War II
John Kennedy and David Ormsby-Gore: They met as young men in pre-war London and began a conversation over the meaning of leadership. A generation later the Cuban Missile Crisis would put their ideas to test as Ormsby-Gore became the president’s unofficial, but most valued foreign policy advisor.

These and other friendships—including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan — populate this fresh and provocative exploration of a series of seminal presidential friendships.

Publishing history teems with books by and about Presidents, First Ladies, First Pets, and even First Chefs. Now former Clinton aide Gary Ginsberg breaks new literary ground on Pennsylvania Avenue and provides fresh insights into the lives of the men who held the most powerful political office in the world by looking at the friends on whom they relied.

First Friends is an engaging, serendipitous look into the lives of Commanders-in-Chief and how their presidencies were shaped by those they held most dear. .

Hatchet Man:
How Bill Barr Broke the
Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted
the Justice Department
by Elie Honig
JULY 6, 2021
HARPER

CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig exposes William Barr as the most corrupt attorney general in modern U.S. history, with stunning new scandals bubbling to the surface even after Barr's departure from office.

In Hatchet Man, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig uncovers Barr’s unprecedented abuse of power as Attorney General and the lasting structural damage done to the Justice Department. Honig uses his own experience as a prosecutor at DOJ to show how, as America’s top law enforcement official, Barr repeatedly violated the Department’s written rules, and those vital, unwritten norms and principles that comprise the “prosecutor’s code.”

Barr was corrupt from the beginning. His first act as AG was to distort the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, earning a public rebuke for his dishonesty from Mueller himself and, later, from a federal judge. Then, Barr tried to manipulate the law to squash a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine—the report that eventually led to Trump’s first impeachment. Barr later intervened in an unprecedented manner to undermine his own DOJ prosecutors on the cases of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, both political allies of the President. And then Barr fired the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York under false pretenses. Finally, Barr amplified baseless theories about massive mail-in ballot fraud, pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire battle over the 2020 election results and contributing to the January 6 insurrection that led to Trump’s second impeachment.

In Hatchet Man, Honig proves that Barr trampled the two core virtues that have long defined the department and its mission: credibility and independence – ultimately in service of his own deeply-rooted, extremist legal and personal beliefs. Honig shows how Barr corrupted the Justice Department and explains what we must do to prevent this from ever happening again.

Stories to Tell:
A Memoir
by Richard Marx
JULY 6, 2021
SIMON & SCHUSTER

Legendary musician Richard Marx offers an enlightening, entertaining look at his life and career.

Richard Marx is one of the most accomplished singer-songwriters in the history of popular music. His self-titled 1987 album went triple platinum and made him the first male solo artist (and second solo artist overall after Whitney Houston) to have four singles from their debut crack the top three on the Billboard Hot 100. His follow-up, 1989’s Repeat Offender, was an even bigger smash, going quadruple platinum and landing two singles at number one. He has written fourteen number one songs in total, shared a Song of the Year Grammy with Luther Vandross, and collaborated with a variety of artists including NSYNC, Josh Groban, Natalie Cole, and Keith Urban. Lately, he’s also become a Twitter celebrity thanks to his outspokenness on social issues and his ability to out-troll his trolls.

In Stories to Tell, Marx uses this same engaging, straight-talking style to look back on his life and career. He writes of how Kenny Rogers changed a single line of a song he’d written for him then asked for a 50% cut—which inspired Marx to write one of his biggest hits. He tells the uncanny story of how he wound up curled up on the couch of Olivia Newton-John, his childhood crush, watching Xanadu. He shares the tribulations of working with the all-female hair metal band Vixen and appearing in their video. Yet amid these entertaining celebrity encounters, Marx offers a more sobering assessment of the music business as he’s experienced it over four decades—the challenges of navigating greedy executives and grueling tour schedules, and the rewards of connecting with thousands of fans at sold-out shows that make all the drama worthwhile. He also provides an illuminating look at his songwriting process and talks honestly about how his personal life has inspired his work, including finding love with wife Daisy Fuentes and the mystery illness that recently struck him—and that doctors haven’t been able to solve.

Stories to Tell is a remarkably candid, wildly entertaining memoir about the art and business of music.

Laughing at Myself:
My Education in Congress,
on the Farm, and at the Movies
by Dan Glickman
(Former U.S. Congressman)
(Former U.S. Sec of Agriculture)
(Former designated survivor of Clinton SOTU Address)
SUMMER 2021

Where else but in America could a Jewish kid from Kansas, son of self-made, entrepreneurial parents and a grandson of Russian and Eastern European immigrants, end up as a congressman, secretary of agriculture, and chief lobbyist for Hollywood?

In Laughing at Myself: My Education in Congress, on the Farm, and at the Movies Dan Glickman tells his story of a classical family background, religious heritage, and “Midwestern-nice” roots, and how it led to a long and successful career in public service. Dan combines a steady sense of humor with serious reflection on his rise from the middle of nowhere to becoming a successful US politician and the first Jewish secretary of agriculture since Joseph served pharaoh in biblical times. Dan defines success as a willingness to listen, an ability to communicate ideas, and a yen for compromise. Dan has successfully navigated the worlds of congressional politics, cabinet-level administration, and the entertainment industry and offers readers the many tricks of the trade he has learned over the years, which will inform the understanding of citizens and help aspiring politicians seeking alternatives to the current crisis of partisanship.

Dan is convinced that the toxicity seen in our current political culture and public discourse can be mitigated by the principles that have guided his life—-a strong sense of humor (specifically an ability to laugh at himself), respect and civility for those who have different points of view, a belief system founded on values based on the Golden Rule, and a steadfast commitment to solve problems rather than create irreconcilable conflicts. While these values form the backbone of Dan Glickman’s personal life and professional career, the real key to his success has been resiliency—learning from adversity and creating opportunities where none may have originally existed. Even though you never know what’s around the corner, in Laughing at Myself Dan offers a bold affirmation that America is still a nation built on opportunity and optimism. Laughing at Myself affirms readers in their desire to move beyond just surviving to living life with purpose, passion, and optimism.

An Ugly Truth:
Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang
JULY 13, 2021
HARPER

Did you ever notice how some reporters freak out when they see investors bid up a stock price even though the reporters think the company isn't nice? Or get disturbed when the CEO maintains control and has a weak Chairman and Board? Or when a company is hyper-competitive and doesn't play nice in the Silicon Valley sandbox?

Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes exposé that offers the definitive account of Facebook’s fall from grace.

Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years (by critics, if not investors), roiled by controversies and crises.

It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users’ data, allowing users to spread fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.

The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.

Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives—he the tech “boy genius” turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.

Landslide:
The Final Days of the Trump Presidency
by Michael Wolff
JULY 13, 2021
Henry Holt & Co.

We all witnessed some of the most shocking and confounding political events of our lifetime: the careening last stage of Donald J. Trump’s reelection campaign, the president’s audacious election challenge, the harrowing mayhem of January 6, the buffoonery of the second impeachment trial. But what was really going on in the inner sanctum of the White House during these calamitous events? What did the president and his dwindling cadre of loyalists actually believe? And what were they planning?

Michael Wolff pulled back the curtain on the Trump presidency with his #1 bestselling blockbuster Fire and Fury.

Now, in Landslide, he closes the door on the presidency with a final, astonishingly candid account.

Wolff embedded himself in the White House in 2017 and gave us a vivid picture of the chaos that had descended on Washington. Almost four years later, Wolff finds the Oval Office even more chaotic and bizarre, a kind of Star Wars bar scene. At all times of the day, Trump, behind the Resolute desk, is surrounded by schemers and unqualified sycophants who spoon-feed him the “alternative facts” he hungers to hear-about COVID-19, Black Lives Matter protests, and, most of all, his chance of winning reelection.

Once again, Wolff has gotten top-level access and takes us front row as Trump’s circle of plotters whittles down to the most enabling and the president reaches beyond the bounds of democracy as he entertains the idea of martial law and balks at calling off the insurrectionist mob that threatens the institution of democracy itself.

As the Trump presidency’s hold over the country spiraled out of control, an untold and human account of desperation, duplicity, and delusion was unfolding within the West Wing. Landslide is that story as only Michael Wolff can tell it.

SOME HIGHLIGHTS: Remember during the impeachment trial when one attorney rambled in nonsense? President Trump reached out to David Schoen, an Alabama-based attorney. Schoen, an orthodox Jew was initially tapped to lead the Trump defense but had been sidelined. When Trump asked Schoen to take over at the end of the trial, the lawyer SHRANK from the task, characterizing himself as a “wimp” and a “pushover.” Before joining the team, Attorney Schoen had expressed reservations about signing onto the team. “I’m a wimp, sir,” Schoen reportedly told Trump. “A wimp?” Trump replied. “You’re supposed to be defending me in an impeachment trial? My lawyer’s a wimp? A wimp? Did you just call yourself a wimp? A wimp? I want you to do it. You do it. Man up.” (Schoen said he was unfamiliar with the passages from Landslide outlining his experience on Trump’s defense team.) …... ALSO......Trump was incensed when Netanyahu offered his congratulations to Joe Biden after the election was called for Biden. He saw Netanyahu’s congarst to Biden as “an ultimate betrayal,” according to Wolff. Israel had owed him and now sold out...

PEARLS OF WISDOM FROM
RABBI YEHONATAN EYBESHITZ
TORAH GIANT
PREACHER & KABBALIST
BY RABBI YENONATAN EYBESHITZ
Translated by Yacov Barber
paperback
2021
Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeshitz was one of the greatest rabbis of the eighteenth century. Even as a child, he was renowned as one of the rare geniuses of his time. Among the most revered Torah scholars of the last 300 years, Rabbi Eybeshitz was also a prolific writer, preacher, and Kabbalah master. His innumerable writings cover all areas of Jewish Learning, including the Talmud, Jewish Law, Homiletics, and Kabbalah.

Carefully chosen selections of Rabbi Eybeshitz’s writings have now been translated into English by the illustrious scholar Rabbi Yacov Barber, making Rabbi Eybeshitz’s extraordinary ideas and insight accessible to a wider audience. In Pearls of Wisdom, you will discover Rabbi Yehonatan’s thoughts on the weekly Torah portion and the Jewish holidays, as well as his insights into the arrival of the Moshiach and the Messianic Era.

“Reading this book is like being transported to Rabbi Eybeshitz’s Shul in Hamburg during the 1750s and listening to his captivating sermons.”

BEING JEWISH TODAY
CONFRONTING THE REAL ISSUE
Rabbi Tony Bayfield, PhD
JULY 13, 2021
Bloomsbury Continuum

Reissued from 2019

This is a book which understands and faces the impact of modernity on the Jewish community today. Being Jewish Today gives an account of both the journey of a particular British Jew and the journey of millions of women and men through today's perplexing and difficult world. With honesty and integrity Rabbi Tony Bayfield breaks new ground in exploring the meaning of Jewish identity and its relationship to Jewish tradition and belief. He does so from the perspective of a person fully integrated into the modern Western world. The rigorous questions he asks of his Jewishness, Judaism and the Jewish God are therefore substantially the same as those asked by all faiths and none.

Beginning with an account of the journey of Jewish people and thought from ancient times to the present day, Bayfield goes on to consider Jewish identity, Israel as land and the scourge of anti-Semitism. He then turns to the twin concerns of Torah: Halakhah – practice, and Aggadah – ethics, along with the matter of belief in a world faced with global extinction. Finally, in addressing the manifest injustice of life, Rabbi Bayfield confronts the widely evaded questions of universal suffering and divine inaction.

Drawing on key religious and secular thinkers who contribute to the force of his argument, Bayfield's masterful, challenging and urgent book will appeal to all Jews, whether religious or cultural, and to anyone curious about the nature of Judaism and religion today.

The Cellist:
A Novel
(Gabriel Allon, #21)
by Daniel Silva
JULY 13, 2021
Bloomsbury Continuum

Master of international intrigue Daniel Silva follows up his acclaimed #1 New York Times bestsellers The Order, The New Girl, and The Other Woman with this riveting, action-packed tale of espionage and suspense featuring art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon.

The fatal poisoning of a Russian billionaire sends Gabriel Allon on a dangerous journey across Europe and into the orbit of a musical virtuoso who may hold the key to the truth about his friend’s death. The plot Allon uncovers leads to secret channels of money and influence that go to the very heart of Western democracy and threaten the stability of the global order. The Cellist is a breathtaking entry in Daniel Silva’s “outstanding series” (People magazine) and reveals once more his superb artistry and genius for invention—and demonstrates why he belongs “firmly alongside le Carré and Forsyth as one of the greatest spy novelists of all time” (The Real Book Spy).

Conquering Jerusalem
Paperback
by Stephen Dando-Collins
JULY 13, 2021
Turner

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR AND HISTORIAN STEPHEN DANDO-COLLINS PROVIDES UNPARALLELED NEW INSIGHT INTO THE FIRST JEWISH REVOLT

66 CE. Menahem ben Judah -leader of the Jewish daggerman, the Sicari, attacks the Romans at Masada.

Dando-Collins details the conflict from both sides of the 7-year campaign. His examination of the revolt draws upon numerous archaeological and forensic discoveries made in recent years to illuminate the people and events as never before.

Neither side emerges from the conflict unscathed. Both were at times equally heroic and barbaric.

In the end, the Jewish freedom fighters lost the war and lost Jerusalem, their holy city – the focus of the campaign by both sides. Yet today, Jerusalem is once more the heart of the Jewish faith, while, thanks to Christianity – an offshoot of Judaism – the Roman Empire and its gods are long gone.

Conquering Jerusalem illustrates that faith can have its rewards, and the tables can be turned, if you wait long enough.

I COULDN'T LOVE YOU MORE
A NOVEL
BY ESTHER FREUD
JULY 13, 2021
ecco

A sweeping story of three generations of women, crossing from London to Ireland and back again, and the enduring effort to retrieve the secrets of the past

It’s London, 1960, and Aoife Kelly—once the sparkling object of young men’s affections—runs pubs with her brusque, barking husband, Cash. Their courtship began in wartime London, before they returned to Ireland with their daughters in tow. One of these daughters—fiery, independent-minded Rosaleen—moves back to London, where she meets and begins an affair with the famous sculptor Felix Lehmann, a German-Jewish refugee artist over twice her tender eighteen years. When Rosaleen finds herself pregnant with Felix’s child, she is evicted from her flat, dismissed from her job, and desperate to hide the secret from her family. Where, and to whom, can she turn?

Meanwhile, Kate, another generation down, lives in present-day London with her young daughter and husband, an unsuccessful musician and destructive alcoholic. Adopted and floundering to find a sense of herself in the midst of her unhappy marriage, Kate sets out to track down her birth mother, a search that leads her to a Magdalene Laundry in Ireland and the harrowing history that it holds. Stirring and nostalgic at moments, visceral and propulsive at others, I Couldn’t Love You More is a tender, candid portrait of love, sex, motherhood, and the enduring ties of family. It is impossible not to fall under the spell of this tale of mothers and daughters, wives and muses, secrets and outright lies.

Mahjong:
A Chinese Game and
the Making of Modern American Culture
by Annelise Heinz
SUMMER 2021
Oxford University Press

How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture.

Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans in the 1930s, incarcerated Japanese Americans in wartime, Jewish American suburban mothers, and Air Force officers' wives in the postwar era.

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the twentieth century.

Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American game. Heinz also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game to gain access to respectable leisure. The result was the forging of friendships that lasted decades and the creation of organizations that raised funds for the war effort and philanthropy. No other game has signified both belonging and standing apart in American culture.

Drawing on photographs, advertising, popular media, and dozens of oral histories, Heinz's rich and colorful account offers the first history of the wildly popular game of mahjong.

Frankly, We Did Win This Election:
The Inside Story of How Trump Lost
by Michael C. Bender
July 13, 2021

Some people are shocked that TRUMP told CHIEF OF STAFF JOHN KELLY about how ADOLPH HITLER did some good things. I am not shocked. New Yorkers knew this before he wsa even elected. New Yorkers knew about his family and the German Bund in NY. But this new book lays it out in print. Retired General Kelly tells the author that Trump was the most flawed human being he ever met in his life. Trump had a total disregard for knowing or understanding world history, racial history, American history, who the WWII allies and axis members were, and more.

Michael C. Bender, senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, presents an account of the 2020 presidential campaign that details how Donald J. Trump became the first incumbent in three decades to lose reelection — (Jimmy Carter, George Bush) and the only one whose defeat culminated in a violent insurrection.

Beginning with President Trump’s first impeachment and ending with his second, FRANKLY, WE DID WIN THIS ELECTION chronicles the inside-the-room deliberations between Trump and his campaign team as they opened 2020 with a sleek political operation built to harness a surge of momentum from a bullish economy, a unified Republican Party, and a string of domestic and foreign policy successes—only to watch everything unravel when fortunes suddenly turned.

With first-rate sourcing cultivated from five years of covering Trump in the White House and both of his campaigns, Bender brings readers inside the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and into the front row of the movement’s signature mega-rallies for the story of an epic election-year convergence of COVID, economic collapse, and civil rights upheaval—and an unorthodox president’s attempt to battle it all. He mentions that VP Pence was not too keep on Trumps embrace of anti-Semitic protestors in Charlottesville.

Fresh interviews with Trump, key campaign advisers, and senior administration officials are paired with an exclusive collection of internal campaign memos, emails, and text messages for scores of never-before-reported details about the campaign. According to the author, it was the idea of Jared and Ivanka that Trump walk to the church and hold up a bible. Jared was also reprimanded by Meadows for inviting a discredit tele-evangelist to the WH. Kushner assumed all were the same, not realizing that the person he was lauding was considered a kook among Protestants. Also mentioned is the time Pence fought back against Trump after calling his disloyal. Pence threw a crumpled article right back at Trump and got in his face, telling him, 'We walked you through every detail of this,' Mr. Pence snarled. 'We did this for you — as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.' PW wrote: “Throughout, he paints a credible portrait of how a lack of coordination and Trump’s own preference for "chaos as an operating principle" doomed the reelection bid. Though the analysis often feels rote, Bender’s insider access impresses, and he enriches the narrative with a sharp sense of humor, describing Trump’s first debate performance against Joe Biden as a "hurricane of assholery."”

FRANKLY, WE DID WIN THIS ELECTION is the inside story of how Trump lost, and the definitive account of his final year in office that draws a straight line from the president’s repeated insistence that he would never lose to the deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol that imperiled one of his most loyal lieutenants—his own vice president.

Rachel to the Rescue
A Novel - Paperback
by Elinor Lipman
JULY 13, 2021
Mariner

Rachel Klein is fired from her job at the White House after she sends an email criticizing Donald Trump to a friend, but clicked on REPLY ALL. She had scored a White House job working for the “shredder in chief,” in documents and records management.

As she is escorted off the premises she is hit by a speeding car, driven by what the press will discreetly call "a personal friend of the President." it is the President's optometrist.

Does that explain the flowers, the get-well wishes at a press briefing, the hush money offered by a lawyer at her hospital bedside? Rachel’s recovery is soothed by comically doting parents, matchmaking lesbian roommates, a new job as aide to a journalist whose books aim to defame the President, and unexpected love at the local wine store.

But secrets leak about a throuple or more involving the optometrist, the president, and more; and Rachel’s new-found happiness has to make room for more than a little chaos. Will she bring down the President? Or will he manage to do that all by himself? Rachel to the Rescue is a mischievous political satire, with a delightful cast of characters, from one of America’s funniest novelists.

Dana’s Bakery:
100 Decadent Recipes
for Unique Desserts
by Dana Pollack
JULY 13, 2021
PAGE STREET

As a trained pastry chef, Dana never fails to take classic, crave-able desserts to a whole new level- including her Mookies (a macaron baked inside a cookie) that people line up to try. Now, you can make them-and 99 other incredible desserts from Dana’s collection-in the comfort of your own kitchen. Organized by flavor, including Cookie Dough, Death by Chocolate and Taste the Rainbow, there’s a dessert for every craving. Recipes include:

Cereal Bowl Cookies
The Perfect 10 Chocolate Brownies
Frosted Flakes No-Bake Cheesecake
Red Velvet Donuts
Anytime, Anywhere Double-Stuffed Cookies
Tiramisu Whoopie Pies
S’mores Cinnamon Rolls
Cookie Dough Macarons

NOTE: THERE IS ONLY ONE MOOKIE RECIPE in here and a few MACARON ones... but how many do you need?

Each recipe is jam-packed (not literally packed with jam) with incredible flavor (and includes an eye-catching photo), and Dana’s easy-to-follow instructions make them a breeze to prepare at home. With this breakout cookbook, you’ll enjoy all the decadent, over-the-top desserts that made Dana’s Bakery famous without having to wait in line.

Dana Pollack is the CEO & Founder of Dana’s Bakery, and the creative force behind America’s favorite macarons & cookies. Dana launched her business out of a small test kitchen in Hawthorne, NJ in 2012 after graduating from the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) in NYC. For a decade prior she had been putting her BFA in photography from Parson’s School of Design to work as a magazine photo editor when an idea struck — traditional French macarons in familiar flavors inspired by the classic desserts, candy, and sweet treats she grew up on. Today, in addition to their online store, Dana’s Bakery has a location inside Dylans Candy Bar, and in her 6,000 square-foot facility in South Hackensack, NJ, she leads a team of 40 female employees, and has been recognized by Ernst & Young as a 2017 “Entrepreneur of the Year.”

Carry On:
Reflections for a
New Generation
by the late John Lewis
Kabir Sehgal Andrew Young (Foreword)
JULY 13, 2021
Grand Central Publishing

A brilliant and empowering collection of final reflections and words of wisdom from venerable civil rights champion, the late Congressman John Lewis at the end of his remarkable life.

Congressman John Lewis was a paragon of the Civil Rights Movement and political leadership for decades. A hero we won’t soon forget, Lewis was a beacon of hope and a model of humility whose invocation to “good trouble” continues to inspire millions across our nation. In his last months on earth, even while battling cancer, he dedicated time to share his memories, beliefs, and advice—exclusively immortalized in these pages—as a message to the generations to come.

Organized by topic ranging from justice, courage, faith, mentorship, and forgiveness to the protests and the pandemic, and many more besides, Carry On collects the late Congressman’s thoughts for readers to draw on whenever they are in need of guidance. John Lewis had great confidence in our future, even as he died in the midst of one of our country’s most challenging years to date. With this book, he performs that crucial passing of the baton, empowering us to live up to the legacy he has left us with his perseverance, dedication, profound insight, and unwavering ability to see the good in life.

Mitka’s Secret:
A True Story of Child Slavery
and Surviving the Holocaust
by Steven W. Brallier,
Joel N. Lohr, and Lynn G. Beck (Contributors)
JULY 20, 2021
Eerdman

Mitka Kalinski had never revealed his past to anyone. Not even to his wife or his four children. But in 1981, three decades after it had all ended, Mitka finally broke his silence about the horrors he had endured during the Holocaust and in the years immediately afterward: not only German concentration camps and sadistic medical experiments but also seven years of enslavement in the household of a Nazi officer, “Iron” Gustav Dörr.

Having been orphaned before the war, Mitka did not know his origins or even his name. Torture, slavery, and a false name stripped him of his identity entirely. Thus, when he immigrated to the United States in 1951, Mitka seized the opportunity to bury his past and forge a new life. He lived the American life in all its fullness and moved to Nevada with his beloved wife, Adrienne, and their children. But the secret he carried became an increasingly heavy burden, preventing wholeness and healing.

This is Mitka’s account of facing the past, confronting his captors, connecting with lost relatives, and finding peace in the rediscovery of his origins. For Mitka, this also meant reclaiming his Jewish heritage — a journey that gave him a new sense of purpose and freedom from the lingering effects of trauma that had filled his life to that point. By the end, Mitka’s Secret is less a story of survival and more one of redemption and transformation—from hidden suffering to abundant joy.

I Alone Can Fix It:
Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year
by Carol Leonnig, Philip Rucker
JULY 20, 2021
PENGUIN

The definitive behind-the-scenes story of Trump's final year in office, by Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporters and authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller, A Very Stable Genius

The true story of what took place in Donald Trump’s White House during a disastrous 2020 has never before been told in full. What was really going on around the president, as the government failed to contain the coronavirus and over half a million Americans perished? Who was influencing Trump after he refused to concede an election he had clearly lost and spread lies about election fraud? To answer these questions, Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig reveal a dysfunctional and bumbling presidency’s inner workings in unprecedented, stunning detail.

Focused on Trump and the key players around him—the doctors, generals, senior advisers, and Trump family members— Rucker and Leonnig provide a forensic account of the most devastating year in a presidency like no other. Their sources were in the room as time and time again Trump put his personal gain ahead of the good of the country. These witnesses to history tell the story of him longing to deploy the military to the streets of American cities to crush the protest movement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, all to bolster his image of strength ahead of the election. These sources saw firsthand his refusal to take the threat of the coronavirus seriously—even to the point of allowing himself and those around him to be infected. This is a story of a nation sabotaged—economically, medically, and politically—by its own leader, culminating with a groundbreaking, minute-by-minute account of exactly what went on in the Capitol building on January 6, as Trump’s supporters so easily breached the most sacred halls of American democracy, and how the president reacted. With unparalleled access, Rucker and Leonnig explain and expose exactly who enabled—and who foiled—Trump as he sought desperately to cling to power.

A classic and heart-racing work of investigative reporting, this book is destined to be read and studied by citizens and historians alike for decades to come.

Perversion of Justice:
The Jeffrey Epstein Story
by Julie K. Brown
JULY 20, 2021
DEY STREET BOOKS

“Julie K. Brown's important book offers not just a definitive account of the Epstein case, but a compelling window into her own experiences as a dogged reporter at a regional newspaper, facing off against powerful interests set against her reporting.” —Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Catch and Kill

Dauntless journalist Julie K. Brown recounts her uncompromising and risky investigation of Jeffrey Epstein's underage sex trafficking operation, and the explosive reporting for the Miami Herald that finally brought him to justice while exposing the powerful people and broken system that protected him.

For many years, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's penchant for teenage girls was an open secret in the high society of Palm Beach, Florida and Upper East Side, Manhattan. Charged in 2008 with soliciting prostitution from minors, Epstein was treated with unheard of leniency, dictating the terms of his non-prosecution. The media virtually ignored the failures of the criminal justice system, and Epstein's friends and business partners brushed the allegations aside. But when in 2017 the U.S Attorney who approved Epstein's plea deal, Alexander Acosta, was chosen by President Trump as Labor Secretary, reporter Julie K. Brown was compelled to ask questions.

Despite her editor's skepticism that she could add a new dimension to a known story, Brown determined that her goal would be to track down the victims themselves. Poring over thousands of redacted court documents, traveling across the country and chasing down information in difficulty and sometimes dangerous circumstances, Brown tracked down dozens of Epstein's victims, now young women struggling to reclaim their lives after the trauma and shame they had endured.

Brown's resulting three-part series in the Miami Herald was one of the most explosive news stories of the decade, revealing how Epstein ran a global sex trafficking pyramid scheme with impunity for years, targeting vulnerable teens, often from fractured homes and then turning them into recruiters. The outrage led to Epstein's arrest, the disappearance and eventual arrest of his closest accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and the resignation of Acosta. The financier's mysterious suicide in a New York City jail cell prompted wild speculation about the secrets he took to the grave-and whether his death was intentional or the result of foul play.

Tracking Epstein’s evolution from a college dropout to one of the most successful financiers in the country—whose associates included Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, and Bill Clinton—Perversion of Justice builds on Brown's original award-winning series, showing the power of truth, the value of local reportage and the tenacity of one woman in the face of the deep-seated corruption of powerful men.

An Inconvenient Minority:
The Attack on Asian American
Excellence and the
Fight for Meritocracy
by Kenny Xu
JULY 13, 2021
DIVERSION BOOKS

Once upon a time, elite schools excluded Jews... or limited Jews. There were quotas. It was not a meritocracy. Now, Xu, who wrotes for The Federalist, the Wash Examiner, and other more right of center publications, the same is happening to Asians and Asian Americans, yet they are succeeding even in spite of restrictions and unspoken quotas.

Hey, I once had a Summer job at a major NYC bank and an HR Director told me she did not like to hire Asian Americans. WHAT???

Okay, back to the book... The author is involved with lines of the Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard lawuit. He wrotes that there is a false narrative of American meritocracy, and the attack on Asian American excellence with its far-reaching implications-from seedy test-prep centers to gleaming gifted-and-talented magnet schools, to top colleges and elite business, media, and political positions across America

Even in the midst of a nationwide surge of bias and incidents against them, Asians from coast to coast have quietly assumed mastery of the nation’s technical and intellectual machinery and become essential American workers. Yet, they’ve been forced to do so in the face of policy proposals-written in the name of diversity-excluding them from the upper ranks of the elite.

In An Inconvenient Minority, journalist Kenny Xu traces elite America’s longstanding unease about a minority potentially upending them. Leftist agendas, such as eliminating standardized testing, doling out racial advantages to “preferred” minorities, and lumping Asians into “privileged” categories despite their deprived historical experiences have spurred Asian Americans to act.

Soon to be former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is attempting to limit Asian Americans from New York City’s Specialized School programs – like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. There are battles over “diversity” quotas at Google and Facebook.. Some Asian Americans have become activists in response to unfair perceptions and admission practices. An Inconvenient Minority chronicles the political and economic repression and renaissance of a long ignored racial identity group-and how they are central to reversing America’s cultural decline and preserving the dynamism of the free world.

This Is What America Looks Like:
My Journey from Refugee
to Congresswoman
by Ilhan Omar
NOW IN PAPERBACK
JULY 27, 2021
Dey Street Books

Don't let others define you.
Define Yourself. Come up with your own origination story, and brand yourself. Ilhan Omar was eight years old when war broke out in Somalia. The youngest of seven children, her mother had died. She was being raised by her father and grandfather when armed gunmen attacked their compound and the family decided to flee Mogadishu. They ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where Ilhan says she came to understand the deep meaning of hunger and death. Four years later, after a painstaking vetting process, her family achieved refugee status and arrived in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington DC.

Twelve years old, a poor refugee, speaking only Somali and having missed out on years of schooling, Ilhan rolled up her sleeves, determined to find her American dream. Faced with the many challenges of being an immigrant and a refugee, she questioned stereotypes and built bridges with her classmates and in her community. By age 32, she had become a grassroots organizer, graduated from college and was elected to congress with a record-breaking turnout by the people of Minnesota.

Her autobio states that she is a beacon of positivity in dark times.
Others would say she is brilliant and knows how to scapegoat Israel to promote her own cause and raise re-election funds.
She is a lightning rod for controversy, and purposely crafts her image and statements to promote her agenda.
Readers would expect that at her level in politics that she would provide insights into religion in American life or what happened in Somalia. Sadly, he provides just trite comments unbecoming someone who wants to legislate public policy.
She chronicles her personal journey. This is What America Looks Like is both the inspiring coming of age story of a refugee and a multidimensional tale of the hopes and aspirations, disappointments and failures, successes, sacrifices and surprises.

The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz:
A Powerful True Story of Hope and Survival
by Thomas Geve
JULY 27, 2021
Harper

An inspiring true story of hope and survival, this is the testimony of a boy who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald and recorded his experiences through words and color drawings.

In June 1943, after long years of hardship and persecution, thirteen-year-old Thomas Geve and his mother were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Separated upon arrival, he was left to fend for himself in the men’s camp of Auschwitz I.

During 22 harsh months in three camps, Thomas experienced and witnessed the cruel and inhumane world of Nazi concentration and death camps. Nonetheless, he never gave up the will to live. Miraculously, he survived and was liberated from Buchenwald at the age of fifteen.

While still in the camp and too weak to leave, Thomas felt a compelling need to document it all, and drew over eighty drawings, all portrayed in simple yet poignant detail with extraordinary accuracy. He not only shared the infamous scenes, but also the day-to-day events of life in the camps, alongside inmates' manifestations of humanity, support and friendship.

To honor his lost friends and the millions of silenced victims of the Holocaust, in the years following the war, Thomas put his story into words. Despite the evil of the camps, his account provides a striking affirmation of life.

The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz, accompanied with 56 of his color illustrations, is the unique testimony of young Thomas and his quest for a brighter tomorrow.

AUGUST 2021 BOOK RELEASES
AUGUST 2021 BOOK RELEASES
AUGUST 2021 BOOK RELEASES

The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line:
Untold Stories of the Women
Who Changed the Course of World War II
by Mari Eder
August 3, 2021

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII-in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

c The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly ever hear about. These women who did extraordinary things didn't expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they've gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen-in and out of uniform.

Liane B. Russell fled Austria with nothing and later became a renowned U.S. scientist whose research on the effects of radiation on embryos made a difference to thousands of lives. Gena Turgel was a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Bergen-Belsen and cared for the young Anne Frank, who was dying of typhus. Gena survived and went on to write a memoir and spent her life educating children about the Holocaust. Ida and Louise Cook were British sisters who repeatedly smuggled out jewelry and furs and served as sponsors for refugees, and they also established temporary housing for immigrant families in London.

Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told-and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Unstrung:
Rants and Stories
of a Noise Guitarist
by Marc Ribot
August 3, 2021
Akashic Books

Iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot offers up essays and stories in this darkly funny and subversive debut collection.
"Ribot is an all-American original, and this collection provides plenty of insight into his fascinating mind." --Kirkus Reviews
"An insightful tour through the razor-sharp mind of one of the world's most original and influential guitar masters. Ribot's acerbic wit, self-deprecating humor, and profoundly vexing love-hate relationship with all things guitar make for a fun and stimulating read."--John Zorn, musician
Throughout his genre-defying career as one of the most innovative musicians of our time, iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot has consistently defied expectation at every turn. Here, in his first collection of writing, we see that same uncompromising sensibility at work as he playfully interrogates our assumptions about music, life, and death. Through essays, short stories, and the occasional unfilmable film "mistreatment" that showcase the sheer range of his voice, Unstrung captures an artist whose versatility on the page rivals his dexterity onstage.

In the first section of the book, "Lies and Distortion," Ribot turns his attention to his instrument--"my relation to the guitar is one of struggle; I'm constantly forcing it to be something else"--and reflects on his influences (and friends) like Robert Quine (the Voidoids) and producer Hal Willner (Saturday Night Live), while delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of artists' rights. Elsewhere, we glimpse fragments of Ribot's life as a traveling musician--he captures both the monotony of touring as well as small moments of beauty and despair on the road. In the heart of the collection, "Sorry, We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties," Ribot offers wickedly humorous short stories that synthesize the best elements of the Russian absurdist tradition with the imaginative heft of George Saunders. Taken together, these stories and essays cement Ribot's position as one of the most dynamic and creative voices of our time.

Once We Were Slaves:
The Extraordinary Journey of a
Multi-Racial Jewish Family
by Laura Leibman
August 10, 2021

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line.

Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and – at times – white.

While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Samuelson Friedman:
The Battle Over the Free Market
by Nicholas Wapshott
August 3, 2021
NORTON

From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics.

In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed “monetarism” and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy.

In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles.

Samuelson (Summers, Arrow), a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws-or crafts its advanced treatises-if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States.

Like Friedrich Hayek (not Jewish, although he hung out with Jews in Vienna and was related to the non Jewish side of Wittgenstein) before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today.

In Wapshott’s nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman’s decades-long argument over how-or whether-to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.

The Ambassador:
Joseph P. Kennedy at
the Court of St. James's 1938-1940
by Susan Ronald
August 3, 2021
St. Martin's Press

People are always so shocked that JFK and RFK were womanizers and narcissists. They are incredulous that RFK Jr pushes anti Vaxx messaging. And then they read about Joseph P. Kennedy and say... a-ha
Acclaimed biographer Susan Ronald reveals the truth about Joseph P. Kennedy's deeply controversial tenure as Ambassador to Great Britain on the eve of World War II.

On February 18, 1938, Joseph P. Kennedy was sworn in as US Ambassador to the Court of St. James. To say his appointment to the most prestigious and strategic diplomatic post in the world shocked the Establishment was an understatement: known for his profound Irish roots and staunch Catholicism, not to mention his “plain-spoken” opinions and womanizing, he was a curious choice as Europe hurtled toward war.

Initially welcomed by the British, in less than two short years Kennedy was loathed by the White House, the State Department and the British Government.

Believing firmly that Fascism was the inevitable wave of the future, he consistently misrepresented official US foreign policy internationally as well as direct instructions from FDR himself. The Americans were the first to disown him and the British and the Nazis used Kennedy to their own ends.

Through meticulous research and many newly available sources, Ronald confirms in impressive detail what has long been believed by many:
that Kennedy was a Fascist sympathizer
that Kennedy was an anti-Semite whose only loyalty was to his family's advancement.

She also reveals the ambitions of the Kennedy dynasty during this period abroad, as they sought to enter the world of high society London and establish themselves as America’s first family. Thorough and utterly readable, The Ambassador explores a darker side of the Kennedy patriarch in an account sure to generate attention and controversy.

Savage Tongues:
A Novel
by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
August 3, 2021
Mariner Books

A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, "written with the intensity of early Marguerite Duras and Ferrante's Days of Abandonment," about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection (The Millions).

It’s summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, in care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood.

Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American anti-Zionist scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she’s long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries.

Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Samanta Schweblin, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.

CHASING HiSTORY
A KID IN THE NEWSROOM
BY CARL BERNSTEIN
August 10, 2021
HOLT

The Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of All the President’s Men-the chronicle of the investigative report about the Watergate break-in and resultant political scandal which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation-recalls his formative years as a teenage newspaper reporter in JFK’s Washington-a tale of adventures, scrapes, clever escapes, and the opportunity of a lifetime.

With these words, the sixteen-year-old senior at Montgomery Blair High School set himself apart from the high school crowd and set himself on a track that would define his life. Carl Bernstein was far from the best student in his class-in fact, he was in danger of not graduating at all-but he had a talent for writing, a burning desire to know things that other people didn’t, and a flair for being in the right place at the right time. Those qualities got him inside the newsroom at the Washington Star, the afternoon paper in the nation’s capital, in the summer of 1960, a pivotal time for America, for Washington, D.C., and for a young man in a hurry on the cusp of adulthood.

Chasing History opens up the world of the early 1960s as Bernstein experienced it, chasing after grisly crimes with the paper’s police reporter, gathering colorful details at a John F. Kennedy campaign rally, running afoul of union rules, and confronting racial tensions as the civil rights movement gained strength. We learn alongside him as he comes to understand the life of a newspaperman, and we share his pride as he hunts down information, gets his first byline, and discovers that he has a talent for the job after all.

By turns exhilarating, funny, tense, and poignant, Chasing History shows us a country coming into its own maturity along with young Carl Bernstein, and when he strikes out on his own after five years at the Star, his hard-won knowledge and experience feels like ours as well.

I Left My Homework in the Hamptons:
What I Learned Teaching
the Children of the One Percent
by Blythe Grossberg, Psy.D.
August 17, 2021
Hanover Square Press

A captivating memoir about tutoring for Manhattan’s elite, revealing how a life of extreme wealth both helps and harms the children of the one percent.
Ben orders daily room service while living in a five-star hotel.
Olivia collects luxury brand sneakers worn by celebrities.
Dakota jets off to Rome when she needs to avoid drama at school.
Welcome to the inner circle of New York’s richest families, where academia is an obsession, wealth does nothing to soothe status anxiety and parents will try just about anything to gain a competitive edge in the college admissions rat race.

When Blythe Grossberg first started as a tutor and learning specialist, she had no idea what awaited her inside the high-end apartments of Fifth Avenue. Children are expected to be as efficient and driven as CEOs, starting their days with 5:00 a.m. squash practice and ending them with late-night tutoring sessions. Meanwhile, their powerful parents will do anything to secure one of the precious few spots at the Ivy Leagues, whatever the cost to them or their kids.

Through stories of the children she tutors that are both funny and shocking, Grossberg shows us the privileged world of America’s wealthiest families and the systems in place that help them stay on top.

Dr. Grossberg is the author of several books about learning differences, including “Making ADD Work” and “Asperger’s Rules.” A graduate of Harvard College, she received a doctoral degree in psychology from Rutgers University. Formerly the Upper School learning specialist at the Collegiate School and at Packer Collegiate in New York City, she has worked with students with learning differences, autism, ADHD, and executive function issues for 20 years. Dr. Grossberg believes that the match between the student and tutor can help the student grow. She also believes she has learned more from her students than they’ve learned from her.

JERUSALEM BEACH
STORIES
By IDO GEFEN
Translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir
August 17, 2021
Astra House

Ahead of his much anticipated novel in 2022, a collection of stories by the 29 year old writer.
"This vigorous, inventive work will surely fire up readers' neurons." — Starred Review, Publisher's Weekly
For fans of Etgar Keret, a debut collection that fuses the humor of everyday life in Israel with technology's challenges and the latest discoveries about the human brain (which makes sense, since the author studies Israeli brains).

At once compassionate, philosophical, and humorous, Jerusalem Beach is a foray into the human condition in all its contradictions. Through a series of snapshots of contemporary life in Israel, Gefen reveals a world that’s a step from the familiar.

A man’s grandfather joins an army platoon of geriatrics looking for purpose in old age. A scheming tech start-up exposes the dire consequences of ambition in trying to share human memories. An elderly couple searches for a beach that doesn’t exist. And, a boy mourns his brother’s death in an attempt to catch time like flies in his fist.

Entirely heartfelt and infused with pathos, Jerusalem Beach is an exploration of both technology and the brain. Whether ruminating on the stakes of familial love or pitching the reader headlong into the absurdity of success and failure, Gefen leaves the reader intrigued throughout.

PW.com reviewed it best with... “In this stimulating debut, Gefen explores the mysteries of the human mind through realist and fantastical lenses. In “The Geriatric Platoon,” an Israeli grandfather is deployed to guard a remote settlement near the Jordanian border, much to the puzzlement of his practical son and rudderless, war-scarred grandson. The setup lends itself to some Catch 22-style absurdist humor—one soldier receives special nap dispensations—but the family relationships resonate emotionally as well. Another military-themed story, “Neptune,” offers a darker vision. Set at a remote outpost, it describes a mock trial over a stolen grilled cheese sandwich that devolves into a brutal display of violence and power. Gefen is also a neurocognitive researcher, and several chilling tales venture into the mysteries of cognition, dream worlds, and mental illness. In the dreamlike title story, a husband tries to help his Alzheimer’s-suffering wife relive a special memory. And in the powerful “Exit,” two parents helplessly watch as their young daughter, who suffers from a mysterious condition in which she believes her dreams last for years, becomes lost in the “infinity of her private future” and withdraws from the waking world. Other stories, like “101.3 FM,” about a radio that can tune into people’s inner thoughts, and “Girl Who Lived Near the Sun,” an interplanetary coming-of-age tale, transcend their conceits thanks to a sharp voice. This vigorous, inventive work will surely fire up readers’ neurons.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(Little People, BIG DREAMS)
by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara
Judit Orosz (Illustrator)
August 24, 2021
Frances Lincoln Books
Preschool - 5

In this book from the critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the incredible life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the beloved supreme court justice.

Little Ruth’s mom taught her to be a lady—which meant to be her own independent self. Ruth promised herself she would do everything her mother didn’t get the chance to do. And she excelled: at school, as a law professor, and later on the supreme court fighting gender discrimination. This inspiring book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the justice’s life.

Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling series of books and educational games that explore the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.

This empowering series offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. Boxed gift sets allow you to collect a selection of the books by theme. Paper dolls, learning cards, matching games, and other fun learning tools provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.

Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!

REAL ESTATE
A LIVING AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BY DEBORAH LEVY
Part 3 in a trilogy
August 24, 2021
BLOOMSBURY

Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one's own. Now, in Real Estate, acclaimed author Deborah Levy concludes her ground-breaking trilogy of living autobiographies with an exhilarating, boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it.

In this vibrant memoir, Levy employs her characteristic indelible writing, sharp wit, and acute insights to craft a searing examination of womanhood and ownership. Her inventory of possessions, real and imagined, pushes readers to question our cultural understanding of belonging and belongings and to consider the value of a woman's intellectual and personal life.

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory, Real Estate is a brilliant, compulsively readable narrative.

More Than I Love My Life:
A novel
by David Grossman
Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
August 24, 2021
KNOPF

From the internationally best-selling author, a remarkable novel of suffering, love, and healing: the story of three generations of women and a secret that needs to be told

More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother and daughter pair, though Gili—abandoned by Nina when she was just three—has always been close to her grandmother. With Gili making the arrangements, they travel together to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera was imprisoned and tortured for three years as a young wife after she refused to betray her husband and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This unlikely journey—filtered through the lens of Gili’s camera, as she seeks to make a film that might help explain her life—lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.

More Than I Love My Life was inspired by the true story of one of David Grossman’s longtime confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Otok (“the Adriatic Alcatraz”). With flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, and Grossman’s fearless examination of the human heart, this swift novel is a thrilling addition to the oeuvre of one of our greatest living novelists, whose revered moral voice continues to resonate around the world.

How many of you had an uncle or great uncle who want to Spain w/ the Lincoln Brigade to fight Fascism?

The International Brigades:
Fascism, Freedom and the
Spanish Civil War
by Giles Tremlett
August 24, 2021
Bloomsbury

A comprehensive and deeply-researched history of the Spanish Civil War through the lens of the men and women who traveled from around the world to fight Franco's fascism.

The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from fifty-two countries around the world came to defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini.

Ill-equipped and disorderly,
yet fueled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory,
disparate groups of idealistic young men and women banded together to form a volunteer army of a size and kind unseen since the Crusades, known as the International Brigades.

These passionate liberal fighters-from across Europe, China, Africa and the Americas-would join the Republican cause, fighting for over two years on the bloody battlegrounds of Madrid, Jarama and Ebro. Were they heroes or fools? Saints or bloodthirsty adventurers? And what exactly did they achieve?

In this magisterial history, award-winning historian Giles Tremlett tells-for the first time-the story of the Spanish Civil War through all the human drama of an historic mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe. The International Brigades shows just how far ordinary people will go to save democracy against overwhelming odds.

The Secret History of Food:
Strange but True Stories
About the Origins of Everything We Eat
by Matt Siegel
August 31, 2021
ECCO

An irreverent, surprising, and entirely entertaining look at the little-known history surrounding the foods we know and love

Is Italian olive oil really Italian, or are we dipping our bread in lamp oil? Why are we masochistically drawn to foods that can hurt us, like hot peppers? Far from being a classic American dish, is apple pie actually . . . English?

“As a species, we’re hardwired to obsess over food,” Matt Siegel explains as he sets out “to uncover the hidden side of everything we put in our mouths.” Siegel also probes subjects ranging from the myths—and realities—of food as aphrodisiac, to how one of the rarest and most exotic spices in all the world (vanilla) became a synonym for uninspired sexual proclivities, to the role of food in fairy- and morality tales. He even makes a well-argued case for how ice cream helped defeat the Nazis.

The Secret History of Food is a rich and satisfying exploration of the historical, cultural, scientific, sexual, and, yes, culinary subcultures of this most essential realm. Siegel is an armchair Anthony Bourdain, armed not with a chef’s knife but with knowledge derived from medieval food-related manuscripts, ancient Chinese scrolls, and obscure culinary journals. Funny and fascinating, The Secret History of Food is essential reading for all foodies.

Fear of a Black Universe:
An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics
by Stephon Alexander
August 31, 2021
BASIC

OUTSIDERS CAN BE MORE CREATIVE AND OPEN
In this important guide to science and society, a cosmologist argues that physics must embrace the excluded, listen to the unheard, and be unafraid of being wrong.

Years ago, cosmologist Stephon Alexander received life-changing advice: to discover real physics, he needed to stop memorizing and start taking risks. In Fear of a Black Universe, Alexander shows that great physics requires us to think outside the mainstream -- to improvise and rely on intuition. His approach leads him to three principles that shape all theories of the universe: the principle of invariance, the quantum principle, and the principle of emergence. Alexander uses them to explore some of physics' greatest mysteries, from what happened before the big bang to how the universe makes consciousness possible. Drawing on his experience as a Black physicist, he makes a powerful case for diversifying our scientific communities. Compelling and empowering, Fear of a Black Universe offers remarkable insight into the art of physics.

Days of Lead:
Defying Death During Israel’s
War of Independence
NOW IN PAPERBACK
by Moshe Rashkes
Arik Rashkes (Preface), Senator Max Cleland (Foreword)
August 31, 2021
Apollo

Hailed by Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion, Days of Lead is a gripping best seller recounting the author’s life on the front line during Israel’s War of Independence.

Exquisitely written with a poetically beautiful touch, Days of Lead is the page-turning true story of a young soldier’s brave escapades during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. This incredible account is a story of determination and heroism, but also a stinging portrait of life on the battlefield—of looking an enemy soldier, also wide-eyed and only eighteen, in the eyes and knowing that it’s his life or yours, either you take a life or you lose yours. Far from a regular coming-of-age story, this is a firsthand account of a young man trying desperately to save the lives of his fellow soldiers, but watching them taken down one-by-one until he’s the last man alive on his platoon. It’s heartrending, but enthralling.

This new edition of Days of Lead, published in English, provides an up-close view of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv long before they became the bustling cities they are today. It also presents fascinating context on the making of the book and its enduring relevancy, as Israeli soldiers continue to fight for Israel’s right to exist.

In a personal letter to the author, Israel’s founder and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, one of many well-known celebrators of the book, writes, “I started reviewing your book without the intention of reading to its end, but from the first pages I was captivated and I read it to the end through excitement and astonishment. From where all of a sudden pops up such mighty expression, truth telling, and wonderful description? It seems to me that until now I have not read such a precise and true story of combat from the War of Independence. . . . You have contributed a valuable asset . . . to our literature at large.”

All In:
An Autobiography
by Billie Jean King
August 17, 2021
KNOPF

King is inspiring to many Jewish women and tennis players. The Battle of the Sexes seems to have occurred eons ago.
In this spirited account, Billie Jean King details her life's journey to find her true self. She recounts her groundbreaking tennis career--six years as the top-ranked woman in the world, twenty Wimbledon championships, thirty-nine grand-slam titles, and her watershed defeat of Bobby Riggs in the famous "Battle of the Sexes." She poignantly recalls the cultural backdrop of those years and the profound impact on her worldview from the women's movement, the assassinations and anti-war protests of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and, eventually, the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

She describes the myriad challenges she's hurdled--entrenched sexism, an eating disorder, near financial peril after being outed--on her path to publicly and unequivocally acknowledging her sexual identity at the age of fifty-one. (Wondering if she writes about TeamTennis) And she talks about how her life today remains one of indefatigable service. She offers insights and advice on leadership, business, activism, sports, politics, marriage equality, parenting, sexuality, and love. She shows how living honestly and openly has had a transformative effect on her relationships and happiness. Hers is the story of a pathbreaking feminist, a world-class athlete, and an indomitable spirit whose impact has transcended even her spectacular achievements in sports.

Forget Prayers, Bring Cake:
A Single Woman's Guide to Grieving
by Merissa Nathan Gerson
August 17, 2021
Mandala

Though at times it may seem impossible, we can heal with help from our friends and community– if we know how to ask. This heartrending, relatable account of one woman’s reckoning with loss is a guide to the world of self-recovery, self-love, and the skills necessary to meeting one's own needs in these times of pain– especially when that pain is suffered alone.

Grief is all around us. In the world of today it has become common and layered, no longer only an occasional weight. A book needed now more than ever, Forget Prayers, Bring Cake is for people of all ages and orientations dealing with grief of any sort—professional, personal, romantic, familial, or even the sadness of the modern day. This book provides actions to boost self-care and self-worth; it shows when and how to ask for love and attention, and how to provide it for others. It shows that it is okay to define your needs and ask others to share theirs. In a moment in which community, affection, and generosity are needed more than ever, this book is an indispensable road map.

This book will be a guiding light to a healthier mental state amid these troubled times.

Merissa Nathan Gerson is a New Orleans-based writer, professor and sex educator. Her written work has been seen in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Playboy, and Tablet among others. She was inherited trauma consultant for Amazon’s Emmy Award winning television show, Transparent, and continues to speak nationwide on sex, Judaism, LGBTQ inclusion in Jewish spaces, and the inheritance of trauma and memory. She has been invited to lecture at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Georgetown Center for Jewish Life, and The Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle and her 2018 Eli Talk on Talmud and consent became KenMeansYes, a pulpit-based Jewish consent advocacy campaign. A member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex and the American Association of Sexuality Educators Counselors and Trainers, Merissa thrives at the intersection of art, academia, sex, gender, and trauma theory. She holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, CO where she studied Shamatha meditation in the Shambhala lineage. She is a certified yoga teacher in the Sivananda lineage, and has trained with Kohenet: Hebrew Priestess Institute, Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, and with Rabbis James Jacobs Maisels and Jeffrey Roth in the practice of Jewish meditation.

Woke, Inc.:
Inside Corporate America's
Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
August 17, 2021
CENTER STREET

To me, this author is the antithesis to the Jewish way in the world. He rails against social justice. He believes anti-Semitism is rife more among progressives than among white supremacists

He believes that support for social justice causes has no place in business, and he sets out a new vision for the future of American capitalism.

He writes that “Stakeholder capitalism” makes rosy promises of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world, but in reality this ideology championed by America’s business and political leaders robs American consumers of their money, voice, and identity.

The author founded multibillion-dollar enterprises, led a biotech company as CEO, he became a hedge fund partner in his 20s, trained as a scientist at Harvard and a lawyer at Yale, and grew up the child of immigrants in a small town in Ohio. Now he takes us behind the scenes into corporate boardrooms and five-star conferences, into Ivy League classrooms and secretive nonprofits, to reveal the defining scam of our century.

The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, America’s elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we as Americans lack both.

This book not only rips back the curtain on the new corporatist agenda, it offers a better way forward. America’s elites may want to sort us into demographic boxes, but we don’t have to stay there. Woke, Inc. begins as a critique of stakeholder capitalism and ends with an exploration of what it means to be an American in 2021—a journey that begins with cynicism and ends with hope.

The Sisters of Auschwitz:
The True Story of Two
Jewish Sisters' Resistance in
the Heart of Nazi Territory
Paperback
by Roxane van Iperen
Joni Zwart, translator
August 31, 2021
HARPER PAPERBACK

The unforgettable story of two unsung heroes of World War II: sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper who joined the Dutch Resistance, helped save dozen of lives, were captured by the Nazis, and ultimately survived the Holocaust.

Eight months after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Nazis roll into The Netherlands, expanding their reign of brutality to the Dutch. But by the Winter of 1943, resistance is growing. Among those fighting their brutal Nazi occupiers are two Jewish sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper from Amsterdam. Risking arrest and death, the sisters help save others, sheltering them in a clandestine safehouse in the woods, they called “The High Nest.”

This secret refuge would become one of the most important Jewish safehouses in the country, serving as a hiding place and underground center for resistance partisans as well as artists condemned by Hitler. From The High Nest, an underground web of artists arises, giving hope and light to those living in terror in Holland as they begin to restore the dazzling pre-war life of Amsterdam and The Hague.

When the house and its occupants are eventually betrayed, the most terrifying time of the sisters' lives begins. As Allied troops close in, the Brilleslijper family are rushed onto the last train to Auschwitz, along with Anne Frank and her family. The journey will bring Janny and Lien close to Anne and her older sister Margot. The days ahead will test the sisters beyond human imagination as they are stripped of everything but their courage, their resilience, and their love for each other.

Based on meticulous research and unprecedented access to the Brilleslijpers’ personal archives of memoirs and photos, Sisters of Auschwitz is a long-overdue homage to two young women’s heroism and moral bravery—and a reminder of the power each of us has to change the world.

Pumpkin Pie for Sigd:
A Holiday Tale
by Tzivia Macleod
Denise Damanti (Illustrator)
August 1, 2021
Berhman / Apples & Honey
Ages 3 - 6

Maddie has just moved to Israel and is excited to celebrate the Ethiopian Jewish holiday of Sigd with her new friend Orly. But what about her own favorite fall holiday, Thanksgiving? Will Maddie be able to celebrate it in her new country? She's determined to find out!

Together, Maddie and Orly go on a quest to find the ingredients for a delicious pumpkin pie and bring a taste of the United States to Israel.

Along the way, they'll discover how their two holidays (and they themselves) have so much in common.

Rosh Hashanah with Uncle Max
A Board book
by Varda Livney
Kibbutz Gezer
August 1, 2021
KAR-BEN
Ages 3 - 6

Uncle Max is coming to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, with the people he loves. They watch the sun go down, eat their holiday meal, dip challah and apples into honey for a sweet year, and listen to the sound of the shofar.

Gitty and Kvetch
by Caroline Kusin Pritchard
Ariel Landy (Illustrator)
August 31, 2021
Atheneum
Ages 3 - 8

In this hilariously sweet story about an opposites-attract friendship, chock-full of Yiddish humor, a girl and her best bird friend’s perfect day turns into a perfect opportunity to see things differently.

Gitty and her feathered-friend Kvetch couldn’t be more different: Gitty always sees the bright side of life, while her curmudgeonly friend Kvetch is always complaining and, well, kvetching about the trouble they get into.

One perfect day, Gitty ropes Kvetch into shlepping off on a new adventure to their perfect purple treehouse. Even when Kvetch sees signs of impending doom everywhere, Gitty finds silver linings and holds onto her super special surprise reason for completing their mission.

But when her perfect plan goes awry, oy vey, suddenly it’s Gitty who’s down in the dumps. Can Kvetch come out of his funk to lift Gitty’s spirits back up?

Happy Roo Year:
It's Rosh Hashanah
Board book
by Jessica Hickman
Elissambura (Illustrator)
August 1, 2021
KAR-BEN
Ages 2 - 6

They think about the year gone by.

They celebrate and schmooze.

They’re really just like you and me-

except they’re KANGAROOS.

Join a kooky cartoon-y kangaroo family in the Australian outback as they celebrate Rosh Hashanah! Learn about the traditions of the Jewish New Year in this rhyming board book, as a community of rambunctious ‘roos celebrates the holiday.

Something New for Rosh Hashanah
by Jane Yolen
Christine Battuz (Illustrator)
August 1, 2021
KAR-BEN
Ages 2 - 6

Becca refuses to try any news foods, until her family persuades her that Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is a time to try something new. While dad suggests shaving off his mustache for a new look, and mom thinks she'll take up knitting as a new project, Becca decides she's ready to try something new, too!

Starlight Soup:
A Sukkot Story
by Elana Rubinstein
Jennifer Naalchigar (Illustrator)
August 1, 2021
Berhman / Apples & Honey
Ages 3 - 6

In this second book about Saralee Siegel, the girl with the superpower smell, Saralee decides to create a new recipe for Sukkot--out of starlight, the secret ingredient that magically makes the soup taste just like each person's favorite soup in the world. But there's a problem with the magic soup that only the magic of friendship can fix.
See also:

Shabbat Shalom!
Board book – Picture Book
by Douglas Florian
Hannah Tolson (Illustrator)
August 3, 2021
CANDLEWICK
Ages 2 - 6

A family enjoys their weekly Sabbath dinner in a board book full of warm illustrations and a simple narration sure to appeal to young children.

Shabbat shalom!
We hurry home.

Dressed in their best, a family lights the Shabbat candles. Then it’s time to share a traditional meal with red wine and challah bread. After dinner, singing joyful songs has everyone feeling cozy and ready for bed. With a rhyming text and friendly illustrations, this inviting window into one family’s celebration of the Jewish Sabbath is a welcome addition for young children of any faith.

WE GO TO SHUL
Board book – Picture Book
by Douglas Florian
Hannah Tolson (Illustrator)
August 3, 2021
CANDLEWICK
Ages 2 - 6

A family heads to synagogue together in a charming board book for little listeners with a rhyming text and child-friendly illustrations.

A day of rest with which we’re blessed.
We all get dressed.

It’s Saturday, and one family is setting out to walk together to shul. Inside the synagogue, they all say hello to their friends and the rabbi, then listen and watch as the Torah is read and held aloft. Singing aloud with everyone else is fun! In a welcome addition for children of any faith, this simple, warmly illustrated story takes an inviting look at a weekly Jewish tradition.

Sharkbot Shalom
by Jenna Waldman
Sharon Davey (Illustrator)
August 1, 2021
Berhman / Apples & Honey
Ages 3 - 6

A Shabbat recharge is just what Sharkbot needs. But will he be ready in time?

Get ready for an under water, steam-punk Shabbat! Count down with this cheerful shark robot as he sets the table, stirs the seaweed soup, and braids kelp into challah loaves. You'll want a byte of the food when a stingray brings seagrass cakes and algae sweets. Some pufferfish made a plankton pie!

Sharkbot sweeps the ocean floor

Before his guests swim through the door . . .

'Slime of snail and tail of trout!

My charge is low -- I might run out!'

SEPTEMBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES
SEPTEMBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES
SEPTEMBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES

The MAGICIAN
A NOVEL
BY COLM TOIBIN
September 7, 2021
SCRIBNER

From one of today’s most brilliant and beloved novelists, a dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War.

Colm Tóibín’s magnificent new novel opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.

In a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire. The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile. This is a man and a family fiercely engaged by the world, profoundly flawed, and unforgettable. As People magazine said about The Master, “It’s a delicate, mysterious process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, and Tóibín captures it beautifully.”

System Error:
Where Big Tech Went Wrong
and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich,
Mehran Sahami, Jeremy M. Weinstein
September 21, 2021
HARPER

A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors—experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades—which reveals how big tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves.

In no more than the blink of an eye, a naïve optimism about technology’s liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. Yet too few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the politicians who give them free rein.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

System Error exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech’s relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. This optimization mindset substitutes what companies care about for the values that we as a democratic society might choose to prioritize. Well-intentioned optimizers fail to measure all that is meaningful and, when their creative disruptions achieve great scale, they impose their values upon the rest of us.

Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, three Stanford professors—a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, a political scientist who served under Obama, and the director of the undergraduate Computer Science program at Stanford (also an early Google engineer)—reveal how we can hold that power to account.

Troubled by the values that permeate the university’s student body and its culture, they worked together to chart a new path forward, creating a popular course to transform how tomorrow’s technologists approach their profession. Now, as the dominance of big tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.

Uncontrolled Spread:
Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and
How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
by Scott Gottlieb
September 21, 2021
HARPER

Has America’s COVID-19 catastrophe taught us anything?

In Uncontrolled Spread, physician and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb shows how COVID-19 was able to trounce America’s pandemic preparations and outlines the steps that must be taken to protect against the next outbreak. As the pandemic unfolded, Gottlieb was in regular contact with all the key players in Congress, the Trump administration, and the drug and diagnostic industries. He provides an inside account of how level after level of American government crumbled as the COVID-19 crisis advanced.

A system-wide failure across government institutions left the nation blind to the threat, and unable to mount an effective response. We’d prepared for the wrong virus. We failed to identify the contagion early enough and became overly reliant on costly and sometimes divisive tactics that couldn’t fully slow the spread. We never considered asymptomatic transmission and we assumed people would follow public health guidance. Key bureaucracies like the CDC were hidebound and outmatched. Weak leadership aggravated these woes. We didn’t view a public health disaster as a threat to our national security.

Uncontrolled Spread argues we must fix our systems and prepare for a deadlier coronavirus variant, a flu pandemic, or whatever else nature may threaten us with. Gottlieb outlines policies and investments that are essential to prepare the United States and the world for future threats.

Unrequited Infatuations:
A Memoir
by Stevie Van Zandt
September 28, 2021
HACHETTE

Jews are an essential part of Springsteen’s entourage. Stevie is not one of them, but drummer, “Mighty” Max Weinberg, is Jewish and his parents ran a Jewish summer camp. Louis Lahav, a sound engineer for Springsteen is Jewish. Mike Appel and Jon Landau, Bruce's past managers, were MOT. Clive Davis, who signed Springsteen... Jewish. Marc Brickman, sound, also. Rabbi Harold Schulweis influenced songs on The River. Okay.. but back to Van Zandt the E STREET BAND member known for leaving the band at the wrong imes, but pursuing a great career in music, acting, activism and philanthropy

An epic tale of self-discovery by a self-confessed Rock n Roll disciple. The odyssey of the guy in the second seat. A story of the triumph of art over commerce. Van Zandt thought of a memoir a decade ago, but needed to wait for a significant ending, and his output over the past three years in a triumph.

What story begins in a bedroom in suburban New Jersey in the early '60s, unfolds on some of the country's largest stages, and then ranges across the globe, demonstrating over and over again how Rock and Roll has the power to change the world for the better? This story.

The first true heartbeat of UNREQUITED INFATUATIONS is the moment when Stevie Van Zandt trades in his devotion to the Baptist religion for an obsession with Rock and Roll. Groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones created new ideas of community, creative risk, and principled rebellion. They changed him forever. While still a teenager, he met Bruce Springsteen, a like-minded outcast/true believer who became one of his most important friends and bandmates. Van Zandt was a co founder of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. As Miami Steve, Van Zandt anchored the E Street Band as they conquered the Rock and Roll world.

And then, in the early '80s, Van Zandt stepped away from E Street to embark on his own odyssey. He refashioned himself as Little Steven, a political songwriter and performer, fell in love with Maureen Santoro who greatly expanded his artistic palette, and visited the world’s hot spots as an artist/journalist to not just better understand them, but to help change them. Most famously, he masterminded the recording of “Sun City,” an anti-apartheid anthem that sped the demise of South Africa’s institutionalized racism and helped get Nelson Mandela out of prison.

By the '90s, Van Zandt had lived at least two lives—one as a mainstream rocker, one as a hardcore activist. It was time for a third. David Chase invited Van Zandt to be a part of his new television show, the Sopranos—as Silvio Dante, he was the unconditionally loyal consiglieri who sat at the right hand of Tony Soprano (a relationship that oddly mirrored his real-life relationship with Bruce Springsteen... plus with his Naples/Calabria heritage...).

Underlying all of Van Zandt's various incarnations was a devotion to preserving the centrality of the arts, especially the endangered species of Rock. In the twenty-first century, Van Zandt founded a groundbreaking radio show (Underground Garage), a fiercely independent record label (Wicked Cool), and developed a curriculum to teach students of all ages through the medium of music history. He also rejoined the E Street Band for what has now been a twenty-year victory lap.

UNREQUITED INFATUATIONS chronicles the twists and turns of Stevie Van Zandt’s always surprising life. It is more than just the testimony of a globe-trotting nomad, more than the story of a groundbreaking activist, more than the odyssey of a spiritual seeker, and more than a master class in rock and roll (not to mention a dozen other crafts). It's the best book of its kind because it's the only book of its kind.

The Matzah Ball:
A Novel
by Jean Meltzer
September 28, 2021
MIRA

"The Matzah Ball had me laughing out loud...an all-around terrific read."—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Oy! to the world

Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl with a shameful secret: she loves Christmas. For a decade she’s hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach.

But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspi`ration suddenly runs dry. Hanukkah’s not magical. It’s not merry. It’s not Christmas. Desperate not to lose her contract, Rachel’s determined to find her muse at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah, even if it means working with her summer camp archenemy—Jacob Greenberg.

Though Rachel and Jacob haven’t seen each other since they were kids, their grudge still glows brighter than a menorah. But as they spend more time together, Rachel finds herself drawn to Hanukkah—and Jacob—in a way she never expected. Maybe this holiday of lights will be the spark she needed to set her heart ablaze.

"A luminous celebration of all types of love, threaded with the message that everyone is worthy of it.”—Rachel Lynn Solomon, author of The Ex Talk

Nazis of Copley Square:
The Forgotten Story
of the Christian Front
by Charles Gallagher
(Boston College)
September 28, 2021
HARVARD UNIV PRESS

The forgotten history of American terrorists who, in the name of God, conspired to overthrow the government and formed an alliance with Hitler.

On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover’s charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a “temporary dictatorship” in order to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the front’s ringleader was unbowed: “All I can say is-long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!”

In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves as crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, under assault from godless Communism, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. The front traced its origins to vibrant global Catholic theological movements of the early twentieth century, such as the Mystical Body of Christ and Catholic Action. The front’s anti-Semitism was inspired by Sunday sermons and by lay leaders openly espousing fascist and Nazi beliefs.

Gallagher chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the mainstream political and religious leaders who shielded the front’s activities from scrutiny. Nazis of Copley Square is a grim tale of faith perverted to violent ends, and a warning for those who hope to curb the spread of far-right ideologies today.

REMEMBER THAT INDIANA JONES FILM.... well... there really was an expedition in search for the lost ark of the covenant – in 1909 – not the 1930's...

TRUE RAIDERS
THE UNTOLD STORY OF
THE 1909 EXPEDITION TO FIND THE
LEGENDARY ARK OF THE COVENANT
BY BRAD RICCA, PHD
(Case Western Reserve)
September 21, 2021
St. Martin's Press

True Raiders is The Lost City of Z meets The Da Vinci Code, from critically acclaimed author Brad Ricca.

This book tells the untold true story of Monty Parker, a British rogue nobleman who, after being dared to do so by Ava Astor, the so-called “most beautiful woman in the world,” headed a secret 1909 expedition to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant. Like a real-life version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, this incredible story of adventure and mystery has almost been completely forgotten today.

In 1908, Monty is approached by a strange Finnish scholar named Valter Juvelius who claims to have discovered a secret code in the Bible that reveals the location of the Ark. Monty assembles a ragtag group of blueblood adventurers, a renowned psychic, and a Franciscan father, to engage in a secret excavation just outside the city walls of Jerusalem.

Using recently uncovered records from the original expedition and several newly translated sources, True Raiders is the first retelling of this group’s adventures– in the space between fact and faith, science and romance.

PW write: Ricca follows up Olive the Lionheart with another cinematic history of a European aristocrat’s adventures in distant lands. In 1909, Montague “Monty” Parker, an English nobleman and veteran of the Second Boer War, led an expedition to Palestine in search of the Ark of the Covenant. He was hired by businessmen who believed that a Finnish scholar had discovered a cipher in the Old Testament that, when decoded, provided a map to where the Ark was hidden in a network of subterranean tunnels near Jerusalem. Following the scholar’s map and the findings of an earlier British explorer, Charles Warren, Parker and his team of amateur archaeologists excavated Hezekiah’s Tunnel, believed to have been built in the 8th century BCE to provide Jerusalem with water during a siege by the king of Assyria. Ricca details the history of biblical sites including Gihon Spring, also known as the Virgin’s Fountain, where Mary was believed to have washed Jesus’s swaddling clothes, as well as a strike by local laborers, the race to beat a rival expedition funded by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and allegations that Parker stole antiquities from the Mosque of Omar. Parker’s rumored romance with Ava Astor, the estranged wife of John Jacob Astor, provides a touch of glamour. Archaeology buffs will be enthralled.

Power Born of Dreams:
My Story is Palestine
by Mohammad Sabaaneh
(Cartoonist, Al Hayat al Jdida)
September 21, 2021
Street Noise Books

What does freedom look like from inside an Israeli prison?

The walls of the cell are etched with the names of the prisoners who came before. A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: “You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories,” stories of family, of community, of Gaza, of Palestine.

Mohammad Sabaaneh brings uses his striking linocut artwork to help the world see Palestinian people as human, not as superheroes or political symbols.

Creative Acts for Curious People:
How to Think, Create, and
Lead in Unconventional Ways
(Stanford d.school Library)
by Sarah Stein Greenberg
David M. Kelley (Foreword)
September 21, 2021
Ten Speed Press

“A delightful, compelling book that offers a dazzling array of practical, thoughtful exercises designed to spark creativity, help solve problems, foster connection, and make our lives better.”—Gretchen Rubin, New York Times bestselling author and host of the Happier podcast

In an era of ambiguous, messy problems—as well as extraordinary opportunities for positive change—it’s vital to have both an inquisitive mind and the ability to act with intention. Creative Acts for Curious People is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence.

At Stanford University’s world-renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, aka “the d.school,” students and faculty, experts and seekers bring together diverse perspectives to tackle ambitious projects; this book contains the experiences designed to help them do it. A provocative and highly visual companion, it’s a definitive resource for people who aim to draw on their curiosity and creativity in the face of uncertainty. Teeming with ideas about discovery, learning, and leading the way through unknown creative territory, Creative Acts for Curious People includes memorable stories and more than eighty innovative exercises.

Curated by executive director Sarah Stein Greenberg, after being honed in the classrooms of the d.school, these exercises originated in some of the world’s most inventive and unconventional minds, including those of d.school and IDEO founder David M. Kelley, ReadyMade magazine founder Grace Hawthorne, innovative choreographer Aleta Hayes, Google chief innovation evangelist Frederik G. Pferdt, and many more.

To bring fresh approaches to any challenge–world changing or close to home–you can draw on exercises such as Expert Eyes to hone observation skills, How to Talk to Strangers to foster understanding, and Designing Tools for Teams to build creative leadership. The activities are at once lighthearted, surprising, tough, and impactful–and reveal how the hidden dynamics of design can drive more vibrant ways of making, feeling, exploring, experimenting, and collaborating at work and in life. This book will help you develop the behaviors and deepen the mindsets that can turn your curiosity into ideas, and your ideas into action.

Can We Talk About Israel?:
A Guide for the Curious,
Confused, and Conflicted
by Daniel Sokatch
The New Israel Fund, CEO
Christopher Noxon (Illustrator)
September 21, 2021
Bloomsbury

From the expert who understands both sides of one of the world's most complex, controversial topics, a modern-day Guide for the Perplexed-a primer on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Can't you just explain the Israel situation to me? In, like, 10 minutes or less?" This is the question Daniel Sokatch is used to answering on an almost daily basis as the head of the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to equality and democracy for all Israelis, not just Jews.

Can We Talk About Israel? is the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, grappling with a century-long struggle between two peoples that both perceive themselves as (and indeed are) victims. And it's an attempt to explain why Israel (and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) inspires such extreme feelings-why it seems like Israel is the answer to "what is wrong with the world" for half the people in it, and "what is right with the world" for the other half. As Sokatch asks, is there any other topic about which so many intelligent, educated, and sophisticated people express such strongly and passionately held convictions, and about which they actually know so little?

Complete with engaging illustrations by Christopher Noxon, Can We Talk About Israel? is an easy-to-read yet penetrating and original look at the history and basic contours of one of the most complicated conflicts in the world.

Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero
by Saadia Faruqi
September 7, 2021
Quill Tree Books

At a time when we are all asking questions about identity, grief, and how to stand up for what is right, this book by the author of A Thousand Questions will hit home with young readers who love Hena Khan and Varian Johnson—or anyone struggling to understand recent U.S. history and how it still affects us today.

Yusuf Azeem has spent all his life in the small town of Frey, Texas—and nearly that long waiting for the chance to participate in the regional robotics competition, which he just knows he can win.

Only, this year is going to be more difficult than he thought. Because this year is the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an anniversary that has everyone in his Muslim community on edge.

With “Never Forget” banners everywhere and a hostile group of townspeople protesting the new mosque, Yusuf realizes that the country’s anger from two decades ago hasn’t gone away. Can he hold onto his joy—and his friendships—in the face of heartache and prejudice?

SAY IT LOUD
ON RACE, LAW,
HISTORY AND CULTURE
BY RANDALL KENNEDY
(Harvard Law School)
September 7, 2021
Pantheon

A collection of provocative essays exploring the key social justice issues of our time—from George Floyd to antiracism to inequality and the Supreme Court. Kennedy is "among the most incisive American commentators on race" (The New York Times).

Informed by sharpness of observation and often courting controversy, deep fellow feeling, decency, and wit, Say It Loud! includes:

The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril • Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste • The Princeton Ultimatum: Antiracism Gone Awry • The Constitutional Roots of “Birtherism” • Inequality and the Supreme Court • “Nigger”: The Strange Career Continues • Frederick Douglass: Everyone’s Hero • Remembering Thurgood Marshall • Why Clarence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized • The Politics of Black Respectability • Policing Racial Solidarity

In each essay, Kennedy is mindful of complexity, ambivalence, and paradox, and he is always stirring and enlightening. Say It Loud! is a wide-ranging summa of Randall Kennedy’s thought on the realities and imaginaries of race in America.

PW WRITES: A middle path through America’s racial turmoil is mapped in these trenchant essays. Harvard Law professor Kennedy (For Discrimination) updates previously published pieces that survey hot-button issues and enduring controversies involving race and the law, including the George Floyd protests, campus movements to remove memorials to racists, moral questions surrounding Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 insurrection against Virginia slaveholders, the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, and the tension between integrationism and separatism in Black social thought. It’s a wide-ranging volume that explores constitutional law; harrowing cases of racial oppression; pioneering figures such as Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom Kennedy clerked; the rise of “distinctively Black names”; and the influential ideas of segregationist George Wallace and Black nationalist Elijah Muhammad. Stoutly defending his centrist stance on race against excesses of the right and left, Kennedy revisits his family’s struggles with racism and tartly dismisses conservative Justice Clarence Thomas as “a Republican apparatchik skilled in bureaucratic self-promotion and the advancement of retrograde policies,” but pushes back against critical race theory in legal studies, speech restrictions (he enunciates the N-word “in full and out loud” in classroom discussions of inflammatory speech), and abolition of the police. In a time of polarized racial politics, Kennedy’s closely reasoned and humanely argued takes offer an appealing alternative.

Into the Forest:
A Holocaust Story of Survival,
Triumph, and Love
by Rebecca Frankel
(Foreign Policy mag)
September 7, 2021
St. Martin's Press

From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, Rebecca Frankel's Into the Forest is one family’s inspiring true story of love, escape, and survival.

In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest, the immense primevel (Bia?owie?a) place. They miraculously survived two years in the woods-through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids-until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.

During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life.

From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.

The Auschwitz Photographer:
The Forgotten Story of
the WWII Prisoner Who
Documented Thousands of Lost Souls
by Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis
September 7, 2021
Sourcebooks

The Nazis asked him to swear allegiance to Hitler, betraying his country, his friends, and everything he believed in.

He refused.

Poland, 1939. Professional photographer Wilhelm Brasse is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and finds himself in a deadly race to survive, assigned to work as the camp's intake photographer and take "identity pictures" of prisoners as they arrive by the trainload. Brasse soon discovers his photography skills are in demand from Nazi guards as well, who ask him to take personal portraits for them to send to their families and girlfriends. Behind the camera, Brasse is safe from the terrible fate that so many of his fellow prisoners meet. But over the course of five years, the horrifying scenes his lens capture, including inhumane medical "experiments" led by Josef Mengele, change Brasse forever.

Based on the true story of Wilhelm Brasse, The Auschwitz Photographer is a stark black-and-white reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. This gripping work of World War II narrative nonfiction takes readers behind the barbed wire fences of the world's most feared concentration camp, bringing Brasse's story to life as he clicks the shutter button thousands of times before ultimately joining the Resistance, defying the Nazis, and defiantly setting down his camera for good.

PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS Reports from a Haunted Present
by Dara Horn
September 7, 2021
Essays
WW NORTON

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.

Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager.

Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture - and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly anti-Semitic attacks - Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones.

In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international VENERATION of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the 2019 shootings at a kosher grocery in Jersey City, NJ, the blockbuster traveling exhibition “Auschwitz” at a museum focused on dead Jews, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China (oh, those 'rich and smart Jews' that built Harbin before Japanese colonial powers destroyed it... like a Jewish Disneyland), and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry.

Throughout, she CHALLENGES readers to confront the reasons – in her view - why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.

Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life-trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study-to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an anti-Semitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past-making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

The Christmas Mitzvah
by Jeff Gottesfeld
Michelle Laurentia Agatha (Illustrator)
September 7, 2021
CRESTON BOOKS
Ages 4 – 8

Al Rosen, a Jewish man, takes on the jobs of his Christian neighbors on Christmas Eve and day so they can spend the holiday with their families, starting a tradition that lasts for decades.

Hannah G. Solomon Dared
to Make a Difference
by Bonnie Lindauer
Sofia Moore (Illustrator)
September 1, 2021
KAR BEN
Ages 5 - 10

When Hannah G. Solomon looked around Chicago, the city where she was born, she saw unfairness all around her. Many people were poor and living in terrible conditions. Immigrants from other countries struggled to survive in their new home. Hannah decided to help change that. When she grew up, she founded the National Council of Jewish Women-the first organization to unite Jewish women around the country-and fought to make life better for others, especially women and children, in Chicago and beyond.

A Bear for Bimi
by Jane Breskin Zalben
Yevgenia Nayberg(Illustrator)
September 1, 2021
KAR BEN
Ages 4 - 8

When Bimi’s refugee family immigrates to America and moves into Evie’s neighborhood, not everybody is welcoming. But with the help of Evie’s teddy bear, Bimi’s family becomes part of the neighborhood and Evie makes a new friend.

Recipe for Disaster
by Aimee Lucido
September 14, 2021
HARPER BOOKS
Ages 8 – 12

In this heartfelt middle school drama, Hannah's schemes for throwing her own bat mitzvah unleash family secrets, create rivalries with best friends, and ultimately teach Hannah what being Jewish is all about.

With a delicious mix of prose, poetry, and recipes, this hybrid novel is another fresh, thoughtful, and accessible Versify novel that is cookin’. - New York Times Best-Selling Author Kwame Alexander

Hannah Malfa-Adler is Jew . . . ish. Not that she really thinks about it. She'd prefer to focus on her favorite pastime: baking delicious food! But when her best friend has a beyond-awesome Bat Mitzvah, Hannah starts to feel a little envious ...and a little left out.

Despite her parents firm no, Hannah knows that if she can learn enough about her own faith, she can convince her friends that the party is still in motion. As the secrets mount, a few are bound to explode. When they do, Hannah learns that being Jewish isn't about having a big party and a fancy dress and a first kiss -- it's about actually being Jewish. Most importantly, Hannah realizes that the only person's permission she needs to be Jewish, is her own.

Flavors of the Sun:
The Sahadi’s Guide to Understanding,
Buying, and Using Middle Eastern Ingredients
by Christine Sahadi Whelan
Kristin Teig (Photographer)
September 7, 2021
Chronicle Books

From our Atlantic Avenue neighbors...
A comprehensive guide to vibrant Middle Eastern ingredients, with more than 120 recipes that let them shine, from James Beard award winning Sahadi's market in Brooklyn, New York.

Sumac. Urfa pepper. Halvah. Pomegranate molasses. Preserved lemons. The seasonings, staples, and spice blends used throughout the Middle East offer deliciously simple ways to transform food—once you know how to use them. In FLAVORS OF THE SUN, the people behind the iconic Brooklyn market Sahadi's showcase the versatility of these ingredients in over 120 everyday dishes, including starters, salads, soups, family-friendly meals, and desserts. With sections devoted to recipes boasting Bright, Savory, Spiced, Nutty, and Sweet accents, it offers inspiration, techniques, and intensely flavorful ways to use everything from Aleppo pepper to za'atar with confidence. Throughout, "no-recipe recipes" help build up your flavor intuition so you can effortlessly incorporate any of the featured spices, condiments, and preserves into your daily repertoire.

120 RECIPES WITH A PUNCH: From an updated take on nachos and mac and cheese to a spectacular pistachio cheesecake and tahini-enriched brownies, FLAVORS OF THE SUN features dozens of the store's most-requested dishes as well as Sahadi family favorites. Simple yet loaded with flavor, these recipes will inspire you to make these distinctive Middle Eastern ingredients essential components of your pantry.

OPTIMUM VERSATILITY: Each section addresses a specific flavor profile and offers a set of essential ingredients for achieving it along with helpful tips on how to use them separately or in combination. Look-and-cook mini recipes provide even more ideas for using distinctive ingredients like tahini, Aleppo pepper, and preserved lemons to give a fresh new spin to everything from salad dressings to cocktails.

EXPERT KNOWLEDGE: Family owned, Sahadi's has been a beloved resource since its founding by Abrahim Sahadi, an immigrant from Lebanon, more than 100 years ago. Now welcoming a fifth generation into the business, the Sahadi family's authentic imported goods and exhaustive knowledge continue to inspire local chefs and adventurous home cooks to taste and explore the diverse world of Middle Eastern spices and sundries.

FOR FANS OF PLENTY: Much like PLENTY, this cookbook dives deep into core ingredients and provides intimate insights into flavorful spice blends like dukkah, berbere, ras el hanout, shawarma spices, and more. Each ingredient profile includes an informative buying guide so you can build your pantry like a pro.

Perfect for: home cooks to seasoned chefs; fans of PLENTY; JERUSALEM; SHUK, and ZAHAV; Sahadi's loyal customers; those interested learning about spices and new ways to use them in everyday dishes

Lemon, Love & Olive Oil
by Mina Stone
September 14, 2021
HARPER WAVE

Author of the cult-favorite Cooking for Artists, Mina Stone, returns with a collection of 80 new recipes inspired by her traditional Greek heritage and her years cooking for some of New York’s most innovative artists.

Growing up in a close-knit Greek-American household, of Cleveland/Jewish and Greek heritage (tahini walnut babka), Mina Stone learned to cook from her Yiayia, who taught her that food doesn’t have to be complicated to be delicious—and that almost any dish can be improved with judicious amounts of lemon, olive oil, and salt. In this deeply personal cookbook, Stone celebrates her grandmother and the other influences that have shaped her life, her career, and her culinary tastes and expertise. Lemon, Love & Olive Oil weaves together more than 80 Mediterranean-style dishes with the stories that inspired them.

Stone offers home cooks a taste of her heritage with healthy, flavorful, and uncomplicated dishes such as Syrian Bulgur and Yogurt with Brown Butter Pine Nuts; Persian Figs with Cardamom and Rosewater; Baby Lettuces with Toasted Sesame Seeds, Mint, and Meyer Lemon Yogurt; and Braised Chickpeas with Orange Zest and Garlic Bread Crumbs. These recipes use fresh, flavorful ingredients to create elegantly simple dishes, complemented by beautiful, minimalist photography and original art throughout.

A fresh and unconventional fusion of art and food, Lemon, Love & Olive Oil is an engaging (and delicious!) cultural and culinary tour, all complimented by the design of world-renowned artist Urs Fischer.

The JEWiSH BRIgAGE by Marvano
September 14, 2021
Dead Reckoning

In the waning years of World War II, as the tragic plight of the European Jews was coming to light in ever more horrific detail, a Jewish fighting force, known as the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group, was born as part of the British Eighth Army. Leslie Toliver, a racecar driver in the pre-war years, eagerly joined the all-volunteer force for a chance to fight with his people against those who sought to murder them.

When the war in Europe ends and the "savage continent" sits on the brink of continental civil war from chaos, terror, and famine, Leslie and the Brigade move to Tarvisio, Italy, a border triangle city perfect for covert action. While out searching for Holocaust survivors, Leslie undertakes vigilante missions in Soviet occupied Eastern Europe hunting down Nazis on the run for both vengeance and justice. With each Nazi found or refugee rescued, he looks for more information to complete his most personal mission: to find his mother and fiancée who went missing in the upheaval of the war.

OCTOBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES
OCTOBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES
OCTOBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES

Three Sisters:
A Novel
by Heather Morris
October 5, 2021
St. Martin's Press
BOOK 3 of 3 in the trilogy

From Heather Morris, the New York Times bestselling author of the multi-million copy bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz and of Cilka's Journey: a story of family, courage, and resilience, inspired by a true story.

Against all odds, three Slovakian sisters have survived years of imprisonment in the most notorious death camp in Nazi Germany: Auschwitz. Livia, Magda, and Cibi have clung together, nearly died from starvation and overwork, and the brutal whims of the guards in this place of horror. But now, the allies are closing in and the sisters have one last hurdle to face: the death march from Auschwitz, as the Nazis try to erase any evidence of the prisoners held there. Due to a last minute stroke of luck, the three of them are able to escape formation and hide in the woods for days before being rescued.

And this is where the story begins. From there, the three sisters travel to Israel, to their new home, but the battle for freedom takes on new forms. Livia, Magda, and Cibi must face the ghosts of their past--and some secrets that they have kept from each other--to find true peace and happiness.

Inspired by a true story, and with events that overlap with those of Lale, Gita, and Cilka, The Three Sisters will hold a place in readers' hearts and minds as they experience what true courage really is.

Thank You Modeh Ani
by Rabbi Alyson Solomon
Bryony Clarkson (Illustrator)
October 1, 2021
Berhman / Apples & Honey
Ages 3 - 6

Starting the day with gratitude is positive, and positively Jewish. Rabbi Alyson Solomon takes inspiration from two prayers traditionally recited each morning to create a joyful celebration of our bodies in all their intricacies and diversity, and start each day in the mood to move, to sing, to rejoice.
Includes a note for families explaining the Jewish texts on which the book is based.

Shield of the Maccabees:
A Hanukkah Graphic Novel
by Eric Kimmel
Dov Smiley (Illustrator)
October 1, 2021
Berhman / Apples & Honey
Ages 10 – 13

Our story begins just before the very first Hanukkah . . . Greeks and Jews are living in an uneasy peace in ancient Judea. Jonathan, a Jewish boy, sees a Greek boy begin attacked by bullies and stands up to defend him.

They become best friends. But when war comes to their land, Jonathan joins the Maccabees while his friend Jason joins the Greek army. They seem destined to fight one another. How will their friendship survive?

(((Wasn;t this a play by Dan Fishback in 2012?)))

Larry's Latkes
by Jenna Waldman
Ben Whitehouse (Illustrator)
October 1, 2021
Berhman / Apples & Honey
Ages 3 - 6

Everyone knows that Big Larry (a reptile) makes the best latkes in town.

This year he is throwing a Hanukkah party for all this friends, and the latkes need to be extra special. So he goes on a quest to find some brand new flavors. But peaches are a soggy mess, and turnips are a flop. Big Larry’s kitchen is a latke disaster. Good thing he has some help from his friends.

Jenna Waldman brings her joyful rhymes and a friendly alligator to Hanukkah, helped by a sweet menagerie created by Ben Whitehouse.

Pinky Bloom and the Case
of the Magical Menorah
by Judy Press, Erica-Jane Waters (Illustrator)
October 1, 2021
KAR BEN
Reading Ages 8 - 12

Pinky Bloom, Brooklyn's greatest kid detective, takes on a new case just in time for Hanukkah.

When an extremely valuable ancient Israeli coin is stolen from her synagogue, Pinky sets out to find the thief.

But other strange events keep distracting her. Could they be connected to the supposedly magical menorah that her neighbor has left in her family's care? Only Pinky can get to the bottom of this-with a little help from her annoying little brother.

Hello, Hanukkah!
Board book
by Susan S. Novich (Illustrator)
(Rhode Island School of Design RISD)
October 1, 2021
KAR-BEN
Reading Ages 2 - 6

"Hello, Hanukkah!" says the friendly badger as he prepares to count the candles in the Hanukkah menorah. This whimsical board book features a cute and clever badger teaching counting and coloring concepts along with Hanukkah customs.

WHEN I GROW UP... I WANT TO BE A FUNERAL DIRECTOR OR GRIEF COUNSELOR...

Sorry For Your Loss
by Joanne Levy
October 12, 2021
ORCA BOOK
Reading Ages 8 - 12

Evie Walman is not obsessed with death. She does think about it a lot, though, but only because her family runs a Jewish funeral home. At twelve, Evie already knows she’s going to be a funeral director when she grows up.

So what if the kids at school call her “corpse girl” and say she smells like death? They’re just mean and don’t get how important it is to have someone take care of things when your world is falling apart.

Evie loves dusting caskets, polishing pews, and vacuuming the chapel-and on funeral days, she dresses up and hands out tissues and offers her condolences to mourners. She doesn’t normally help her parents with the grieving families directly, until one day when they ask her to help with Oren, a boy who was in a horrific car accident that killed both his parents. Oren refuses to speak and Evie, who is nursing her own private grief, is determined to find a way to help him deal with his loss.

The Sour Cherry Tree
by Ms. Naseem Hrab
Nahid Kazemi (Illustrator)
October 12, 2021
OwlKids
Reading Ages 4 - 8

A heartwarming look at love, loss, and memorable objects through the eyes of a child

After her grandfather’s death, a young girl wanders through his house. As she tours each room, the objects she discovers stir memories of her grandfather-her baba bozorg. His closet full of clothes reminds her of the mints he kept in his pockets. His favorite teacup conjures thoughts of the fig cookies he would offer her. The curtains in the living room bring up memories of hide-and-seek games and the special relationship that she and her baba bozorg shared, even though they spoke different languages.

The Sour Cherry Tree is an authentic look at death and loss centred on the experiences of a child, both strikingly whimsical and matter-of-fact. Drawing on the Iranian-Canadian author’s childhood memories, this tender meditation on grief, love, and memory is at once culturally specific and universally relatable.

The Three Latkes
by Eric A. Kimmel (
Feronia Parker-Thomas (Illustrator)
October 1, 2021
KAR BEN
Reading Ages 4 - 8

When three Hanukkah latkes fight over which of them tastes the best, the winner is decided by the family cat. Which will he choose? The excited latkes can’t wait to find out, but perhaps they should be careful what they wish for!

With Great Power:
The Marvelous Stan Lee
by Annie Hunter Eriksen
Lee Gatlin (Illustrator)
October 5, 2021
Page Street Kids
Reading Ages 8-12

Every superhero has their origin story: a radioactive spider bite turns ordinary teen Peter Parker into Spider-Man, wealthy Tony Stark escapes captivity by building his Iron Man suit, scientist Bruce Banner survives gamma rays only to transform into the Hulk.

For Stan Lee, it was books of adventure, monsters, and magic that helped him transform from an ordinary boy to a superstar superhero creator. At first, reading these stories was a pathway to a world bigger than his family’s tiny apartment in New York City, but it wasn’t long until Stan was crafting his own stories, creating comics professionally when he was still just a teenager! Still, writing wasn’t exciting when the heroes were always the same: strong, perfect, and boring. Stan had a revolutionary idea. What if anyone-even an ordinary kid-could be a superhero?

Discover more about the life of the Cameo King, known to many for his appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and how he revolutionized comics with this vibrant introduction bustling with action, humor, and references for fans new and old. ‘Nuff said!

Red and Green and
Blue and White by Lee Wind
Paul O. Zelinksy (Illustrator)
October 19, 2021
Levine
Reading Ages 4-7

On a block dressed up in Red and Green
one house shone Blue and White.

It's a holiday season that both Isaac, whose family is Jewish, and Teresa, whose family is Christian, have looked forward to for months! They've been counting the days, playing in the snow, making cookies, drawing (Teresa) and writing poems (Isaac). They enjoy all the things they share, as well as the things that make them different.

But when Isaac's window is smashed in the middle of the night, it seems like maybe not everyone appreciates "difference."

Inspired by a true story, this is a tale of a community that banded together to spread light.

I'll Keep You Close
by Jeska Verstegen
Bill Nagelkerke (Translator)
Fall 2021
LEVINE
Reading Ages 8-12

Jeska doesn't know why her mother keeps the curtains drawn so tightly every day. And what exactly is she trying to drown out when she floods the house with Mozart? What are they hiding from?

When Jeska's grandmother accidentally calls her by a stranger's name, she seizes her first clue to uncovering her family's past, and hopefully to all that's gone unsaid. With the help of an old family photo album, her father's encyclopedia collection, and the unquestioning friendship of a stray cat, the silence begins to melt into frightening clarity: Jeska's family survived a terror that they've worked hard to keep secret all her life. And somehow, it has both nothing and everything to do with her, all at once.

A true story of navigating generational trauma as a child, I'll Keep You Close is about what comes after disaster: how survivors move forward, what they bring with them when they do, and the promise of beginning again while always keeping the past close.

My Mother's Delightful Deaths
by Carla Haslbauer
Fall 2021
NorthSouth Books
Reading Ages 4-8

What could it mean that your mom is paid to die? It could mean she’s an opera singer!

How does it feel to grow up as the child of a glamorous opera singer? It’s anything but boring! In a single day, Mom’s mood can change—from very quiet to loud to quick-tempered. By day she plays with the children, but at night a transformation occurs! Who will Mother be today? When Mom is on stage, she delights her audience and her countless tragic, but also funny, death scenes leave a special impression. But to her family, she is always Mom.

Carla Haslbauer’s hilarious debut picture book, inspired by the world of opera, reminds us that we all slip into many different roles

The Lost Café Schindler:
The Lost Cafe Schindler:
One Family, Two Wars,
and the Search for Truth
by Meriel Schindler
October 12, 2021
W.W. NORTON

An extraordinary memoir of a Jewish family spanning two world wars and its flight from Nazi-occupied Austria.

Meriel Schindler spent her adult life trying to keep her father, Kurt, at bay. But when he died in 2017, he left behind piles of Nazi-era documents related to her family’s fate in Innsbruck and a treasure trove of family albums reaching back to before World War I. Meriel was forced to confront not only their fractured relationship, but also the truth behind their family history.

The Lost Café Schindler re-creates the journey of an extraordinary family, whose relatives included the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother when she was dying of breast cancer; the Kafka family; and Alma Schindler, the wife of Gustav Mahler. But the narrative centers around the Café Schindler, famous for its pastries, home-distilled liquors, live entertainment, and hospitality-which was expropriated during the Nazi era. This is a story of tragic loss-several relatives disappeared in Terezín and Auschwitz-but ultimately of reclamation and reconciliation.

In the Midst of Civilized Europe:
The Pogroms of 1918–1921
and the Onset of the Holocaust
by Jeffrey Veidlinger
(((University of Michigan)))
October 12, 2021
METROPOLITAN

“The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” -Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands

Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine and Poland by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms-ethnic riots-dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.

Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Mooncakes and Milk Bread:
Sweet and Savory Recipes
Inspired by Chinese Bakeries
by Kristina Cho (Author
October 12, 2021
HARPER Horizon

In Mooncakes & Milk Bread, food blogger Kristina Cho (eatchofood.com) introduces readers to Chinese bakery cooking with fresh, uncomplicated interpretations of classic recipes for the modern baker.

Inside you’ll find sweet and savory baked buns, steamed buns, Chinese breads, unique cookies, whimsical cakes, juicy dumplings, Chinese breakfast dishes, and drinks. Recipes for steamed buns, pineapple buns with a thick slice of butter, silky smooth milk tea, and chocolate Swiss rolls all make an appearance--because a book about Chinese bakeries wouldn’t be complete without them!

Kristina teaches you to whip up these delicacies like a pro, including how to
Knead dough without a stand mixer
Avoid collapsed steamed buns
Infuse creams and custards with aromatic tea flavors
Mix the most workable dumpling dough
Pleat dumplings like an Asian grandma

This is the first book to exclusively focus on Chinese bakeries and cafes, but it isn’t just for those nostalgic for Chinese bakeshop foods--it’s for all home bakers who want exciting new recipes to add to their repertoires.

Come and Hear:
What I Saw in My
Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey
through the Talmud
by Adam Kirsch
October 26, 2021
Brandeis Univ Press

A literary critic’s journey through the Talmud.

Spurred by a curiosity about Daf Yomi—a study program launched in the 1920s in which Jews around the world read one page of the Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years—Adam Kirsch approached Tablet magazine to write a weekly column about his own Daf Yomi experience.

An avowedly secular Jew, Kirsch, an editor at The Wall Street Journal, did not have a religious source for his interest in the Talmud; rather, as a student of Jewish literature and history, he came to realize that he couldn’t fully explore these subjects without some knowledge of the Talmud.

This book is for readers who are in a similar position. Most people have little sense of what the Talmud actually is — how the text moves, its preoccupations and insights, and its moments of strangeness and profundity. As a critic and journalist Kirsch has experience in exploring difficult texts, discussing what he finds there, and why it matters. His exploration into the Talmud is best described as a kind of travel writing—a report on what he saw during his seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud. For readers who want to travel that same path, there is no better guide.

The Book of Mac:
Remembering Mac Miller
by Donna-Claire Chesman
October 26, 2021
Permuted Press

An album-by-album celebration of the life and music of Mac Miller through oral histories, intimate reflections, and critical examinations of his enduring work.

Following Mac Miller’s tragic passing in 2018, Donna-Claire Chesman dedicated a year to chronicling his work through the unique lens of her relationship to the music and Mac’s singular relationship to his fans. Like many who’d been following him since he’d started releasing mixtapes at eighteen years old, she felt as if she’d come of age alongside the rapidly evolving artist, with his music being crucial to her personal development.

“I want people to remember his humanity as they’re listening to the music, to realize how much bravery and courage it takes to be that honest, be that self-aware, and be that real about things going on internally. He let us witness that entire journey. He never hid that.” —Kehlani, friend and musician.

The project evolved to include intimate interviews with many of Mac’s closest friends and collaborators, from his Most Dope Family in Pittsburgh to the producers and musicians who assisted him in making his everlasting music, including Big Jerm, Rex Arrow, Wiz Khalifa, Benjy Grinberg, Just Blaze, Josh Berg, Syd, Thundercat, and more. These voices, along with the author’s commentary, provide a vivid and poignant portrait of this astonishing artist—one who had just released a series of increasingly complex albums, demonstrating what a musical force he was and how heartbreaking it was to lose him.

“As I’m reading the lyrics, it’s crazy. It’s him telling us that he hopes we can always respect him. I feel like this is a message from him, spiritually. A lot of the time, his music was like little letters and messages to his friends, family, and people he loved, to remind them of who he really was.” —Quentin Cuff, best friend and tour manager.

MODERNIST PIZZA
by
Nathan Myhrvold
Francisco Migoya
October 5, 2021
About $400 for the set

Modernist Pizza is the definitive guide to the world’s most popular food. Created by the team that published the critically acclaimed Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and Modernist Bread, this groundbreaking set is the culmination of exhaustive research, travel, and experiments to collect and advance the world’s knowledge of pizza. Authors Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya share practical tips and innovative techniques, which are the outcome of hundreds of tests and experiments.

Spanning 1,708 pages, including three volumes plus a recipe manual, Modernist Pizza is much more than a cookbook: it’s an indispensable resource for anyone who not only loves to eat pizza but is also interested in the science, stories, cultures, and history behind it.

Each gorgeously illustrated chapter examines a different aspect of pizza, from its history and top travel destinations to dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, equipment, and more. Housed in a red stainless-steel case, Modernist Pizza contains over 1,000 traditional and avant-garde recipes to make pizza from around the globe, each carefully developed with both professional and home pizzaioli in mind. Modernist Pizza will provide you with the tools to evolve your craft, invent, and make sublime creations. There’s never been a better time to make pizza.

Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys:
Recipes, Techniques, and Traditions
from around the World
by Sandor Ellix Katz
October 7, 2021
Chelsea Green
From James Beard Award winner and New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of Fermentation: the recipes, processes, cultural traditions, and stories from around the globe that inspire Sandor Katz and his life’s work-a cookbook destined to become a modern classic essential for every home chef.

For the past two decades, fermentation expert and bestselling author Sandor Katz has traveled the world, both teaching and learning about the many fascinating and delicious techniques for fermenting foods. Wherever he’s gone, he has gleaned valuable insights into the cultures and traditions of local and indigenous peoples, whether they make familiar ferments like sauerkraut or less common preparations like natto and koji.

In his latest book, Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys, Katz takes readers along with him to revisit these special places, people, and foods.

This cookbook goes far beyond mere general instructions and explores the transformative process of fermentation through:

Detailed descriptions of traditional fermentation techniques Celebrating local customs and ceremonies that surround particular ferments Profiles of the farmers, business owners, and experimenters Katz has met on his journeys
It contains over 60 recipes for global ferments, including:
Chicha de jora (Peru)
Misa Ono’s Shio-koji, or salt koji (Japan)
Doubanjiang (China)
Efo riro spinach stew (Nigeria)
Whole sour cabbages (Croatia)
Chucula hot chocolate (Colombia)

Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys reminds us that the magical power of fermentation belongs to everyone, everywhere. Perfect for adventurous foodies, armchair travelers, and fermentation fanatics who have followed Katz’s work through the years-from Wild Fermentation to The Art of Fermentation to Fermentation as Metaphor-this book reflects the enduring passion and accumulated wisdom of this unique man, who is arguably the world’s most experienced and respected advocate of all things fermented.

Baking with Dorie:
Sweet, Salty & Simple
by Dorie Greenspan
Mark Weinberg (Photographer)
October 19, 2021
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt HMH

From James Beard Award-winning and NYT best-selling author Dorie Greenspan, a baking book of more than 150 exciting recipes

Say Dorie, and people think of Finding Nemo
Say “Dorie Greenspan” and think baking.

The renowned author of thirteen cookbooks and winner of five James Beard and two IACP awards offers a collection that celebrates the sweet, the savory, and the simple. Every recipe is signature Dorie: easy—beginners can ace every technique in this book—and accessible, made with everyday ingredients. Are there surprises? Of course!

You’ll find ingenious twists like Berry Biscuits. Footlong cheese sticks made with cream puff dough. Apple pie with browned butter spiced like warm mulled cider. A s’mores ice cream cake with velvety chocolate sauce, salty peanuts, and toasted marshmallows. It’s a book of simple yet sophisticated baking. The chapters are classic: Breakfast Stuff • Cakes • Cookies • Pies, Tarts, Cobblers and Crisps • Two Perfect Little Pastries • Salty Side Up. The recipes are unexpected. And there are “Sweethearts” throughout, mini collections of Dorie’s all-time favorites. Don’t miss the meringue Little Marvels or the Double-Decker Caramel Cake. Like all of Dorie’s recipes, they lend themselves to being remade, refashioned, and riffed on.

Ottolenghi Test Kitchen:
Shelf Love:
Recipes to Unlock the Secrets
of Your Pantry, Fridge, and Freezer:
A Cookbook Paperback
by Noor Murad and Yotam Ottolenghi
October 19, 2021
CLARKSON POTTER

From the New York Times bestselling author and his superteam of chefs, this is Ottolenghi, unplugged: 85+ irresistible recipes for relaxed, flexible home cooking that will bring the love to every shelf in your pantry, fridge, and freezer.

Led by Yotam Ottolenghi and Noor Murad, the revered team of chefs at the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen gives everyday home cooks the accessible yet innovative Middle Eastern-inspired recipes they need to put dinner on the table with less stress and less fuss in a convenient, flexibound package. With fit-for-real-life chapters like “The Freezer Is Your Friend,” “That One Shelf in the Back of Your Pantry,” and “Who Does the Dishes?” (a.k.a. One-Pot Meals), Shelf Love teaches readers how to flex with fewer ingredients, get creative with their pantry staples, and add playful twists to familiar classics.

All the signature Ottolenghi touches fans love are here—big flavors, veggie-forward appeal, diverse influences—but are distilled to maximize ease and creative versatility. These dishes pack all the punch and edge you expect from Ottolenghi, using what you've got to hand—that last can of chickpeas or bag of frozen peas—without extra trips to the grocery store. Humble ingredients and crowd-pleasing recipes abound, including All-the-Herbs Dumplings with Caramelized Onions, Mac and Cheese with Za'atar Pesto, Cacio e Pepe Chickpeas, and Crispy Spaghetti and Chicken.

With accessible recipe features like MIYO (Make It Your Own) that encourage ingredient swaps and a whimsical, lighthearted spirit, the fresh voices of the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen will deliver kitchen confidence and joyful inspiration to new and old fans alike.

A Tale of Two Omars:
A Memoir of Family, Revolution,
and Coming Out During the Arab Spring
by Omar Sharif Jr
October 5, 2021

One Omar Sharif was a film star in Egypt and America... Hollywood royalty.
The other Omar, his grandson, is a gay, Jewish actor, and … Canadian.

"A powerful and essential memoir of self-discovery . . . Brimming with beautiful remembrances of his grandfather and terrifying stories of abuse and homophobia, this is an essential book that shines a much-needed light on the intersection of Arab and queer identity." —Abdi Nazemian, Lambda Literary Award–winning author of Like a Love Story, a Stonewall Honor Book

The grandson of Hollywood royalty on his father’s side and Holocaust survivors on his mother’s, Omar Sharif Jr. learned early on how to move between worlds, from the Montreal suburbs to the glamorous orbit of his grandparents’ Cairo. His famous name always protected him wherever he went. When, in the wake of the Arab Spring, he made the difficult decision to come out in the pages of The Advocate, he knew his life would forever change. What he didn’t expect was the backlash that followed.

From bullying, to illness, attempted suicide, becoming a victim of sex trafficking, death threats by the thousands, revolution and never being able to return to a country he once called home, Omar Sharif Jr. has overcome more challenges than one might imagine. Drawing on the lessons he learned from both sides of his family, A Tale of Two Omars charts the course of an iconoclastic life, revealing in the process the struggles and successes that attend a public journey of self-acceptance and a life dedicated in service to others.

Squirrel Hill:
The Tree of Life Synagogue
Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood
by Mark Oppenheimer
October 5, 2021
KNOPF

A piercing portrait of the struggles and triumphs of a singular community in the wake of unspeakable tragedy that highlights the hopes, fears, and tensions all Americans must confront on the road to healing.

Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in the country, known for its tight-knit community and the profusion of multigenerational families. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill--the most deadly anti-Semitic attack in American history.

Many neighborhoods would be understandably subsumed by despair and recrimination after such an event, but not this one. Mark Oppenheimer poignantly shifts the focus away from the criminal and his crime, and instead presents the historic, spirited community at the center of this heartbreak. He speaks with residents and nonresidents, Jews and gentiles, survivors and witnesses, teenagers and seniors, activists and historians.

Together, these stories provide a kaleidoscopic and nuanced account of collective grief, love, support, and revival. But Oppenheimer also details the difficult dialogue and messy confrontations that Squirrel Hill had to face in the process of healing, and that are a necessary part of true growth and understanding in any community. He has reverently captured the vibrancy and caring that still characterize Squirrel Hill, and it is this phenomenal resilience that can provide inspiration to any place burdened with discrimination and hate.

Meir Kahane:
The Public Life and Political
Thought of an American Jewish Radical
by Shaul Magid
October 5, 2021
PRINCETON UNIV PRESS

The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survival

Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial figure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought.

Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane’s theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenge he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment.

This incisive book shows how Kahane was a quintessentially American figure, one who adopted the radicalism of the militant Left as a tenet of Jewish survival.

A Queen to the Rescue:
The Story of Henrietta Szold,
Founder of Hadassah
by Nancy Churnin
Yevgenia Nayberg (Illustrator)
October 5, 2021
CRESTON BOOKS
Ages 4 – 8

Henrietta Szold took Queen Esther as a model and worked hard to save the Jewish people. In 1912, she founded the Jewish women's social justice organization, Hadassah. Henrietta started Hadassah determined to offer emergency medical care to mothers and children in Palestine. When WWII broke out, she rescued Jewish children from the Holocaust, and broadened Hadassah's mission to include education, youth development, and women's rights. Hadassah offers free help to all who need it and continues its mission to this day.

NOVEMBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES
NOVEMBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES
NOVEMBER 2021 BOOK RELEASES

Operation Joktan
(A Nir Tavor Mossad Thriller)
Amir Tsarfati, Steve Yohn
November 16, 2021

The thrilling first installment in a new series from bestselling prophecy author Amir Tsarfati and Steve Yohn

In present-day Israel, Mossad intelligence catches word that a foreign militia is planning a drone strike on Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. Nir Tavor, an Israeli secret service member turned Mossad agent, has noticed an increasing number of Arab nations being targeted by radicals in the lead-up to the Abraham Accords.

Reteaming with Nicole le Roux, a fellow agent and former flame, Nir is prepared to do everything he can to stop this attack. Yet Nicole has reentered his life as a changed woman with a newfound peace. As they work together to stop the radicals using a combination of cutting-edge technology and on-the-ground manpower, Nir grows increasingly captivated by the hope that has transformed Nicole since they were last together.

Authors Amir Tsarfati and Steve Yohn draw on true events as well as political and tactical insights Amir learned from his time in the Israeli Defense Forces. For believers in God’s life-changing promises, Operation Joktan is a suspense-filled page-turner that illuminates the blessing Israel can be to the world.

Both/And:
A Life in Many Worlds
by Huma Abedin
November 2, 2021
Scribner

So many people have an opinion on Huma Abedin (and Hillary Clinton) without knowing the facts. They think of her as a driven focused power hungry political player who attached herself to the Clinton's, married a political striver (Anthony Weiner) to form a power couple of a new generation, and had it all fall apart as Clinton lost and Anthony Weiner was jailed. BUT this memoir sets the record straight. In her book, Huma Abedin — Hillary Clinton’s famously private top aide and longtime adviser — takes command and defines her own story.

In her memoir, she writes that she is the daughter of Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and advocates who split their time between Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the United States. She grapples with family, legacy, identity, faith, marriage, and motherhood.

Abedin scored a college internship in the office of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1996. She found that thrived in rooms with diplomats and sovereigns, entrepreneurs and artists, philanthropists and activists (I mean, who wouldn't? It is much easier to thrive among celebrities than with regular people...), and Huma witnessed many crucial moments including Camp David's attempts at Mideast peace, Ground Zero in the days after the 9/11 attacks, the inauguration of Barack Obama, the the time Hillary was nominated at the DNC as the party's first female presidential candidate.

Abedin’s relationship with Clinton has seen both women through extraordinary personal and professional highs, as well as the lows that were played out in public. Both women had to deal with spouses who were sex addicts or used sex for power. Both women had to deal with whisper campaigns about infidelity and being LGBT. But in her memoir, she writes of Clinton as mentor, confidante, and role model. Abedin cuts through caricature, rumor, and misinformation to reveal a crystal-clear portrait of Clinton as a brilliant and caring leader a steadfast friend, generous, funny, hardworking, and dedicated. Both/And is a candid and heartbreaking chronicle of Abedin’s marriage to Anthony Weiner, what drew her to him, how much she wanted to believe in him, the devastation wrought by his betrayals—and their shared love for their son.

It is also a timeless story of a young woman with aspirations and ideals coming into her own in high-pressure jobs, and a testament to the potential for women in leadership to blaze a path forward while supporting those who follow in their footsteps. Both/And describes Abedin’s journey through the opportunities and obstacles, the trials and triumphs, of a full and complex life. Abedin’s compassion and courage, her resilience and grace, her work ethic and mission are an inspiration to people of all ages.

“This journey has led me through exhilarating milestones and devastating setbacks,” said Abedin. “I have walked both with great pride and in overwhelming shame. It is a life I am—more than anything—enormously grateful for and a story I look forward to sharing.”

Huda F Are You?
by Huda Fahmy
November 2, 2021
Dial Books

From the creator of Yes, I'm Hot In This, this cheeky, hilarious, and honest graphic novel asks the question everyone has to figure out for themselves: Who are you?

Huda and her family just moved to Dearborn, Michigan, a small town with a big Muslim population. In her old town, Huda knew exactly who she was: She was the hijabi girl. But in Dearborn, everyone is the hijabi girl.

Huda is lost in a sea of hijabis, and she can't rely on her hijab to define her anymore. She has to define herself. So she tries on a bunch of cliques, but she isn't a hijabi fashionista or a hijabi athlete or a hijabi gamer. She's not the one who knows everything about her religion or the one all the guys like. She's miscellaneous, which makes her feel like no one at all. Until she realizes that it'll take finding out who she isn't to figure out who she is.

Klezmer!
by Kyra Teis
November 2, 2021
KAR BEN
AGES 4 - 8

When Eastern European Jewish immigrants bring their klezmer music with them to America, it takes on a rockin’ new vibe, adding elements of Jazz borrowed from its new country. In the beautifully illustrated Klezmer!, a child makes an exciting music-filled visit to her grandparents’ apartment in New York City, learning all about the evolution of this toe-tapping music genre.

The Rabbi and the Reverend:
Joachim Prinz, Martin Luther King Jr.,
and Their Fight against Silence
by Audrey Ades
Chiara Fedele (Illustrator)
KAR BEN
AGES 4 - 8

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, he did not stand alone. He was joined by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who also addressed the crowd. Though Rabbi Prinz and Dr. King came from very different backgrounds, they were united by a shared belief in justice. And they knew that remaining silent in the face of injustice was wrong. Together, they spoke up and fought for a better future.

Martin Luther King, Jr. gained inspiration that fueled his passionate and relentless work for justice and civil rights from many people, such as Mahatma Gandhi, and places, such as the segregated South where he spent his youthful years. One of his lesser-known influences was Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who both experienced and spoke out against racism in Nazi Germany. When Prinz was forced to flee to America, he was shocked to see the same kind of treatment he was fleeing being experienced by Black individuals in America. Prinz began to speak out, proclaiming that silence about injustices is the greatest threat to justice for all. This book parallels the lives of the two men as well as their shared message, eventually covering how it led them to speak together during the 1963 March on Washington. This is a short but important book that gives readers one more angle on the Civil Rights story, another venue for sharing the message of justice, a reinforcement of the vital need to speak up against wrongs, and an example of how it takes many individuals to create a movement. The subdued tones and unfinished lines of the drawings add to the seriousness and reflect the unfinished nature of the subject. Included at the end of the story is a helpful timeline, a photograph of the event, and several suggested books for further reading.

Sydney A. Frankel's
Summer Mix-Up
by Danielle Joseph
KAR BEN
AGES 8-12

Sydney Frankel, soon to be a sixth-grader, is looking forward to a summer of fun with her best friend, Maggie. She figures she deserves some time to herself to do what she wants before her mom delivers Sydney's new sibling in just four months. Too bad Sydney's mom has other plans for her.

Sydney's forced to take a summer course at the South Miami Community Center. She's allowed to take any class, except for what she really wants-a reading course. But when Maggie comes up with a switcheroo plan so that they can both take the classes they like, unexpected complications arise.

The Backyard Secrets
of Danny Wexler
by Karen Pokras
KAR BEN
AGES 8-12

Eleven-year-old Danny Wexler, the only Jewish boy in his blue-collar town during the late 1970s, is obsessed with the Bermuda Triangle. When a local child goes missing, Danny's convinced it's connected to an old Bermuda Triangle theory involving UFOs. With his two best friends and their Spacetron telescope, Danny heads to his backyard to investigate.

But hunting for extraterrestrials is complicated, and it doesn't help that his friend Nicholas's mom doesn't want her son hanging out with a Jewish boy. Equipped with his super-secret spy notebook, Danny sets out to fight both the aliens and the growing anti-Semitism in the town, in hopes of mending his divided community.

Expect the Unexpected:
Ten Lessons on Truth,
Service, and the Way Forward
by Anthony Fauci, MD
November 2, 2021
Hachette

In his own words, world-renowned infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci shares the lessons that have shaped his life philosophy, offering an intimate view of one of the world's greatest medical minds as well as universal advice to live by.

Before becoming the face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and America’s most trusted doctor, Dr. Anthony Fauci had already devoted three decades to public service. Those looking to live a more compassionate and purposeful life will find inspiration in his unique perspective on leadership, expecting the unexpected, and finding joy in difficult times.

With more than three decades spent combating some of the most dangerous diseases to strike humankind-- AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19--Dr. Fauci has worked in daunting professional conditions and shouldered great responsibility. The earnest reflections in these pages offer a universal message on how to lead in times of crisis and find resilience in the face of disappointments and obstacles.

Sure to strike a chord with readers, the inspiring words of wisdom in this book are centered around life lessons compiled from hours of interviews, offering a concrete path to a bright and hopeful future.

Under Jerusalem:
The Buried History of the
World's Most Contested City
by Andrew Lawler (Archaeology magazine)
November 2, 2021
Doubleday

A sweeping history of the hidden world below the Holy City—a saga of biblical treasures, intrepid explorers, and political upheaval

In 1863, a French senator arrived in Jerusalem hoping to unearth relics dating to biblical times. Digging deep underground, he discovered an ancient grave that, he claimed, belonged to an Old Testament queen. News of his find ricocheted around the world, evoking awe and envy alike, and inspiring others to explore Jerusalem’s storied past.

In the century and a half since the Frenchman broke ground, Jerusalem has drawn a global cast of fortune seekers and missionaries, archaeologists and zealots, all of them eager to extract the biblical past from beneath the city’s streets and shrines. Their efforts have had profound effects, not only on our understanding of Jerusalem’s history, but on its hotly disputed present. The quest to retrieve ancient Jewish heritage has sparked bloody riots and thwarted international peace agreements. It has served as a cudgel, a way to stake a claim to the most contested city on the planet. Today, the earth below Jerusalem remains a battleground in the struggle to control the city above.

Under Jerusalem takes readers into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City. It brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape. With clarity and verve, acclaimed journalist Andrew Lawler reveals how their pursuit has not only defined the conflict over modern Jerusalem, but could provide a map for two peoples and three faiths to peacefully coexist.

Watching Darkness Fall:
FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise
of Adolf Hitler
by David McKean
November 2, 2021
St. Martin's

A gripping and groundbreaking account of how all but one of FDR's ambassadors in Europe misjudged Hitler and his intentions

As German tanks rolled toward Paris in late May 1940, the U.S. Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, was determined to stay put, holed up in the Chateau St. Firmin in Chantilly, his country residence. Bullitt told the president that he would neither evacuate the embassy nor his chateau, an eighteenth Renaissance manse with a wine cellar of over 18,000 bottles, even though “we have only two revolvers in this entire mission with only forty bullets.”

As German forces closed in on the French capital, Bullitt wrote the president, “In case I should get blown up before I see you again, I want you to know that it has been marvelous to work for you.” As the fighting raged in France, across the English Channel, Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy wrote to his wife Rose, “The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the allies.”

David McKean's Watching Darkness Fall will recount the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and the road to war from the perspective of four American diplomats in Europe who witnessed it firsthand: Joseph Kennedy, William Dodd, Breckinridge Long, and William Bullitt, who all served in key Western European capitals-London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Moscow-in the years prior to World War II. In many ways they were America’s first line of defense and they often communicated with the president directly, as Roosevelt's eyes and ears on the ground. Unfortunately, most of them underestimated the power and resolve of Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Third Reich.

Watching Darkness Fall is a gripping new history of the years leading up to and the beginning of WWII in Europe told through the lives of five well-educated and mostly wealthy men all vying for the attention of the man in the Oval Office.

The Cactus and Snowflake at Work:
How the Logical and Sensitive
Can Thrive Side by Side
by Devora Zack
November 2, 2021
Berrett Koehler

From the networking specialist who is a popular speaker in corporate America and among Jewish orgs.

This hilarious and profound workplace guide proves the rigorously rational and the supremely sympathetic can meet in the middle and merge their strengths. Readers will discover how blending with their opposite opens the pathway to being their truest selves.

The famed Myers-Briggs personality scale says that Feelers (who lead with their hearts) put more weight on personal concerns and the people involved, and Thinkers (who lead with their heads) are guided by objective principles and impartial facts. This book calls them Cacti and Snowflakes—each singularly transcendent. But can people with such fundamentally different ways of making sense of and engaging with the world work together?

Yes, says Devora Zack! The key is not to try to change each other. Zack says we can directly control only three things: what we say, what we think, and what we do. The best use of our energy is to focus on our own reactions and perceptions rather than try to “fix” other people.

This book includes an assessment so readers can learn where they are on the Thinker/Feeler spectrum—and because it’s a spectrum, readers might well be a snowcactus or a cactusflake. Then Zack helps them figure out where other people might be, guiding them through myraid modes of communication and motivation based on personality type. She includes real-life scenarios that show how to nurture one’s nature while successfully connecting with those on the other side.

As always, Zack fearlessly and entertainingly dispels myths, squashes stereotypes, and transforms perceived liabilities into strengths. And she once again affirms that, like chocolate and peanut butter, we are better together.

God: An Anatomy
by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
(Exeter)
November 23, 2021
KNOPF

An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers--with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous.

From the professor of Hebrew bible and specialist in the religion of ancient Israel/Judea. The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. Here is a portrait--arrived at through the author's close examination of and research into the Bible--of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe--and every part of the body in between--this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before.

By the Grace of the Game:
The Holocaust, A Basketball Legacy,
and an Unprecedented American Dream
by Dan Grunfeld
November 16, 2021
Triumph

When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive.

In By the Grace of the Game, Dan Grunfeld, once a basketball standout himself at Stanford University, shares the remarkable story of his family, a delicately interwoven narrative that doesn't lack in heartbreak yet remains as deeply nourishing as his grandmother's Hungarian cooking, so lovingly described. The true improbability of the saga lies in the discovery of a game that unknowingly held the power to heal wounds, build bridges, and tie together a fractured Jewish family. If the magnitude of an American dream is measured by the intensity of the nightmare that came before and the heights of the triumph achieved after, then By the Grace of the Game recounts an American dream story of unprecedented scale.

From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game.

Year with Martin Buber:
Wisdom on the Weekly Torah Portion
(JPS Daily Inspiration)
by Rabbi Dennis S. Ross
December 1, 2021
JPS, Nebraska, Jewish Publication Society

The teachings of the great twentieth-century Jewish thinker Martin Buber empower us to enter a spiritual dimension that often passes unnoticed in the daily routine. In A Year with Martin Buber, the first Torah commentary to focus on his life’s work, we experience the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and eleven Jewish holidays through Buber’s eyes.

While best known for the spiritual concept of the I-Thou relationship between people, Buber graced us with other fundamentals, including Over Against, Afterglow, Will and Grace, Reification, Inclusion, and Imagine the Real. And his life itself—for example, Buber’s defiance of the Nazis, his call for Jewish-Arab reconciliation, and his protest of Adolf Eichmann’s execution—modeled these teachings in action.

Rabbi Dennis S. Ross demonstrates Buber’s roots in Jewish thought and breaks new ground by explaining the broader scope of Buber’s life and work in a clear, conversational voice. He quotes from the weekly Torah portion; draws lessons from Jewish commentators; and sets Buber’s related words in context with Buber’s remarkable life story, Hasidic tales, and writing. A wide variety of anecdotal illustrations from Buber as well as the author’s life encourages each of us to “hallow the everyday” and seek out “spirituality hiding in plain sight.”

Rabbi Ross is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and an Intentional Interim Rabbi at Temple Am Echad in Lynbrook, N. Y. He served congregations in Manhattan, Chappaqua, Monroe, Neponsit, and Albany, New York, Summit, N.J., Washington, D. C. and Massachusetts.

May You Go

God, Grades, and Graduation:
Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success
by Ilana Horwitz
Stanford
January 3, 2022
Oxford Univ Press

The surprising ways in which a religious upbringing shapes the academic lives of teens It's widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. Upper and middle-class parents invest considerable time facilitating their children's activities, while working class and poor families take a more hands-off approach. These different strategies influence how children approach school. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories?

Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Dr. Ilana Horwitz estimates that approximately one out of every four students in American schools are raised with religious restraint. These students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church.

This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper class kids--and for girls especially--religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, God, Grades and Graduation offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality.

May You Go

From Strength to Strength:
Finding Success, Happiness,
and Deep Purpose in the
Second Half of Life
by Arthur C. Brooks
Harvard, The Atlantic
January 11, 2022
Portfolio

The roadmap for finding purpose, meaning, and success as we age, from bestselling author, Harvard professor, and the Atlantic's happiness columnist Arthur Brooks.

Many of us assume that the more successful we are, the less susceptible we become to the sense of professional and social irrelevance that often accompanies aging. But the truth is, the greater our achievements and our attachment to them, the more we notice our decline, and the more painful it is when it occurs.

What can we do, starting now, to make our older years a time of happiness, purpose, and yes, success?

At the height of his career at the age of 50, Arthur Brooks embarked on a seven-year journey to discover how to transform his future from one of disappointment over waning abilities into an opportunity for progress. From Strength to Strength is the result, a practical roadmap for the rest of your life.

Drawing on social science, philosophy, biography, theology, and eastern wisdom, as well as dozens of interviews with everyday men and women, Brooks shows us that true life success is well within our reach. By refocusing on certain priorities and habits that anyone can learn, such as deep wisdom, detachment from empty rewards, connection and service to others, and spiritual progress, we can set ourselves up for increased happiness.
Read this book and you, too, can go from strength to strength.

Brooks was formerly a professor of public policy at Syracuse University and then president of the American Enterprise Institute for 10 years. He is presently William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, where he teaches on nonprofit management, leadership, and happiness. He wants social science and public policy not to treat the question of happiness as an afterthought, but rather spend more time understanding how we can bring happiness into our lives and less on what he calls the widgets of a machine we might not even understand. He has a “How to Build a Life” column for The Atlantic, and his “Art of Happiness” podcast. Brooks says that there is very little going on in academia that ties leadership to creating greater happiness, that talks about the happiness of leaders, and how leaders can bring more happiness to other people. He says, “You can get better at happiness, but you have to do three things. Number one, you need to understand it. So, you can be happier, but you have to understand it and do the work, do the reading, do the studying, do the thinking, do the analysis. The second is that you need to apply the things that you learned in your life. That's actually what the real work is. And the last part there is you have to share what you know. If you do these three things—understand, apply, share--happiness will come to you in greater abundance. You won't be happy all the time, but that said, to have more happiness in your life, you've got to do those three things.”

The secret to happiness: money, power, pleasure, and prestige? These bring DIS satisfaction to many. They put you on a hedonic treadmill, where you run and run and you never make any distance. So then what? Read the book. It will be dedicated to the young strivers who are going out in the world, and the older strivers that want their life to be better.

SLEDGEHAMMER
HOW BREAKING WITH THE PAST
BROUGHT PEACE TO THE MIDDLE EAST
BY DAVID FRIEDMAN
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel
2017-2021, DJ Trump Administration
February 8, 2022
Broadside Books, Harper Collins

The Trump Administration's Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, tells the story of how the Abraham Accords — the deals between Israel and five Muslim led nations — came to pass. In 2020, the United States brokered a series of peace deals between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. The Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Kosovo and Morocco. The accords were the result of painstaking, behind-the-scenes work by a small team with no prior diplomatic experience, including Ambassador David Friedman. Sledgehammer is the story of the accords from Friedman's POV — its origin and how it was successfully achieved.

He writes that in the past, Middle Eastern diplomacy was led from the perspective of extensive prior experience and detailed knowledge of the region’s history and culture. But all parties used these old rules and policies to stall — each hoping to achieve a deal better for their side further down the road.

The Trump Administration and Friedman blamed the Palestinian leaders for intransigence, the the Israelis for chaotic politics and coalitions. Friedman suggested a new route. The United States needed to find a way to facilitate peace, a detour that would ignore the Palestinians.

Friedman takes us across the globe and back, from the Oval Office to the highest echelons of power in the Middle East and puts us at the table during the intense negotiations that led to this historic breakthrough. The inside story of arguably the greatest achievement of the Trump Administration, Sledgehammer is an important, inspiring story of the hard but hopeful work necessary to bring long overdue—and lasting—peace to one of the most turbulent and tragic regions of the globe.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST TO THIS
Forthcoming Title
By Jared Kushner
Spring 2022
Broadside Books, HarperCollins

Jared Kushner, a former senior advisor in the Trump White House will write about his White House experiences, including his role in negotiating normalization deals between Israel and selected Arab nations, including United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco (Abraham Accords); criticisms over his family's 666 Fifth Avenue bailout by an Arab country investment; U.S. prison reform; bilateral trade deals; U.S-China policies; the White House response to the coronavirus pandemic; his statemet that we would all be dead by June 2020 (in private) but all would be great in public; Russia’s interference in the 2016 election; the two times that President Trump, his father-in-law, was impeached; the issues related to immigration and the Mexican border and the caging and separation of children; his views on the murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis; the 2020 election results; his hopes that Saudi Arabia would be the key to Mideast Peace but how the MBS murder of the WaPo journalist in Turkey and the use of a body double and bone saw ruined it; the Trump-related siege on January 6, 2021 on the Congress; rumors of he and his wife's bisexuality and its effect on future politics; and his family's move from Washington DC to Miami in 2021, and his alleged distancing himself from his father in law in order to pursue future opportunities.

Blacks and Jews in America:
An Invitation to Dialogue
by Terrence L. Johnson
Jacques Berlinerblau
Yvonne Chireau (Contributor)
Susannah Heschel (Contributor)
February 1, 2022
Georgetown University Press

A Black-Jewish dialogue lifts a veil on these groups' unspoken history, shedding light on the challenges and promises facing American democracy from its inception to the present

In this uniquely structured conversational work, two scholars - one of African American politics and religion, and one of contemporary American Jewish culture - explore a mystery: Why aren't Blacks and Jews presently united in their efforts to combat white supremacy? As alt-right rhetoric becomes increasingly normalized in public life, the time seems right for these one-time allies to rekindle the fires of the civil rights movement.

Blacks and Jews in America investigates why these two groups do not presently see each other as sharing a common enemy, let alone a political alliance. Authors Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau consider a number of angles, including the disintegration of the "Grand Alliance" between Blacks and Jews during the civil rights era, the perspective of Black and Jewish millennials, the debate over Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Ultimately, this book shows how the deep roots of the Black-Jewish relationship began long before the mid-twentieth century, changing a narrative dominated by the Grand Alliance and its subsequent fracturing. By engaging this history from our country's origins to its present moment, this dialogue models the honest and searching conversation needed for Blacks and Jews to forge a new understanding.

Satisfaction Guaranteed:
How Zingerman's Built a Corner Deli
into a Global Food Community
by Micheline Maynard
March 1, 2022
Scribner

From the Detroit bureau chief of the NYT,
a lively look at the inception, growth, future, and unique management style of Zingerman’s—a beloved, $70 million-dollar Michigan-based specialty food store with global reach.

Certain businesses are legendary, exerting immense influence in their field. Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is one of those places. Over the years the flagship deli has expanded into a community of more than a dozen businesses, including a wildly successful mail order operation, restaurants, bakery, coffee roastery, creamery, candy maker, and events space—transforming Ann Arbor into a destination for food lovers.

Founded in 1982 by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, Zingerman’s philosophy of good food, excellent service, and sound finances has turned it into a company whose reach spans all corners of the gourmet food world.? Famous for its generous deli sandwiches, fresh bread, and flavorful coffee—all locally produced—Zingerman’s is also widely celebrated for its superb customer service and employee equity. The culture is one of respect and innovation, while maintaining very high standards. Every employee has access to the financial records, everyone has a voice, and everyone is heard. It has legions of enthusiastic customers, fans across the food world, and business principles and a work ethic that have been admired, analyzed, and copied. All that is revealed here, in Micheline Maynard’s Satisfaction Guaranteed.

Readers will discover how by 2019, Zingerman’s employed hundreds of employees and achieved close to $70 million in annual sales. When the pandemic struck, Zingerman’s growth momentarily screeched to a halt—but it survived by reinventing itself, while still serving its beloved food and selling its wide array of groceries. Now, as Zingerman’s approaches its 40th anniversary, it is on track for stronger results than ever. A recipe for success in business and in life, Satisfaction Guaranteed provides a roadmap for manifesting joy and purpose in business.

Alias Anna:
A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood, Greg Dawson (Author
March 22, 2022
HarperCollins
Ages 10 and up

The moving true story of how young Ukrainian Jewish piano prodigies Zhanna (alias “Anna”) and her sister Frina outplayed their pursuers while hiding in plain sight during the Holocaust. A middle grade nonfiction novel-in-verse by award-winning author Susan Hood with Greg Dawson (Zhanna’s son).

She wouldn’t be Zhanna. She’d use an alias. A for Anna. A for alive.

When the Germans invade Ukraine, Zhanna, a young Jewish girl, must leave behind her friends, her freedom, and her promising musical future at the world’s top conservatory. With no time to say goodbye, Zhanna, her sister Frina, and their entire family are removed from their home by the Nazis and forced on a long, cold, death march. When a guard turns a blind eye, Zhanna flees with nothing more than her musical talent, her beloved sheet music, and her father’s final plea: “I don’t care what you do. Just live.”

This incredible true story in-verse about sisterhood, survival, and music is perfect for fans of Lifeboat 12, Inside Out and Back Again, and Alan Gratz.

Includes extensive back matter with original letters and photographs, additional information, and materials for further reading.

MORE IN SPRING 2022

Aviva vs. the Dybbuk by debut author Mari Lowe, about a Jewish girl who lives with her mother above their Orthodox synagogue’s mikvah and is coping with her father’s tragic death and the appearance of a dybbuk that only she can see (Levine)

Sitting Shiva by Erin Silver, illus. by Michelle Theodore, introducing the Jewish practice of sitting shiva after a family member dies

The Ghosts of Rose Hill by R.M. Romero, in which a biracial Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a violinist meets the ghost of a kindhearted boy when she is sent to Prague for the summer to stay with an aunt and witness the humble life of an artist

Until the Blueberries Grow by Jennifer Kam, illus. by Sally Walker, which finds Ben trying to convince his great-grandfather to stay in his house just a bit longer as they celebrate a yearly cycle of Jewish holidays together

Who Liked to Build: The Architecture of Frank Gehry by Deborah Blumenthal, illus. by Maria Brzozowska, spotlighting the life of this groundbreaking architect

José and the Pirate Captain Toledano by Arnon Z. Shorr, illus. by Joshua M. Edelglass, a graphic novel focusing on the bond between young refugee José Alfaro and Pirate Captain Toledano during the Spanish Inquisition

Mrs. Noah’s Doves by Jane Yolen, illus. by Alida Massari, featuring the special mission chosen for the many doves Mrs. Noah brings onto the ark when the flood arrives

Rena Glickman, Queen of Judo by Eve Nadel Catarevas, illus. by Martina Peluso, the story of a poor Jewish girl who grew up to be the pre-eminent female judo master of her time

The Button Box by Fawzia Gilani-Williams and Bridget Hodder, illus. by Harshad Marathe, in which Jewish fifth-grader Ava and her Muslim best friend Nadeem find a magic button in Granny’s button box that transports them to ancient Morocco, where Nadeem’s ancestor is running for his life.

[book]

PLEASE CLICK HERE
TO TRANSFER TO OUR HOME PAGE:

USE THE "SEARCH" FUNCTION BELOW to find any other books that interest you, or click the top frame to see the other books that Sefer Safari can offer.

Disclaimer: We provide this data as a service to readers. We are not responsible for the results of the use or misuse of the data and/or the review of the works above. Amazon.com fulfills book orders

Email Admin@MyJewishBooks.com

Welcome to MyJewishBooks.com Summer 2021 Suggestions

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO TRANSFER TO OUR HOME PAGE:

PLEASE CLICK HERE
TO TRANSFER TO OUR HOME PAGE: