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FALL 2020 BOOK SUGGESTIONS

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Welcome to MyJewishBooks.com Fall 2020 Suggestions

SOME WINTER 2021 BOOK READINGS

Nearly all in person book readings are postponed.
But if we hear of ZOOM one and other online readings, we will let you know
If any authors want to create one with us, please let us know

OUR DECEMBER 2020 UPDATE
Some Fall 2020 Book Releases/Recommendations Below

Be sure to visit our pages for releases in 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).

SEPTEMBER 2020
BOOKS

RECOMMENDED BY OPRAH WINFREY

THE GIFT:
12 LESSONS TO SAVE YOUR LIFE
by Dr. Edith Eva Eger
(La Jolla, CA)
September 15, 2020
SCRIBNER

This practical and inspirational guide to healing from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Choice shows us how to stop destructive patterns and imprisoning thoughts to find freedom and enjoy life.

Edith Eger’s powerful first book The Choice told the story of her survival in the concentration camps, her escape, healing, and journey to freedom. Oprah Winfrey says, “I will be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story.” Thousands of people around the world have written to Eger to tell her how The Choice moved them and inspired them to confront their own past and try to heal their pain; and to ask her to write another, more “how-to” book. Now, in The Gift, Eger expands on her message of healing and provides a hands-on guide that gently encourages us to change the thoughts and behaviors that may be keeping us imprisoned in the past.

Eger explains that the worst prison she experienced is not the prison that Nazis put her in but the one she created for herself, the prison within her own mind. She describes the twelve most pervasive imprisoning beliefs she has known—including fear, grief, anger, secrets, stress, guilt, shame, and avoidance—and the tools she has discovered to deal with these universal challenges. Accompanied by stories from Eger’s own life and the lives of her patients each chapter includes thought-provoking questions and takeaways, such as:

-Would you like to be married to you?
-Are you evolving or revolving?
-You can’t heal what you can’t feel.

Filled with empathy, insight, and humor, The Gift captures the vulnerability and common challenges we all face and provides encouragement and advice for breaking out of our personal prisons to find healing and enjoy life.

SEE ALSO:

A native of Hungary, Edith Eger was a teenager when she and her family were sent to Auschwitz.
Despite overwhelming odds, Edith survived the Holocaust and emigrated with her husband and young daughter to America where she raised a family, earned a Ph.D., and practiced psychology. She spent decades hiding from her past, struggling with flashback and survivors guilt. 35 years after World War II ended, Edith returned to Auschwitz and was finally able to heal and forgive herself. Today she maintains a busy clinical practice and helps others heal.

A LINK TO HER YOuTUBE VIDEOS

HOW TO LEAD
Wisdom from the World's Greatest
CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers
by David M. Rubenstein
September 1, 2020
Simon & Schuster

From philanthropist and Carlyle Group leader, David Rubinstein, an essential leadership playbook. Taken from his friendly interviews on Bloomberg and other platforms, we learn the principles and guiding philosophies of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, and many others

Many of them, like Rubinstein, were late bloomers, and not Eagle Scouts or class presidents.

For the past five years, David M. Rubenstein—author of The American Story, visionary cofounder of The Carlyle Group, and host of The David Rubenstein Show—has spoken with the world’s highest performing leaders about who they are and how they became successful. How to Lead distills these revealing conversations into an indispensable leadership guidebook.

Advice is gleaned from leaders in finance (Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde, Ken Griffin), tech (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook), entertainment (Oprah Winfrey, Lorne Michaels, Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma), sports (Jack Nicklaus, Adam Silver, Coach K, Phil Knight), government (President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi), and many others. Although Donald J. Trump was interviewed (how to get followers), it is not included in the book.

-Jeff Bezos harnesses the power of wandering, discovering that his best decisions have been made with heart and intuition, rather than analysis.
-Richard Branson never goes into a venture looking to make a profit. He aims to make the best in field.
-Phil Knight views Nike as a marketing company whose product is its most important marketing tool.
-Marillyn Hewson, who grew up in a fatherless home with four siblings in Kansas, quickly learned the importance of self-reliance and the value of a dollar.

How to Lead shares the extraordinary stories of these pioneering agents of change. Discover how each luminary got started and how they handle decision making, failure, innovation, change, and crisis. Learn from their decades of experience as pioneers in their field. No two leaders are the same.

THE NIGHT ARCHER:
and Other Stories
by Michael Oren
September 1, 2020
The Wicked Son Pubishing

The Night Archer and Other Stories is a collection of startling short fiction by New York Times bestselling author (historian, professor), former member of the Knesset and Israeli government, and diplomat, Michael Oren.

Writing since he was a preteen, Oren collects come of his fiction here. Should it have been published by The Wicked Son, or the One Who Cannot Formulate a Question? (I AM KIDDING)... A medieval slave-turned-sultan, an alien who declines to visit Earth, a prophet who dares to ask “is God funny?,” an army captain in 1841 (on the eve of the Opium Wars perhaps), a child in search of the Afikomen, and a ghost who fears the living are among the terrifying, tragic, passionate, and comic characters who animate Michael Oren’s stories.

Crisscrossing genres, they explore the outer bounds of imagination and artistic freedom, exposing the reader to a kaleidoscope of human emotions and experience. In The Night Archer, the acclaimed historian, political commentator, and statesman Michael Oren is revealed as a writer of bold versatility.

The Brothers of Auschwitz
by Malka Adler
Noel Canin (Translator)
September 1, 2020
One More Chapter Press

The USA Today Bestseller. Now in Paperback. An extraordinary novel of hope and heartbreak, this is a story about a family separated by the Holocaust and their harrowing journey back to each other. My brother’s tears left a delicate, clean line on his face. I stroked his cheek, whispered, it’s really you…
Dov and Yitzhak live in a small village in the mountains of Hungary, isolated both from the world and from the horrors of the war. But one day in 1944, everything changes. The Nazis storm the homes of the Jewish villagers and inform them they have one hour. One hour before the train will take them to Auschwitz.

Six decades later, from the safety of their living rooms at home in Israel, the brothers finally break their silence to a friend who will never let their stories be forgotten. Told in a poetic style reminiscent of Atwood and Salinger, Malka Adler has penned a visceral yet essential read for those who have found strength, solace and above all, hope, in books like The Choice, The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

This paperback includes an exclusive 14-page P.S. section with an author Q&A, an Author’s Note and a reading group guide.
‘It is a book we all must read, read in order to know … It is harsh, enthralling, earth-shattering, rattling – but we must. And nothing less’ Aliza Ziegler, Editor-in-Chief at Proza Books, Yedioth Ahronoth Publishing House
‘Great courage is needed to write as Adler does – without softening, without beautifying, without leaving any room to imagination’ Yehudith Rotem, Haaretz newspaper

STARRED REVIEW
HIGHLY ANTICIPATED
NO GERMAN PUBLISHER HAS ACQUIRED IT YET

THE APPOINTMENT
A NOVEL
BY Katharina Volckmer
September 1, 2020
Avid

For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Han Kang, a whip-smart, darkly funny, and subversive debut novel in which a woman on the verge of major change addresses her doctor in a stream of consciousness narrative.

In a well-appointed examination in London, a young woman unburdens herself to a certain Dr. Seligman. Though she can barely see above his head, she holds forth about her life and desires, her struggles with her sexuality and identity. Born and raised in Germany, she has been living in London for several years, determined to break free from her family origins and her haunted homeland. But the recent death of her grandfather, and an unexpected inheritance, make it clear that you cannot easily outrun your own shame, whether it be physical, familial, historical, national, or all of the above.

Or can you? With Dr. Seligman’s help, our narrator will find out.

In a monologue that is both deliciously dark and subversively funny, she takes us on a wide-ranging journey from Hitler-centered sexual fantasies and overbearing mothers to the medicinal properties of squirrel tails and the notion that anatomical changes can serve as historical reparation. The Appointment is an audacious debut novel by an explosive new international literary voice, challenging all of our notions of what is fluid and what is fixed, and the myriad ways we seek to make peace with others and ourselves in the 21st century.

The Distance Learning Playbook,
Grades K-12:
Teaching for Engagement and
Impact in Any Setting
by Douglas Fisher,
Nancy Frey, John Hattie
(SDSU)
2020
CORWIN

Effective teaching is effective teaching, no matter where it occurs. The pandemic teaching of mid-2020 was not really distance learning, but rather crisis teaching. But starting now, teachers have the opportunity to prepare for distance learning with purpose and intent-using what works best to accelerate students’ learning all the while maintaining an indelible focus on equity.

Harnessing the insights and experience of renowned educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie, The Distance Learning Playbook applies the wisdom and evidence of VISIBLE LEARNING® research to understand what works best with distance learning. Spanning topics from teacher-student relationships, teacher credibility and clarity, instructional design, assessments, and grading, this comprehensive playbook details the research- and evidence-based strategies teachers can mobilize to deliver high- impact learning in an online, virtual, and distributed environment.

This powerful guide includes:
Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for each module to track your own learning and model evidence-based teacher practices for meaningful learning
A diversity of instructional approaches, including direct instruction, peer learning, and independent work that foster student self-regulation and move learning to deep and transfer levels
Discussion of equity challenges associated with distance learning, along with examples of how teachers can work to ensure that equity gains that have been realized are not lost.
Special guidance for teachers of young children who are learning from a distance
Videos of the authors and teachers discussing a wide variety of distance learning topics
Space to write and reflect on current practices and plan future instruction
The Distance Learning Playbook is the essential hands-on guide to preparing and delivering distance learning experiences that are truly effective and impactful.

SEE ALSO

THE MEMORY MONSTER
A NOVEL
BY YISHAI SHARID
Translated from Hebrew by Yardenna Greespan
September 8, 2020
Restless

The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust.

Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives.

The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers-their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill.

With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?

HITLER:
DOWNFALL: 1939-1945
(DIE ZEIT)
by Volker Ullrich
Jefferson Chase (Translator)
September 1, 2020
KNOPF

From the author of HITLER Ascent, 1889-1939 from five years ago, – a riveting account of the dictator's final years, when he got the war he wanted but his leadership led to catastrophe for his nation, the world, and himself.

In the summer of 1939 Hitler was at the zenith of his power. The Nazis had consolidated political control in Germany and a series of foreign-policy coups had restored Germany to the status of a major world power. He now embarked on realizing his lifelong ambition: to provide the German people with the resources they needed to flourish and to exterminate those who stood in the way. Yet despite a series of stunning initial triumphs, Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 turned the tide for good.

Now, Volker Ullrich offers fascinating new insight into Hitler's character and personality, vividly portraying the insecurity, obsession with minutiae, and narcissistic penchant for gambling that led Hitler to overrule his subordinates and then blame them for his failures; and, ultimately, when he realized the war was not winnable, to embark on the annihilation of Germany itself in order to punish the people who he believed had failed to hand him victory.

This is a masterful account of a spectacular downfall, and an essential addition to our understanding of Hitler and the Second World War.

Schmegoogle
Yiddish Words for Modern Times
by Daniel Klein
September 1, 2020
Chronicle Books

Schmegoogle: n. : a person so insignificant that if you Google his name, nothing comes up.
Schmegoogle: Yiddish Words for Modern Times is a hilariously useful lexicon of neologisms that capture the flavor of life as we live it today.

This book introduces more than 200 NEW terms rooted in real Yiddish, accompanied funny use-it-in-a-sentence examples and entertaining etymology.
Not my cup of borscht, but you might like it. If you like terms like cyberschmooze (gossipy online conversation); cashew (a half-Catholic, half-Jew); tsuriasis (a psychogenic skin disorder); schlockbroker (seller of worthless items); meshuga-nug (a marijuana fanatic) and baruch-a-toke (a blessing for a blunt).

• Yiddish has long enriched English language slang.
• Covers subjects including technology, family, dating, anxiety, insults and more
• All terms are a unique blend of classic Yiddish with modern topics

In this fast-changing modern world experienced online and through apps, of foodies, legal weed, and shifting social constructs, our need for the expressive wonders of Yiddish has never been greater.

Bothered by that unanswered drift of e-mail piling up (e-charazi), stuffed by food or worry (gifilted), feeling like the dating app sends in only clowns (a zhlub magnet)? Schmegoogle is here to help.

• Hilarious useful Yiddish neologisms for the 21st century
• Makes a great gift for Jewish holidays or anyone who loves Jewish humor, as well as language nerds.
• Perfect for display on the coffee table to crack open anytime
• Add it to the shelf with books like Yiddish with Dick and Jane by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods by Michael Wex, and Yiddish with George and Laura by Ellis Weiner, Barbara Davilman.

No Vacancy
by Tziporah Cohen
September 1, 2020
Ages 9 - 12
Groundwood Books

Buying and moving into the run-down Jewel Motor Inn in upstate New York wasn’t eleven-year-old Miriam Brockman’s dream, but at least it’s an adventure. Miriam befriends Kate, whose grandmother owns the diner next door, and finds comfort in the company of Maria, the motel’s housekeeper, and her Uncle Mordy, who comes to help out for the summer.

She spends her free time helping Kate’s grandmother make her famous grape pies and begins to face her fears by taking swimming lessons in the motel’s pool.

But when it becomes clear that only a miracle is going to save the Jewel from bankruptcy, Jewish Miriam and Catholic Kate decide to create their own miracle. Otherwise, the No Vacancy sign will come down for good, and Miriam will lose the life she’s worked so hard to build.

The Assignment
by Liza Wiemer
2020
Ages 12 – 15
Young Adult
Delacorte Press

Inspired by a real-life incident, this riveting novel explores discrimination and antisemitism and reveals their dangerous impact.
The author of this book was in upstate NY when she read about two young students who stood up to their teacher who assigned the class to defend antisemitism after reading about Wansee and the plan to murder the Jews. Students were asked to wrte a defense of why Germany should proceed with the murders and genocide. The school administration did not cancel the assignment, but let students choose another one if they wanted. Thus was the seed of an idea for this book

Would you defend the indefensible?

That's what seniors Logan March and Cade Crawford are asked to do when a favorite teacher instructs a group of students to argue for the Final Solution--the Nazi plan for the genocide of the Jewish people.

Logan and Cade decide they must take a stand, and soon their actions draw the attention of the student body, the administration, and the community at large. But not everyone feels as Logan and Cade do--after all, isn't a school debate just a school debate? It's not long before the situation explodes, and acrimony and anger result.

Based on true events, The Assignment asks: What does it take for tolerance, justice, and love to prevail?

"An important look at a critical moment in history through a modern lens showcasing the power of student activism." -SLJ

If I Lived with Noah
by Pamela Moritz
MacKenzie Haley (Illustrator)
September 1, 2020
Ages 3 - 6
Apples and Honey Press / Behrman

A playful peek into Noah s Ark that will spark a compare-and-contrast conversation about the traditional Bible story. --Kirkus Reviews

If I saw the animals boarding the ark
As Noah stood by with his staff
I'd say, 'I can help with the animals, sir.'
He'd welcome me on with a laugh.

What would you do if you could meet the animals on Noah's ark? Would you make friends with the monkeys? Read stories to the cows? Play games with the chickens?

Maybe you'd set up a diving board so you could all swim in the sea together. Come climb aboard the ark, and let's find out! For ages 3 to 6.

Behind the Bookcase:
Miep Gies, Anne Frank,
and the Hiding Place
by Barbara Lowell
Valentina Toro (Illustrator)
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
Ages 4 - 8
KAR-BEN

Anne Frank’s diary is a gift to the world because of Miep Gies. One of the protectors of the Frank family, Miep recovered the diary after the family was discovered by Nazis, and then returned it to Otto Frank after World War II. Displaced from her own home as a child during World War I, Miep had great empathy for Anne, and she found ways-like talking about Hollywood gossip and fashion trends-to engage her. The story of their relationship-and the impending danger to the family in hiding-unfolds in this unique perspective of Anne Frank’s widely known story.

The Littlest Candle:
A Hanukkah Story
by Rabbi Kerry Olitzky
Rabbi Jesse Olitzky
Jen Kostman (Illustrator)
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
Ages 4 - 8
KALANIOT BOOKS
ENDLESS MOUNTAINS

Kalaniot (Lili Rosenstreich) is a new Jewish children's book imprint (Hebrew for wild poppies). Expect three more titles from them in 2021

is always cheering his friends on with words of encouragement and support. But as the smallest candle in the box, why should he be chosen to be the shamash in the Hanukkah menorah? Isn’t the job of lighting all the others candles too big for him? As it turns out, it’s the size of your heart that matters, and in that department, Little Flicker is huge!

This book’s bright and quirky illustrations make it easy to imagine the possibility of a world where candles walk, talk, dance, and sing. Kids will love exploring the details of Little Flicker’s life inside his cozy drawer.

Such a Library!:
A Yiddish Folktale Re-Imagined
by Jill Ross Nadler
Esther Van Den Berg (Illustrator)
2020
Ages 4 - 8
Intergalactic Afikomen

Nadler, making her picture book debut, and van den Berg (Good Night and Sleep Tight) base their comic fantasy on a classic Yiddish folktale known as “It Could Always Be Worse.” The library is supposed to be Stevie’s quiet refuge from a home filled with “three brothers, two sisters,/ and a baby,” but he can’t seem to find any peace. “Pages are turning,/ keys are tapping,/ and the storyteller/ is once upon a timing,” he complains to Miss Understood, the librarian. “It’s like a party in here.” Her response is nothing short of extraordinary: she opens a book, welcoming balloons and party fixings. When Stevie then likens the library to a zoo and a circus, things really get crazy. As the good-natured, buoyant cartoons chronicle a cumulative comic cacophony with subtle nods to the story’s shtetl origins, the text fills up with a growing list of onomatopoeia—those reading aloud will be called on to make sounds ranging from book pages turning (“whoosh, swoosh”) to the sound of a clown car horn (“ah-ooo-gah”). Stevie, for his part, learns two important lessons: he didn’t know how good he had it, and librarians are indeed magic. --Publisher's Weekly

Does Your Dog Speak Hebrew?:
A Book of Animal Sounds
Board book – Illustrated
by Ellen Bari
Holly Clifton-Brown (Illustrator)
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
Ages 1-4
KAR-BEN

A dog says “bow, wow” in English and “hav, hav” in Hebrew. Whimsical animals in American and Israeli settings compare their varied noises and sounds. Readers can explore which sounds are the same and which are different in droll depictions of animals in Israel and the United States.

Basic Hebrew vocabulary, including animal names and sounds, are introduced. Iconic locations like Capitol Hill and Central Park in the United States, and the Dome of the Rock and the Sea of Galilee in Israel are featured in illustrations.

There Was a Young Rabbi:
A Hanukkah Tale
by Suzanne Wolfe
Jeffrey Ebbeler (Illustrator)
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
Ages 4-9
KAR-BEN

Hanukkah is a very busy time! Join the young rabbi as she makes festive preparations-spinning the dreidel, cooking a tasty meal, lighting the menorah, and more-in this cumulative, rhyming story reminding readers of the Hanukkah miracle of long ago! Learn about Hanukkah’s festivities and rituals, and about the Jewish holiday itself.

Kayla and Kugel's
Happy Hanukkah
by Ann D. Koffsky
September 1, 2020
Ages 3 - 6
Apples and Honey Press / Behrman

From the author of Judah Macabee Goes to the Doctor and other Kayla and Kugel books

I'm Kayla and this is my dog, Kugel. We are getting ready for Hanukkah. KUGEL! We need the Hanukkah candles tonight, not the Shabbat candles. Oh, no Kugel! Just because the soldiers in the Hanukkah story made a mess doesn't mean you have to.

Celebrate the story of Hanukkah with Kayla and her mischievous dog, Kugel. And don't forget to light the menorah and play dreidel!

The Contradictions
by Sophie Yanow
September 8, 2020
Drawn and Quarterly
Graphic novel

The Eisner Award–winning story about a student figuring out radical politics in a messy world

Sophie is young and queer and into feminist theory. She decides to study abroad, choosing Paris for no firm reason beyond liking French comics. Feeling a bit lonely and out of place, she’s desperate for community and a sense of belonging. She stumbles into what/who she’s looking for when she meets Zena. An anarchist student-activist committed to veganism and shoplifting, Zena offers Sophie a whole new political ideology that feels electric. Enamored-of Zena, of the idea of living more righteously-Sophie finds herself swept up in a whirlwind friendship that blows her even further from her rural California roots as they embark on a disastrous hitchhiking trip to Amsterdam and Berlin, full of couch surfing, drug tripping, and radical book fairs.

Capturing that time in your life where you’re meeting new people and learning about the world-when everything feels vital and urgent-The Contradictions is Sophie Yanow’s fictionalized coming-of-age story. Sophie’s attempts at ideological purity are challenged time and again, putting into question the plausibility of a life of dogma in a world filled with contradictions. Keenly observed, frank, and very funny, The Contradictions speaks to a specific reality while also being incredibly relatable, reminding us that we are all imperfect people in an imperfect world.

No Rules Rules:
Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
by Reed Hastings
September 8, 2020
Penguin Press

Honesty is always the best policy, even when the truth is uncomfortable.

Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies. Hastings co founded NETFLIX with Marc (Bernays-Freud) Randolph as they commuted from Santa Cruz

There has never before been a company like Netflix. It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again.

Remember, the started by delivering DVDs by mail. They were like Blockbuster.... and morphed several times to get to streaming and cannibalizing its own business... to the point of where it is now... with actually creating series, fiction and docs... and next... family entertainment (but NOT sports, NOT news, not Games, and not truth to power).

This type of unprecedented flexibility would have been impossible without the counterintuitive and radical management principles that co-founder Reed Hastings established from the very beginning. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed.

Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. (which is so great, since I get in trouble every year for not taking enough vacation days). At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irreleevant. At Netflix, you don’t try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, employees don’t need approval, and the company pays top of market. BUT ALSO... Netflix works ike a baseball team. You dont get to keep your job just cuz you are there. You are evaluated and cut if you dont meet the team needs for the future. They are also fond of 360 face to face reviews and feedback.

When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world.

Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer (INSEAD, HBR), bestselling author of The Culture Map and one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial ideologies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings’s own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.

How I Built This:
The Unexpected Paths to Success
from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
September 15, 2020
HMH

Based on the highly acclaimed NPR podcast, How I Built This with Guy Raz, this book offers priceless insights and inspiration from the world’s top entrepreneurs on how to start, launch, and build a successful venture.

Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).

Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. In How I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur’s journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting their own business or wondered how trailblazing entrepreneurs made their own dreams a reality.

Real Change:
Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves
and the World Hardcover
by Sharon Salzberg
September 1, 2020
Flatiron

Salzberg, along with Kornfield, Goldstein, and other Jewish thinkers studied Eastern religions and pursued teaching positions in meditation and Buddhism. From one of most prominent figures in the field of meditation comes a guidebook for how to use mindfulness to build our inner strength, find balance, and help create a better world.

In today’s fractured world, we’re constantly flooded with breaking news that causes anger, grief, and pain. People are feeling more stressed out than ever, and in the face of this fear and anxiety they can feel so burnt out and overwhelmed that they end up frozen in their tracks and unable to do anything. In Real Change, Sharon Salzberg, a leading expert in lovingkindness meditation, shares sage advice and indispensable techniques to help free ourselves from these negative feelings and actions. She teaches us that meditation is not a replacement for action, but rather a way to practice generosity with ourselves and summon the courage to break through boundaries, reconnect to a movement that’s bigger than ourselves, and have the energy to stay active.

Consulting with veteran activists and social-change agents in a variety of fields, Salzberg collects and shares their wisdom and offers the best practical advice to foster transformation in both ourselves and in society. To help tame our inner landscape or chaos, Salzberg offers mindfulness practices that will help readers cultivate a sense of agency and stay engaged in the long-term struggle for social change.

Whether you’re resolving conflicts with a crotchety neighbor or combating global warming, Real Change will provide the fundamental principles and mindfulness practices to help guide you to the clarity and confidence to lift a foot and take the next step into a better world.

WISE TALES FROM THE EAST
BY URI KAPLAN
(Hebrew University)
2020
Prapanca

This little book of insights contains forty-nine parables and fables that will amuse, teach, and inspire you to reflect on your life and actions. Some of the stories are funny, others are enigmatic and philosophical, but they all convey remarkable life lessons and morals. The tales were carefully selected from the Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist (Taoist), and Confucian traditions, as well as from Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean folklore.

If you let them, they just might blow your mind!Yoga and meditation instructors and practitioners may find these wise tales valuable for contemplating their training. College professors and high school teachers may find them handy for preparing lectures and stimulating class debates. Psychologists and bibliotherapists may find them useful for therapy sessions. And anyone else in search of wisdom would surely benefit from perusing through these enchanting tales of sages, monks, Zen masters, scorpions, centipedes, and horses.

Invisible Women:
Data Bias in a World
Designed for Men
by Caroline Criado Perez
Harry N. Abrams

With women taking the CEO positions at Citibank and The New York Times, it is good to re-read...
Winner of the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award; Winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.

Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.

Inside the NRA:
Inside the National Rifle Association
A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed,
and Paranoia within the Most Powerful
Political Group in America
by Joshua L. Powell
(former Chief of Staff)
September 8, 2020
Twelve

With its blood red cover, the book is an exposé of rampant, decades-long incompetence at the National Rifle Association, as told by a former member of its senior leadership, its Chief of Staff who was “fired” in the past year. Joshua L. Powell – a lifelong gun advocate – began his new role as a senior strategist and chief of staff to NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in 2016. Powell writes that he uncovered "waste and dysfunction at the NRA..." (He was being paid nearly $1 million a year, but left or was fired after accusations of sexual misconduct.)

INSIDE THE NRA reveals the rise and fall of the most powerful political organization in America – how the NRA became feared as the “Death Star” of Washington lobbies and so militant and extreme as "to create and fuel the toxicity of the gun debate until it became outright explosive."

INSIDE THE NRA explains this intentional toxic messaging was wholly the product of LaPierre's leadership and the extremist branding by his longtime PR puppet master Angus McQueen. (Of course he would not be fond of Angus, it was Angus McQueen that got Powell fired, allegedly) In damning detail, Powell exposes the NRA's plan to "pour gasoline" on the fire in the fight against gun control, to sow discord to fill its coffers, and to secure the presidency for Donald J. Trump. Powell also writes that LaPierre considered resigning and getting former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckebee or (former Jewish, now Mormon; former Dem, now GOP) former (5 term, til resigning) Congressman and Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz to take his position. According to the book, after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, CT, the N.R.A. rebuffed new gun control measures and instead promoted a “School Shield” program in which it would help review and recommend school safety countermeasures like arming security guards. (In the 4 yrs after the massacre, the N.R.A. assessed the safety of only three schools... it was all just P.R. and talk, and a way to raise millions from unsuspecting contributors and gun owners). Joel Friedman, the Pasadena-based Little Tokyo (mochi) businessman and NRA board member, told The NYT that the School Shield “began very slowly because it needed to be proven,” and called Mr. Powell’s book “a 180-degree flop.” Powell writes that after the 2018 murders at the Parkland, FL high school (Marjorie Stoneman), President Trump “seemed to support imposing some of the toughest new restrictions on guns in decades,” But, he writes, Trump folded after a meeting with Mr. LaPierre, who reminded him who had helped elect him. Also, after mass shootings in El Paso, TX, and Dayton, OH n 2019, Mr. Powell helped prepare Mr. LaPierre for a call with Mr. Trump, during which Mr. LaPierre told the president “the membership would go wild” if he moved forward with background check legislation. But Powell writes that the NRA did NOT actually have an expansive political machine that helped candidates. It just had the perception that it did. Critics say this book is just for revenge, when Powell's request for a new $.7 million consulting contract was rejected.

The Hanukkah Magic of Nate Gadol
by Arthur A. Levine
Kevin Hawkes (Illustrator)
September 8, 2020
Ages 5 - 8
Candlewick

A play on words... Nate Gadol and Nes Gadol

From an imaginative team come a new larger-than-life holiday hero who brings Hanukkah wonder and generosity to anyone in need!

Nate Gadol is a great big spirit with eyes as shiny as golden coins and a smile that is lantern bright. He can make anything last as long as it is needed, like a tiny bit of oil that must stretch for eight nights, a flower that needs to stay fresh to cheer up someone ailing, or a small lump of chocolate that grows to allow the Glasers to treat their children over the holiday and, during a harsh winter when medicine is needed more than sweets, spurs them to share what little they have with the O’Malleys. In this charming holiday hybrid story, well-known children’s author and editor Arthur A. Levine pairs with award-winning illustrator Kevin Hawkes to offer a mythical, magical take on the way Jewish families came to give and receive gifts over Hanukkah, just as their Christian neighbors do at Christmas, thanks to a loving spirit named Nate Gadol working behind the scenes—together with a certain jolly old soul.

THE ORDER
A NOVEL
Book 20
By Daniel Silva
July 14, 2020
HARPER

From Daniel Silva, author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers The New Girl and The Other Woman, comes a stunning new action-packed thriller of high stakes international intrigue featuring the enigmatic art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon.

Master of the spy thriller Silva has entertained readers with twenty-two thoughtful and gripping suspense novels featuring a diverse cast of compelling characters and ingenious plots that have taken them around the globe and back-from the United States to Europe, Russia to the Middle East.

He returns with another blockbuster-a powerhouse novel that showcases his outstanding skill and brilliant imagination, destined to be a must read for both his multitudes of fans and growing legions of converts.

Grounded:
A Senator's Lessons on
Winning Back Rural America
by Jon Tester
U.S. Senator (D, MT)
September 15, 2020
Ecco

An inspiring and eye-opening memoir showing how Democrats can reconnect with rural and red-state voters, from Montana’s three-term democratic senator

Senator Jon Tester is a rare voice in Congress. He is the only United States senator who manages a full-time job outside of the Senate—as a farmer. But what has really come to distinguish Tester in the Senate is his commitment to accountability, his ability to stand up to Donald Trump, and his success in, time and again, winning red state voters back to the Democratic Party.

In Grounded, Tester shares his early life, his rise in the Democratic party, his vision for helping rural America, and his strategies for reaching red state voters. Leaning deeply into lessons on the value of authenticity and hard work that he learned growing up on his family’s 1,800-acre farm near the small town of Big Sandy, Montana—the same farm he continues to work today with his wife, Sharla—Tester has made his political career a testament to crossing the divides of class and geography. The media and Democrats too often discount rural people as Trump supporters; Tester knows better. His voice is vital to the public discourse as we seek to understand the issues that are important to rural and working-class America in not just the 2020 election but also for years to come.

A heartfelt and inspiring memoir from a courageous voice, Grounded shows us that the biggest threat to our democracy isn’t a president who has no moral compass. It’s politicians who don’t understand the value of accountability and hard work. Tester demonstrates that if American democracy is to survive, we must put our trust in the values that keep us grounded.

Find the Helpers:
What 9/11 and Parkland Taught Me
About Recovery, Purpose, and Hope
by Fred Guttenberg
Bradley Whitford (Foreword)
September 15, 2020
Mango

Life changed forever on Valentine's Day 2018. What was to be a family day celebrating love turned into a nightmare. Thirty-four people were shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Jaime Guttenberg, a fourteen-year-old with a huge heart, was the second to last victim. That she and so many of her fellow students were struck down in cold blood galvanized many to action, including Jaime’s father Fred who has become an activist dedicated to passing common sense gun safety legislation.

Fred was already struggling with deep personal loss. Four months earlier his brother Michael died of 9/11 induced pancreatic cancer. He had been exposed to so much dust and chemicals at Ground Zero, the damage caught up with him. Michael battled heroically for nearly five years and then died at age fifty.

This book is not about gun safety or Parkland. Instead, Find the Helpers tells the story of Fred Guttenberg’s journey since Jaime’s death and how he has been able to get through the worst of times thanks to the kindness and compassion of others. Good things happen to good people at the hands of other good people?and the world is filled with them. They include everyone from amazing gun violence survivors Fred has met around the country to former VP Joe Biden, who spent time talking to him about finding mission and purpose in learning to grieve.

If you have read books such as Eyes to the Wind, Haben, The Beauty in Breaking, The Book of Rosy, or We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders; then you'll love Find the Helpers.

HILLEL BUILDS A HOUSE!
SUKKOT AND SIMCHAT TORAH
by Shoshana Lepon (Author)
Ángeles Ruiz / Angeles Ruiz (Illustrator)
August 1, 2020
Ages 2 - 6
KAR-BEN

All year, Hillel builds treehouses and forts. His structures-in the backyard, under the stairs and even in the living room-can get in the way when the family is busy with holiday preparations. As the Jewish holidays come and go throughout the year, Hillel can't seem to find the right one for his building projects. That is, until fall comes, and with it the holiday of Sukkot, the Jewish harvest holiday, which is all about building a temporary structure, called a sukkah. Hillel puts all his practice building to work as he helps his father use boards, branches and decorations to create the family sukkah.

Nicanor's Gate
by Eric A. Kimmel
Alida Massari (Illustrator)
August 1, 2020
Ages 4 - 8
KAR-BEN

Set in biblical times, the story of Nicanor's Gate-one of the entrances to the Temple in Jerusalem-shows how a man's faith is important to living a happy, fulfilled life. Nicanor, a wealthy merchant from Alexandria, is thrilled when King Herod calls on him to assist in rebuilding the ruined Temple in Jerusalem. Nicanor orders massive, beautifully intricate doors to be built, especially for the Eastern Gate of the Temple, but disaster strikes while the gates are being shipped from Alexandria to Jerusalem. To escape sinking, the ship must reduce its load, and one of the doors is pushed into the sea. But a miracle happens: the heavy door surfaces, is recovered from the sea, and installed as an entrance to the Temple area.

Kirkus:"Anyone looking for a definition of “miracle” could look to this picture book. The miracle Nicanor witnesses couldn’t be more straightforward. He’s hired the finest artisans to build a gate for the Temple in Jerusalem, two colossal doors made of metal. But as soon as they’re placed on a transport ship, a storm begins. It sinks one of the doors-and very nearly the ship-to the bottom of the sea. But just as the precious cargo seems to be lost, the law of gravity appears to reverse itself, and the door is suddenly floating on top of the water. It would be difficult to find a clearer example of deus ex machina. But if the plot is unsurprising (at least to people who believe in miracles), the story still manages to convey a sense of wonder. This is due largely to Massari’s illustrations. The text describes the doors: 'cast from Corninthian gold, a rare mixture of copper, gold, and silver that gleamed like the sun.' The colors in her pictures are so rich that the metal really does look like gold. (The characters’ skin tones are equally rich and varied shades of brown.) The marvels also contrast beautifully with the bleakness of the story. When hope seems lost, one character responds with both faith and resignation: 'We do what we can. The rest is in God’s hands.' ...”

CHANCE
ESCAPE FROM THE HOLOCAUST
(through the eyes of Uri as a child)
A MEMOIR
BY URI SHULEVITZ
August 25, 2020
FS&G
Ages 8-14

From a beloved voice in children’s literature comes this landmark memoir of hope amid harrowing times and an engaging and unusual Holocaust story.

With backlist sales of over 2.3 million copies, Uri Shulevitz, one of FSG BYR’s most acclaimed picture-book creators, details the eight-year odyssey of how he and his Jewish family escaped the terrors of the Nazis by fleeing Warsaw for the Soviet Union in CHANCE.

It was during those years, with threats at every turn, that the young Uri experienced his awakening as an artist, an experience that played a key role during this difficult time. By turns dreamlike and nightmarish, this heavily illustrated account of determination, courage, family loyalty, and the luck of coincidence is a true publishing event.

Note: The illustrations are facially expressive, impressionistic and emotional and might be sketchy since they relate memory and emotion more than realism. Of course, he did not remember the features of some people from 1939, so the “wisdom of his fingers” drew his impressions. (He let his fingers do the guiding/walking)

Uri Shulevitz is a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and author. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, on February 27, 1935. He began drawing at the age of three and, unlike many children, never stopped. The Warsaw blitz occurred when he was four years old, and the Shulevitz family fled. For eight years they were wanderers, arriving, eventually, in Paris in 1947. There Shulevitz developed an enthusiasm for French comic books, and soon he and a friend started making their own. At thirteen, Shulevitz won first prize in an all-elementary-school drawing competition in Paris's 20th district. In 1949, the family moved to Israel, where Shulevitz worked a variety of jobs: an apprentice at a rubber-stamp shop, a carpenter, and a dog-license clerk at Tel Aviv City Hall. He studied at the Teachers' Institute in Tel Aviv, where he took courses in literature, anatomy, and biology, and also studied at the Art Institute of Tel Aviv. At fifteen, he was the youngest to exhibit in a group drawing show at the Tel Aviv Museum. At 24 he moved to New York City, where he studied painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School and drew illustrations for a publisher of Hebrew books. One day while talking on the telephone, he noticed that his doodles had a fresh and spontaneous look-different from his previous illustrations. This discovery was the beginning of Uri's new approach to his illustrations for The Moon in My Room, his first book, published in 1963. Since then he was written and illustrated many celebrated children’s books. He won the Caldecott Medal for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for The Treasure, Snow and How I Learned Geography. His other books include One Monday Morning, Dawn, So Sleepy Story, and many others. He also wrote the instructional guide Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books. He lives in New York City.

The Jewish Calendar
16-Month 2020-2021
Engagement Calendar:
Jewish Year 5781 Calendar
by The Jewish Museum New York
August 4, 2020
Universe Publishing

The Jewish Calendar 16-Month 2020-2021 Engagement features 53 full-color Judaic ceremonial masterpieces from the internationally renowned collection of The Jewish Museum, New York.
Features include:
2-page weekly spreads include a full-color art page of museum artifacts and plenty of room to record appointments, notes, or anything!
7x9-inch size (14x9 open) feels like a paperback and fits easily in purses, totes, or backpacks
Spans a full 16 months from September 2020 through December 2021
Includes U.S. and Jewish holidays, Sabbath candle-lighting times, and a list of Jewish holidays through the year 2030, making this calendar essential for every Jewish household

The Jewish Museum Calendar 2021
Wall Calendar
by The Jewish Museum
August 4, 2020
Pomegranate

The extraordinary works of art reproduced here communicate the aesthetic values and skill of their creators while revealing different aspects of Jewish culture. Paintings, prints, sculptures, and ceremonial objects all speak as evocatively about the Jewish experience in the world as they do about the unique power of art to both inspire and inform. Spanning several centuries, these works represent the enormous range of art in the unparalleled collection of the Jewish Museum in New York City. Features sixteen months (September 2020 through December 2021), with Jewish holidays, weekly Torah readings and candle-lighting times, and the blessings to be recited over the candles. Calendars are printed with soy-based inks on environmentally sourced paper.

Nice Jewish Guys
Wall Calendar 2021 Calendar
by Adam Cohan
Summer 2020
Workman

You can absolutely take these guys home to Mom and Dad.

Nice Jewish Guys is the sweet and irreverent hit calendar that features a dozen super-handsome, super-nice, and super-eligible bachelors. Meet Justin, with a puppy-dog smile and penchant for dance fitness classes. Outdoor adventurer Scott, whose mom describes him as “very single.” And, for ladies who love a bad boy, there’s “geeky tough guy” Howie, who was once body slammed by a sumo wrestler. Ouch! Includes adorable photos and bios packed with fun facts, favorite things, and goals, like Dov’s: “Children and a wife he worships.” So sweet.

Printed on FSC-certified paper.

Jewish Cats 5781 Calendar:
14 Month 2020/2021 Calendar Featuring
Jewish and American Holidays,
Weekly Torah Portions,
Select Candle Lighting Times, and More
Calendar – Wall Calendar
by Larry Yudelson
September 15, 2020
Ben Yehudah Press

If you don't love cats, you can stop reading now.

If you don't find yourself needing a wall calendar to know when the Jewish holidays are, or what the weekly Torah portion is we get it, you re fully digital.

But if you are still with us, have we got a calendar for you.

The Jewish Cat Calendar 5781 (2020-2021) features gorgeous felines in studious repose next to or on top of the treasured classic texts of the Jewish people or otherwise looking Jewish along with the secular and Hebrew dates, Jewish and American holidays, the weekly Torah portions, and candle lighting times for select cities from New York and Los Angeles to Jerusalem and Kathmandu.

What Are You Going Through:
A Novel
by Sigrid Nunez
September 8, 2020
Riverhead Books

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship.

A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.

In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

Break It Up:
Secession, Division, and the
Secret History of America's Imperfect Union
by Richard Kreitner
Summer 2020

From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a "powerful revisionist account"of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up (Eric Foner).

The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away.

With a scholar’s command and a journalist’s curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the thirteen colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil.

From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age.

Finding My Father:
His Century-Long Journey
from World War I Warsaw
and My Quest to Follow
by Deborah Tannen
September 15, 2020
Ballantine

A #1 New York Times bestselling author traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell.

Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, praised by Oliver Sacks for having “a novelist’s ear for the way people speak,” Deborah Tannen was a girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, she was profoundly influenced by his gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew older, she spent countless hours recording conversations with her father for the account of his life she had promised him she’d write. But when he hands Tannen journals he kept in his youth, and she discovers letters he saved from a woman he might have married instead of her mother, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her father’s life and her parents’ marriage.

In this memoir, Tannen embarks on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father’s life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw, where he was born in 1908, she traces his journey: from arriving in New York City in 1920 to quitting high school at fourteen to support his mother and sister, through a vast array of jobs, including prison guard and gun-toting alcohol tax inspector, to eventually establishing the largest workers’ compensation law practice in New York and running for Congress. As Tannen comes to better understand her father's—and her own—relationship to Judaism, she uncovers aspects of his life she would never have imagined.

Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen’s life and the ways in which it reflects the near century that he lived. Even more than that, it’s an unflinching account of a daughter’s struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to find a more truthful story about her family and herself.

Speaking for Myself:
Faith, Freedom, and the
Fight of Our Lives Inside
the Trump White House
by Sarah Huckabee Sanders
September 8, 2020
St. Martin's Press

I know you are wondering if this is fiction or non fiction.
That is up to you

Sarah Huckabee Sanders served as White House Press Secretary for President Donald J. Trump from 2017 to 2019. A trusted confidante of the President, Sanders advised him on everything from press and communications strategy to personnel and policy. She was at the President’s side for two and a half years.
The daughter of a governor and media icon, she fought the press, spoke for the President and his administration, she waged battle against reporters trying to create honest reports, she worked with elected lawmakers and CEOs, and accompanied the President on every international trip.

Now, in Speaking for Myself, Sarah Huckabee Sanders describes what it was like on the front lines and inside the White House, focusing on her Christian faith, the challenges of being a working mother at the highest level of American politics, her relationship with the press, and her unique role in the historic fight raging between the Trump administration and who she believes are its critics

WITH REGARD TO COLLEAGUE JOSH RAFFEL, whom she called a FOUL mouthed Jew... “Josh and I hadn't known each other before starting in the White House. He was a liberal, aggressive, foulmouthed Jew from New York City who had spent most of his career working in Hollywood. I was pretty much his total opposite.” … “despite our differences, I had grown to love Josh. He is one of the funniest people I know, intensely loyal, and probably the most talented communications strategist I've ever worked with. Nobody in the White House could work a story better than Josh, and he was always one of the first colleagues I turned to for help on the toughest assignments.”

Donald Trump v. The United States:
Inside the Struggle to
Stop a President
by Michael S. Schmidt
September 1, 2020
Random House

With unparalleled reporting, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter continues to break news about the most important political story of our lives as he chronicles the clash between a president and the officials of his own government who tried to stop him.

In the early days of the Trump presidency, the people who work in the institutions that make America America saw Trump up close in the Oval Office and became convinced that they had to stand up to an unbound president. These officials faced a situation without parallel in American history: What do you do, and who do you call, if you are the only one standing between the president, his extraordinary powers, and the abyss?

Michael S. Schmidt’s Donald Trump v. The United States tells the dramatic, high-stakes story of those who felt compelled to confront and try to contain the most powerful man in the world as he shredded norms and sought to expand his power.

Schmidt has broken many of the major stories of the Trump era, from the news of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account to the report on former FBI director James Comey’s contemporaneous memos of conversations with Trump that led directly to the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Now he takes us inside the defining events of the presidency, chronicles them up close, and records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia. Through their eyes and ears, we observe an epic struggle.

Drawing on secret FBI and White House documents and confidential sources inside federal law enforcement and the West Wing, Donald Trump v. The United States is vital journalism, recording the shocking reality of a presidency like no other, a riveting contemporary history, and a lasting account of just how fragile and vulnerable the institutions of American democracy really are.

In the book, Schmidt reports from a confidential McGahn memo for the first time, describing how General Kelly (COS) had serious concerns about granting Jared Kushner a top-secret clearance in response to a briefing he had received related to the routine FBI investigation into Kushner’s background. "The information you were briefed on one week ago and subsequently relayed to me, raises serious additional concerns about whether this individual ought to retain a top security clearance until such issues can be investigated and resolved," McGahn wrote in the memo to Kelly. The details of the highly sensitive intelligence that raised alarms with Kelly are not revealed in the McGahn memo or in Schmidt's book. McGahn wrote that he had been unable to receive the briefing or "access this highly compartmented information directly" about Kushner, Schmidt reports.

By reducing Kushner's clearance from top secret to secret, McGahn and Kelly had restricted Kushner's access to the PDB, the closely held rundown provided by the intelligence community six days a week for the president and his top aides, and other highly sensitive intelligence that exposed sources and methods." President President Trump ultimately intervened to ensure Kushner got his top-secret security clearance.

Melania and Me:
The Rise and Fall of My
Friendship with the First Lady
by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff
September 1, 2020
Gallery Books

A kiss and tell story.

The former director of special events at Vogue and producer of nine legendary Met Galas, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff – who Anna Wintour called GENERAL WINSTON – met Melania Knauss in 2003 and had a front row seat to the transformation of Donald Trump’s then girlfriend from a rough-cut gem to a precious diamond. As their friendship deepened over lunches at Manhattan hot spots, black-tie parties, and giggle sessions in the penthouse at Trump Tower, Wolkoff watched the newest Mrs. Trump raise her son, Barron, and manage her highly scrutinized marriage. Melania was no naif, she knew who and what she was marrying, and Ms Winston Wolkoff, which the help of Vogue, helped transform her.

After Trump won the 2016 election, Wolkoff was recruited to help produce the 58th Presidential Inauguration and to become the First Lady’s trusted advisor. When she questioned where the money for the inauguration was being spent... she was excluded from future budget meetings. The money is still missing. Of course, the Trumps tried to blame and curse Wolkoff.

Melania put Wolkoff in charge of hiring her staff, organizing her events, helping her write speeches, and creating her debut initiatives. Then it all fell apart when Wolkoff was made the scapegoat for inauguration finance irregularities. Melania could have defended her innocent friend and confidant, but Wolkoff writes, Melania stood by her man, knowing full well who was really to blame. The betrayal nearly destroyed Wolkoff.

In this candid and emotional memoir, Stephanie (Batinkoff) Winston Wolkoff (she was adopted by a stepfather who was the son of jeweler/retailer Harry Winston) takes you into Trump Tower and the White House to tell the funny, thrilling, and heartbreaking story of her intimate friendship with one of the most famous women in the world, a woman few people truly understand.

Should Wolkoff be surprised that Melania would scapegoat her? Not really... she has done what was necessary to get to her position and stay there. How did Melania react to the Access Hollywood tape and her husband’s affair with Stormy Daniels? Does she get along well with Ivanka? Why did she wear that jacket with “I really don’t care, do u?” printed on the back? Is Melania happy being First Lady? And what really happened with the inauguration’s funding of $107 million? Wolkoff has some ideas...

sOULMATES
DISLOYAL
A Memoir:
The True Story of the Former Personal
Attorney to President Donald J. Trump
by Michael Cohen
September 8, 2020
Skyhorse

Once Donald Trump’s fiercest surrogate, closest confidant, and staunchest defender, Michael Cohen knows where the skeletons are buried. He is no hero. He is/was corrupt and a bully. He was/is slick and slimey. But this is a devastating business and political horror story where as Trump’s lawyer and “fixer,” Cohen not only witnessed firsthand but was also an active participant in the inner workings of Trump’s business empire, political campaign, and presidential administration.

This is a story that you have not read in newspapers, or on social media, or watched on television. These are accounts that only someone who worked for Trump around the clock for over a decade—not a few months or even a couple of years—could know. Cohen describes Trump’s racist rants against President Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, and Black and Hispanic people in general, as well as the cruelty, humiliation, and abuse he leveled at family and staff. Whether he’s exposing the fact that Trump engaged in tax fraud by inflating his wealth or electronic fraud by rigging an online survey, or outing Trump’s Neanderthal views towards women or his hush-money payments to clandestine lovers, Cohen pulls no punches.

He shows Trump’s relentless willingness to lie, exaggerate, mislead, or manipulate. Trump emerges as a man without a soul—a man who courts evangelicals and then trashes them, panders to the common man, but then rips off small business owners, a con man who will do or say absolutely anything to win, regardless of the cost to his family, his associates, or his country.

At the heart of Disloyal, we see how Cohen came (according to Cohen) under the spell of his charismatic "Boss" and, as a result, lost all sense of his moral compass. (boo hoo.... he was just a puppet working for his hero... bullshit... he made choices to break laws.. )

The real "real" Donald Trump who permeates these pages—the racist, sexist, homophobic, lying, cheating President—will be discussed, written about, and analyzed for years to come.

RAGE
By Bob Woodward
September 15, 2020
Simon and Schuster

Rage goes behind the scenes like never before, according to the publisher, with stunning new details about early national security decisions and operations and Trump’s moves as he faces a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest.

Woodward, the #1 internationally bestselling author of 13 #1 bestsellers, including Fear: Trump in the White House, shows Trump up close in his entirety before the 2020 presidential election.

RAGE concludes that Trump is the wrong person for the job of POTUS. Each time Woodward tried to ask him about policies or philosophy or a deep question, Trump could not understand or answer the inquiries. It leads to a boring book with little new information except for some nuggets that can be read in online reviews of the book. Like so much of America – and Jewish readers – we expect some intellectual nuggets, some introspection, some intelligence... but we get nothing. We get just a huckster, bumbler, self-aggrandizer, self promoter who exceleld at selling high end real estate to those looking to associate themselves with a brand, and not someone who understands how to govern or manage.

President Trump has said publicly that Woodward has interviewed him. What is not known is that Trump provided Woodward a window into his mind through a series of exclusive interviews.

At key decision points, RAGE shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president.

RAGE draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses, as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents.

Woodward obtained 25 personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that have not been public before. Kim describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film,” as the two leaders engage in an extraordinary diplomatic minuet.

RAGE reports that Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu used doctored (forged) video to convince Trump that P.A. Leader Abbas was awful. Trump had expressed allowed that it was Netanyahu who was the problem and roadblock, but his mind changed after seeiing the video. It used re-edited words of Mahmoud Abbas to make it seem he was ordering the murder of babies. Tillerson told the President that the video was fabricated. Trump would not believe Tillerson. When Trump met Abbas, he berated Abbas and called him a murderer and liar. But then told Abbas to play nice in front of the cameras, like he would. Jared, on this excerpt of the book, said that Trup was “much calmer” with Abbas. A member of Trump's team could not stand how Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner kissed Netanyahu's butt.

Woodward writes that Senator Lindsay Graham implored Trump not to kill senior Iranian general Qassen Soleimani. Trump chose to order the killing on January 3.

Rage will be the foundational account of the Trump presidency, its turmoil, contradictions and risks. It is an essential document for any voter seeking an accurate inside view of the Trump years—volatile and vivid.

Risk:
The Science and Politics of Fear.
By Dan Gardner
Paperback edition
2009
Virgin

OF THE many decisions you have taken this week about your health, safety and general well-being, you probably think the vast majority were rational and well thought out. They almost certainly were not. As Dan Gardner shows in this compelling analysis of how we judge risk, most of our decision-making is governed by emotion. Occasionally this serves us well, but often it does not. In the year following the 9/11 attacks, a surge in road travel in the US led to 1595 extra deaths, six times the number killed on the doomed aircraft. By showing how to read statistics properly he teaches and risk and fear, and how humans ar eprogrammed to avoid fear and how politicians can use fears to their campaigns' advantages.

If Then:
How the Simulmatics Corporation
Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
(Harvard)
September 15, 2020
Liveright

Longlisted • National Book Award (Nonfiction)
Shortlisted • Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year
Best Books of Fall 2020:

After WWII, social scientists thought they could model everything, create punchcards, and have UNIVAC like lights and blinks and come up with a solution for elections, for Vietnam insurgency, for civil rights riots. O rlike McKinsey reports, were they just confirming what their clients wanted them to decide?

This is a revelatory account of the Cold War origins of the data-MAD, algorithmic twenty-first century. The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge-decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Professor Jill Lepore came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists-“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”-Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior.

Lepore compares hiring for the company to assembling a team for a bank heist. There was:
Alex Bernstein, a computer scientist
Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist, and son of a famed NYC rabbi and Ed Greenfield, “the huckster” – the salesman

In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign (about his message as a Catholic, and civil rights), the New York Times (election analysis), the Department of Defense (Vietnam insurgency, hearts and minds), and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots (Rochester). The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.

The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. Sure de Sola Pool predicted many things, but he was privy to information that few had. In the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.

God's Shadow:
Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire,
and the Making of the Modern World
by Alan Mikhail
(Yale University)
2020

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans, with extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled monopolies over trade routes, controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any world power, forcing Europeans out of the Mediterranean and to the New World.

Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire’s history has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and even suppressed in the West. Now Alan Mikhail presents a vitally needed recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520).

Born to a concubine, and the fourth of his sultan father’s ten sons, Selim was never meant to inherit the throne. With personal charisma and military prowess-as well as the guidance of his remarkably gifted mother, Gülbahar-Selim claimed power over the empire in 1512 and, through ruthless ambition, nearly tripled the territory under Ottoman control, building a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century. At the same time, Selim-known by his subjects as “God’s Shadow on Earth”-fostered religious diversity, welcoming Jews among other minority populations into the empire; encouraged learning and philosophy; and penned his own verse.

Drawing on previously unexamined sources from multiple languages, and with original maps and stunning illustrations, Mikhail’s game-changing account “challenges readers to recalibrate their sense of history” (Leslie Peirce), adroitly using Selim’s life to upend prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories that have held sway for decades. Whether recasting Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the “Americas” as a bumbling attempt to slay Muslims or showing how the Ottomans allowed slaves to become the elite of society while Christian states at the very same time waged the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, God’s Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the history of the modern world.

Friendly Fire:
How Israel Became Its Own Worst
Enemy and the Hope for Its Future
by Ami Ayalon and Anthony David
Dennis Ross (Foreword)
September 8, 2020
Steerforth

In this deeply personal journey of discovery, Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for "the enemy" and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose.

Researching and writing Friendly Fire, he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel's civil society while heaping humiliation upon its Palestinian neighbors. "If Israel becomes an Orwellian dystopia," Ayalon writes, "it won't be thanks to a handful of theologians dragging us into the dark past. The secular majority will lead us there motivated by fear and propelled by silence." Ayalon is a realist, not an idealist, and many who consider themselves Zionists will regard as radical his conclusions about what Israel must do to achieve relative peace and security and to sustain itself as a Jewish homeland and a liberal democracy.

Admiral (Ret.) Ami Ayalon is a former Flotilla 13 (Israel's navy SEALs) commando, commander of the navy, director of the Shin Bet security agency, cabinet minister, Knesset member and a recipient of the Medal of Valor, Israel's highest military decoration. With Sari Nusseibeh, he established the People's Voice peace initiative in 2002. He is a member of Commanders for Israel's Security, chairman of the Executive Committee of the Haifa Research Center for Maritime & Strategy and chairman of AKIM Israel (the National Association for children and adults with Intellectual Disabilities). He organized and was featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, The Gatekeepers.

GOLEM GIRL
A MEMOIR
BY RIVA LEHRER
Fall 2020
One World

What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy? And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity? Can we envision a world that sees impossible creatures?

In 1958, amongst the children born with spina bifida is Riva Lehrer.

At the time, most such children are not expected to survive. Her parents and doctors are determined to "fix" her, sending the message over and over again that she is broken. That she will never have a job, a romantic relationship, or an independent life. Enduring countless medical interventions, Riva tries her best to be a good girl and a good patient in the quest to be cured.

Everything changes when, as an adult, Riva is invited to join a group of artists, writers, and performers who are building Disability Culture.

Their work is daring, edgy, funny, and dark—it rejects tropes that define disabled people as pathetic, frightening, or worthless. They insist that disability is an opportunity for creativity and resistance. Emboldened, Riva asks if she can paint their portraits—inventing an intimate and collaborative process that will transform the way she sees herself, others, and the world. Each portrait story begins to transform the myths she’s been told her whole life about her body, her sexuality, and other measures of normal.

Written with the vivid, cinematic prose of a visual artist, and the love and playfulness that defines all of Riva's work, Golem Girl is an extraordinary story of tenacity and creativity. With the author's magnificent portraits featured throughout, this memoir invites us to stretch ourselves toward a world where bodies flow between all possible forms of what it is to be human.

Letters from Cuba
A NOVEL
by Ruth Behar
2020
Nancy Paulsen
Grades 3 - 7

Inspired by her own grandmother’s life, Behar (Lucky Broken Girl) crafts a series of loving letters from Esther to her sister, describing the perilous journey and Esther’s first year in Cuba. . . . Global issues such as Hitler’s rise, anti-Semitism, slavery, and worker protests are neatly woven into Esther’s narrative. . . . Behar’s appreciative descriptions of Cuba and Esther’s close, protective bonds with her father and sister make for an engaging read.”—Publishers Weekly

“Pura Belpré Award winner Behar’s newest story is based on her own grandmother’s immigration journey. Eleven-year-old Esther bravely travels to Cuba from Poland to help her father earn enough money for the rest of their family to join them, including her mother, grandmother, three brothers, and cherished sister Malka. The narrative is told in a series of letters from Esther to Malka, chronicling her journey across the sea and her experiences in this new homeland. . . . Throughout the story, readers learn that many Jewish people are arriving in Cuba, trying to escape the Jewish persecution in Europe, despite Nazi sympathy infiltrating the island. Readers dive into the story headfirst as they get to know Esther, her family, and her newfound friends. Esther’s first-person descriptions of people and the island craft a vivid experience of Cuba’s sights, sounds, and culinary delights. Readers will not want to part with this story of resilience. A World War II refugee tale that spotlights dedicated hard work. A must-have.”—School Library Journal, starred review

* “After three years abroad, Papa’s saved only enough money to send for one of his children. Thus Esther boards the steamship alone even though she’s not quite 12. Cuba is a constant surprise. . . . In glowing letters to her sister back in Poland, Esther details how she’s learning Spanish through the poems of José Martí. She introduces her sister to her beloved new friends. . . . Esther’s first year in Cuba is marked by the calendar of Jewish holidays, as she wonders if she can be both Cuban and a Jew. As the coming war looms in Europe, she and her friends find solidarity. . . . An author’s note describes how the story was loosely inspired by the author’s own family history. Warmhearted cross-cultural friendship for a refugee on distant shores: both necessary and kind.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Evening:
A Novel
by Nessa Rapoport
September 1, 2020
Counterpoint

Two sisters, lost youth, and youthful obsessions; organized by day as the family sits shiva, Evening unfolds the paradoxes of love, ambition, siblings, and the way the past continues to inflect the present, sometimes against our will.

In her thirties, Eve is summoned home by her distraught family to mourn the premature death of her sister, Tam, a return that becomes an unexpected encounter with the past. Eve bears the burden of a secret: Two weeks before Tam died, Eve and Tam argued so vehemently that they did not speak again. Her sister was famous, acclaimed for her career as a TV journalist and her devoted marriage. But Tam, too, had a secret, revealed the day after the funeral, one that inverts the story Eve has told herself since their childhood. In the aftermath, Eve is forced to revise her version of her fractured family, her sister’s accomplishments and vaunted marriage, and her own impeded ambition in work and love.

Day by day as the family sits shiva, the stories unfold, illuminating the past to shape the present. Evening explores the dissonant love between sisters, the body in longing, the pride we take in sustaining our illusions, and the redemption that is possible only when they are dispelled.

NOW IN PAPERBACK

The Man Who Saw Everything
Paperback
by Deborah Levy
September 1, 2020
Bloomsbury

An electrifying novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness from Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize finalists Hot Milk and Swimming Home.

It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life.

The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present--to reveal the full spectrum of our world.

The Ends Game:
How Smart Companies Stop
Selling Products and Start
Delivering Value
by Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg (Technion)
September 8, 2020
MIT Press

How some firms are rewriting the rules of commerce by pursuing “ends”—actual outcomes—rather than selling “means”—their products and services.

Would you rather pay for healthcare or for better health? For school or education? For groceries or nutrition? A car or transportation? A theater performance or entertainment? In The Ends Game, Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg describe how some firms are rewriting the rules of commerce: instead of selling the “means” (their products and services), they adopt innovative revenue models to pursue “ends” (actual outcomes). They show that paying by the pill, semester, food item, vehicle, or show does not necessarily reflect the value that customers actually derive from their purchases. Revenue models anchored on the ownership of products, they argue, are patently inferior.

Bertini and Koenigsberg explain that advances in technology have made it possible for firms to collect “impact data” that tells them when and how customers use their products and how those products perform, and that firms can draw on this data to turn products into seamless services. New revenue models will enable transparency, accountability, and efficiency.

Bertini and Koenigsberg offer real-world examples of how companies in healthcare, transportation, education, and other sectors are already playing “the ends game,” describing, among other things, the successes of Dollar Shave Club, Rent the Runway, and “pay as you fly” insurance for drone flights.

Finally, they outline the challenges in adopting these new models, offering guidance on such issues as criteria for defining an outcome, concerns over data collection, and internal organizational obstacles.

Oded, a leader at London B School and grad of Technion, Cornell and Duke, was the Barbara and Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business at Columbia University (2002-2012).

Modern Kosher:
Global Flavors, New Traditions
by Michael Aaron Gardiner, Esq.
(San Diego Union Tribune)
September 8, 2020
RIZZOLI !!

This dynamic, inspiring set of recipes includes Asian, Indian, Latin, European, and Israeli influences, fresh ingredients, and modern techniques to present a bright, elevated vision of everyday kosher cooking.

Taking a food-forward, modern approach to the laws of kashrut, 100 original recipes showcase the breadth of flavors, textures, ingredients, and techniques available while keeping kosher.

Modern Kosher presents culturally Jewish recipes from Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and contemporary Israeli traditions; dishes from Latin, Asian, and other international cuisines for the kosher table; and highly practical pantry recipes, including stocks, sauces, oils, and pickles, plus the ultimate recipes for schmaltz and gribenes to enhance the reader's everyday cooking. Vegans, vegetarians, and gluten-free cooks will all find recipes to share. Whether planning a family holiday or a weeknight dinner with friends, Modern Kosher is elevated comfort food of the most delicious sort.

Check out his ROAST CHICKEN WITH SCHMALTZ “MASSAGE” and Le Puy Lentils recipe HERE

Speaking of which, take a look at The Culinary Saga of New Iceland: Recipes From the Shores of Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, Eaten at Christmas, these gyoingakokur, which translates to “Jewish cookie” may have come to Iceland via Denmark and its Jewish traders. Jews from the Iberian peninsula who were forced to move to Holland and Scandanavia, made butter cookies (Joodse boterkoeke) from their olive oil cookies and spread from there.

Speaking of which, take a look at The Rosh Hashanah Seder Cookbook: Stories & Recipes From the Reform Jewish Community of Madrid by Sara M. Gardner, from the second largest progressive community of Spain – Comunidad Judía Reformista de Madrid or the Reform Jewish Community of Madrid – comes a collection of recipes inspired by and organized around the Sephardic tradition of holding a Seder on Rosh Hashanah, including 52 recipes, each one accompanied by a story of a family that contributed it.

Deep Flavors:
A Celebration of Recipes for
Foodies in a Kosher Style
by Kenneth M. Horwitz
IOP Publishing

Rediscover classic dishes that have been elevated by years of home cooking in Ken Horwitz's kitchen. After fifty-one years in a general tax and transaction practice as a lawyer and CPA, Ken has brought his capacity for problem-solving and developing creative solutions to the recipes presented in Deep Flavors. Ken analyzes and modifies recipes to create better and more flavorful results. His passion for quality food shapes these family favorites, which have been adapted for a kosher cook to enjoy. Ken's strong family ties are rooted in a love of cooking, as he shares recipes often made by his mom, his wife, or his daughter over the years. Readers of all backgrounds will find recipes that can be tailored to their own tastes, dietary restrictions, and busy weeknight schedules. From cover to cover, this collection is full of the rich history of classic dishes and the food industry, tips for the home cook to develop his or her skills, and advice for planning ahead during a busy week or when there is a large meal to be prepared. For fresh, home-cooked meals and desserts that are easy to execute, Deep Flavors provides a variety of options that are sure to make every meal something for the whole family to look forward to enjoying.

Florence Fabricant in The York Times wrotes, “Kenneth M. Horwitz is first an accountant and a lawyer. But for decades, his avocation has been cooking. “Deep Flavors,” his hefty new cookbook, is a compendium of his own recipes (sometimes adapted from others) all written for a kosher kitchen. He approaches the kitchen with the same attention to detail that he might apply to a tax file or brief. It’s worth reading the copious text as he explains how his recipes evolved, sometimes with advice he picked up from figures like Julia Child, Mark Bittman and Barbara Kafka. He disdains shortcuts and treasures fresh and unprocessed high-quality ingredients. Pay attention to his advice about preparing ingredients before starting a recipe, like blanching basil for pesto to keep the color. The recipes are Jewish, Southern (he lives in Texas), Middle Eastern and more, tweaked, when necessary, for a Jewish or kosher home. His brownies are winners, as is his Indian-style grilled chicken with a spiced nondairy yogurt. Mr. Horwitz seems to have quite a sweet tooth, shown in the sugar he adds to several recipes, most notably his stuffed cabbage.”

Which Country Has the World's
Best Health Care?
by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD
Summer 2020
PublicAffairs

The preeminent doctor and bioethicist, Penn Professor and Provost Ezekiel Emanuel (of Emanuel kids fame) is repeatedly asked one question: Which country has the best healthcare? He set off to find an answer.

The US spends more than any other nation, nearly $4 trillion, on healthcare. Yet, for all that expense, the US is not ranked #1 -- not even close.

In Which Country Has the World's Best Healthcare? Ezekiel Emanuel profiles eleven of the world's healthcare systems in pursuit of the best or at least where excellence can be found. Using a unique comparative structure, the book allows healthcare professionals, patients, and policymakers alike to know which systems perform well, and why, and which face endemic problems. From Taiwan to Germany, Australia to Switzerland, the most inventive healthcare providers tackle a global set of challenges -- in pursuit of the best healthcare in the world.

These Violent Delights:
A Novel
BY MICAH NEMEREVER
September 15, 2020
Harper

Too violent for me, but you might like it

An O Magazine.com LGBTQ Book That Is Changing the Literary Landscape in 2020 • An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut of the Second Half of 2020 • A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books To Read This Year Selection
The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel — a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.

When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure (Jewish and traumatized by his family's Jewish experience), incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father’s recent death.

Paul sees the wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. He idolizes his friend for his magnetic confidence. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel. And admiration isn’t the same as trust.

As their friendship spirals into an all-consuming intimacy, Paul is desperate to protect their precarious bond, even as it becomes clear that pressures from the outside world are nothing compared with the brutality they are capable of inflicting on one another. Separation is out of the question. But as their orbit compresses and their grip on one another tightens, they are drawn to an act of irrevocable violence that will force the young men to confront a shattering truth at the core of their relationship.

Exquisitely plotted, unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is a novel of escalating dread and an excavation of the unsettling depths of human desire.

The Spymasters:
How the CIA Directors Shape
History and the Future
by Chris Whipple
September 15, 2020
Scribner

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers, a remarkable, behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to run the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, and how the CIA is often a crucial counterforce against presidents threatening to overstep the powers of their office.

Only eleven men and one woman are alive today who have made the life-and-death decisions that come with running the world’s most powerful and influential intelligence service. With unprecedented, deep access to nearly all these individuals plus several of their predecessors, Chris Whipple tells the story of an agency that answers to the United States president alone, but whose activities—spying, espionage, and covert action—take place on every continent. At pivotal moments, the CIA acts as a brake on rogue presidents, starting in the mid-seventies with DCI Richard Helms’s refusal to conceal Richard Nixon’s criminality and continuing to the present as the actions of a CIA whistleblower have ignited impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.

Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has been a powerful player on the world stage, operating largely in the shadows to protect American interests. For The Spymasters, Whipple conducted extensive, exclusive interviews with nearly every living CIA director, pulling back the curtain on the world’s elite spy agencies and showing how the CIA partners—or clashes—with counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Topics covered in the book include attempts by presidents to use the agency for their own ends; simmering problems in the Middle East and Asia; rogue nuclear threats; and cyberwarfare.

A revelatory, behind-the-scenes look, The Spymasters recounts seven decades of CIA activity and elicits predictions about the issues--and threats—that will engage the attention of future operatives and analysts. Including eye-opening interviews with George Tenet, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus, as well as those who’ve just recently departed the agency, this is a timely, essential, and important contribution to current events.

CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP
ELEVATING HUMANITY THROUGH BUSINESS
BY JOHN MACKEY
with STEVE MCINTOSH
CARTER PHILLIPS
(Whole Foods)
September 15, 2020
Portfolio

From Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and his coauthors, a follow-up to groundbreaking bestseller Conscious Capitalism—revealing what it takes to lead a purpose-driven, sustainable business.

John Mackey started a movement when he founded Whole Foods, bringing natural, organic food to the masses and not only changing the market, but breaking the mold. Now, for the first time, Conscious Leadership closely explores the vision, virtues, and mindset that have informed Mackey’s own leadership journey, providing a roadmap for innovative, value-based leadership—in business and in society.

Conscious Leadership demystifies strategies that have helped Mackey shepherd Whole Foods through four decades of incredible growth and innovation, including its recent sale to Amazon. Each chapter will challenge you to rethink conventional business wisdom through anecdotes, case studies, profiles of conscious leaders, and innovative techniques for self-development, culminating in an empowering call to action for entrepreneurs and trailblazers—to step up as leaders who see beyond the bottom line.

Outside the Box:
How Globalization Changed
from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas
by Marc Levinson
September 15, 2020
Princeton University Press

From the acclaimed author of The Box, a new history of globalization that shows us how to navigate its future

Globalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is also one of the most contentious issues of our time. While it may have made goods less expensive, it has also sent massive flows of money across borders and shaken the global balance of power. Outside the Box offers a fresh and lively history of globalization, showing how it has evolved over two centuries in response to changes in demography, technology, and consumer tastes.

Marc Levinson, the acclaimed author of The Box, tells the story of globalization through the people who eliminated barriers and pursued new ways of doing business. He shows how the nature of globalization changed dramatically in the 1980s with the creation of long-distance value chains. This new type of economic relationship shifted manufacturing to Asia, destroying millions of jobs and devastating industrial centers in North America, Europe, and Japan. Levinson describes how improvements in transportation, communications, and computing made international value chains possible, but how globalization was taken too far because of large government subsidies and the systematic misjudgment of risk by businesses. As companies began to account properly for the risks of globalization, cross-border investment fell sharply and foreign trade lagged long before Donald Trump became president and the coronavirus disrupted business around the world.

In Outside the Box, Levinson explains that globalization is entering a new era in which moving stuff will matter much less than moving services, information, and ideas.

HOW TO LEAD
WISDOM FROM THE WORLD'S
CEOs, FOUNDERS, and
GAME CHANGERS
BY DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN
September 1, 2020
Simon and Schuster

The essential leadership playbook. Learn the principles and guiding philosophies of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Warren Buffet, Oprah, and many others through illuminating conversations about their remarkable lives and careers.

For the past five years, David M. Rubenstein—author of The American Story, visionary cofounder of The Carlyle Group, and host of The David Rubenstein Show—has spoken with the world’s highest performing leaders about who they are and how they became successful. How to Lead distills these revealing conversations into an indispensable leadership guidebook.

Gain advice and wisdom from CEOs, presidents, founders, and master performers from the worlds of finance (Warren Buffet, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde, Ken Griffin), tech (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook), entertainment (Oprah, Lorne Michaels, Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma), sports (Jack Nicklaus, Adam Silver, Coach K, Phil Knight), government (President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi), and many others.

-Jeff Bezos harnesses the power of wandering, discovering that his best decisions have been made with heart and intuition, rather than analysis.
-Richard Branson never goes into a venture looking to make a profit. He aims to make the best in field.
-Phil Knight views Nike as a marketing company whose product is its most important marketing tool.
-Marillyn Hewson, who grew up in a fatherless home with four siblings in Kansas, quickly learned the importance of self-reliance and the value of a dollar.

How to Lead shares the extraordinary stories of these pioneering agents of change. Discover how each luminary got started and how they handle decision making, failure, innovation, change, and crisis. Learn from their decades of experience as pioneers in their field. No two leaders are the same.

Friday Forward:
Inspiration & Motivation to End
Your Week Stronger Than It Started
by Robert Glazer
September 1, 2020
Simple Truths

FROM USA TODAY AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ELEVATE
Wake up. Get inspired. Change the world. Repeat.

Global business leader and national bestselling author, Robert Glazer, believes we all have a responsibility to each other: to give one another the inspiration and support we need to be our best. What started as a weekly note known as Friday Forward to his team of forty has turned into a global movement reaching over 200,000 leaders across sixty countries and continually forwarded to friends and family.

In FRIDAY FORWARD, Robert shares fifty-two of his favorite stories with real life examples that will motivate you to grow and push you to be your best self. He encourages you to use this book as part of a positive and intentional Friday morning routine to get the weekend started on a forward-looking note that will carry you through the week. At once uplifting and deeply thought-provoking, these stories will challenge you to propel yourself outside your comfort zone to unlock your innate potential. By making small, intentional changes, you have the power to create lasting impact, not only in your own life, but also to inspire those around you to do the same. Today is the perfect day to start.

Battlegrounds:
The Fight to Defend the Free World
by H. R. McMaster
September 22, 2020
Harper
560 pages

Retired Lt. General H.R. McMaster, was – for 13 months - an NSA Adviser for Donald J. Trump, and the author of “Dereliction of Duty.” For me, he is an immediate turnoff and a bellicose speaker. But his opinions carry weight in Washington DC, so it is important to take a look at this book in terms of future policies.

In his opinion, since the end of the Cold War and the idea of the end of History, American foreign policy has been misconceived, inconsistent, and poorly implemented. Therefore, America and its free world allies have fallen behind its rivals (China) in power and influence. Meanwhile threats to security, freedom, and prosperity, such as nuclear proliferation and jihadist terrorism have grown. In BATTLEGROUNDS, H.R. McMaster describes efforts to reassess and fundamentally shift policies while he was National Security Advisor. And he provides his path to improve strategic competence and prevail in complex competitions against America's adversaries.

SEE ALSO...

Mother for Dinner:
A Novel
by Shalom Auslander
September 22, 2020
Riverhead Books

By the author of Foreskin's Lament, a novel of identity, tribalism, and mothers.

Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: "Eat me."

This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions, both practical and emotional. Of practical concern, his dead mother is six-foot-two and weighs about four hundred and fifty pounds. Even divided up between Seventh and his eleven brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan, First hated her, and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated, and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, whose erratic understanding of their traditions leads to conflict.

Seventh struggles with his mother's deathbed request. He never loved her, but the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels--to her and to his people and to his "unique cultural heritage"--is overwhelming. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, thousands of people long, stretching back hundreds of years. But, as his brother First says, he's getting tired of chains.

Irreverent and written with Auslander's incomparable humor, Mother for Dinner is an exploration of legacy, assimilation, the things we owe our families, and the things we owe ourselves.

The Book of Two Ways:
A Novel
by Jodi Picoult
September 22, 2020
Ballantine Random House

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and A Spark of Light comes a riveting novel about the choices that alter the course of our lives.

Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: Prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband but of a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong.

Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, their beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, in which she helps ease the transition between life and death for her clients.

But somewhere in Egypt is Wyatt Armstrong, who works as an archaeologist unearthing ancient burial sites, a career Dawn once studied for but was forced to abandon when life suddenly intervened. And now, when it seems that fate is offering her second chances, she is not as sure of the choice she once made.

After the crash landing, the airline ensures that the survivors are seen by a doctor, then offers transportation to wherever they want to go. The obvious destination is to fly home, but she could take another path: return to the archaeological site she left years before, reconnect with Wyatt and their unresolved history, and maybe even complete her research on The Book of Two Ways—the first known map of the afterlife.

As the story unfolds, Dawn’s two possible futures unspool side by side, as do the secrets and doubts long buried with them. Dawn must confront the questions she’s never truly asked: What does a life well lived look like? When we leave this earth, what do we leave behind? Do we make choices . . . or do our choices make us? And who would you be if you hadn’t turned out to be the person you are right now?

THINK LIKE A MONK
by JAY SHETTY
September 8, 2020
Simon and Schuster

DO YOU REMEMBER THAT 2011 DOC FILM (KUMARE) about the man (Vikram Gandhi) who decides to pretend to be an Indian guru and make benign bullcrap up and so many people start to follow him, and he wants to show how absurd it is...

Jay Shetty grew up in England. He made fun of his father when he had a midlife crisis and sought out meaning. Jay, at 18, went to business college and wanted to be like those wealthy CEOs and studied their biographies and attended their campus lectures. When a friend coaxed him to go hear a monk. In return for a night at the pub drinking, Jay agreed and had an epiphany. He spent Summers in India and upon graduation went to India to study meditation for three years.

He returned to the UK and then Los Angeles to peddle his thoughts and appear on coail media and TV talk shows. He is a social media superstar and host of a podcast “On Purpose,” which sells his wisdom to all comers, reduces anxiety, tells listeners to be kind and to learn from those around them.

Imagine he is RAMY, but became successful

In this book, Shetty draws on his time as a monk to explain how you to can be successful and calm, and like the chef Gasteau in Ratatouille who said everyone can cook... everyone can think like a monk.

The Last Million:
Europe's Displaced Persons from
World War to Cold War
by David Nasaw
September 15, 2020
Penguin Press

STARRED REVIEWS FROM BOTH KIRKUS AND PW

From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII

In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries.

The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany.

A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.

FROM HISTORY: By October 1, 1945, more than 2 million Soviets, 1.5 million Frenchmen, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch citizens, almost 300,000 Belgians and Luxembourgians, more than 200,000 Yugoslavs, 135,000 Czechs, 94,000 Poles, and tens of thousands of other European displaced persons, or DPs, had been sent home. There remained left behind in Germany more than a million displaced persons warehoused in camps, overseen by the occupying militaries and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority (UNRRA), which had been organized in 1943 to oversee wartime recovery and the repatriation of the displaced. The Last Million is the story of these displaced Eastern Europeans who, when the shooting stopped, refused to go home or had no homes to return to. It is the story of their confinement in refugee camps for up to five years after the war ended.
The Polish Catholics who comprised the largest group of displaced persons had come to Germany during the war, the vast majority deported against their will as forced laborers to replace soldiers sent to the eastern front. They had homes and families to go back to and a government that welcomed their return, but hundreds of thousands preferred to remain in refugee camps in Germany. Caught up in the postwar conflict between East and West, they had been warned—and heeded those warnings—not to return to a Poland devastated by war, threatened by civil war, no longer independent but under Soviet domination, its eastern provinces ripped away and annexed by the USSR. The Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and some of the western Ukrainians had, unlike the Poles, departed their homelands voluntarily in the final year of the war, in flight from the advancing Red Army. Large numbers of them had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers; some had participated in the slaughter of their Jewish neighbors; a significant number had fought in German uniforms as part of Waffen-SS units. Even the innocent among them whose collaboration had entailed nothing more than working in a post office under German superiors feared that should they return they would be charged with treason or war crimes. They preferred to remain in the relative safety of the displaced persons camps in Germany until their nations were liberated from the Soviets or they could start their lives anew somewhere else. A much smaller number of Jewish survivors of concentration, labor, and death camps had entered Germany in the last months of the war. As the Red Army moved westward, German officials, fearful lest the world discover the full extent of Nazi atrocities, had loaded them into boxcars or death-marched them into Germany to work them to death in the underground munitions factories that Hitler believed were going to produce the miracle weapons that would win the war for the Third Reich. Those still alive when the war ended had no families, no homes, no loved ones to return to. Their ultimate destination, they hoped, would be a Jewish homeland in Palestine or with family members in the United States, but for now they had no choice but to remain in the displaced persons camps in Germany, where they were fed, sheltered, and protected by the American and British militaries, and where they enjoyed a measure of security they had not known since the war began. ….. The United States was among the last nations to welcome the Last Million for resettlement..... Black market operations connected insiders with German civilians outside and brought into the camps luxuries and necessities not otherwise available.... The Last Million were able to exert some control over their daily lives in the camps, but not over their futures. Those who were willing to return home would be assisted in doing so. But those who had no intention of going home again or had no homes to return to were marooned, with neither the resources nor permission nor the documents they needed to leave the camps and Germany and resettle elsewhere..... Their fate was in the hands of the Allies, who remained sharply divided over what to do with them. The Americans and the British were agreed that the Eastern Europeans whose lands had been occupied or annexed by the Soviets had the right to refuse or delay repatriation, if that was what they chose, and the international community had the responsibility of caring for them until they decided to go home again or a place was found for them to resettle. The Soviets and the Eastern bloc of nations where the DPs had formerly lived demanded that they be repatriated. Only the Jews and Spanish Republicans were, they argued, truly displaced; the others had homes to return to and nations ready to welcome them. Those who sought refuge in the camps were, they insisted, refusing repatriation because they preferred being fed by the western Allies and UNRRA to working to rebuild their shattered nations, or, worse yet, because they feared punishment as quislings, Nazi collaborators, or war criminals should they return home.... The IRO succeeded in removing the Last Million from the camps by marketing them as the solution to labor shortages aggravated by the recent war. Britain, France, Belgium, and then Canada, Australia, and the nations of South America and the Caribbean were encouraged to send recruiting teams to the camps to select displaced persons to fill their particular labor needs. The first choices of the recruiters were the Latvians and Estonians because they were white, Protestant, healthier than the forced laborers and concentration camp survivors, reliably anti-Communist, and with a reputation for being disciplined and diligent. Next were the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Polish DPs. Ignored or intentionally discounted in the recruiting nations’ eagerness to gain a cheap labor force was the fact that a not insignificant proportion of the Baltic and some of the Ukrainian DPs had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers or fought alongside them. The IRO member nations that accepted for resettlement hundreds of thousands of Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Eastern Europeans refused to do the same for the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish displaced persons, who remained trapped in the camps in Germany, the land of their murderers, awaiting the opening by the British of the gates to Palestine or the offer of visas to the United States, Canada, or Australia...(The opponents of DP legislation, trading in timeworn Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories, suggested that those who had lived in the Soviet Union or Soviet-dominated Poland and been liberated by the Red Army were more than likely to be Communist sympathizers or clandestine operatives and, for that reason alone, should be barred from entering the United States....)

Eli's Promise:
A Novel
by Ronald H. Balson
September 22, 2020
ST. Martin's Press

A "fixer" in a Polish town during World War II, his betrayal of a Jewish family, and a search for justice 25 years later-by the winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Eli’s Promise is a masterful work of historical fiction spanning three eras?Nazi-occupied Poland, the American Zone of post-war Germany, and Chicago at the height of the Vietnam War. Award-winning author Ronald H. Balson explores the human cost of war, the mixed blessings of survival, and the enduring strength of family bonds.

1939: Eli Rosen lives with his wife Esther and their young son in the Polish town of Lublin, where his family owns a construction company. As a consequence of the Nazi occupation, Eli’s company is Aryanized, appropriated and transferred to Maximilian Poleski an unprincipled profiteer who peddles favors to Lublin’s subjugated residents. An uneasy alliance is formed; Poleski will keep the Rosen family safe if Eli will manage the business. Will Poleski honor his promise or will their relationship end in betrayal and tragedy?

1946: Eli resides with his son in a displaced persons camp in Allied-occupied Germany hoping for a visa to America. His wife has been missing since the war. One man is sneaking around the camps selling illegal visas; might he know what has happened to her?

1965: Eli rents a room in Albany Park, Chicago. He is on a mission. With patience, cunning, and relentless focus, he navigates unfamiliar streets and dangerous political backrooms, searching for the truth. Powerful and emotional, Ronald H. Balson's Eli’s Promise is a rich, rewarding novel of World War II and a husband’s quest for justice.

Judaism for the World:
Reflections on God,
Life, and Love
by Rabbi Arthur Green, PhD
September 22, 2020
Yale University Press

An internationally recognized scholar and theologian shares a Jewish mysticism for our times
Judaism, one of the world’s great spiritual traditions, is not addressed to Jews alone. In this masterful book, Arthur Green calls out to seekers of all sorts, offering a universal response to the eternal human questions of who we are, why we exist, where we are going, and how to live.

Drawing on over half a century as a Jewish seeker and teacher, he shows us a Judaism that cultivates the life of the spirit, that inspires an inward journey leading precisely toward self-transcendence, to an awareness of the universal Self in whose presence we exist. As a neo-hasidic seeker, he is both devotional and boldly questioning in his understanding of God and tradition. Engaging with the mystical sources, he translates the insights of the Hasidic masters into a new religious language accessible to all those eager to build an inner life and a human society that treasures the divine spark in each person and throughout Creation.

Thinking about the Prophets:
A Philosopher Reads the Bible
(JPS Essential Judaism)
by Kenneth Seeskin
(Northwestern University)
September 1, 2020
JPS: Jewish Publication Society

Rethinking the great literary prophets whose ministry ran from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE—Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, and Job—Thinking about the Prophets examines their often-shocking teachings in light of their times, their influence on later Western and Jewish thinkers, and their enduring lessons for all of us. As a noted scholar of Jewish philosophy, Kenneth Seeskin teases out philosophical, ethical, and theological questions in the writings, such as the nature of moral reasoning, the divine persona, divine providence, the suffering of the innocent, the power of repentance, and what it means to believe in a monotheistic conception of God.

Seeskin demonstrates that great ideas are not limited by time or place, but rather once put forth, take on a life of their own. Thus he interweaves the medieval and modern philosophers Maimonides, Kant, Cohen, Buber, Levinas, Heschel, and Soloveitchik, all of whom read the prophets and had important things to say as a result. We come to see the prophets perhaps in equal measure as divinely authorized whistle-blowers and profound thinkers of the human condition.

Readers of all levels will find this volume an accessible and provoking introduction to the enduring significance of biblical prophecy.

The Man Who Ran Washington:
The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
May 12, 2020
postponed to September 29, 2020
Doubleday

From two of America's most revered political journalists (former Jerusalem bureau chief NYT) comes the definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III: the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world.

Of course, all his service and successes are worth crap after he chose party over country and supported Trump even though he dislikes him and called Trump crazy and nuts.

BAKER has no doubts, no regrets, no introspection. He is about power and the use of power. When it comes down to it, power must be held on to. If someone gets in your way, don't spank them, you must utterly destroy them and run them over with all possible alacrity

For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House without his advice. James Addison Baker III was the indispensable man for four presidents because he understood better than anyone how to make Washington work at a time when America was shaping events around the world. The Man Who Ran Washington is a page-turning portrait of a power broker who influenced America's destiny for generations.

Baker was/is a deal maker, a master of compromise. He loved to make deals and was successful at it. He knew how to get things done. He made deals with Democrats as long as the GOP would win elections. It was Baker is suggested and PUSHED for Sandra Day O'Conner to be the SCOTUS nominee.

A scion of Texas aristocracy who became George H. W. Bush's best friend on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club, Baker had never even worked in Washington until a devastating family tragedy struck when he was thirty-nine. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford's campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. He ran Ronald Reagan's White House and became the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, rewrote the tax code, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War, brokered the reunification of Germany and helped bring a decades-long nuclear superpower standoff to an end. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season, Baker governed as the avatar of pragmatism over purity and deal-making over division, a lost art in today's fractured nation.

His story is a case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late twentieth-century America and the story of Washington and the world in the modern era--how it once worked and how it has transformed into an era of gridlock and polarization. This masterly biography by two brilliant observers of the American political scene is destined to become a classic.

Where Law Ends:
Inside the Mueller Investigation
by Andrew Weissmann
September 29, 2020
Random House

In the first and only inside account of the Mueller investigation, one of the special counsel’s most trusted prosecutors breaks his silence on the team’s history-making search for the truth, their painstaking deliberations and costly mistakes, and Trump’s unprecedented efforts to stifle their report.

“Weissmann delivers the kind of forceful, ringing indictment that Mueller’s report did not.”—The New York Times

In May 2017, Robert Mueller was tapped to?lead an?inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, coordination by foreign agents with Donald Trump’s campaign, and obstruction of justice by the president.?Mueller assembled a “dream team” of top prosecutors, and for the next twenty-two months, the investigation was a black box and the subject of endless anticipation and speculation—until April 2019, when?the?special counsel’s report was released.

In Where Law Ends, legendary?prosecutor?Andrew?Weissmann—a key player in the Special Counsel’s Office—finally pulls back the curtain to reveal exactly what went on inside the investigation, including the heated debates, painful deliberations, and mistakes of the team—not to mention the external efforts by the president and Attorney General William Barr to manipulate the investigation to their political ends.?

Weissmann puts the reader in the room as Mueller’s team made their most consequential decisions, such as whether to subpoena the president, whether to conduct a full financial investigation of Trump, and whether to explicitly recommend obstruction charges against him. Weissmann also details for the first time the debilitating effects that President Trump himself had on the investigation, through his dangling of pardons and his constant threats to shut down the inquiry and fire Mueller, which left?the team?racing against the clock and?essentially fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.??

In Where Law Ends, Weissmann conjures the camaraderie and esprit de corps of the investigative units led by the enigmatic Mueller, a distinguished public servant who is revealed here, in a way we have never seen him before, as a manager, a colleague, and a very human presence. Weissmann is as candid about the team’s mistakes as he is about its successes, and is committed to accurately documenting the historic investigation for future generations to assess and learn from. Ultimately, Where Law Ends is a story about?a team of public servants, dedicated to the rule of law, tasked with investigating a president who did everything he could to stand in their way.

Unbinding Isaac:
The Significance of the Akedah
for Modern Jewish Thought
by Aaron Koller
(Yeshiva University)
2020
JPS: Jewish Publication Society

Unbinding Isaac takes readers on a trek of discovery for our times into the binding of Isaac story. Nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard viewed the story as teaching suspension of ethics for the sake of faith, and subsequent Jewish thinkers developed this idea as a cornerstone of their religious worldview. Aaron Koller examines and critiques Kierkegaard’s perspective—and later incarnations of it—on textual, religious, and ethical grounds. He also explores the current of criticism of Abraham in Jewish thought, from ancient poems and midrashim to contemporary Israel narratives, as well as Jewish responses to the Akedah over the generations.

Finally, bringing together these multiple strands of thought—along with modern knowledge of human sacrifice in the Phoenician world—Koller offers an original reading of the Akedah. The biblical God would like to want child sacrifice—because it is in fact a remarkable display of devotion—but more than that, he does not want child sacrifice because it would violate the child’s autonomy. Thus, the high point in the drama is not the binding of Isaac but the moment when Abraham is told to release him. The Torah does not allow child sacrifice, though by contrast, some of Israel’s neighbors viewed it as a religiously inspiring act. The binding of Isaac teaches us that an authentically religious act cannot be done through the harm of another human being. With a Study Guide

FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER IS 96 ON EREV SUKKOT

His Very Best:
Jimmy Carter, a Life
by Jonathan Alter
September 29, 2020
Simon and Schuster

It always angers me when some so-called rabbis (you know, the grotesque publicity seeking ones) and pundits dare to malign Jimmy Carter and call him the worst President. Really? Because he was not a demagogue? Because he was more substance than photo op fluff? Because he healed a nation? Author Jonathan Alter helps bring facts to the discussion

From one of America’s most-respected journalists and modern historians comes the first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and Nobel Prize–winning humanitarian.

Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure—ridiculed and later revered—with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people.

Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first.

Drawing on fresh archival material and five years of extensive access to Carter and his entire family, Alter traces how he evolved from a timid, bookish child—raised mostly by a black woman farmhand—into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights, and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties.

This engrossing, monumental biography will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

MORALITY:
Restoring the Common Good
in Divided Times
by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonweath
September 1, 2020
Basic Books

First... In October 2020, Rabbi Sacks disclosed that he is undergoing treatment for cancer for a third time. We wish him well and a speedy full recovery of body and spirit.

A distinguished religious leader's stirring case for reconstructing a shared framework of virtues and values

With liberal democracy embattled, public discourse grown toxic, family life breaking down, and drug abuse and depression on the rise, many fear what the future holds.

In Morality, respected faith leader and public intellectual Jonathan Sacks traces today's crisis to our loss of a strong, shared moral code and our elevation of self-interest over the common good (Individualism over community). We have outsourced morality to the market and the state, but neither is capable of showing us how to live, he writes. Sacks leads readers from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment to the present day to show that there is no liberty without morality and no freedom without responsibility, arguing that we must all must play our part in rebuilding a common moral foundation.

A major work of moral philosophy, Morality is an inspiring vision of a world in which we can all find our place and face the future without fear.

Sacks makes the case that society has undergone what he calls “cultural climate change,” in which individualism has eroded collective morality. As with meteorological climate change, he argues, there are forces fueling a dangerous shift — he points to social media as a leading one — but there is also time to avert disaster. The way to become moral, Sacks writes, is both simple and a great challenge: “We need direct encounters with other human beings. We have to be in their presence, open to their otherness, alert to their hopes and fears, engaged in the minuet of conversation, the delicate back-and-forth of speaking and listening.” In an interview with JTA, Rabbi Sacks said that dealing with people who espouse views different from our own is like the process of a Jewish family. Other people have conversations, Jews have arguments. But with “cancel culture,” Sacks said we are losing a sense of being able to talk to the people with whom we disagree. He continued, “I think this extraordinary thing that Judaism brings into the world — of course, nowadays everyone associates it with Christianity — but it’s Judaism who says God is our father, is a relative. Some people have God as a friend; we have God as family. The first thing that God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh is that Israel is his firstborn son. And God relates to us even though we have views that he regards as abhorrent. That is the existential nature of family — that there are certain loves that are unconditional, even while you reserve the right to argue strenuously against those views. It’s really disturbed me, you know, that people nowadays say the views are more important than the family. That’s a real error of priorities. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of Jewish peoplehood. It doesn’t seem clear that there are so many things that unite the Jewish people today in terms of central values that all Jews can agree on. Does the Torah even have a clear, singular morality in your view, or some common threads we can all agree on from the beginning? When it comes to talking about Jewish unity or Jewish peoplehood, talk is cheap. I think you have to walk the talk. And that’s why, for instance, I’ve always had public conversations with people who really reject every single thing that I stand for. One of them was the late Amos Oz, the novelist. Another is Steven Pinker — Steven is the thinking person’s atheist, right? And I love Steven. We feel this bond of Jewishness between us. And I have that with David Brooks of The New York Times, or the American philosopher Mike Sandel, or Robert Putnam of Harvard. These are people with whom I have a real bond, despite the fact that their approaches to Judaism are often totally and absolutely different from mine. You have to have these conversations, in public as well as private, and show it can be done. And I think it makes an impact when it’s done...”

Judaism's Life-Changing Ideas
by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonweath
Summer 2020
Maggid

What is Judaism? A religion? A faith? A way of life?
A set of beliefs? A collection of commands? A culture?
A civilization?
It is all these, but it is emphatically something more. It is a way of thinking about life, a constellation of ideas. One might think that the ideas Judaism introduced into the world have become part of the common intellectual heritage of humankind, at least of the West. Yet this is not the case. Some of them have been lost over time; others the West never fully understood. Yet these ideas remain as important as ever before, and perhaps even more so. In this inspiring work, Rabbi Sacks introduces his readers to one Life-Changing Idea from each of the weekly parashot.

The Crowns on the Letters:
Essays on the Aggada and
the Lives of the Sages
by Rabbi Ari Kahn
Summer 2020
OU Press

Rabbi Ari Kahn's The Crowns on the Letters represents a major achievement in the study of the lives of our sages, as well as in the study of rabbinic aggada.This work is an immensely learned and deeply creative interpretation of many fundamental aggadot relating both to the intellectual biographies of the tannaim and amoraim Hillel and Shammai, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Resh Lakish and Rabbi Yochanan, and many others as well as to major themes in Jewish thought including the nature of the Oral Law, mysticism and its perils, the messianic era, teshuva, and Eretz Yisrael. Rabbi Kahn's work is refreshingly original and he wears his erudition lightly, so that this is not only edifying scholarship but readable as well. Rabbi Menachem Genack

Speaking of God...

Twilight of the Gods:
War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945
(Volume 3) (Pacific War Trilogy)
by Ian W. Toll
September 1, 2020
WW NORTON

The final volume of the magisterial Pacific War Trilogy from acclaimed historian Ian W. Toll, “one of the great storytellers of War” (Evan Thomas).

In June 1944, the United States launched a crushing assault on the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Mariana Islands and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower marked a pivotal moment in the Pacific War. No tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the two combatants. The War in the Pacific had entered its endgame.

Beginning with the Honolulu Conference, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with his Pacific theater commanders to plan the last phase of the campaign against Japan, Twilight of the Gods brings to life the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in atomic blasts.

Ian W. Toll’s narratives of combat in the air, at sea, and on the beaches are as gripping as ever, but he also reconstructs the Japanese and American home fronts and takes the reader into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo, where the great questions of strategy and diplomacy were decided.

Drawing from a wealth of rich archival sources and new material, Twilight of the Gods casts a penetrating light on the battles, grand strategic decisions and naval logistics that enabled the Allied victory in the Pacific. An authoritative and riveting account of the final phase of the War in the Pacific, Twilight of the Gods brings Toll’s masterful trilogy to a thrilling conclusion. This prize-winning and best-selling trilogy will stand as the first complete history of the Pacific War in more than twenty-five years, and the first multivolume history of the Pacific naval war since Samuel Eliot Morison’s series was published in the 1950s.

God in Gotham:
The Miracle of Religion
in Modern Manhattan
by Jon Butler
September 29, 2020
Belknap/Harvard

A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism.

In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community.

Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan’s young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island’s booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth.

God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than foundered in it. Far from the world of “disenchantment” that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.

Never Alone:
Prison, Politics,
and My People
by Natan Sharansky with
Gil Troy
September 1, 2020
PublicAffairs

A classic account of courage, integrity, and most of all, belonging

In 1977, Natan Sharansky, a leading activist in the democratic dissident movement in the Soviet Union and the movement for free Jewish emigration, was arrested by the KGB. He spent nine years as a political prisoner in the USSR in the gulag, convicted of treason against the state. Every day, Sharansky fought for individual freedom in the face of overt tyranny, a struggle that would come to define the rest of his life.

Never Alone reveals how Sharansky's years in prison, many spent in harsh solitary confinement, prepared him for a very public life after his release and life in Israel.

As an Israeli politician and the head of the Jewish Agency, Sharansky brought extraordinary moral clarity and uncompromising, often uncomfortable, honesty. His storyis suffused with reflections from his time as a political prisoner, from his seat at the table as history unfolded in Israel and the Middle East, and from his passionate efforts to unite the Jewish people.

Written with frankness, affection, and humor, the book offers us profound insights from a man who embraced the essential human struggle: to find his own voice, his own faith, and the people to whom he could belong.

Those Who Forget:
My Family's Story in Nazi Europe
– A Memoir, A History, A Warning
by Geraldine Schwarz
Laura Marris (Translator)
May 5, 2020
Postponed to September 22, 2020
Scribner

Those Who Forget, published to international awards and acclaim, is journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s riveting account of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II, an in-depth history of Europe’s post-war reckoning with fascism, and an urgent appeal to remember as a defense against today’s rise of far-right nationalism.

During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich.

Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy.

Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget is a riveting memoir, an illuminating history, and an urgent call for remembering.

Game Changer:
How to Be 10x in
the Talent Economy
by Michael Solomon, Rishon Blumberg,
and Daniel Weizmann (Contributor)
September 22, 2020
HarperCollins Leadership series

Whether you’re an employer, employee, freelancer, or part of a management team, you must understand how highly skilled “10x” talent is radically shifting the dynamics of the employment marketplace. Learn how to identify, attract, vet, employ, and retain--or become--the game-changing talent that will make a difference in the work world of tomorrow.

Individuals, companies, and governments around the globe need to understand what tactics are required to employ, attract, and retain the kind of game-changing talent required to survive and thrive in an increasingly global, automated, and distributed economy.

The term “10x” is borrowed from the tech world to describe an extremely talented coder that brings at least ten times the value to whatever business he or she engages with. In Silicon Valley, the big tech companies compete for the services of 10xers by offering outrageous compensation packages and a plethora of perks. Even more crucially, the 10xers demand and expect a level of flexibility, respect, and participation unheard of in the old work world. The lessons presented in Game Changer apply to individuals or companies striving to become 10x in any industry.

Using the tech industry as an example, Game Changer shows companies how to attract and manage 10x talent by ditching traditional business structures, for a more agile approach where 10xers can be plugged in where they will make the most impact--and where they themselves will find the most fulfillment. Offering work flexibility, increased autonomy, and a variety of previously unheard-of freedoms is a small price to pay for the transformative results 10xers deliver. For readers who are confident in their abilities and want to make an impact where they work, Game Changer shows them how to be a 10xer and enjoy the varied rewards that this brings.

See how highly skilled talent is transforming companies of all sizes and industries through real-world stories.
Get an inside glimpse into how companies attract, retain, and manage 10x talent. Recognize the roadblocks to retaining top talent that are inherent in the traditional employer-employee model and learn how these obstacles can be overcome to incredible success.
Learn how to see yourself as both talent and management to achieve the rewards and satisfaction that come with being 10x.

Chinatown Pretty:
Fashion and Wisdom from
Chinatown's Most Stylish Seniors
by Andria Lo and
Valerie Luu
September 22, 2020
Chronicle Books

Can you imagine a book on stylish elderly Jewish woman, with their advice on looking fabulous??

Chinatown Pretty features beautiful portraits and heartwarming stories of trend-setting seniors across six Chinatowns. Andria Lo and Valerie Luu have been interviewing and photographing Chinatown's most fashionable elders on their blog and Instagram, Chinatown Pretty, since 2014.

Chinatown Pretty is a signature style worn by pòh pohs (grandmas) and gùng gungs (grandpas) everywhere—but it's also a life philosophy, mixing resourcefulness, creativity, and a knack for finding joy even in difficult circumstances.

Photos span Chinatowns in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Vancouver; The style is a mix of modern and vintage, high and low, handmade and store bought clothing; This is a celebration of Chinese American culture, active old-age, and creative style. Chinatown Pretty shares nuggets of philosophical wisdom and personal stories about immigration and Chinese-American culture. This book is great for anyone looking for advice on how to live to a ripe old age with grace and good humor—and, of course, on how to stay stylish.

Battlegrounds:
The Fight to Defend
the Free World
by H. R. McMaster
September 15, 2020
HARPER

From Lt. General H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army, ret., the former National Security Advisor and author of the bestselling classic Dereliction of Duty, comes a bold and provocative re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States, and an urgent call to compete to preserve America’s standing and security.

Across multiple administrations since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy has been misconceived, inconsistent, and poorly implemented. As a result, America and the free world have fallen behind rivals in power and influence. Meanwhile threats to security, freedom, and prosperity, such as nuclear proliferation and jihadist terrorism have grown. In BATTLEGROUNDS, H.R. McMaster describes efforts to reassess and fundamentally shift policies while he was National Security Advisor. And he provides a clear pathway forward to improve strategic competence and prevail in complex competitions against our adversaries.

BATTLEGROUNDS is a groundbreaking reassessment of America’s place in the world, drawing from McMaster’s long engagement with these issues, including 34 years of service in the U.S. Army with multiple tours of duty in battlegrounds overseas and his 13 months as National Security Advisor in the Trump White House. It is also a powerful call for Americans and citizens of the free world to transcend the vitriol of partisan political discourse, better educate themselves about the most significant challenges to national and international security and work together to secure peace and prosperity for future generations.

DEAR FRIENDS
THE CENTER FOR JEWISH HISTORY IN NYC
HAS AN ONLINE COOKBOOK FOR DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
THEY HAVENT SHARED WITH US ANY DETAILS ON IT
BUT
IF YOU VISIT THEIR WEBSTE AT CJH.ORG
YOU CAN FOLLOW THE LINKS AND TAKE A LOOK AT IT

Eating Out Loud:
Bold Middle Eastern Flavors
for All Day, Every Day:
A Cookbook
by Eden Grinshpan
(Top Chef Canada, host)
September 1, 2020
Clarkson Potter

Discover a playful new take on Middle Eastern cuisine with more than 100 fresh, flavorful recipes.

“Finally! Eden Grinshpan is letting us in on her secrets of her healthful and deliriously delicious cooking. Giant flavors, pops of color everywhere and dishes you’ll crave forever. It’s the Eden way!”—Bobby Flay

Eden Grinshpan’s accessible cooking is full of bright tastes and textures that reflect her Israeli ex-pat family heritage and laid-back but thoughtful style. In Eating Out Loud, Eden introduces readers to a whirlwind of exciting flavors, mixing and matching simple, traditional ingredients in new ways: roasted whole heads of broccoli topped with herbaceous yogurt and crunchy, spice-infused dukkah; a toasted pita salad full of juicy summer peaches, tomatoes, and a bevy of fresh herbs; raw carrot salad with dates, walnuts, and Aleppo pepper; a lamb flatbread with pomegranate and mint; tomatoes stuffed with beef, eggplant, and currants; and babka that becomes pull-apart morning buns, layered with chocolate and tahini and sticky with a salted sugar glaze, to name a few.

This is not a book for those who want traditional food. She borrows from cuisines outside the Middle East. She cooks sunchokes like Swiss r0sti, then tops the cake with chive sour cream and roasted lemon. Her Caesar salad has tahini in the dressing. Her pita grilled cheese uses gouda. And she makes a shakshuka using garam masala. It's a big, boisterous spirit both on the plate and around the table, Eating Out Loud is the perfect guide to the kind of meal—full of family and friends eating with their hands, double-dipping, and letting loose—that you never want to end.

The Chicken Soup Manifesto:
Recipes from around the world
by Jenn Louis
September 1, 2020
Hardie Grant

Celebrating the universal joy of chicken soup.

This is a celebration of one of the most widely interpreted, and beloved dishes the world over. With more than 100 recipes dedicated to this one special, often humble, meal, James Beard-nominee Jenn Louis shows readers how chicken soup is not only a source of heart-warming sustenance, but also a cure-all and the ultimate expression of love.

With chapters broken down by region and country, The Chicken Soup Manifesto includes everything from Algerian Chorba Bayda, Colombian and Panamanian Sancocho and Thai Kao Tom Gai to Spanish Sopa de Picadillo. Samgyetang. Laska. Her mother's matza ball soup.

She includes Supu ya Kaku from Tanzania (coconut, tomatoes, plantains); Ajiaco Bogotano from Colombia (corn, potatoes, green beans, fresh herbs); Pollo en Jocón from Guatemala (tomatillos, pumpkin, sesame seeds); Cambodian Sgnor Jruk Sach Moan (lime, lemongrass, basil). Myanmar Ohn-No Kaho Swe (ginger, chickpea flour, coconut milk, turmeric); Finnish Kesäkeitto (beans, peas, spring onions).

Along with the recipes, Jenn also covers essential chicken know-how, from selecting and storing, to stock 101 and brining. The book is fully photographed with a design that establishes it as a collectible object as much as a hard-working guide to the world's favorite soup.

The Primal Gourmet Cookbook:
Whole30 Endorsed:
It's Not a Diet If It's Delicious
by Ronny Joseph Lvovski
Melissa Hartwig Urban (Foreword)
September 1, 2020
HMH

100+ gluten-free, grain-free, and dairy-free recipes based on the popular Cook Primal Gourmet blog, fully endorsed by Whole30

Ronny Joseph Lvovski, the son of Jewish immigrants to Canada from Lithuania and Moldova struggled with a lifetime of obesity, failed diets, and low self-esteem before discovering the Paleo diet.

Once he eliminated grains and dairy from his diet, his allergies, asthma, upset stomachs, headaches, back pain, lethargy, excess weight, and cravings disappeared. After losing 40 pounds, Ronny set out to create gourmet-quality meals that followed Paleo guidelines and left him feeling satisfied. He shared those recipes on his Primal Gourmet blog, and became one of the most popular contributors to the @whole30recipes Instagram account. The Primal Gourmet Cookbook, Ronny’s first cookbook, is fully endorsed by Whole30 and includes a foreword by Whole30 co-creator Melissa Urban. The cookbook includes more than 120 recipes, with blog fan-favorites plus all-new dishes such as Mojo Loco Chicken Wings, Short Rib Ragu, Jerk Ribs, and Moroccan Lamb Stew, proving healthy diets really can be delicious.

The Vegucated Family Table:
Irresistible Vegan Recipes and
Proven Tips for Feeding Plant-Powered
Babies, Toddlers, and Kids
by Marisa Miller Wolfson, Laura Delhauer
September 1, 2020
Ten Speed

Raise happy and healthy plant-powered children with more than 125 family favorite recipes by Vegucated film creator Marisa Miller Wolfson, plant-based chef Laura Delhauer, and parents in the vegan community.

“The Vegucated Family Table comes at a perfect time, when it’s never been more urgent for people to live more in line with their own values.”—Senator Cory Booker

For both vegans and the veg-curious, The Vegucated Family Table answers the question every caregiver ponders on a daily basis: “What should I feed my child?” But this book goes a step further, showing parents how to navigate the early years of childhood as a vegan, giving not only recipes and nutritional advice but also tips for holidays, packed lunches, play dates, and more.

Unlike other family-oriented vegan cookbooks, The Vegucated Family Table is the first to focus on raising vegans “from scratch,” from five months through elementary school. A Q&A section focuses on nutrition, with advice by renowned pediatric plant-based expert Reed Mangels. With more than 125 rigorously tested recipes for beloved dishes like Baby Mac-o-Lantern and Cheeze, Chickpea Sweet Potato Croquettes, PBJ Smoothie Bowl, Tempeh Tacos, Baby’s First Birthday Smash Cake, and more, this book will become the go-to reference for parents raising vegan children.

Tecumseh and the Prophet:
The Shawnee Brothers Who
Defied a Nation
by Peter Cozzens
September 15, 2020
KNOPF

The first biography of the great Shawnee leader in more than twenty years, and the first to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States.

Until the Americans assassinated Tecumseh in 1813, he and his brother Tenskwatawa were the co-architects of the broadest pan-Indian confederation in United States history. In previous accounts of Tecumseh's life, Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. But award-winning historian Peter Cozzens now shows us that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat and war leader--admired by the same white Americans he opposed--it was Tenskwatawa, called the "Shawnee Prophet," who created a vital doctrine of religious and cultural revitalization that unified the disparate tribes of the Old Northwest. Detailed research of Native American society and customs provides a window into a world often erased from history books and reveals how both men came to power in different but no less important ways.

Cozzens brings us to the forefront of the chaos and violence that characterized the young American Republic, when settlers spilled across the Appalachians to bloody effect in their haste to exploit lands won from the British in the War of Independence, disregarding their rightful Indian owners. Tecumseh and the Prophet presents the untold story of the Shawnee brothers who retaliated against this threat--the two most significant siblings in Native American history, who, Cozzens helps us understand, should be writ large in the annals of America.

Beat Breast Cancer Like a Boss:
30 Powerful Stories
by Ali Rogin
September 15, 2020
Diversion

Edie Falco, Sheryl Crow, Athena Jones, Heidi Heitkamp, and other breast cancer survivors and “previvors” lend their voices to this collection of powerful stories

Drawing from first-hand interviews of successful, high-profile women from myriad industries and perspectives, award-winning journalist Ali Rogin brings together an all-star support and recovery team to inspire anyone confronting a cancer diagnosis, along with their loved ones.

Learn how preeminent actresses, musicians, politicians, journalists, and entrepreneurs faced a formidable disease and put it in its place. In their own words, the women of Beat Breast Cancer Like a Boss inform and encourage by sharing their experiences and advice: how they told loved ones about their diagnoses, navigated treatment options, and managed the work/life/cancer balance.

Rogin, too, faced great uncertainty when she tested positively for the BRCA1 genetic mutation at age twenty. She found answers in the vibrant community of breast cancer survivors and “previvors” who also stared down the odds. With her brave decision to undergo a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy before even graduating college, Rogin joined this diverse sisterhood of women confronting breast cancer in its many forms with dignity, strength, and humor.

THE QUIET AMERICANS
FOUR CIA SPIES
AT THE DAWN OF THE COLD WAR
– A TRAGEDY IN THREE ACTS
BY SCOTT ANDERSON
September 1, 2020
Doubleday

THE QUIET AMERICANS chronicles the exploits of the CIA's four original spies: Michael Burke, a charming former football star fallen on hard times, Frank Wisner, the scion of a wealthy Southern family, Peter Sichel, a sophisticated German Jew who escaped the Nazis (SICHEL is still alive and in his 90s, he was interviewed about 8 times for this book), and Edward Lansdale, a brilliant ad executive. The four ran covert operations across the globe, trying to outwit the ruthless KGB in Berlin, parachuting commandos into Eastern Europe, plotting coups, and directing wars against Communist insurgents in Asia.

But time and again their efforts went awry, thwarted by a combination of incompetence and ideological rigidity at the highest levels of the government. The intertwined lives of these men began in a common purpose of defending freedom, but the ravages of the Cold War led them to different fates. Two would quit the CIA in despair, stricken by the moral compromises they had to make; one became the archetype of the duplicitous and destructive American spy; and one would be so heartbroken he would take his own life.

THE QUIET AMERICANS is the story of these four men. It is also the story of how the United States, at the very pinnacle of its power, managed to permanently damage its moral standing--a tragic outcome with consequences that echo around the world today.

True Believer:
The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
by Abraham Riesman
September 29, 2020
POSTPONED TO 2021
Crown

The definitive, revelatory biography of Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, a writer and entrepreneur who reshaped global pop culture—at a steep personal cost

Stan Lee—born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922—was one of the most beloved and influential entertainers to emerge from the twentieth century. He served as head editor of Marvel for three decades and, in that time, launched more pieces of internationally recognizable intellectual property than anyone other than Walt Disney: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Thor . . . the list seems to never end. On top of that, his carnival-barker marketing prowess more or less single-handedly saved the comic-book industry and superhero fiction. Without him, the global entertainment industry would be wildly different—and a great deal poorer.

But Lee’s unprecedented career was also filled with spectacular failures, controversy, and bitter disputes. Lee was dogged by accusations from key collaborators such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko over who really created Marvel’s signature characters—iconic figures for whom Lee had always been suspected of taking more than his proper share of credit. A major business venture, Stan Lee Media, resulted in stock manipulation, bankruptcy, and criminal charges. A second one, POW! Entertainment, has been repeatedly accused of malfeasance and deceit. And in his final years, after the death of his beloved wife, Joan, rumors swirled that Lee was a virtual prisoner in his own home, beset by abusive grifters and issuing cryptic video recordings as a battle to control his fortune and legacy ensued.

Abraham Riesman is a veteran culture reporter who has conducted more than 150 interviews and investigated thousands of pages of private documents, turning up never-before-published revelations about Lee’s life and work. Lee’s most famous motto was “With great power comes great responsibility.” Stretching from the Romanian shtetls of Lee’s ancestors to his own final moments in Los Angeles, True Believer chronicles the world-changing triumphs and tragic missteps of an extraordinary life, and leaves it to readers to decide whether Lee lived up to the responsibilities of his own talent.

Agent Sonya:
Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy
by Ben Macintyre
September 15, 2020
Crown

The “master storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle) behind the New York Times bestseller The Spy and the Traitor uncovers the true story behind the Cold War’s most intrepid female spy.

In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.

They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. EVEN HER HUSBAND WAS UNAWARE. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

This true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named “Sonya.” Born to a prosperous, secular Berlin, she became a communist in response to the rise of Hitler. Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI—and she evaded them all. MI5 couldnt brek her; their were so sexist they were blinded. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century—between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy—and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.

With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has conjured a page-turning history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.

A Ritchie Boy:
A Novel
by Linda Kass
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
She Writes Press

From the author of Tasa’s Song, an extraordinary narrative about one young immigrant’s triumph in America, inspired by true events.

1938. Eli Stoff and his parents, Austrian Jews, escape to America just after Germany takes over their homeland. Within five years, Eli enlists in the US Army and, thanks to his understanding of the German language and culture, joins thousands of others like him who become known as Ritchie boys, young men who work undercover in Intelligence on the European front to help the Allies win World War II. In A Ritchie Boy, different characters tell interrelated stories that, together, form a cohesive narrative about the circumstances and people Eli encounters from Vienna to New York, from Ohio to Maryland to war-torn Europe, before he returns to the heartland of his new country to set down his roots.

Set during the dawn of World War II and the disruptive decade to follow, A Ritchie Boy is the poignant, compelling tale of one young immigrant's triumph over adversity as he journeys from Europe to America, and from boyhood to manhood.

The Man Who Ate Too Much:
The Life of James Beard
by John Birdsall
Fall 2020
WW Norton

The definitive biography of America’s best-known and least-understood food personality, and the modern culinary landscape he shaped.

In the first portrait of James Beard in twenty-five years, John Birdsall accomplishes what no prior telling of Beard’s life and work has done: He looks beyond the public image of the "Dean of American Cookery" to give voice to the gourmet’s complex, queer life and, in the process, illuminates the history of American food in the twentieth century. At a time when stuffy French restaurants and soulless Continental cuisine prevailed, Beard invented something strange and new: the notion of an American cuisine.

Informed by previously overlooked correspondence, years of archival research, and a close reading of everything Beard wrote, this majestic biography traces the emergence of personality in American food while reckoning with the outwardly gregarious Beard’s own need for love and connection, arguing that Beard turned an unapologetic pursuit of pleasure into a new model for food authors and experts.

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1903, Beard would journey from the pristine Pacific Coast to New York’s Greenwich Village by way of gay undergrounds in London and Paris of the 1920s. His mother was a lesbian who ran a upper middle cass boarding house with great food who raised James to be her adult companion more than just a child. He was wise beyond his years. He attended the progressive Reed College in Portland, but was expelled on false charges after he wa seen having sex with a professor. Rather than accuse him of gay sexm which was a criminal act, he was accused of lack of scholarship. This was a time of eugenics when some people living outside the mainstream were ordered to be sterilized. His mother suggested he headed to NYC, and also studied voice in London at 19 near Covent Gardens, He then headed to the food and sex and pleasure filled Paris in the gay 1920s, managing his lifelong depression with food. Arriving in NYC, he became the failed actor–turned–Manhattan canapé hawker–turned–author and anti Elitist cooking teacher that we know today; the jovial bachelor uncle presiding over America’s kitchens for nearly four decades.

In the 1940s he hosted one of the first television cooking shows, and by flouting the rules of publishing would end up crafting some of the most expressive cookbooks of the twentieth century, with recipes and stories that laid the groundwork for how we cook and eat today.

In stirring, novelistic detail, The Man Who Ate Too Much brings to life a towering figure, a man who still represents the best in eating and yet has never been fully understood-until now. This is biography of the highest order, a book about the rise of America’s food written by the celebrated writer who fills in Beard’s life with the color and meaning earlier generations were afraid to examine.

Live Not by Lies:
A Manual for Christian Dissidents
by Rod Dreher
Fall 2020

I AM ADDING THIS.. since it is selling well.. and it is a POV of a Conservative thinker who has unique views on conservative christians, jews and others.

For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves our country especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation.

In Live Not By Lies, Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Live Not By Lies teaches American Christians a method for resistance: SEE: Acknowledge the reality of the situation; JUDGE: Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true; ACT: Take action to protect truth.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can't happen in their country. Many American Christians are making that mistake today, sleepwalking through the erosion of our freedoms. Live Not By Lies will wake them and equip them for the long resistance.

Nine Quarters of Jerusalem:
New Paths Through the Old City
by Matthew Teller
June 23, 2020
POSTPONED TO SEPTEMBER 29, 2020
POSTPONED TO 2021
New Internationalist

FROM A BBC REPORTER. THEIR SYNOPSIS:
In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. Beyond the crush and frenzy of a few tourist sites, the Old City within its medieval walls remains largely unknown to visitors, its people ignored and its stories untold. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem lets the Palestinian and other communities of the Old City speak for themselves. Ranging from past to present, highlighting stories and personalities across faiths and outlooks, it evokes the depth and cultural diversity of Palestinian Jerusalem.

Around the time the British arrived in the Holy Land, the idea began to spread that the ancient Old City could be divided by straight lines into four neat quarters, each defined by a faith community. The idea was false. Jerusalem’s people had always clustered together according to religious belief or ethnicity or geographic origin, but the city was undivided.

Nonetheless, those divisions suited successive rulers, so today – more than a century on – they have become entrenched. Maps show ‘Christian Quarter’ or ‘Muslim Quarter’ as if they were real, defined places within borders. They are not. The reality of Jerusalem is a diversity and inclusion that belies imposed narratives of opposition, separation and exclusivity.

This book evokes a sense of place through Jerusalem’s other, ignored quarters – its African and Indian voices, its Greek and Armenian and Syriac communities, its downtrodden Gypsy families, its Sufi mystics and its lost Moroccan Quarter. It discusses the sources of the city’s holiness and the ideas – often startlingly secular – that have shaped lives within its walls. It links discussions of the city’s finest mosques, libraries, churches and monuments through personal stories that, in many cases, have never been told before in English, and certainly not in an accessible, marketable form.

God-Level Knowledge Darts:
Life Lessons from the Bronx
by Desus & Mero
Fall 2020
Random House

Who could have predicted that, after a fateful meeting in a Bronx summer school in the 1990s, Desus & Mero would turn their friendship into an empire of talking to each other.

And it’s no surprise—tuning in to them is like listening to the funniest, smartest people you know dissect a topic and then light it on fire. Now they’ve written the most essential guide to life of this century*, in which all the important questions are asked: How do I talk to my kids about drugs if I do them, too? What are the ethics of ghosting in a relationship? How do I bet on sports? How should I behave in jail? How much is too much to spend on sneakers? Is porn really that bad for me?

They grew up in a very Jewish city, and Martinez has four Jewish kids. As they put it: “We want to share all we’ve learned, after years in the Bronx streets, with you: the people. So with a lifetime spent building up a plethora of information from trials and tribulations and a handful of misdemeanors, we decided to write this book—a sequel to the Bible, or maybe to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,depending on how big a nerd you are. Let this book be your North Star.”

Lives of the Stoics:
The Art of Living
from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Fall 2020
Portfolio

When Zeno lost his fortune in a shipwreck - supposedly – he was elated, because he then focused on philosophy, instead. Who knows what is true. What is true, is that a disaster was an opportunity that Zeno used to create a new life and adapt in 222 BCE at a time of changing empires and trade.

From the bestselling authors of The Daily Stoic comes an inspiring guide to the lives of the Stoics, and what the ancients can teach us about happiness, success, resilience and virtue.

Nearly 2,300 years after a ruined merchant named Zeno first established a school on the Stoa Poikile of Athens, Stoicism has found a new audience among those who seek greatness, from athletes to politicians and everyone in between. It's no wonder; the philosophy and its embrace of self-mastery, virtue, and indifference to that which we cannot control is as urgent today as it was in the chaos of the Roman Empire.

In Lives of the Stoics, Holiday and Hanselman present the fascinating lives of the men and women who strove to live by the timeless Stoic virtues of Courage. Justice. Temperance. Wisdom. Organized in digestible, mini-biographies of all the well-known--and not so well-known--Stoics, this book vividly brings home what Stoicism was like for the people who loved it and lived it, dusting off powerful lessons to be learned from their struggles and successes.

More than a mere history book, every example in these pages, from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius--slaves to emperors--is designed to help the reader apply philosophy in their own lives. Holiday and Hanselman unveil the core values and ideas that unite figures from Seneca to Cato to Cicero across the centuries. Among them are the idea that self-rule is the greatest empire, that character is fate; how Stoics benefit from preparing not only for success, but failure; and learn to love, not merely accept, the hand they are dealt in life. A treasure of valuable insights and stories, this book can be visited again and again by any reader in search of inspiration from the past.

Be Water, My Friend: ,BR. The Teachings of Bruce Lee
by Shannon Lee, his daughter
Fall 2020
Flatiron Books

Bruce Lee’s daughter illuminates her father’s most powerful life philosophies-demonstrating how martial arts are a perfect metaphor for personal growth, and how we can practice those teachings every day.

"Empty your mind; be formless, shapeless like water."

Bruce Lee is a cultural icon, renowned the world over for his martial arts and film legacy. But Lee was also a deeply philosophical thinker, learning at an early age that martial arts are more than just an exercise in physical discipline-they are an apt metaphor for living a fully realized life.

Now, in Be Water, My Friend, Lee’s daughter Shannon shares the concepts at the core of his philosophies, showing how they can serve as tools of personal growth and self-actualization. Each chapter brings a lesson from Bruce Lee’s teachings, expanding on the foundation of his iconic “be water” philosophy. Over the course of the book, we discover how being like water allows us to embody fluidity and naturalness in life, bringing us closer to our essential flowing nature and our ability to be powerful, self-expressed, and free.

Through previously untold stories from her father’s life and from her own journey in embodying these lessons, Shannon presents these philosophies in tangible, accessible ways. With Bruce Lee’s words as a guide, she encourages readers to pursue their essential selves and apply these ideas and practices to their everyday lives-whether in learning new things, overcoming obstacles, or ultimately finding their true path.

Be Water, My Friend is an inspirational invitation to us all, a gentle call to action to consider our lives with new eyes. It is also a testament to how one man's exploration and determination transcended time and place to ignite our imaginations-and to inspire many around the world to transform their lives.

Wagnerism:
Art and Politics
in the
Shadow of Music
by Alex Ross
Fall 2020
FS&G

Adolph Hitler and the Nazis elevated WAGNER to godlike status and used his writings, his vile anti-Semitism, his music, his operas, his philosophies to reinforce and justify their hate, racism, and GENOCIDE.

But this New Yorker writer explores how so many people incorporate his philosophies and music into their works, and close their eyes to his hate for Jews.

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics - an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and VIOLENCE.

For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music.

Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, racists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism.

For many, his name is synonymous with artistic evil. For decades, his music was avoided in Israel.

In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the “magnificent confusion” of what it means to be a Wagnerian.

A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. Ross ranges across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of HATE. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

The Book of Lost Names
a novel
by Kristin Harmel
2020

Inspired by an astonishing true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis in this unforgettable historical novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the “epic and heart-wrenching World War II tale” (Alyson Noel, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Winemaker’s Wife.

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer—but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

An engaging and evocative novel reminiscent of The Lost Girls of Paris and The Alice Network, The Book of Lost Names is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of bravery and love in the face of evil.

A Place of Exodus:
Home, Memory, and TEXAS
by David Biespiel
September 30, 2020
Kelson Books

Acclaimed poet and memoirist David Biespiel tells the story of the rise and fall of a Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life's central riddle:
Are we ever done leaving home? Growing up in a family devoted to Jewish identity, Biespiel comes under the tutelage of the head rabbi of the largest conservative congregation in North America. (Beth Yeshurun, Meyerland section of Houston)

After the rabbi kicks him out of the synagogue during a public quarrel, Biespiel leaves Texas and his religious upbringing behind. After a near-forty-year exile from Texas, he returns for a day to see home--and himself--in a way that changes his relationship to the world around him. Biespiel draws on a lifetime of writing to create this memoir, an essential companion for anyone who has journeyed far from home.

The Meaning of Mariah Carey
by Mariah Carey
September 29, 2020
Andy Cohen Books

Mariah Carey discovered her talent playing Hudel in Fiddler on The Roof as a preteen

The global icon, award-winning singer, songwriter, producer, actress, mother, daughter, sister, storyteller, and artist finally tells the unfiltered story of her life in The Meaning of Mariah Carey

It took me a lifetime to have the courage and the clarity to write my memoir. I want to tell the story of the moments - the ups and downs, the triumphs and traumas, the debacles and the dreams, that contributed to the person I am today. Though there have been countless stories about me throughout my career and very public personal life, it’s been impossible to communicate the complexities and depths of my experience in any single magazine article or a ten-minute television interview. And even then, my words were filtered through someone else’s lens, largely satisfying someone else’s assignment to define me.

Mariash writes: This book is composed of my memories, my mishaps, my struggles, my survival and my songs. Unfiltered. I went deep into my childhood and gave the scared little girl inside of me a big voice. I let the abandoned and ambitious adolescent have her say, and the betrayed and triumphant woman I became tell her side.

OCTOBER 2020 BOOK RELEASES

THE PARASITIC MIND:
How Infectious Ideas
Are Killing Common Sense
by Gad Saad, PhD
October 6, 2020
Blackstone
Regnery

Professor Saad was born to a Jewish family in 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon. They stayed until the civil war, and then fled to Montreal, Quebec. He teaches in Canada at Concordia/Molson and has the popular social media channel “The SAAD Truth.” Dr. Gad Saad exposes how an epidemic of idea pathogens are spreading like a virus and killing common sense in the West.

Serving as a powerful follow-up to Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life Dr. Saad unpacks what is really happening in progressive safe zones, why we need to be paying more attention to these trends, and what we must do to stop the spread of dangerous thinking. A professor at Concordia University who has witnessed this troubling epidemic first-hand, Dr. Saad dissects a multitude of these concerning forces (corrupt thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, etc.) that have given rise to a stifling political correctness in our society and how these have created serious consequences that must be remedied–before it’s too late.

In August, he tweeted,
The EXACT same person who loves @barackobama because he is so "regal and presidential" loves @justintrudeau because he is so "handsome & progressive" and hates @realDonaldTrump because he is so "gross & mean." Getting Drunk by the Cork of the Wine Bottle Syndrome. ZERO focus on substance and a complete commitment to visceral peripheral cues. Humans are indeed cognitive misers.

The Good American:
The Epic Life of Bob Gersony,
the U.S. Government's Greatest Humanitarian
by Robert D. Kaplan
October 6, 2020
POSTPONED TO FEB 2021
Random House

You are probably used to reading Kaplan on Naval Affairs, Geopolitics, and the Oceans of Asia. But in this book, he applies his brilliance to the story of the most influential humanitarian you’ve never heard of — Bob Gersony, who spent four decades in crisis zones around the world, as America's SHO (Chief Humanitarian Officer).

“For anyone who has stopped believing that one person can make a difference, or that government service is still a noble calling, or that facts still matter, or that the American brand can still hold fast to practical idealism, this book is the antidote to those fears.”—Jim Mattis, general, U.S. Marines (ret.), and former secretary of defense, author of Call Sign Chaos

Author Robert D. Kaplan often found himself crossing paths with Bob Gersony, a consultant for the U.S. State Department whose quiet dedication and consequential work made a deep impression on Kaplan. Gersony, the son of a wealthy Jewish family, dropped out of high school, and was later awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam. After Vietnam, he founded a network of Mayan language schools in Guatemala. In Guatemala hew was recruited by U.S. AID and began a 40-year odyssey through virtually every war and disaster zone on every continent, interviewing hundreds of refugees and displaced persons in every location. By providing high decision-makers with a second opinion on momentous events, in almost every case he improved policy for the better, saving countless lives. It is an inspiring story about someone who always worked alone, spending much of his life in refugee camps, and who remained obscure and unrecognized.

In Thailand, Central and South America, Sudan, Chad, Mozambique, Rwanda, Gaza, Bosnia, North Korea, Iraq, and beyond, Gersony never flinched from entering dangerous areas that diplomats could not reach, sometimes risking his own life.

Gersony’s behind-the scenes fact-finding, which included interviews with hundreds of refugees and displaced persons from each war zone and natural-disaster area, often challenged the assumptions and received wisdom of the powers that be, on both the left and the right. In nearly every case, his advice and recommendations made American policy at once smarter and more humane—often dramatically so.

In 1994, his "Gersony Report" was suppressed by the United Nations, who had originally commissioned it, because it had reached the politically embarrassing conclusion that the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had taken control of the country after the Rwandan genocide, was carrying out politically-motivated mass killings.

In Gersony, Kaplan saw a powerful example of how American diplomacy should be conducted. In a work that exhibits Kaplan’s signature talent for combining travel and geography with sharp political analysis, The Good American tells Gersony’s powerful life story. Set during the State Department’s golden age, this is a story about the loneliness, sweat, and tears and the genuine courage that characterized Gersony’s work in far-flung places. It is also a celebration of ground-level reporting: a page-turning demonstration, by one of our finest geopolitical thinkers, of how getting an up-close, worm’s-eye view of crises and applying sound reason can elicit world-changing results.

ELEANOR
a biography
by David Michaelis
October 6, 2020
Simon & Schuster

In my opinion, before Golda and Ruth, Jewish woman had Elanor as a hero. At the time, we did not know of her painful marriage and the issues she had with her mother in law and husband. Here is a mature, introspective biography.

Prizewinning bestselling author David Michaelis presents a breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women.

In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation.

When Eleanor discovered Franklin’s betrayal with her younger, prettier social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. She came to accept FDR’s bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand; she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could; and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR’s first presidential campaign, and younger men.

Eleanor needed emotional connection. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband’s proxy in presidential ambition, and then the people’s proxy in the White House. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a “world mind.” She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together.

Drawing on new research, Michaelis’s riveting portrait is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever.

The Code for Love
and Heartbreak
by Jillian Cantor
October 6, 2020
Inkyard Press

In this contemporary romcom retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma by USA TODAY bestselling author Jillian Cantor, there’s nothing more complex—or unpredictable—than love.

When math genius Emma and her coding club co-president, George, are tasked with brainstorming a new project, The Code for Love is born.

George disapproves of Emma’s idea of creating a matchmaking app, accusing her of meddling in people’s lives. But all the happy new couples at school are proof that the app works. At least at first.

Emma’s code is flawless. So why is it that perfectly matched couples start breaking up, the wrong people keep falling for each other, and Emma’s own feelings defy any algorithm?

GOTCHA!:
Inside Trump’s 2020 Campaign—
A Novel by Ed. Weinberger
October 11, 2020
South Street Books

“...my favorite kind of satire; wonderfully observed and bitingly funny. It cuts so close to the bone, you’ll think you’re a staffer on the campaign. It’s the perfect tonic to help you through these insane times.” —Rob Reiner, actor, director, producer

Nine-time Emmy Award-winning writer/producer Ed. Weinberger, known for his work on such legendary comedies as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and The Cosby Show, imagines an alternate Trump 2020 presidential campaign in this hilarious new novel.

In GOTCHA! Weinberger creates a chaotic world inhabited by America’s 45th President where cheating at golf is taken for granted; Fox anchors are valued advisors; and hydroxychloroquine is promoted as a COVID-19 cure.

Spanning the critical period from March 5, 2020 to January 24, 2021, GOTCHA! takes readers into Trump’s private world as he meets with his re-election committee, has a hush-hush dinner with Laura Ingraham, makes an angry early-morning call to Don, Jr., and asks Melania whether his bullet-proof vest makes him look fat. Trump tries to rush through a COVID-19 vaccine; attempts to build rapport with African Americans; and even gets away with shooting a protester on Fifth Avenue—an incident applauded by the NRA.

With an entertaining mix of fiction and satire, this provocative novel looks into the corrupt, three-ring-circus that is Washington in the new normal.

I am Anne Frank
(Ordinary People Change the World)
by Brad Meltzer
Christopher Eliopoulos (Illustrator)

October 13, 2020
Kindergarten to Grade 3
Dial Books

The 22nd book in the New York Times bestselling series of biographies about heroes tells the story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who documented her life while hiding from the Nazis during World War II.

This engaging biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great--the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of an icon in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction readers. At the back are an excellent timeline and photos. This volume features Anne Frank, whose courage and hope during a time of terror are still an inspiration for people around the world today.

Winner of the Prix d’histoire de la justice
To be reviewed in the WSJ

Denaturalized:
How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship
and Lives in Vichy France
by Claire Zalc
Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Translated by Catherine Porter

October 13, 2020
Belknap Press
/ Harvard University Press

A leading historian radically revises our understanding of the fate of Jews under the Vichy regime. Winner of the Prix d’histoire de la justice.

Thousands of naturalized French men and women had their citizenship revoked by the Vichy government during the Second World War. Once denaturalized, these men and women, mostly Jews who were later sent to concentration camps, ceased being French on official records and walked off the pages of history. As a result, we have for decades severely underestimated the number of French Jews murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. In Denaturalized, Claire Zalc unearths this tragic record and rewrites World War II history.

At its core, this is a detective story. How do we trace a citizen made alien by the law? How do we solve a murder when the body has vanished? Faced with the absence of straightforward evidence, Zalc turned to the original naturalization papers in order to uncover how denaturalization later occurred. She discovered that, in many cases, the very officials who granted citizenship to foreigners before 1940 were the ones who retracted it under Vichy rule.

The idea of citizenship has always existed alongside the threat of its revocation, and this is especially true for those who are naturalized citizens of a modern state. At a time when the status of millions of naturalized citizens in the United States and around the world is under greater scrutiny, Denaturalized turns our attention to the precariousness of the naturalized experience-the darkness that can befall those who suddenly find themselves legally cast out.

The Piano Student
A novel
by Lea Singer
(aka Eva Gesine Bauer)
Elisabeth Lauffer (Translator, Wesleyan, Harvard)
October 6, 2020
New Vessel Press

The Piano Student is a novel about regret, secrecy, and music, involving an affair between one of the 20th century’s most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s. As Europe hurtles toward political catastrophe and Horowitz ascends to the pinnacle of artistic achievement, the great pianist hides his illicit passion from his wife Wanda, the daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini.

The affair is narrated by Kaufmann in the 1980s to another music devotee, who comes to him enchanted by Schumann’s composition Träumerei and awakens memories of the thwarted relationship.

Based on unpublished letters by Horowitz to Kaufmann that author Lea Singer discovered in Switzerland, the novel portrays the anguish that the acclaimed musician felt about his never publicly acknowledged homosexuality and the attendant duplicity of his personal life. It's a riveting and sensitive tale of musical perfection, love, and longing denied, with multiple historical layers and insights into artistic creativity.

Jamie and Bubbie:
A Book About People’s Pronouns
by Afsaneh Moradian
Maria Bogade (Illustrator)
October 6, 2020
Ages 4-8
Free Spirit Publishing

Jamie teaches respectful use of personal pronouns in this lighthearted, multigenerational story. Jamie is excited to spend the day walking around the neighborhood with great-grandma Bubbie. They meet so many friends and neighbors throughout the day, along the way...
but Jamie has to correct Bubbie when she incorrectly assumes Ms. Wallace is a he and their server is a she.

“You can’t always know if someone goes by he or she or something else. Sometimes a person will tell you. If they don’t, you can use the person’s name or you can say they.”

Jamie helps Bubbie understand that it’s important not to assume a person’s pronouns based on appearance, and to always use the name and pronouns they go by: he, she, they, or something else.

Jamie and Bubbie introduces children, through an accessible fictional narrative, to the nonbinary experience, the use of gender-neutral pronouns, and how to respectfully use personal pronouns. They will learn the importance of using the correct pronouns, and that sometimes a person’s name and pronouns can change.

The story stays lighthearted and sweet, while diving into an often misunderstood, evolving topic, so children can build empathy and begin to explore their own feelings about gender identity. A section at the back of the book includes tips for teachers, parents, and caregivers for expanding on the concepts in the book and for talking with children about gender.

Noah Green Saves the World
by Laura Toffler-Corrie
Macky Pamintuan (Illustrator)
October 1, 2020
Ages 9-13
KAR-BEN

Noah is a would-be filmmaker who has trouble making friends and understanding people. In Noah Green Saves the World, by Laura Toffler-Corrie, Noah thinks that this summer, the best place for him is the David Lynch Film Camp, to work on his film “opus,” and not his parents’ choice, Camp Challah, to work on his bar mitzvah project. But before camp starts, Noah’s grandfather, “Pops” takes him aside, along with Simon, a new arrival but not quite friend, and tells them both “It’s up to you to save the world!” Is Pops just confused, or is he onto something? When a pigeon flies into camp carrying mysterious messages, Noah and Simon wonder if maybe they do really have to save the world.

With help from his new friends, Josh, Tyler, environmentalist and upcoming singer-songwriter Mia, and even his popular sister Lily, Noah finds that he can make films, make friends, do his bar mitzvah project, and maybe even save the world after all.

The Missing:
The True Story of My Family
in World War II
by Michael Rosen
October 6, 2020
Ages 10-14
Candlewick

An award-winning author and poet traces the history of his relatives lost in the Holocaust in a personal, powerful narrative with resonance for readers today.

“They were there at the beginning of the war, but they were gone by the end. I suppose they died in the camps.”

That’s all young Michael Rosen, born in England just after the end of the Second World War, was told about the six great-aunts and great-uncles who had been living in Poland or France at the beginning of that war. This wasn’t enough for him. So, as an adult, he started to search. He asked relatives for any papers they might have. He read book after book. He searched online, time and again, as more information was digitized and suddenly there to be found. In a unique mix of memoir, history, and poetry, scholar and children’s literature luminary Michael Rosen explores his family history, digging up more details than he ever thought he would and sharing them with readers so that now, a lifetime after the Nazis tried to make the world forget the Rosen family and the rest of Europe’s Jews, his readers can do something essential: remember.

With an extensive list of titles for further reading, maps of France and Poland, a family tree, and an introduction by lauded author and anthologist Marc Aronson, this immensely readable narrative offers a vital tool for talking to children about the Holocaust against the background of the ongoing refugee crisis.

LET LOVE RULE
by Lenny Kravitz
October 6, 2020
Henry Holt and Company

His first song at age 6 or 7 was I LOVE YOUR BABY, MORE AND MORE. In First Grade, Lenny's mother told him he should be proud of his Jewish, Caribbean, and Black backgrounds, but that people would only see him as Black. Lenny “Jackson” saw himself as the undiscovered sixth brother of the Jackson 5.. haha... and so is the start of an amazing memoir

“I see my story as a suite of songs that have a magical connection. I never understood that connection until I sat down to write. It was then that the magic started to flow.”

LET LOVE RULE is not a story of his songs and rock career, it is a work of deep reflection. Lenny Kravitz looks back at his life with candor, self-scrutiny, and humor.

“My life is all about opposites,” he writes.
“Black and white.
Jewish and Christian.
The Jackson 5 and Led Zeppelin.
I accepted my Gemini soul. I owned it.
I adored it. Yins and yangs mingled in various parts of my heart and mind, giving me balance and fueling my curiosity and comfort.”

LET LOVE RULE covers a vast canvas stretching from Manhattan’s Upper East Side in th East 80s just like THE JEFFERSONs, to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant of grandparents, to Los Angeles’s Baldwin Hills and Beverly Hills (when his mother became the interracial couple star of THE JEFFERSONs, and finally to France, England and Germany as a rock star.

It’s the story of a wildly creative kid who, despite tough struggles at school and extreme tension at home, finds salvation in music. We see him grow as a musician and ultimately a master songwriter, producer, and performer. We see him reject the ideas of being a token black duo singer to becoming the real cross between Prince and John Lennon. We also see Lenny’s spiritual growth-and the powerful way in which spirit informs his music. The cast of characters surrounding Lenny is extraordinary: his father, Sy, a high-powered news executive; his mother, Roxie Roker, a television star; and Lisa Bonet (she two, Half Jewish/Half Black), the young actress who becomes his muse, lover, wife, mother of his daughter, ex-wife, friend.

The central character, of course, is Lenny, who, despite his great aspirational energy, turns down record deal after record deal until he finds his true voice. The creation of that voice, the same voice that is able to declare “Let Love Rule” to an international audience, is the very heart of this story. “Whether recording, performing, or writing a book,” says Lenny, “my art is about listening to the inspiration inside and then sharing it with people. Art must bring the world closer together.”

The Blessing and the Curse:
The Jewish People and Their
Books in the Twentieth Century
by Adam Kirsch
October 6, 2020
W W NORTON

An erudite and accessible survey of Jewish life and culture in the twentieth century, as reflected in seminal texts.

Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review), poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the story of modern Jewish literature. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the twentieth century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels, plays, poems, and memoirs of Jewish writers provided intimate access to new worlds of experience.

Kirsch surveys four themes that shaped the twentieth century in Jewish literature and culture: Europe, America, Israel, and the endeavor to reimagine Judaism as a modern faith. With discussions of major books by over thirty writers-ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel to Tony Kushner, Hannah Arendt to Judith Plaskow-he argues that literature offers a new way to think about what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. With a wide scope and diverse, original observations, Kirsch draws fascinating parallels between familiar writers and their less familiar counterparts. While everyone knows the diary of Anne Frank, for example, few outside of Israel have read the diary of Hannah Senesh. Kirsch sheds new light on the literature of the Holocaust through the work of Primo Levi, explores the emergence of America as a Jewish home through the stories of Bernard Malamud, and shows how Yehuda Amichai captured the paradoxes of Israeli identity.

An insightful and engaging work from "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal), The Blessing and the Curse brings the Jewish experience vividly to life.

Is This Anything?
by Jerry Seinfeld
October 6, 2020
Simon and Schuster

The first book in twenty-five years from Jerry Seinfeld features pretty pretty good work across five decades in comedy.

Since his first performance at the legendary New York nightclub “Catch a Rising Star” as a twenty-one-year-old college student in fall of 1975, Jerry Seinfeld has written his own material and saved everything. “Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old school accordion folders,” Seinfeld writes. “So I have everything I thought was worth saving from forty-five years of hacking away at this for all I was worth.”

For this book, Jerry Seinfeld has selected his favorite material, organized decade by decade. In page after hilarious page, one brilliantly crafted observation after another, readers will witness the evolution of one of the great comedians of our time and gain new insights into the thrilling but unforgiving art of writing stand-up comedy.

Humor, Seriously:
Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon
in Business and Life
(And how anyone can harness
it. Even you.)
by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas
October 6, 2020
Currency

Anyone—even you!—can learn how to harness the power of humor in business (and life), based on the popular class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. (But at Stanford, you would pay over $6000 for the credit

Working professionals have fallen off a humor cliff. In fact, around the time we enter the workforce, the number of times we laugh and smile on an average day statistically starts to plummet.

And yet, research shows that humor is one of the most powerful tools we have for accomplishing serious work. Studies reveal that humor makes us appear more competent and confident, strengthens relationships, unlocks creativity, and boosts our resilience during difficult times. Plus, it fends off a permanent and unsightly frown known as “resting boss face”.

Top executives are in on the secret: 98 percent prefer employees with a sense of humor, and 84 percent believe that these employees do better work. But even for those who intuitively understand humor’s power, few know how to wield it with intention. As a result, humor is vastly underleveraged in most workplaces today, impacting our performance, relationships, and health.

That’s why Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas teach the popular course Humor: Serious Business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where they help some of the world’s most hard-driving, blazer-wearing business minds build levity into their organizations and lives. In Humor, Seriously, they draw on findings by behavioral scientists, world-class comedians, and inspiring business leaders to reveal how humor works and—more important—how you can use it more often and effectively

Aaker and Bagdonas unpack the theory and application of humor: what makes something funny and how to mine your life for material. They show how to use humor to make a strong first impression, deliver difficult feedback, persuade and motivate others, and foster cultures where levity and creativity can thrive—not to mention, how to keep it appropriate and recover if you cross a line.

President Dwight David Eisenhower once said, “A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.” If Eisenhower, the second least naturally funny president ever (after Franklin Pierce), thought humor was necessary to win wars, build highways, and warn against the military-industrial complex, then you might consider learning it too. Seriously.

And yes, she is the daughter of Professor David Aaker.

And yes, here is a story that Joel Stein (Stanford B School grad and contributor to the course wrote on the course a few years ago:
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/humor-serious-business

The 99% Invisible City:
A Field Guide to the
Hidden World of Everyday Design
by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt
October 6, 2020
HMH

A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast

Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk mean?

Or stopped to ponder who gets to name the streets we walk along?

Or what the story is behind those dancing inflatable figures in car dealerships?

99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.

Now, in The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to Hidden World of Everyday Design, host Roman Mars and coauthor Kurt Kohlstedt zoom in on the various elements that make our cities work, exploring the origins and other fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and fire escapes to drinking fountains and street signs. With deeply researched entries and beautiful line drawings throughout, The 99% Invisible City will captivate devoted fans of the show and anyone curious about design, urban environments, and the unsung marvels of the world around them.

Dancing in God's Earthquake:
The Coming Transformation
of Religion
by Arthur Ocean Waskow, Rabbi
October 14, 2020
Orbis Books

Here is a book of deep wisdom from a prophetic rabbi who has for fifty years worked to promote a progressive spirit of renewal that connects Jews, Christians, and people of other faiths. We all experience earthquakes in our lives--social, personal, religious. From those earthquakes renewal and new life can come forth if we learn to dance in the midst of the earthquake.

American Crisis:
Leadership Lessons from the
COVID-19 Pandemic
by Andrew Cuomo
Governor, State of New York
October 13, 2020
Crown

Not to be confused with a pamphlet by Thomas Paine.
Andrew Cuomo, heroic governor of NY, former HUD secretary in DC, writes on leadership and the response to the Covid-19 crisis

Governor Andrew Cuomo tells the riveting story of how he took charge in the fight against COVID-19 as New York became the epicenter of the pandemic, offering hard-won lessons in leadership and his vision for the path forward.

When COVID-19 besieged the United States, New York State emerged as the global “ground zero” for a deadly contagion that threatened the lives and livelihoods of millions. Quickly, Governor Andrew Cuomo provided the leadership to address the threat, becoming the standard-bearer of the organized response the country desperately needed. With infection rates spiking and more people dying every day, the systems and functions necessary to combat the pandemic in New York—and America—did not exist. So Cuomo undertook the impossible. He unified people to rise to the challenge and was relentless in his pursuit of scientific facts and data. He quelled fear while implementing an extraordinary plan for flattening the curve of infection. He and his team worked day and night to protect the people of New York, despite roadblocks presented by a president incapable of leadership and addicted to transactional politics.

Taking readers beyond the candid daily briefings that became must-see TV across the globe, and providing a dramatic, day-by-day account of the catastrophe as it unfolded, American Crisis presents the intimate and inspiring thoughts of a leader at an unprecedented historical moment. In his own voice, Andrew Cuomo chronicles the ingenuity and sacrifice required of so many to fight the pandemic, sharing the decision-making that shaped his policy as well as his frank accounting and assessment of his interactions with the federal government, the White House, and other state and local political and health officials. Real leadership, he shows, requires clear communication, compassion for others, and a commitment to truth-telling—no matter how frightening the facts may be.

Including a game plan for what we as individuals—and as a nation—need to do to protect ourselves against this disaster and those to come, American Crisis is a remarkable portrait of selfless leadership and a gritty story of difficult choices that points the way to a safer future for all of us.

The Upswing:
How America Came Together a
Century Ago and How We Can
Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam
(Harvard)
Shaylyn Romney Garrett
October 13, 2020
Simon and Schuster

STRAIGHT FROM THE JFNA GENERAL ASSEMBLY 2020 PLENARY on the I – WE – I polarized, gilded period (of now and of 1898). How can we be a WE is a polarized, inequitable time. How do the Jewish WE and the external WE succeed in America, an America of multiple WE's

An eminent political scientist’s brilliant analysis of economic, social, and political trends over the past century demonstrating how we have gone from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” society and then back again, and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation—from the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids.

Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times.

But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray.

In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an “I” society to a “We” society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. Engaging, revelatory, and timely, this is Putnam’s most ambitious work yet, a fitting capstone to a brilliant career.

Professor Putnam converted to the Jewish faith many decades ago.

True or False:
A CIA Analyst's Guide to
Spotting Fake News
by Cindy L. Otis
2020
Ages 13 – 18
Feiwel and Friends

You read on Twitter that Orthodox Jews I pick up trucks are rallying for Trump and driving around NYC
You see on Facebook that a rabbi has used a racist term while endorsing Trump
You hear that Jews in Williamsburg are pretending to close their stores, but letting customers break pandemic rules via a side door
What should one believe?
How can we determine what is “true” and what is fake

"If I could pick one book to hand to every teen-and adult-on earth, this is the one. True or False is accessible, thorough, and searingly honest, and we desperately needed it." -Becky Albertalli, author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

A former CIA analyst unveils the true history of fake news and gives readers tips on how to avoid falling victim to it in this highly designed informative YA nonfiction title. "Fake news" is a term you’ve probably heard a lot in the last few years, but it’s not a new phenomenon. From the ancient Egyptians to the French Revolution to Jack the Ripper and the founding fathers, fake news has been around as long as human civilization. But that doesn’t mean that we should just give up on the idea of finding the truth.

In True or False, former CIA analyst Cindy Otis will take readers through the history and impact of misinformation over the centuries, sharing stories from the past and insights that readers today can gain from them. Then, she shares lessons learned in over a decade working for the CIA, including actionable tips on how to spot fake news, how to make sense of the information we receive each day, and, perhaps most importantly, how to understand and see past our own information biases, so that we can think critically about important issues and put events happening around us into context.

True or False includes a wealth of photo illustrations, informative inserts, and sidebars containing interesting facts and trivia sure to engage readers in critical thinking and analysis.

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex:
The History of a
Multibillion-Dollar Institution
by Lila Corwin Berman
(Temple University, Feinstein Center)
October 13, 2020
Princeton University Press

The first comprehensive history of American Jewish philanthropy and its influence on democracy and capitalism

For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated reality of changing and uneasy relationships among philanthropy, democracy, and capitalism.

With a fresh eye and lucid prose, and relying on previously untapped sources, Berman shows that from its nineteenth-century roots to its apex in the late twentieth century, the American Jewish philanthropic complex tied Jewish institutions to the American state. The government’s regulatory efforts-most importantly, TAX POLICIES - situated philanthropy at the core of its experiments to maintain the public good without trammeling on the private freedoms of individuals.

Jewish philanthropic institutions and leaders gained financial strength, political INFLUENCE, and state protections within this framework. However, over time, the vast inequalities in resource distribution that marked American state policy became inseparable from philanthropic practice. By the turn of the millennium, Jewish philanthropic institutions reflected the state’s growing investment in capitalism against democratic interests. But well before that, Jewish philanthropy had already entered into a tight relationship with the governing forces of American life, reinforcing and even transforming the nation’s laws and policies.

The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex uncovers how capitalism and private interests came to command authority over the public good, in Jewish life and beyond.

(check out the chapter on Finance and Identity, about the time when students wanted a seat at the table at the 1968 GA in Boston.. and got it.. and got applause.. and.. ended up help create endowments that saves $$ for the future rather than spend it in the present...

Matthew, Mark,
Luke, John...and Me:
Growing Up Jewish in
a Christian World
by Arthur Ullian
October 13, 2020
Bauhan

An upbringing in the WASP enclaves of suburban Boston gave Arthur D. Ullian an early taste of antisemitism, and later sent him on a search through Judeo-Christian history for the roots of discrimination against the Jewish people.

Following a successful career in New England real estate and a life-changing accident that left him paralyzed at age 51, Arthur Ullian began to realize that not only did life in a wheelchair make him feel “different,” but he had always felt like an outsider to some degree. This sent him on a multi-year research project investigating antisemitism from the New Testament to the Inquisition to the Holocaust. He came to see that over the course of his life he had, paradoxically, internalized the prevailing Christian view of the “Jewish character” and unconsciously attempted to replicate the social and material trappings of those who excluded him.

From the world of private schools, cotillion classes, sailing yachts, and restricted clubs to the Halls of Congress where he successfully advocated for medical research with Christopher Reeve, Ullian’s life is one that illustrates the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, or “Repair the World.” In Matthew, Mark, Luke, John...and Me — a thoughtful, historically-grounded, and often humorous memoir — he interweaves personal experience with his exploration of the roots of stereotypes, ending with reasons to hope that historic Jewish–Christian enmities will fade and brotherhood prevail.

Science and Cooking:
Physics Meets Food,
From Homemade to Haute Cuisine
by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen,
and David Weitz
(Harvard University)
October 20, 2020
Norton

Based on the popular Harvard University and edX course, Science and Cooking explores the scientific basis of why recipes work.

Why do we knead bread?
What determines the temperature at which we cook a steak
Or the amount of time our chocolate chip cookies spend in the oven?
What is the viscosity of cheese sauce?
Can you break a chocolate chip cookie down to its molecular level?
What do Chinese soup dumplings have in common with polymer chains of hydrocolloids?
Discuss carrot soup and sugar caramelization?
What does over temperature for baking have to do with the melting point of sugar?
You now about lemon juice and apples... but what about lemon juice and pesto?
Coalescance? Barrier? Oil and Water?

The spectacular culinary creations of modern cuisine are the stuff of countless articles and social media feeds. But to a scientist they are also perfect pedagogical explorations into the basic scientific principles of cooking. In Science and Cooking, Harvard professors Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz bring the classroom to your kitchen to teach the physics and chemistry underlying every recipe.

Science and Cooking answers these questions and more through hands-on experiments and recipes from renowned chefs such as Christina Tosi, Joanne Chang, and Wylie Dufresne, all beautifully illustrated in full color. With engaging introductions from revolutionary chefs and collaborators Ferran Adria and José Andrés, Science and Cooking will change the way you approach both subjects-in your kitchen and beyond.

DESSERT PERSON:
Recipes and Guidance for
Baking with Confidence
by Claire Saffitz
October 20, 2020
Clarkson Potter

In her first cookbook, Bon Appétit and YouTube star of the show Gourmet Makes offers wisdom, problem-solving strategies, and more than 100 meticulously tested, creative, and inspiring recipes.

Claire Saffitz, an Upper West Sider, is a baking hero for a new generation. In Dessert Person, fans will find Claire's signature spin on sweet and savory recipes like Babkallah (a babka-Challah mashup), Apple and Concord Grape Crumble Pie, Strawberry-Cornmeal Layer Cake, Crispy Mushroom Galette, and Malted Forever Brownies.

She outlines the problems and solutions for each recipe--like what to do if your pie dough for Sour Cherry Pie cracks (patch it with dough or a quiche flour paste!)--as well as practical do's and don'ts, skill level, prep and bake time, and foundational know-how. With Claire at your side, everyone can be a dessert person.

Hailing from St Louis, this Harvard and McGill educated baker studied French cuisine and pastry at École Grégoire-Ferrandi in Paris, France.

Old World Italian:
Recipes and Secrets from
Our Travels in Italy:
A Cookbook
by Mimi Thorisson
Fall 2020
Clarkson Potter

Not a Jewish cookbook. But the author once wrote that “Carciofi alla giudia (Jewish artichoke). If I had one last meal, this would be it. I ordered this as a starter, and ordered it again as a second starter. Food is love, food is emotion, and this is my version of happiness on a plate.”

Mimi explores the beautiful coasts and countrysides of Italy in this lavishly photographed cookbook featuring simple, authentic recipes inspired by the country's devoted producers and rich food heritage.

NAMED ONE OF FALL’S BEST COOKBOOKS BY CHOWHOUND AND EPICURIOUS

Beloved for her gorgeous cookbooks A Kitchen in France and French Country Cooking, Mimi Thorisson, along with her lively family and smooth fox terriers in tow, immersed readers in the warmth of their convivial lives in rural France. In their newest cookbook, the Thorissons pause their lives in the idyllic French countryside to start a new adventure in Italy and satisfy their endless curiosity and passion for the magic of Italian cooking.

Old World Italian captures their journey and the culinary treasures they discovered. From Tuscany to Umbria to Naples and more, Mimi dives into Italy’s diverse regional cuisines and shares 100 recipes for authentic, classic dishes, enriched by conversations with devoted local food experts who share their timeworn techniques and stories. You'll indulge in dishes culled from across the country, such as plump agnolotti bathed in sage and butter from the north, the tomato-rich ragùs and pastas of the southwest, and the multifaceted, seafood-laden cuisine of Sicily. The mysteries of Italian food culture will unravel as you learn to execute a perfect Neapolitan-style pizza at home or make the most sublime yet elemental cacio e pepe.

Full of local color, history, and culture, plus evocative, sumptuous photography shot by Mimi’s husband, Oddur Thorisson, Old World Italian transports you to a seat at the family’s table in Italy, where you may never want to leave.

Barbuto Cookbook:
California-Italian Cooking from
Jonathan Waxman's Beloved
West Village Restaurant
by Chef Jonathan Waxman
Fall 2020
Harry N. Abrams

A culinary exploration of Barbuto’s menu—a unique blend of rustic Italian and modern California cuisine—from legendary chef Jonathan Waxman

There are very few New York City restaurants that have maintained their currency, quality, and charm for as long as Jonathan Waxman’s Barbuto. For the ?rst time ever, The Barbuto Cookbook invites home cooks into the history, culture, and cuisine of the Greenwich Village dining spot that became both a neighborhood favorite and a New York culinary destination. Jonathan and his team provide the necessary tools for re-creating Barbuto classics, including the famous JW roast chicken, the otherworldly kale salad, specialty pizzas, gnocchi, spectacular desserts, and much more. Every recipe is a flavorful restaurant showstopper adapted for straightforward preparation at home.

Super Good Baking for Kids
by Duff Goldman (Jeffrey Goldman)
Fall 2020

Super Good Baking for Kids, from New York Times bestselling celebrity chef and host of Ace of Cakes and Kids Baking Championship Duff Goldman, teaches budding young bakers how to make dozens of crazy delicious concoctions—from confetti snickerdoodles to unicorn cupcakes to amazing dessert pizzas. With more than 35 delicious recipes and tons of fun fact-filled sidebars on everything from the science of yeast to the history of baking, Super Good Baking for Kids shows kids how to make treats that will amaze parents, delight friends, and make the whole family go “mmmmmm.”

Celebrity chef and host of Kids Baking Championship Duff Goldman believes baking should be three things: super fun, super delicious, and super creative.

Super Good Baking for Kids features dozens upon dozens of the gooiest, chewiest, easiest-to-follow recipes ever! This book teaches young bakers how to make everything from wicked good Boston crème donuts to delicious monkey bread to a mind-blowing stuffed-crust dessert pizza! The cakes, cookies, pies, and puddings are all fun to bake, a thrill to decorate, and delicious every time.

With kid-friendly step-by-step instructions; helpful kitchen-safe tips; funny, fact-filled sidebars on everything from the best places to eat in New York to the surprising facts about unicorns; and an overview of crucial cooking skills, this book will give any kid the kitchen confidence to make crazy delicious desserts that everyone will enjoy!

JUST A NOTE OF DUFF.... Tucked into Esther (Mamo) Steinberg's safety deposit box in Wichita, Kansas was her prized recipe for apple marmalade pineapple strudel. She shared it with few, and with her granddaughter Jacqueline Winch, who is the mother of Duff Goldman. Baking it took two days, and was like a rite of passage, a bat/bar mitzvah. Many of the recipes now are stored in Duff’s home are are on stationary from the Hollywood Hat Shop, the store Esther owned in Wichita. Esther lived in Halych, western Ukraine on the Dniester River (southeast of Lvov, closer to Krakow and Poland than to Kiev), before coming to America.

The Nom Wah Cookbook:
Recipes and Stories from
100 Years at New York City's Iconic Dim Sum Restaurant
by Wilson Tang
and Joshua David Stein
October 20, 2020
Ecco

For the last 100 years, Nom Wah Tea Parlor has been slinging some of the world’s greatest dim sum from New York’s Chinatown. Now owner Wilson Tang tells the story of how the restaurant came to be—and how to prepare their legendary dishes in your own home.

Nom Wah Tea Parlor isn’t simply the story of dumplings, though there are many folds to it. It isn’t the story of bao, though there is much filling. It’s not just the story of dim sum, although there are scores and scores of recipes. It’s the story of a community of Chinese immigrants who struggled, flourished, cooked, and ate with abandon in New York City. (Who now struggle, flourish, cook, and eat with abandon in New York City.) It’s a journey that begins in Toishan, runs through Hong Kong, and ends up tucked into the corner of a street once called The Bloody Angle.

In this book, Nom Wah’s owner, Wilson Tang, takes us into the hardworking kitchen of Nom Wah and emerges with 75 easy-to-make recipes: from bao to vegetables, noodles to desserts, cakes, rice rolls, chef’s specials, dumplings, and more. We’re also introduced to characters like Mei Lum, the fifth-generation owner of porcelain shop Wing on Wo, and Joanne Kwong, the lawyer-turned-owner of Pearl River Mart. He paints a portrait of what Chinatown in New York City is in 2020. As Wilson, who quit a job in finance to take over the once-ailing family business, struggles with the dilemma of immigrant children—to jettison tradition or to cling to it—he also points to a new way: to savor tradition while moving forward. A book for har gow lovers and rice roll junkies, The Nom Wah Cookbook portrays a culture at a crossroads.

JOSHUA DAVID STEIN is a Brooklyn-based author and journalist. He’s the editor-at-large at Fatherly and the host of The Fatherly Podcast, the coauthor of Food & Beer, the U.S. editor of Where Chefs Eat. He was the restaurant critic for the New York Observer until he quit in protest in 2016.

Peas, Love and Carrots
Cookbook
by Danielle Renov
July 31, 2020
Mesorah Publications

Delicious recipes and beautiful art and photos worthy of space in your kitchen and on your coffee table from blogger/influencer Danielle Renov. An extension of the @peaslovencarrots community Danielle has built, where tens of thousands of people tune in daily for recipes and cooking tutorials, lifestyle tips, and all things family related. With 254+ approachable recipes and 186+ gorgeous photos that draw inspiration from Danielle's Sephardic / Moroccan and Ashkenazi roots, there is plenty in here for every person and every occasion. Filled with tips + tricks, stories, anecdotes, and insights that leave us laughing, teach us how to be better cooks, and make us proud of our lives in the kitchen and of the food that we serve to beloved friends and family.

Xi'an Famous Foods:
The Cuisine of Western China,
from New York’s Favorite Noodle Shop
by Jason Wang (CEO)
with Jenny Huang and Jessica Chou
October 13, 2020
Abrams

Years ago, Jewish New Yorkers in the know went to Flushing, to the basement of a building, and sought out the cuisine of Western China in a dank cellar food court. I went several times, but it was too authentic for me.... and it remains too authentic. But nearly everyone else loves it. When Jason Wang graduated from Washington University in St Louis, he convinced his family to let him grow the business. Now it is a multi-unit chain.

If you can handle the spice level of Xi-an, then you will like this long awaited book.

Since its humble opening in 2005, Xi’an Famous Foods has expanded from one stall in Flushing to 14 locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. CEO Jason Wang divulges the untold story of how this empire came to be, alongside the never-before-published recipes that helped create this New York City icon. From heavenly ribbons of liang pi doused in a bright vinegar sauce to cumin lamb over hand-pulled Biang Biang noodles, this cookbook helps home cooks make the dishes that fans of Xi’an Famous Foods line up for while also exploring the vibrant cuisine and culture of Xi’an.

Transporting readers to the streets of Xi’an and the kitchens of New York’s Chinatown, Xi’an Famous Foods is the cookbook that fans of Xi’an Famous Foods have been waiting for.

Chasing Flavor:
Techniques and Recipes
to Cook Fearlessly
by Dan Kluger
October 13, 2020
HMH

In his debut cookbook, James Beard Award–winning chef Dan Kluger shares 190 recipes to help home cooks master flavor and technique

Dan Kluger, a chef celebrated for his simple yet flavorful food, knows there’s more to mastering cooking than just following directions. So with each of the innovative, elegant recipes in his debut cookbook, he includes a valuable lesson that applies beyond the tasty dish. For example, master the art of mixing raw and cooked versions of the same ingredient while preparing a Sugar Snap Pea Salad with Manchego Vinaigrette.

From homemade pantry items to vegetable mains, meats, and grains, this book is not just sophisticated recipes but a master class of lessons for more flexibility and innovation in the kitchen.

In Bibi's Kitchen:
The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers
from the Eight African Countries
that Touch the Indian Ocean
by Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen
October 13, 2020
Ten Speed Press

Grandmothers (bibi's in Swahili) from eight eastern African countries welcome you into their kitchens to share flavorful recipes and stories of family, love, and tradition in this transporting cookbook-meets-travelogue.

“Their food is alive with the flavors of mangoes, cinnamon, dates, and plantains and rich with the history of the continent that had been a culinary unknown for much too long.”—Jessica B. Harris, food historian, journalist, and public speaker

Bravo to Ten Speed press for publishing this, when most major publishers ignore Africa and Black cookbook authors.

In this incredible volume, Somali chef Hawa Hassan and renowned food writer Julia Turshen present 75 recipes and stories gathered from bibis (or grandmothers) from eight African nations: South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Comoros, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, and Eritrea. Most notably, these eight countries are at the backbone of the spice trade, many of them exporters of things like pepper and vanilla. We meet women such as Ma Shara, who helps tourists “see the real Zanzibar” by teaching them how to make her famous Ajemi Bread with Carrots and Green Pepper; Ma Vicky, who now lives in suburban New York and makes Matoke (Stewed Plantains with Beans and Beef) to bring the flavor of Tanzania to her American home; and Ma Gehennet from Eritrea who shares her recipes for Kicha (Eritrean Flatbread) and Shiro (Ground Chickpea Stew).

A highlight... fish in coconut sauce, with tomatoes, clove, yellow onions and curry (Mozambique)

You’ll see influences from the Arab world, Persia, India, and European colonial powers, all of them interpreted through local ingredients and traditions. Fit fit, made through much of the region, mixes torn, dried flatbread with spiced butter and yogurt. Mukimo from Kenya, mashes split peas, potatoes, and corn or hominy. For mbowa from Mozambique, cooks stew dark leafy greens in coconut milk. And from Comoros come sweet vermicelli noodles with cardamom and butter. Through Hawa’s writing—and her own personal story—the women, and the stories behind the recipes, come to life. With evocative photography shot on location by Khadija Farah, and food photography by Jennifer May, In Bibi's Kitchen uses food to teach us all about families, war, loss, migration, refuge, and sanctuary.

Pieometry:
Modern Tart Art and
Pie Design for the Eye
and the Palate
by Lauren Ko
October 13, 2020
William Morrow Cookbooks

The pie-making genius behind the popular Instagram account @lokokitchen reveals the secrets of her mind-blowing creations in this gorgeous full-color cookbook featuring 50 incredible sweet and savory pie and tart designs
In a few short years, Lauren Ko made all hell bake loose, going from novice pie baker to internet star and creator of today’s most surprising and delightful pie and tart designs. Her unique geometric style uses fruit and dough cut and woven into stunning shapes to highlight color and texture. With an elegant symmetry that matches their knockout flavor, her dazzlingly intricate and inventive designs look difficult to produce, but can be achieved with little more than a knife, ruler, and some patience.

In Pieometry, Lauren reveals her secrets, sharing stories about her designs and the inspiration behind them. Warm and funny, she recounts the spectacular piesasters that led to some of her best creations, and breaks down her most beautiful designs, describing how to make naturally-colored dough, intricate weaves, and striking cut-out patterns. Pieometry provides clear, step-by-step instructions, accompanied by helpful photographs, which any patient baker can follow to build these pies from bottom crust to top in their own kitchens. Lauren makes it easy to mix and match doughs, fruits, fillings, and designs, and each recipe includes suggestions for alternative ingredients. Best of all, the beautiful finished pie and tart photos are just as much of a treat to look at as the pies are to eat. But even if you make a mistake here and there, her flavors save the day!

When it comes to flavor, Pieometry offers a balance of sweet and savory pies that are a feast for the senses, including:
Of a Shingle Mind: Honey ricotta tart with an herbed pastry shell and beets
Berried Treasure: Lavender blackberry cream with a shortbread crust and berries
Wave of Wonders: Cardamom coffee cream with a shortbread crust and pear
Once in a Tile: Pumpkin black sesame pie with a black sesame crust
C and Easy: Butternut bacon macaroni and cheese pie with a whole wheat cheddar chive crust
Squiggle Room: Grilled cinnamon pineapple pie with a basic butter crust

Nose Dive:
A Field Guide to the World's Smells
by Harold McGee
October 20, 2020
Penguin

PUT DoWN THE HAVDALAH SPICES

PUT DOWN THAT ETROG...

The ultimate guide to the smells of the universe - the ambrosial to the malodorous, and everything in between - from the author of the acclaimed culinary guides On Food and Cooking and Keys to Good Cooking

From Harold McGee, James Beard Award-winning author and leading expert on the science of food and cooking, comes an extensive exploration of the awe-inspiring world of smell. In Nose Dive, McGee takes us on a sensory-filled adventure, from the sulfurous nascent earth more than four billion years ago, to the sweetly fragrant Tian Shan mountain range north of the Himalayas, to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of formaldehyde escape between the keys. We'll sniff the ordinary (wet pavement and cut grass) and extraordinary (fresh bread and chocolate), the delightful (roses and vanilla) and the unpleasant (spoiled meat and rotten eggs). We'll smell each other. We'll smell ourselves.

Through it all, McGee familiarizes us with the actual bits of matter that we breathe in -- the molecules that trigger our perceptions, that prompt the citrusy smells of coriander and beer and the medicinal smells of daffodils and sea urchins. And like everything in the physical world, molecules have histories. Many of the molecules that we smell every day existed long before any creature was around to smell them -- before there was even a planet for those creatures to live on. Beginning with the origins of those molecules in interstellar space, McGee moves onward through the smells of our planet, the air and the oceans, the forest and the meadows and the city, all the way to the smells of incense, perfume, wine, and food.

Here is a story of the world, of all of the smells under our collective nose. A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Nose Dive distills the science behind the smells and translates it, as only McGee can, into an accessible and entertaining guide. Incorporating the latest insights of biology and chemistry, and interwoven with personal observations, McGee reveals how our sense of smell has the power to expose invisible, intangible details of our material world and life, and trigger in us feelings that are the very essence of being alive.

Baking at the 20th Century Cafe:
Iconic European Desserts from
Linzer Torte to Honey Cake
by Michelle Polzine
October 20, 2020
Artisan

Transporting readers straight to the grand cafés of Europe, Baking at the 20th Century Cafe brings renewed attention to the legendary sweet and savory baking recipes of Central and Eastern Europe. Polzine, one of San Francisco’s best pastry chefs, pays homage to the foundational desserts of so many cultures, while lightening and modernizing the recipes through her California lens. Her fruit desserts, nut-based desserts, and chocolate treats—many of them gluten-free—are smart, interesting, and foolproof, and deliver big flavor.

Polzine’s coveted honey cake recipe is included, too, along with recipes for plum kuchen, walnut hamantaschen, Sacher torte, linzer torte, poppy-filled rugelach, vanilla cheesecake—even pierogi and potato knishes, all full of twists and innovations. All the recipes are written with Polzine’s quirky, relatable “you can do this” enthusiasm to assure readers that they can achieve excellent results. Following in the footsteps of such esteemed bakers as Nancy Silverton and Dorie Greenspan, with Baking at the 20th Century Cafe, Polzine offers a new entry into the essential baking cookbook canon.

SOME BACKGROUND: At the age of 5, Polzine ran away from home because she didnt want to eat hamburgers. Her mother was not a cook and mostly served things paired with cream of mushroom canned soup. At 19, she'd become a political canvasser and moved to SF to lobby for women's healthcare. By 22, she moved to NC to become a dishwasher and study cooking in Chapel Hill at a hippie eatery called Pyewacket. It took half a decade to score a pastry internship. By 2002, she was back in SF where she finally got a pastry job, and learned about Hungarian tortes with Hili Revzan, and then flew to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest to study and eat more... The result is 20th Century Cafe

The Mexican Home Kitchen:
Traditional Home-Style Recipes That
Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico
by Mely Martínez
Fall 2020
Rock Point

Her blog is followed by many Jewish cooks, especially those with roots in Mexico, their grandparents having immigrated to Mexico when America closed its doors after WWI.
Here are recipes from Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Veracruz, Puebla, Estado de México, and Yucatán. Born and raised in Tampico, a coastal city in the Gulf state of Tamaulipas, Martínez spent summers on her grandmother’s farm in Veracruz. Mexican cooking has always been about family, community, and tradition for her. Mely started her popular blog, Mexico in My Kitchen, to share the recipes and memories of her home so that her son can someday recreate and share these dishes with his own family. In the meantime, it has become the go-to source for those looking for authentic home-style Mexican cooking.
Recipes include those for Caldo de Pollo (Mexican chicken soup), Tacos de Bistec (steak tacos), Albondigas (Mexican meatballs), Tamales (both savory and sweet), Enchiladas (both red and green sauces), Mole Poblano (one of the most classic and popular moles), Nopales (recipes made with cactus paddles), Empanadas (beef and cheese filled), Chiles Rellenos (stuffed and fried poblano peppers), Pozole (both red and green versions), Salsa Taquera (salsa for tacos), Pastel de Tres Leches (a luscious and moist cake that’s a Mexican favorite), Buñuelos (crispy dough fritters coated in sugar), Aguas Frescas (horchata, hibiscus, and tamarind flavors) and much more!

The Chile Pepper in China:
A Cultural Biography
by Brian R. Dott
2020
a scholarly book
Columbia University Press

not for a casual read
Chinese cuisine without chile peppers seems unimaginable. Entranced by the fiery taste, diners worldwide have fallen for Chinese cooking. In China, chiles are everywhere, from dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, from the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber to contemporary music videos. Indeed, they are so common that many Chinese assume they are native. Yet there were no chiles anywhere in China prior to the 1570s, when they were introduced from the Americas.

Brian R. Dott explores how the nonnative chile went from obscurity to ubiquity in China, influencing not just cuisine but also medicine, language, and cultural identity. He details how its versatility became essential to a variety of regional cuisines and swayed both elite and popular medical and healing practices. Dott tracks the cultural meaning of the chile across a wide swath of literary texts and artworks, revealing how the spread of chiles fundamentally altered the meaning of the term spicy. He emphasizes the intersection between food and gender, tracing the chile as a symbol for both male virility and female passion. Integrating food studies, the history of medicine, and Chinese cultural history, The Chile Pepper in China sheds new light on the piquant cultural impact of a potent plant and raises broader questions regarding notions of authenticity in cuisine.

The Flavor Equation:
The Science of Great Cooking
Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes
by Nik Sharma
October 27, 2020
Chronicle Books

In this groundbreaking book, Nik Sharma, scientist, food blogger, and author of the buzz-generating cookbook Season, guides home cooks on an exploration of flavor in more than 100 recipes.

• Provides inspiration and knowledge to both home cooks and seasoned chefs
• An in-depth exploration into the science of taste
• Features Nik Sharma's evocative, trademark photography style

The Flavor Equation is an accessible guide to elevating elemental ingredients to make delicious dishes that hit all the right notes, every time.

Recipes include Brightness: Lemon-Lime Mintade, Saltiness: Roasted Tomato and Tamarind Soup, Sweetness: Honey Turmeric Chicken Kebabs with Pineapple, Savoriness: Soba Noodles with Mushrooms and Walnut Sauce, and Richness: Coconut Milk Cake.

• A global, scientific approach to cooking from bestselling cookbook author Nik Sharma
• Dives deep into the most basic of our pantry items—salts, oils, sugars, vinegars, citrus, peppers, and more
• Perfect gift for home cooks who want to learn more beyond recipes, those interested in the science of food and flavor, and readers of Lucky Peach, Serious Eats, Indian-Ish, and Koreatown
• Add it to the shelf with cookbooks like The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji López-Alt; The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg; and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat.

Modern Comfort Food:
A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook
by Ina Garten
October 6, 2020
Clarkson Potter

A collection of all-new soul-satisfying dishes from America's favorite home cook!

In Modern Comfort Food, Ina Garten shares 85 new recipes that will feed your deepest cravings. Many of these dishes are inspired by childhood favorites--but with the volume turned way up, such as Cheddar and Chutney Grilled Cheese sandwiches (the perfect match for Ina's Creamy Tomato Bisque), Smashed Hamburgers with Caramelized Onions, and the crispiest hash browns that are actually made in a waffle iron!

There are few things more comforting than gathering for a meal with the ones you love, especially when dishes like Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas are at the center of the table. Old-fashioned crowd pleasers like Roasted Sausages, Peppers, and Onions are even more delicious and streamlined for quick cleanup. For dessert? You'll find the best Boston Cream Pie, Banana Rum Trifle, and Black and White Cookies you'll ever make. Home cooks can always count on Ina's dependable, easy-to-follow instructions, with lots of side notes for cooking and entertaining--it's like having Ina right there beside you, helping you all the way.

From cocktails to dessert, from special weekend breakfasts to quick weeknight dinners, you'll find yourself making these cozy and delicious recipes over and over again.

OTTOLENGHI FLAVOR:
A Cookbook
by Yotam Ottolenghi
Ixta Belfrage
October 13, 2020
Ten Speed Press

The New York Times bestselling author of Plenty joins up with the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen's Ixta Belfrage to reveal how flavor is amplified in more than 100 innovative, super-delicious plant-based recipes.

Yotam Ottolenghi--the beloved chef and influencer who has captured the hearts of home cooks looking for inspiration and great-tasting vegetable cooking--is back. In Ottolenghi Flavor, Yotam collaborates with longtime colleague Ixta Belfrage to identify the principles behind his stylish, innovative brand of cooking with a new collection of revolutionary plant-based recipes. Yotam and Ixta build on the vegetarian cooking that made Plenty and Plenty More phenomenal bestsellers, this time adding Italian and Mexican influences and revealing how to understand, build, and amplify flavor through more than 100 vegetarian recipes (half are also vegan). In essence, Yotam and Ixta show how to evolve creatively, be intuitive in the kitchen, and become ever-better cooks through the "three P's":

• Process: Key reactions that happen when vegetables or supporting ingredients are cooked.
• Pairing: Matching vegetables with flavorings to accentuate their qualities.
• Produce: Identifying key ingredients that make vegetables shine.

With surefire hits, such as Stuffed Eggplant in Curry and Coconut Dal, Spicy Mushroom Lasagna, and Vegetable Schnitzel, plus stunning photographs of nearly every recipe, Ottolenghi Flavor is the exciting, next-level approach to vegetable cooking that Yotam's fans, home cooks of all levels, and vegetable lovers everywhere have been craving.

EAST
120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes
from Bangalore to Beijing
by Meera Sodha
October 20, 2020
Flatiron

This edition has been adapted for the US market. It was originally published in the UK.

Modern, vibrant, fuss-free food made from easy-to-find ingredients, East is a must-have whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or simply want to eat more delicious meat-free food.

Meera Sodha grew up in Lincolnshire, 3 hours North of London. It was two decades ago. She was 18, at college, and eating with friends at a curry house in London, in the East End. Her Indian family arrived in England after fleeing Uganda when Idi Amin ordered all Asians and Indians to leave or be murdered. After the meal, made with non fresh ingredients, she rang up her mum to get recipes for fresh vega, entrees.

Meera Sodha's stunning new collection features brand-new recipes from a wide range of Asian cuisines. This cookbook is a collaboration between Sodha and the East Asian and South East Asian home cooks and gourmet chefs who inspired her along the way. There are noodles, curries, rice dishes, tofu, salads, sides, and sweets, all easy to make and bursting with exciting flavors.

Taking you from India to Indonesia, Singapore, and Japan, by way of China, Thailand, and Vietnam, East will show you how to whip up a root vegetable laksa and a chard, potato, and coconut curry; how to make kimchi pancakes, delicious dairy-free black dal and chili tofu. There are sweet potato momos for snacks and unexpected desserts like salted miso brownies and a no-churn Vietnamese coffee ice cream.

THE JEWISH VEGETARIAN SOCIETY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM recommends this recipe from the book: Visit - https://www.jvs.org.uk/recipe-view/sprout-nasi-goreng/

Simply:
Easy everyday dishes from
the bestselling author of Persiana
by Sabrina Ghayour
October 6, 2020
Mitchell Beazley

Sabrina Ghayour's new collection of unmissable dishes in her signature style, influenced by her love of fabulous flavors, is full of delicious food that can be enjoyed with a minimum of fuss. With sections ranging from Effortless Eating to Traditions With a Twist, Simply provides over 100 bold and exciting recipes that can be enjoyed every day of the week.

Recipes include:
Baked sweet potato & za'atar chips
Pomegranate molasses & honey glazed meatballs
Kabab koobideh
Chilled pistachio & cucumber soup
Goats' cheese, vegetable & za'atar filo tart
Albaloo polow (lamb & sour cherry rice)
Harissa chicken noodle lettuce cups
Tahini, almond & orange brownies
Saffron & sesame shortbreads
Turmeric, orange & coconut rice pudding

Practical, flavorful dishes that rely on short ingredient lists and uncomplicated preparation. A cauliflower and cumin soup needs just 6 ingredients and takes about 30 minutes to be ready. A tomato and peanut salad with tamarind, ginger, and honey dressing takes about 20 minutes. And while some dishes take longer, such as mashed cannellini beans with preserved lemon and tahini, most of that extra time is simply the food simmering away on a back burner or roasting in an oven. Also roasted nectarines served on a bed of savory spiced labneh; cumin-scented lamb over tagliatelle; green bean and black-eyed pea baklava.

The Character Edge:
Leading and Winning with Integrity
by Robert L. Caslen Jr.
Michael D. Matthews
October 13, 2020
St. Martin's Press

The former superintendent at West Point and a psychologist explain why all successful leaders rely on a foundation of strong character.

Among the most successful leaders throughout history-from Abe Lincoln to Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi to Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr. to Nelson Mandela-some were brilliant mathematicians and economists, others were creative visionaries, still others were masterful at strategic planning. Their mastery of their field wasn’t the secret to their highly effective leadership. All of their skill, grit, resilience, charisma, and courage emanated from one thing: their strength of character.

Character-the moral values and habits of an individual-is in the spotlight now more than perhaps at any other point in modern history. Politicians distort facts. Corporations cheat customers and investors. Athletes are caught using illegal supplements. In addition to harming our culture at large, these failures of character have a profound and undermining impact on leadership.

The authors of this book are experts on the value of character, its correlation with successful leadership, and how to build it in individuals and prospective leaders. General Robert L. Caslen, Jr. served the US Army for over 43 years and served as Superintendent at the US Military Academy at West Point. Psychologist Dr. Michael D. Matthews is a Professor of Engineering Psychology at West Point who has focused on the psychology of character for years. Together they witnessed firsthand that raw talent is not enough to stand on its own; successful leadership relies on the critical foundation of a strong character.

In The Character Edge they leverage their perspectives to offer an empowering, story-driven argument-backed by the latest scientific research-that character is vital to success. They give readers the tools to build and sustain character in themselves and their organizations by testing readers' strengths of the gut, head and heart and teaching how to build trust and nurture the seeds of character.

CHANCE
ESCAPE FROM THE HOLOCAUST
(through the eyes of Uri as a child)
A MEMOIR
BY URI SHULEVITZ
August 25, 2020
postponed to October 20, 2020 FS&G
Ages 8-14

From a beloved voice in children’s literature comes this landmark memoir of hope amid harrowing times and an engaging and unusual Holocaust story.

With backlist sales of over 2.3 million copies, Uri Shulevitz, one of FSG BYR’s most acclaimed picture-book creators, details the eight-year odyssey of how he and his Jewish family escaped the terrors of the Nazis by fleeing Warsaw for the Soviet Union in CHANCE.

It was during those years, with threats at every turn, that the young Uri experienced his awakening as an artist, an experience that played a key role during this difficult time. By turns dreamlike and nightmarish, this heavily illustrated account of determination, courage, family loyalty, and the luck of coincidence is a true publishing event.

Note: The illustrations are facially expressive, impressionistic and emotional and might be sketchy since they relate memory and emotion more than realism. Of course, he did not remember the features of some people from 1939, so the “wisdom of his fingers” drew his impressions. (He let his fingers do the guiding/walking)

Uri Shulevitz is a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and author. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, on February 27, 1935. He began drawing at the age of three and, unlike many children, never stopped. The Warsaw blitz occurred when he was four years old, and the Shulevitz family fled. For eight years they were wanderers, arriving, eventually, in Paris in 1947. There Shulevitz developed an enthusiasm for French comic books, and soon he and a friend started making their own. At thirteen, Shulevitz won first prize in an all-elementary-school drawing competition in Paris's 20th district. In 1949, the family moved to Israel, where Shulevitz worked a variety of jobs: an apprentice at a rubber-stamp shop, a carpenter, and a dog-license clerk at Tel Aviv City Hall. He studied at the Teachers' Institute in Tel Aviv, where he took courses in literature, anatomy, and biology, and also studied at the Art Institute of Tel Aviv. At fifteen, he was the youngest to exhibit in a group drawing show at the Tel Aviv Museum. At 24 he moved to New York City, where he studied painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School and drew illustrations for a publisher of Hebrew books. One day while talking on the telephone, he noticed that his doodles had a fresh and spontaneous look-different from his previous illustrations. This discovery was the beginning of Uri's new approach to his illustrations for The Moon in My Room, his first book, published in 1963. Since then he was written and illustrated many celebrated children’s books. He won the Caldecott Medal for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for The Treasure, Snow and How I Learned Geography. His other books include One Monday Morning, Dawn, So Sleepy Story, and many others. He also wrote the instructional guide Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books. He lives in New York City.

The Language of Thieves:
My Family's Obsession with a
Secret Code the Nazis Tried
to Eliminate
by Martin Puchner
(Harvard University)
October 13, 2020
NORTON

Tracking an underground language and the outcasts who depended on it for their survival.

Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people who were "wiz" (in the know). This hybrid language, dubbed Rotwelsch, facilitated survival for people in flight-whether escaping persecution or just down on their luck.

It was a language of the road associated with vagabonds, travelers, Jews, and thieves that blended words from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Romani, Czech, and other European languages and was rich in expressions for police, jail, or experiencing trouble, such as "being in a pickle." (HEAR THAT SETH ROGEN?!?!?)

This renegade language unsettled those in power, who responded by trying to stamp it out, none more vehemently than the Nazis.

As a boy, Martin Puchner learned this secret language from his father and uncle. Only as an adult did he discover, through a poisonous 1930s tract on Jewish names buried in the archives of Harvard’s Widener Library, that his own grandfather had been a committed Nazi who despised this "language of thieves."

Interweaving family memoir with an adventurous foray into the mysteries of language, Puchner, a professor of comp lit at Harvard, crafts an entirely original narrative. In a language born of migration and survival, he discovers a witty and resourceful spirit of tolerance that remains essential in our volatile present.

Culture Warlords:
My Journey Into the
Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
October 13, 2020
Hachette

A Jewish reporter makes an immersive dive into white supremacy's explosive metastasis online, exploring the undercurrents of propaganda, religion, misogyny and history that led us to where we are now -- and how to fight back.
Talia Lavin is every skinhead's worst nightmare: a loud and unapologetic Jewish woman, acerbic, smart, and profoundly anti-racist, with the investigative chops to expose the tactics and ideologies of online hatemongers.

Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies of how white supremacy proliferates online. Within these pages, she reveals the extremists hiding in plain sight online: Incels. White nationalists. White supremacists. National Socialists. Proud Boys. Christian extremists. In order to showcase them in their natural habitat, Talia assumes a range of identities, going undercover as a blonde Nazi babe, a forlorn incel, and a violent Aryan femme fatale.

Along the way, she discovers a whites-only dating site geared toward racists looking for love, a disturbing extremist YouTube channel run by a 14-year-old girl with over 800,000 followers, the everyday heroes of the antifascist movement, and much more. By combining compelling stories chock-full of catfishing and gatecrashing with her own in-depth, gut-wrenching research, she also turns the lens of anti-Semitism, racism, and white power back on itself in an attempt to dismantle and decimate the online hate movement from within.

Shocking, humorous, and merciless in equal measure, Culture Warlords explores some of the vilest subcultures on the Web -- and shows us how we can fight back.

NYT review excerpt: “Culture Warlords isn’t one of those books in which an intrepid author journeys behind enemy lines in order to write plaintively of our shared humanity. Yes, Lavin says, the people she encountered were human—ordinary individuals who eat, drink, sleep, and feel sadness and joy like anyone else. But it’s precisely their humanity that angers her; their hatred is ‘the culmination of dozens or hundreds of small human choices.’ Studying the far right made her more knowledgeable about and less patient with those who tolerate it. Her research, she says, ‘taught me how to hate’ … one of the marvels of this furious book is how insolent and funny Lavin is; she refuses to soft-pedal the monstrous views she encounters, and she clearly takes pleasure in cutting them down to size. She is aided in her mission by the fact that the language of extremists tends to occupy the space between risible and profoundly dumb … Lavin suggests that drawing delicate distinctions, an activity beloved by liberal moderates, is ultimately powerless against the steamrolling forces of an insurgent far right. Having been on the receiving end of the bile spewed by online trolls, she says that hatred flourishes when it’s allowed to take cover in the shadows: ‘Let us hold it to the light—this wet, rotting, malodorous thing—and let it dry up and crumble into dust and be gone.’ ”

The Lost Shtetl:
A Novel
by Max Gross
October 13, 2020
HarperVia

A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now.

What if there was a town that history missed? For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century.

Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities.

Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide.

Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good.

Losing the Long Game:
The False Promise of Regime Change
in the Middle East
by Philip H. Gordon
October 6, 2020
St. Martin's Press

The definitive account of how regime change in the Middle East has proven so tempting to American policymakers for decades-and why it always seems to go wrong.
"Must reading-by someone who saw it first-hand-for all interested in America’s foreign policy and its place in the world.” -Robin Wright

Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade-in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have likewise been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation. What is common to all the operations, however, is that they failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended and even catastrophic consequences, carried heavy financial and human costs, and in many cases left the countries in question worse off than they were before.

Philip H. Gordon's Losing the Long Game is a thorough and riveting look at the U.S. experience with regime change over the past seventy years, and an insider’s view on U.S. policymaking in the region at the highest levels. It is the story of repeated U.S. interventions in the region that always started out with high hopes and often the best of intentions, but never turned out well. No future discussion of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be complete without taking into account the lessons of the past, especially at a time of intense domestic polarization and reckoning with America's standing in world.

The Cap:
How Larry Fleisher and
David Stern Built the Modern NBA
by Joshua Mendelsohn
October 1, 2020
University of Nebraska Press

Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap tells the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of the deal between the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association that created the salary cap in 1983, the first in all of sports, against the backdrop of a looming players’ strike on one side and threatened economic collapse on the other.

Joshua Mendelsohn illustrates how the salary cap was more than just professional basketball’s economic foundation—it was a grand bargain, a compromise meant to end the chaos that had gripped the sport since the early 1960s. The NBA had spent decades in a vulnerable position financially and legally, unique in professional sports. It entered the 1980s badly battered, something no one knew better than a few legendary NBA figures: Larry Fleisher, general counsel and negotiator for the National Basketball Players Association; Larry O’Brien, the commissioner; and David Stern, who led negotiations for the NBA and would be named the commissioner a few months after the salary cap deal was reached.

As a result, in 1983 the NBA and its players made a novel settlement. The players gave up infinite pay increases, but they gained a guaranteed piece of the league’s revenue and free agency to play where they wished—a combination that did not exist before in professional sports but as a result became standard for the NBA, NFL, and NHL as well.

The Cap explores in detail not only the high-stakes negotiations in the early 1980s but all the twists and turns through the decades that led the parties to reach a salary cap compromise. It is a compelling story that involves notable players, colorful owners, visionary league and union officials, and a sport trying to solidify a bright future despite a turbulent past and present. This is a story missing from the landscape of basketball history.

The Rise and Fall of
Jewish American Literature
by Benjamin Schreier
(Jewish Studies, Penn State Univ)
October 16, 2020
University of Pennsylvania Press

hahaha... you like the cover art... just like Philip Roth designs??

Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of "breakthrough"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative.

In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.

Our Last Season:
A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship
by Harvey Araton
October 20, 2020
Penguin Press

The moving story of a bond between sportswriter and fan that was forged in a shared love of basketball and grew over several decades into an extraordinary friendship

"This is a story about friendship, sports, aging, and ultimately time itself--the things it strips away and the things it cannot touch. I loved it."--Wright Thompson, author of The Cost of These Dreams

Harvey Araton is one of New York's--and the nation's--best-known sports journalists, having covered thousands of Knicks games over the course of a long and distinguished career. But the person at the heart of Our Last Season, Michelle Musler, is largely anonymous--except, that is, to the players, coaches, and writers who have passed through Madison Square Garden, where she held season tickets behind the Knicks bench for 45 years. In that time, the daughter of a Jewish steamfitter father and Irish mother, she juggled a successful career as a corporate executive and single parenthood of five children. She missed only a handful of home games. The Garden was her second home – and the place where an extraordinary friendship between fan and sportswriter was forged.

That relationship soon grew into something much bigger than basketball, with Michelle serving as a cherished mentor and friend to Harvey as he weathered life's inevitable storms: illness, aging, and professional challenges and transitions. During the 2017-18 NBA season, as Michelle faces serious illness that prevents her from attending more than a few Knicks games, Harvey finally has the chance to give back to Michelle everything she has given him: reminders of all she's accomplished, the blessings she's enjoyed, and the devoted friend she has been to him.

Chock-full of anecdotes from behind the scenes and cameos from Knicks legends--from Frazier, King, and Ewing to Riley, Van Gundy, and many more--the story of Harvey and Michelle's nearly four decades of friendship is a delight for basketball fans. But at its core, Our Last Season is a book for all of us, offering a poignant and inspiring message about how to live with passion, commitment, and optimism.

The Bible With and Without Jesus:
How Jews and Christians Read
the Same Stories Differently
by Amy-Jill Levine and
Marc Zvi Brettler
October 27, 2020
HarperOne

The editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament explore how Jews and Christians can learn from and understand each other better by exploring how they read many of the same Bible stories through different lens.

Esteemed Bible scholars Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt Divinity, the Jewish Feminist Bible Scholar who teaches New Testament at a predominantly Christian school) and Marc Brettler (Duke University, Jewish Study Bible) take readers on a guided tour of the most popular Old Testament stories referenced in the New Testament to explore how Christians, Jews, and scholars read these ancient texts differently. Among the passages analyzed are the creation story, the role of Adam and Eve, the suffering servant passages in Isaiah, the sign of "Jonah" Jesus refers to, and the words Jesus quotes from Psalm 22 as he is dying on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Comparing Jewish, Christian, and academic interpretations of each ancient narrative, Levine and Brettler offer a deeper understanding of these contrasting faiths, and illuminate the historical and literary significance of the Bible and its place in our culture. Revealing not only what Jews and Christians can learn from each other, The Bible With and Without Jesus also shows how to appreciate the distinctive perspectives of each. By understanding the depth and variety of reading these passages, we not only enhance our knowledge of each other, but also see more clearly the beauty and power of Scripture itself.

How Millennials Can Lead Us
Out of the Mess We're In:
A Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian
Share Leadership Lessons from
the Life of Moses
by Iqbal Unus, Mordecai Schreiber,
and Ian Case Punnett
October 20, 2020
Rowman and Littlefield

During troubled times, millions have been inspired by the stories and spiritual lessons of the selfless leadership of Moses. In a world increasingly affected by political, social, and racial imbalance, we need strong, innovative leaders who have not forgotten or ignored these valuable lessons.

How Millennials Can Lead Us Out of the Mess We're In: A Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian Share Leadership Lessons from the Life of Moses brings together an Israeli-born rabbi (Bnai Brith Intnl), a Pakistani-born Muslim scholar (ISNA), and an ordained Midwestern American (Episcopal movement) to inspire the next generation of leaders with a timeless story of the ancient prophet Moses.

Written in an easy and accessible style, this book is meant for sincerely spiritual but church-resistant Bible readers as well as those who are familiar with the Moses narrative. No leadership book has ever attempted to synthesize the religious views of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity into one unified, harmonious voice singing a single hymnal.

Max Jacob:
A Life in Art and Letters
by Rosanna Warren
(University of Chicago)
October 20, 2020
Norton

A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame.

Though less of a household name than his contemporaries in early twentieth century Paris, Jewish homosexual poet Max Jacob was Pablo Picasso’s initiator into French culture, Guillaume Apollinaire’s guide out of the haze of symbolism, and Jean Cocteau’s loyal friend. As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, the product of a complex amalgamation of Jewish, Breton, Parisian, and Roman Catholic influences.

In Max Jacob, the poet’s life plays out against the vivid backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. Acclaimed poet Rosanna Warren transports us to Picasso’s ramshackle studio in Montmartre, where Cubism was born; introduces the artists gathered at a seedy bar on the left bank, where Max would often hold court; and offers a front-row seat to the artistic squabbles that shaped the Modernist movement.

Jacob’s complex understanding of faith, art, and sexuality animates this sweeping work. In 1909, he saw a vision of Christ in his shabby room in Montmartre, and in 1915 he converted formally from Judaism to Catholicism-with Picasso as his godfather. In his later years, Jacob split his time between Paris and the monastery of Benoît-sur-Loire. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die a few days later.

More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry-in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.

When Rabbis Bless Congress:
The Great American Story
of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill
by Howard Mortman
October 20, 2020
Cherry Orchard Press

Who was the first rabbi to deliver a speech in Congress? Hint .. he was born in Sweden and had a Manhattan pulpit (1860)? And what did he say which was awfu, under President Buchanan?
Who was the first cisgender female rabbi to give a prayer (1973)... Hint: It was on the day that there wold be a vote to impeach Nixon?
About 420 rabbis and over 600 prayers?
Who gave the 613th invocation?
How many times did retired Navy Chaplain Resnicoff give the invocation?

Congress opens each session with a prayer offered by a chaplain or guest chaplain. Among the guest chaplains: Rabbis.

This book is about the rabbis. It’s an unprecedented examination of 160 years of Jewish prayers delivered in the literal and figurative center of American democracy. With exhaustive research written in approachable prose, it uniquely tells the story of over 400 rabbis giving over 600 prayers since the Civil War days-who they are and what they say.

Few written works examine the tradition of prayers in government. This new angle will appeal to students and lovers of American history, Congress, American Jewish history, and religion. It’s a welcome, important addition to our understanding of Congress and Jewish contribution to America.

The Spider:
Inside the Criminal Web of
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
by Barry Levine
October 20, 2020
Crown

Who was Jeffrey Epstein? A Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist unearths never-before-reported details in the most comprehensive account yet of the disgraced financier’s life, death, and criminal web, including the role of Ghislaine Maxwell.

By now, the basic contours of Jeffrey Epstein’s horrendous crimes—his decades-long serial abuse of young women and underage girls—are familiar. But for all that has been written about Epstein since his shocking death in a lower Manhattan jail cell, an astonishing amount remains unknown. A shy Brooklyn kid turned renegade financier, Jeffrey Epstein never wanted to play by the rules of polite society. He was elusive in life and he has remained just as elusive in death.

What is known is that he had amassed nearly $600 million by the time of his death. That fortune allowed Epstein to pursue a privileged, secretive life, jetting between his fortress-like homes in Manhattan, New Mexico, and Little St. James, his private island. Behind these closed doors, Epstein socialized with scientists and world leaders and preyed on powerless young women.

In this dogged work of reporting, Barry Levine shines a light into the darkest corners of Epstein’s world, including

• Epstein’s young adulthood and earliest accusations of sexual misconduct
• the murky sources of Epstein’s fortune and business dealings
• Epstein’s circle of confidantes and employees, particularly the nature of his long relationship with socialite Ghislaine Maxwell
• his ties to powerful men, including Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Les Wexner, and Donald Trump
• Epstein’s last hours as a free man in Paris and the secret operation to arrest him at a New Jersey airport before he could flee
• new details on Epstein’s final days in jail and the mystery surrounding his death

BILLION DOLLAR LOSER:
The Epic Rise and Spectacular
Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
October 20, 2020
Little, Brown

WeFraud?
WeDuped?
WeFlake?
If a loser walks away with a billion... are they a winner?

"Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel" (Ken Auletta)
The inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, which tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history

In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an Israeli immigrant to NYC determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. He had lived on a Kibbutz in Israel and had absorbed utopian ideas, but he was not into the communal lifestyles. He wanted to save the world, and be very rich, but also had a small flaw similar to Jerusalem Syndrome.. he thought of himself as a messiah.

He tried to make it rich with a retractable high heel shoe for woman. He tried to make it rich with baby pants with knee pads for “Krawlers.” And then he hit on a type of co-working space, one where he could smoke weed at his desk, and one that would be like Chabad lechaim groups, namely and have lot of shot drinking happy hours. Also, WeWork would find a highly paid role for Rebekah Paltrow, Neumann's spouse, who could add her Kabbalah Center learnings and red wrist-strings into the biz.

Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than "elevating the world's consciousness."

Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork's CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann's relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools.

Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork's botched IPO and Neumann's dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company's desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump's first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins.

Bound in the Bond of Life:
Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on
the Tree of Life Tragedy
by Beth Kissileff (Editor)
Eric S. Lidji (Editor)
October 27, 2020
University of Pittsburgh Press

On October 27, 2018, three congregations were holding their morning Shabbat services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood when a lone gunman entered the building and opened fire. He killed eleven people and injured six more in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. The story made national headlines for weeks following the shooting, but Pittsburgh and the local Jewish community could not simply move on when the news cycle did.

The essays in this anthology, written by local journalists, academics, rabbis, and other community members, reveal a city’s attempts to cope, make sense of, and come to terms with an unfathomable horror. Here, members from the three impacted congregations are able to reflect on their experiences in a raw, profound way. Local reporters who wrote about the event professionally contribute stories that they were unable to articulate until now. Activists consider their work at a calm distance from the chaotic intensity of their daily efforts. Academics mesh their professional expertise with their personal experiences of this shattering event in their hometown. Rabbis share their process of crafting comforting messages for their constituents when they themselves felt hopeless.

By bringing local voices together into a chorus, they are raised over the din of national and international chroniclers who offer important contributions but do not and cannot feel the intensity of this tragedy in the same way as locals. The essays in this anthology tell a collective story of city shaken to its very core, but determined that love will ultimately win.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Jewish Family and Community Service of Pittsburgh.

NOVEMBER 2020 SUGGESTIONS

The Greatest Beer Run Ever:
A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War
by John "Chick" Donohue
and J. T. Molloy (NYC journalist)
November 10, 2020
William Morrow

When you hear the story, you wonder why it isn ta film.. well it will be... Soon to be a major motion picture written and directed by Peter Farrelly, who won two Academy Awards for Green Book—a wildly entertaining, feel-good memoir of an Irish-American New Yorker and former U.S. marine who embarked on a courageous, hare-brained scheme to deliver beer to his pals serving Vietnam in the late 1960s.

One night in 1967, twenty-six-year-old John Donohue—known as Chick—was out with friends, drinking in a New York City bar. He was from a tight Irish-Jewish neighborhood. The friends gathered there had lost loved ones in Vietnam. Now, they watched as anti-war protesters turned on the troops themselves.

One neighborhood patriot came up with an inspired—some would call it insane—idea. Someone should sneak into Vietnam, track down their buddies there, give them messages of support from back home, and share a few laughs over a can of beer.

It would be the Greatest Beer Run Ever.

But who’d be crazy enough to do it?

One man was up for the challenge—a U. S. Marine Corps veteran turned merchant mariner who wasn’t about to desert his buddies on the front lines when they needed him.

Chick volunteered.

A day later, he was on a cargo ship headed to Vietnam, armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol. Landing in Qui Nho’n, Chick set off on an adventure that would change his life forever—an odyssey that took him through a series of hilarious escapades and harrowing close calls, including the Tet Offensive. But none of that mattered if he could bring some cheer to his pals and show them how much the folks back home appreciated them.

This is the story of that epic beer run, told in Chick’s own words and those of the men he visited in Vietnam.

TO BE A MAN
A collection of stories
By Nicole Krauss
November 3, 2020
Harper

In this dazzling collection of short fiction, the National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestselling author of The History of Love—“one of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation” (New York Times)—explores what it means to be in a couple, and to be a man and a woman in that perplexing relationship and beyond.

In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.

The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women’s coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss’s stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.

There is a story of a student who arrives at the House of Study and he is more concerned about the lesson than he is about his study partner. His teacher/rabbi admonishes the student, telling to go inquire to make sure his study partner is well and to get his priorities in order. Was it attributed to the Maggid of Mezritch? Reb Zusya of Annapoli/Hanapol? I forget... but... this book reminds me of the story... when people are more concerned with Finding Waldo or Fergus than they are WITH how Waldo and Fergus are:

Find Fergus
by Mike Boldt
November 3, 2020
Doubleday

"Think of it as a Where's Waldo? book if Waldo were really, really bad at hiding." - author/illustrator Mike Boldt's pitch for Find Fergus.
The hilarious mind behind I Don't Want to Be a Frog and Bad Dog brings picture book fans the super-funny, interactive story of Fergus the bear, who loves to play hide-and-seek with the reader . . . but can't really seem to get the hang of it.
Children will giggle from start to finish as they follow huge, loveable Fergus and see all the silly ways in which he is TERRIBLE at playing hide-and-seek -- such as hiding behind a VERY tiny tree ("Found you, Fergus! That was too easy!") or hiding in a giant crowd of bunnies and squirrels ("Try bears, Fergus. Bears!").
But wait -- the game isn't over yet! The last two pages fold out into a giant panoramic look-and-find scene, where Fergus is well and truly hidden, and young readers can have fun looking for him and lots of other silly details in the the crowd. There's a ton of play value in this adorable book, and children will want to come back to it again and again.

Fergus wants to play hide and seek. But, look, there he is, hiding right in the middle of a big blank page!
"Found you, Fergus! That was too easy. Try hiding behind something." (Giant, furry Fergus hides behind a very tiny tree.)
"Oh, Fergus. Start by hiding in a crowd." (Fergus hides next to duck and a fox, who don't seem impressed.)
"A crowd is more than THREE, Fergus!"

The Same River Twice:
A Memoir of Dirtbag Backpackers,
Bomb Shelters, and Bad Travel
by Pam Mandel
November 3, 2020
Skyhorse

Acclaimed travel writer Pam Mandel's thrilling account of a life-defining journey from the California suburbs to Israel to the Himalayan peaks and back.

Given the choice, Pam Mandel would say no and stay home. It was getting her nowhere, so she decided to say yes. Yes to hard work and hitch-hiking, to mean boyfriends and dirty travel, to unfolding the map and walking to its edges. Yes to unknown countries, night shifts, language lessons, bad decisions, to anything to make her feel real, visible, alive.

A product of beige California suburbs, Mandel was overlooked and unexceptional. When her father ships her off on a youth group tour of Israel, he inadvertently catapults his seventeen-year-old daughter into a world of angry European backpackers, seize-the-day Israelis, and the fall out of cold war-era politics. Border violence hadn't been on the birthright tour agenda. But then neither had domestic violence, going broke, getting wasted, getting sick, or getting lost.

With no guidance and no particular plan, utterly unprepared for what lies ahead, Mandel says yes to everything and everyone, embarking on an adventure across three continents and thousands of miles, from a cold water London flat to rural Pakistan, from the Nile River Delta to the snowy peaks of Ladakh and finally, back home to California, determined to shape a life that is truly hers. An extraordinary memoir of going away and growing up, The Same River Twice follows Mandel's tangled journey and shows how travel teaches and changes us, even while it helps us become exactly who we have been all along.

Dangerous Religious Ideas:
The Deep Roots of Self-Critical
Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
by Rabbi Rachel S. Mikva
November 3, 2020
Beacon Press

Reveals how faith traditions have always passed down tools for self-examination and debate, because all religious ideas--not just extremist ones--can cause harm, even as they also embody important moral teachings. Scripture's abiding relevance can inspire great goodness, such as welcoming the stranger and extending compassion for the poor. But its authority has also been wielded to defend slavery, marginalize LGBTQ individuals, ignore science, and justify violence. Grounded in close readings of scripture and tradition in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, religious scholar Rachel Mikva shows us that the Abrahamic religions have always been aware of their tremendous power both to harm and to heal. And so they have transmitted their sacred stories along with built-in tools--interpretive traditions--to do the necessary work of taking on dangerous religious ideas and fostering self-critical faith. By exploring the themes of Scripture, Election, Reward and Punishment, Mikva examines how the interpretive methodologies of these religions have identified and grappled with their perilous power and positive potential. Many readers presume that their understanding of scripture's meaning is absolute, forgetting how these sacred texts and the history of interpretation have valued multiple perspectives and recognized ongoing rhythms of change. It's not a modern phenomenon to debate the nature of truth, hold space open for doubt, value humility, and question our capacity to know things--especially about God and God's will--with certainty. In fact, none of the traditions could remain vital or thrive together without a sustained practice of self-critique. Dangerous Religious Ideas reframes the way we talk about faith to create a space where public discussion of religion is more constructive, nuanced, and socially engaged.

Judaism on Purpose:
A Guidebook for Wandering Jews &
Wondering Rabbis to Reignite Individualized
Meaning INside Out through Judaism
by Yaakov (Jim) Schwartz
November 3, 2020

PROBLEM & OPPORTUNITY: Jews feel disconnected from their faith. The synagogue cannot deliver individualized, personalized meaning. 22% of Jews classify themselves as “nones” (having no religion).When high holiday attendance is factored out, effective affiliation is but 3% - 5%. Regular affiliation might optimistically be 10% (and that is pre-pandemic).

SOLUTION: Under the guidance of a participating rabbi, participants go through a personal, INsideout process of reconnecting to their faith. Judaism On Purpose(tm) is an actionable guidebook helping individuals find The One Thing: Meaning IN one’s life.

PROCESS: Each Jews of Meaning© member meets individually with the participating rabbi for one hour on initiation and then for one monthly one-hour meeting with the rabbi. Groups are comprised of no more than seven members studying weekly for an hour with the rabbi, who guides individuals topersonalized meaning.The Soul purpose of Judaism On Purpose(tm) is reigniting personalized meaning IN one’s life through reconnection to Judaism.

THE TAHINI TABLE
Go Beyond Hummus with
100 Recipes for Every Meal
by Amy Zitelman
Andrew Schloss,
Jillian Guyette (Photographer)
Forewords by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook
November 10, 2020
Agate Surrey

Most people who know about tahini understand the sesame paste as simply one of the building blocks of hummus. But for Amy Zitelman, CEO and cofounder of woman-owned Soom Foods—the leading purveyor of tahini and tahini products in the American market—the culinary potential of tahini goes far beyond hummus. In The Tahini Table: Go Beyond Hummus with 100 Recipes for Every Meal, tahini is introduced to home cooks as a new pantry staple that can be used in recipes from dips to desserts.

Tahini, made from pressed roasted sesame seeds, is a healthy, vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free, and low-sugar superfood rich in Omega fatty acids, protein, and calcium. Although tahini’s historical roots are in the Middle East, Zitelman aims to stretch the culinary borders of tahini outside of traditional Middle-Eastern fare. The Tahini Table contains 100 recipes that showcase tahini’s wide range of uses. This “cult condiment” is mild enough to step in as an inspiring replacement for the eggs, cheese, mayo, and cream called for in recipes that American home cooks are making for their families every day. The Tahini Table provides tahini hacks for reimagined American classics, including vegan “queso,” eggless mayonnaise, and gluten-free brownies.

From Vegan Mac and “Cheese” and Tahini Chicken Schnitzel, to Chocolate Halvah French Toast and Tahini Flan, Zitelman writes with the home cook in mind, incorporating tahini into everyday cooking in delicious and unexpected ways. With beautiful color photos, contributions from top restaurant chefs, and easy substitutions for a variety of diets, The Tahini Table proves that tahini is the next must-have pantry staple for home cooks everywhere.

The Wondering Jew:
Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity
by Micah Goodman
Eylon Levy (Translator)
November 10, 2020
Yale University Press

A celebrated Israeli author explores the roots of the divide between religion and secularism in Israel today, and offers a path to bridging the divide

Zionism began as a movement full of contradictions, between a pull to the past and a desire to forge a new future. Israel has become a place of fragmentation, between those who sanctify religious tradition and those who wish to escape its grasp. Now, a new middle ground is emerging between religious and secular Jews who want to engage with their heritage—without being restricted by it or losing it completely.

In this incisive book, acclaimed author Micah Goodman explores Israeli Judaism and the conflict between religion and secularism, one of the major causes of political polarization throughout the world. Revisiting traditional religious sources and seminal works of secularism, he reveals that each contains an openness to learn from the other’s messages. Goodman challenges both orthodoxies, proposing a new approach to bridge the divide between religion and secularism and pave a path toward healing a society torn asunder by extremism.

Fruit Cake:
Recipes for the Curious Baker
by Jason Schreiber
November 10, 2020
Morrow

Jason Schreiber, one of New York City’s most influential and popular food stylists, combines aesthetic flair and flavor in 75 whimsical recipes that celebrate fruit and cake in all their festive and delicious glory.

In gorgeous photos and dozens of fresh and flavorful recipes, acclaimed food stylist Jason Schreiber shatters misconceptions about that most maligned of desserts—fruitcake—by imaginatively breaking with convention as he pays homage to the delicious combination of fruit and cake. Forget those dried artificially dyed candied doorstops that everyone regifts and passes on. Fruit Cake is a tasty epicurean tour through dozens of cakes and other pastries that use a variety of fruits, combining them with diverse fillings, as well as liquor, nuts, and more. Interwoven with the recipes are stories, anecdotes and asides that are just as charming and intriguing as the lush, full-color photos that accompany them.

Each recipe in Fruit Cake showcases one of thirty-eight fruit, whose natural sweetness and juice make desserts that are perfectly moist and sweet without being overpowering. Indulge your taste buds with his beautiful, fanciful creations, including:

Constant Cravings—cakes like Raspberry Tea Cake and Polenta Pound Cake with Spiced Mandarins that will satisfy your cravings at any hour of day
Out of Hand—finger-focused treats perfect for pocketing or dressing to impress, such as Mango Coconut Cashew Bites and Blueberry Ginger Studmuffins
Showstoppers—cakes for the spotlight that you can humblebrag about “just throwing together,” including Passionfruit Lime Pavlova and Horchata and Roasted Plum Sorbet Cake
All Rise—the next best thing to eating sumptuous creations like the Blood Orange Bee Sting Cake or Bourbon Peach Kugelhopf, and other sumptuous creations is smelling the just-risen yeasted dough
Soaked—try one slice of these decadent cakes that marinate in booze for days—whether it’s the likes of the Pomegranate Molasses Cake or the Fig, Port, and Chocolate Cake—and you’ll need a designated driver
Filled with divine desserts for all seasons, this wonderful cookbook will forever change the way you think about fruit and cake.

A Good Bake:
The Art and Science
of Making Perfect Pastries,
Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and
Breads at Home:
A Cookbook
by Melissa Weller
Carolynn Carreno
November 17, 2020
Knopf

From the mind behind Sadelle's in SoHO NY

From the James Beard Award nominee who redefined American baking, a comprehensive baking bible for the twenty-first century, with 120 scientifically grounded recipes for sweet and savory baked goods anyone can master.

Melissa Weller is the baking superstar of our time. As the head baker at some of the best restaurants in the country, her takes on chocolate babka and sticky buns brought these classics back to life and kicked off a nationwide movement. In A Good Bake, Weller shares her meticulously honed, carefully detailed recipes for producing impossibly delicious--and impossibly beautiful--baked goods. A chemical engineer before she became a baker, Weller uses her scientific background to explain the whys and hows of baking, so home cooks can achieve perfect results every time. Here are recipes both sweet (Pumpkin Layer Cake with Salted Caramel Buttercream and Brown Sugar Frosting) and savory (Khachapuri with Cheese, Baked Egg, and Nigella Seeds); beloved classics (Croissants and Chocolate Babka) and new sure-to-be favorites (Milk Chocolate and Raspberry Blondies)--as well as Salted Caramel Sticky Buns, of course . . . all written and tested for even the most novice home baker to re-create.

With gorgeous photographs by the award-winning Johnny Miller, and tutorials that demystify all of the stuff that sounds complicated, like working with yeast, sourdough starters, and laminating dough Weller's book is the one guide every home baker needs.

Red Sands:
Reportage and Recipes through
Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland
by Caroline Eden
November 17, 2020
Quadrille

Red Sands, the follow-up to Caroline Eden's multi-award-winning Black Sea, is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore Central Asia. In a quest to better understand this vast heartland of Asia, Caroline navigates a course from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the sun-ripened orchards of the Fergana Valley.

A book filled with human stories, forgotten histories and tales of adventure, Caroline is a reliable guide using food as her passport to enter lives, cities and landscapes rarely written about. Lit up by emblematic recipes, Red Sands is an utterly unique book, delving into 'the last blank on the map' while bringing in universal themes that relate to us all: hope, hunger, longing, love and the joys of eating well on the road.

See also:

Black Sea:
Dispatches and Recipes,
Through Darkness and Light
by Caroline Eden

This Is Not My Memoir
by André Gregory
with Todd London
May 5, 2020
Postponed until November 17, 2020
FS&G

The autobiography-of-sorts of André Gregory, an iconic figure in American theater and the star of My Dinner with André

Remember My Dinner with Andre? All the wild stories that Andre shared with Wallace Shawn? Well here is his life story

This is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the reader from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India. Along the way we meet Jerzy Grotowski, Helene Weigel, Gregory Peck, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Wallace Shawn, and many other larger-than-life personalities.

The book opens with young Gregory and his globe trotting parents. He makes it to America and is enrolled in St Bernard's prep school. The family says they are escaped aristocratic Russians and not Jews, and the school either believes them or was desperate for tuition from Andre and his brother. Andre discovers the power of theater. The family summers in Westwood, Los Angeles, at a time when it was undeveloped. They rent from Thomas Mann and other Jewish emigres. His mother has a few affairs with celebrities, including Errol Flynn, who back in NYC, his mother has to rouse from his hotel bed where he is passed out with a prostitute. At Harvard he gets a job in a theater working for a stipper.

This is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and Todd London who together create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years. Here, too, are the reflections of a man who rehearses shows for decades, and only recently learned how to love. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value on the process of creating it? And what does it mean to confront the process of aging when your greatest work of art may well be your own life?

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are
essays
by Rachel Bloom
November 17, 2020
Grand Central Publishing

From the charming and wickedly funny co-creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a collection of hilarious personal essays, poems and even amusement park maps on the subjects of insecurity, fame, anxiety, and much more.

Rachel Bloom has felt abnormal and out of place her whole life. In this exploration of what she thinks makes her "different," she's come to realize that a lot of people also feel this way; even people who she otherwise thought were "normal."

In a collection of laugh-out-loud funny essays, all told in the unique voice (sometimes singing voice) that made her a star; Rachel writes about everything from her love of Disney, OCD and depression, weirdness, and Spanx to the story of how she didn't poop in the toilet until she was four years old; Rachel's pieces are hilarious, smart, and infinitely relatable (except for the pooping thing).

No One Asked for This:
Essays
by Cazzie David
November 17, 2020
Mariner

A BEST BOOK OF THE FALL AS SEEN IN: PureWow * Pop Sugar * HelloGiggles

From writer Cazzie David (daughter of comedian/producer Larry David) comes a series of acerbic, darkly funny essays about misanthropy, social media, anxiety, relationships, and growing up in a wildly eccentric family.

For Cazzie David, the world is one big trap door leading to death and despair and social phobia. From shame spirals caused by hookups to panic attacks about being alive and everyone else having to be alive too, David chronicles her life’s most chaotic moments with wit, bleak humor, and a mega-dose of self-awareness.

In No One Asked for This, David provides readers with a singular but ultimately relatable tour through her mind, as she explores existential anxiety, family dynamics, and the utterly modern dilemma of having your breakup displayed on the Internet. With pitch-black humor resonant of her father, comedy legend Larry David, and topics that speak uniquely to generational malaise, No One Asked for This is the perfect companion for when you don’t really want a companion.

Cazzie, 26, told the LA TIMES, that she suffers from anxiety. When she is anxious, she often gets stomachaches, and she has emetophobia. Her other fears include but are not limited to: Showering with the bathroom door locked — she could slip and fall and no one would save her. Showering with the bathroom door unlocked — someone could sneak in and murder her. Her father dying. Getting surgery. Not checking her phone. Flying. Having a wedding. Spending time alone. Leaving the house. Being compared to Olive Oyl. The book is a treatise on both the vagaries of being a young woman in 2020 — talking men into wearing condoms, comparing oneself to Bella Hadid on Instagram, answering a FaceTime call without makeup — and the very specific experience of being a celebrity’s privileged child. She addresses her issues (from stints in mental health facilities to her breakup with comedian Pete Davidson) so honestly, agonizingly and excessively that external criticism would seem cruel — not to mention useless.

U.S. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020

The Way Back
Young Adult / Teen / YA Novel
by Gavriel Savit
November 17, 2020
Knopf
Ages 12 – 15, Grades 7 – 9

A review by the “School Library Journal:” Gr 7 Up - From the moment a girl leaves her cottage to gather strawberries at the far side of the forest, Savit sets a dark fairy tale tone. Readers fast forward to meet Bluma, the teenage granddaughter of the berry collector, and Yehuda Leib, a poor and scrappy village neighbor of Bluma's age. Told from alternating viewpoints, and incorporating language and elements from Jewish folk tradition, Bluma and Yehuda Leib begin separate adventures-eventually crossing paths on the outskirts of their shtetl of Tupik in a cemetery where "the living world wears thin," and both Bluma and Yehuda Leib cross over into the Far Country. Dark messengers, the Master of Whispers, Lilith, and the Sisters of Lileen inhabit this magical realm. Bluma brings with her a magical spoon, dropped by the Dark Messenger when he took her grandmother, which allows her to see events in altered time. Yehuda Leib enters and encounters the Treasure House of Lord Mammon, who eats a tiny man as a snack, and enlists Yehuda Leib's help in a plot for more power. As they unite over chicken soup in an old hut, with a double-edged dagger at hand, Bluma and Yehuda Leib realize that death comes for everyone in its own time, but need not be faced alone. VERDICT An entrancing historical fantasy, thick with elements of magic and folk tales.

COVER SYNOPSIS: Perfect for readers of Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman, a sweeping historical fantasy that follows two teens on a journey through the Far Country, a Jewish land of spirits and demons.

For the Jews of Eastern Europe, demons are everywhere: dancing on the rooftops in the darkness of midnight, congregating in the trees, harrowing the dead, even reaching out to try and steal away the living.

But the demons have a land of their own: a Far Country peopled with the souls of the transient dead, governed by demonic dukes, barons, and earls. When the Angel of Death comes strolling through the little shtetl of Tupik one night, two young people will be sent spinning off on a journey through the Far Country. There they will make pacts with ancient demons, declare war on Death himself, and maybe-- just maybe--find a way to make it back alive.

Drawing inspiration from the Jewish folk tradition, The Way Back is a dark adventure sure to captivate readers of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust.

The Company I Keep:
My Life in Beauty
by Leonard A. Lauder
November 17, 2020
Harper Business

In 1982, in Vance Hall at Wharton/Penn, I was working for Vice Dean Everett Keech and had the good fortune to get invited to a lunch with Mr. Leonard Lauder (I remember it was chicken salad with green grapes) and hear some of his fascinating stories, his active listening, and a story like the one where a box manufacturer ignored his parents' order since they were too small.. but then wanted their business when they were larger, etc. And in 1992, I pitched a pink ribbon fundraising idea to the late Evelyn Lauder. So I have been looking forward to this book this Fall.

In his much-anticipated memoir, The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty, Chairman Emeritus and former CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies Leonard A. Lauder shares the business and life lessons he learned as well as the adventures he had while helping transform the mom-and-pop business his mother founded in 1946 in the family kitchen into the beloved brand and ultimately into the iconic global prestige beauty company it is today.

In its infancy in the 1940s and 50s, the company comprised a handful of products, sold under a single brand in just a few prestigious department stores across the United States. Today, The Estée Lauder Companies constitutes one of the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of prestige skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products. It comprises more than 25 brands, whose products are sold in over 150 countries and territories. This growth and success was led by Leonard A. Lauder, Estée Lauder’s oldest son, who envisioned and effected this expansion during a remarkable 60-year tenure, including leading the company as CEO and Chairman.

In this captivating personal account complete with great stories as only he can tell them, Mr. Lauder, now known as The Estée Lauder Companies’ “Chief Teaching Officer,” reflects on his childhood, growing up during the Great Depression, the vibrant decades of the post-World War II boom, and his work growing the company into the beauty powerhouse it is today. Mr. Lauder pays loving tribute to his mother Estée Lauder, its eponymous founder, and to the employees of the company, both past and present, while sharing inside stories about the company, including tales of cutthroat rivalry with Charles Revson of Revlon and others. The book offers keen insights on honing ambition, leveraging success, learning from mistakes, and growing an international company in an age of economic turbulence, uncertainty, and fierce competition.

Caste
The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
August 4, 2020
Random House

Wilkerson, an award winning former NYT reporter, says that CASTE is the bones and race is the skin. Caste is the underlying infrastructure, race is the metric to determine one's assignment in the CASTE system. CASTE pre-dates RACE.

Speaking of the author and race, Wilkerson was once waiting to interview a harried retailer in Chicago for The New York Times. The retailer disregarded her because he expected a white woman to interview him. The retailer asked to see her business card or an I.D. Card to prove she was a reporter for The NYT (She never told her editors, because it would have been perceived as a barrier)

In the Jim Crow South of the US, black and whites could not use the same bible to swear an oath in a courtroom. It was illegal to for a white person to play chess with a black person. Just like a cast for a broken arm, it hold the structure of bones in place. Castes of ranked categories of where people belong in a system is the structural racism of our world.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. The author's study of Germany's racial laws grew out of the attack in Charlottesville against the Jews. Germany studied how America subjugated Blacks to learn how to handle Jews and could not understand why America's treated Jewish as Whites.

Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

After reading it your can ponder... was there a CASTE in ancient Israel? Namely why about kohanim; leviyim; Israelites, Chalalim (priests born to illegitimate unions), Gerim, Charurim (Former slaves now freed), Mamzerim (children of marriages or sexual unions that are not allowed), Netinim (temple servants/slaves, Gibeonites), Shetugim (those who do not know who their fathers are), and Assufim (orphans, abandoned children, not knowing their parents).

A PROMISED LAND
by the 44th U.S. President Barack Obama
November 17, 2020
Crown
768 Pages
Volume 1

A deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president, 59, who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy

In the highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office.

Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.

A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible.

This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.

Of special interest:
On Inauguration Day 2009, there was intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. AT the podium, the newly sworn in President had instructions that he would have announced had the attack occurred in order to evacuate and clam the crowds.
There was time President Obama out-cursed curse-loving COS Rahm Emanuel, after Netanyahu “spun” that the President had snubbed him during a visit to AIPAC.
The book describes Netanyahu as “smart, canny, tough and a gifted communicator” who is “charming, or at least solicitous” when it is necessary.
The time in 2005 when Obama won a Senate seat and saw Netanyahu in a Chicago airport lounge. Netanyahu lavished praised on Obama for his support of a pro-Israel bill.
Social media and new media demonized Obama to the point where no GOP Senators or Congressmen would work with them for fear of losing their future seats
Michelle Obama adamantly did not want then Senator Obama to run for the White House. But in the end did not stand in his way. But she was never happy with the decision and the toll it took on their family.
While in college, Obama was intrigued by the influence of Jewish philosophers on the civil rights movement. Some of his “most stalwart friends and supporters” came from the Chicago’s Jewish community and that he had admired how Jewish voters “tended to be more progressive” on issues than any other ethnic group.
Obama felt tied to the Jewish community by “a common story of exile and suffering” made him “fiercely protective” of the rights of the Jewish people to have a state of their own, but “impossible to ignore the conditions under which Palestinians in the occupied territories were forced to live.”
During the 2008 campaign, Obama visited the Kotel in Jerusalem and submitted a prayer in the cracks. The prayer was then stolen and printed by an Israeli newspaper. “Get used to it, I told myself. It’s part of the deal,” he noted, now that he was on the world stage
He recalls the times when Netanyahu pulled strings and levers of the American political system to fight back against Obama Administration policies.
Rahm Emanuel's warning that, “You don’t get progress on peace when the American president and the Israeli prime minister come from different political backgrounds.”
How AIPAC dissed Obama was the Israel government – and AIPAC – moved more to the right, and how elected members of Congress and candidates for office avoided criticizing Israel policy so as not to risk “being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic)” and would have to confront a well-funded (AIPAC) opponent in the next election.
The book notes that Obama faced a whisper campaign by AIPAC that portrayed him as being “insufficiently supportive — or even hostile toward — Israel” during his 2008 presidential run. Obama writes, “On Election Day, I’d end up getting more than 70 percent of the Jewish vote, but as far as many AIPAC board members were concerned, I remained suspect, a man of divided loyalties; someone whose support for Israel, as one of Axelrod’s friends colorfully put it, wasn’t ‘felt in his kishkes’”
Obama shares the comment of Ben Rhodes, who said some Jews did not support Obama due to policy positions but because they perceived him as “a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan and went to Jeremia Wright’s church.”
Obama writes that he thought it was “reasonable” to ask for Israel, which he viewed as the “stronger party,” to take a “bigger first step” and freeze settlements in the West Bank. But Netanyahu’s response was “sharply negative” and Israel commenced an aggressive pressure campaign in Washington against Obama's policies. Obama writes, “The White House phones started ringing off the hook,” as his national security team fielded calls from lawmakers, Jewish leaders and reporters “wondering why we were picking on Israel.” He adds that one time Ben Rhodes arrived late to a meeting after a “highly agitated” liberal Democratic congressman had harangued him about the attempt to stop Israel's settlement activity. Obama writes that Netanyahu had “orchestrated” efforts to put his administration on the defensive and that there would be a domestic political cost from Jewish and other voters if Obama had a policy difference with Netanyahu.

Paper Bullets:
Two Artists Who Risked Their
Lives to Defy the Nazis
by Jeffrey H. Jackson
November 10, 2020
ALONGONQUIN

Paper Bullets is the first book to tell the history of an audacious anti-Nazi campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute “paper bullets”—wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home on the British Channel Island of Jersey. Devising their own PSYOPS campaign, they slipped their notes into soldier’s pockets or tucked them inside newsstand magazines.

Hunted by the secret field police, Lucy and Suzanne were finally betrayed in 1944, when the Germans imprisoned them, and tried them in a court martial, sentencing them to death for their actions. Ultimately they survived, but even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners and spreading a message of hope.

Better remembered today by their artist names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the couple’s actions were even more courageous because of who they were: lesbian partners known for cross-dressing and creating the kind of gender-bending work that the Nazis would come to call “degenerate art.” In addition, Lucy was half Jewish, and they had communist affiliations in Paris, where they attended political rallies with Surrealists and socialized with artists like Gertrude Stein.

Paper Bullets is a compelling World War II story that has not been told before, about the galvanizing power of art, and of resistance.

My Gaza:
A City in Photographs
by Jehad al Saftawi (Photographer)
November 17, 2020
McSweeney's

Saftawi currently resides in the USA where he is seeking asylum since 2016 from Gaza. His work has appeared in Aljazeera, Huffpost, and other platforms.

My Gaza offers photos of contemporary Gaza. Photographer Jehad al-Saftawi documents his life there up until his escape, in 2016.

His “eye” is drawn to moments of humanity and tenderness that redefine this place beyond propaganda, beyond prevailing narratives. Through vivid images and captions-a gun to the head, an interrogation, a family in strife-al-Saftawi exposes a situation that cannot withstand further escalation. My Gaza presents photos of present-day Gaza by a Gazan journalist.

Om The NY Rev of Books, he wrote, “My name is Jehad al-Saftawi. I am a photographer and journalist. For years, I clung to the idea of fleeing my country for the Western world. There is no free press in Gaza. Most of the news channels cater to political parties that use violence to silence opposition. I come from a place overflowing with weapons, where my father could easily buy a pistol and shoot it into the air while cruising the streets of our city. A place where, on any night, you could be awoken by a bomb exploding in your neighbor’s home, stored there by a member of their family who belonged to an armed faction. Working as a journalist in Gaza is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step. Each neighborhood comprises its own intimate social network, and traveling through them with a camera makes you a significant cause for suspicion. You’re caught between the two sides of the conflict: the rulers of Gaza limit what you can photograph and write about, imprisoning and torturing those who disobey; at the same time, the Israeli army sees you as a potential threat that must be eliminated, as has been the fate of many Palestinian journalists. Standing behind the camera, my hands shook as I documented the suffering. I am the second son of five children. Our father, Imad al-Saftawi, grew up in an ultraconservative middle-class family that was heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. As an adult, he spent many years participating in armed struggles, both within and outside the framework of Palestinian armed organizations, which he believed to be justifiable resistance to the Israeli occupation. As a member of one of the leading armed factions in Gaza, Islamic Jihad, he killed innocent Israelis. I condemn these actions, though many in Gaza consider my father a hero, one who carried out valiant operations for the sake of his country and religion. In the late 1990s, when I was a young child, our father’s day job was with the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs, which meant, in practical terms, he worked in the management of mosques. On top of his professional duties, he acted as the khateeb (orator) on Fridays in various mosques around the Gaza Strip, where he would lecture about religion. My mother was a housewife, overseeing our education and raising us according to our father’s methods and rules. In 2000, when I was nine, our father was arrested by the Israeli army at the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. He remained in prison for the next eighteen years. His influence over our family did not relent: from prison, he frequently telephoned our house and enforced religious and social strictures upon us, his children, threatening us in the event of noncompliance. Hadith (the Prophet’s quotes) lined our walls. Islamic books filled the shelves, along with animal statues my father had broken the heads off of in accordance with the Islamic rule prohibiting the portrayal and embodiment of spirits.... Set free in December of 2018, Imad al-Saftawi has served as a brigadier general in Hamas’s Ministry of the Interior.... By then, however, I had succeeded in escaping. In 2016, when I was twenty-five, I managed to leave the Gaza Strip for New York, and, soon after, I began the process of seeking asylum in Berkeley, California. I’m now seven thousand miles away from him, from Gaza, and I walk as a free man.... The time I spent, and the conversations I had, with the subjects of my photographs are, for me, a lifetime burden and responsibility. Through my lens, and the events that I’ve witnessed, I have tried to show the human reality for people who were born into a situation with no option but to live it, people who have been all but abandoned and left to face alone the ramifications of others’ decisions and actions amid the intolerable deterioration of living conditions in Gaza. But I have tried also to show the glimpses of joy and hope as an alternative to the wretched paradigm of justice the political elite claims to be fighting for.

Jewish Bible Translations:
Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress
by Leonard Greenspoon
November 1, 2020
JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY

Jewish Bible Translations is the first book to examine Jewish Bible translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation.

Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, Leonard Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages: Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. He profiles many Jewish translators, among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto, Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon, framing their aspirations within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked.

Greenspoon differentiates their principles, styles, and techniques—for example, their choice to emphasize either literal reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular language—and their underlying rationales. As he highlights distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits. Additionally, Greenspoon shows how profoundly Jewish translators and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James Bible.

Accessible and authoritative for all from beginners to scholars, Jewish Bible Translations enables readers to make their own informed evaluations of individual translations and to holistically assess Bible translation within Judaism.

Cain v. Abel:
A Jewish Courtroom Drama
by Rabbi Dan Ornstein
2020
JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY

Enter the packed courtroom and take your seat as a juror on the Cain v. Abel trial. Soon, the prosecution and defense attorneys (angels from Jewish legend) will call Cain, Abel, Sin, Adam, Eve, and God to the witness stand to present their perspectives on the world’s first murder. Great Jewish commentators throughout the ages will also offer contradictory testimony on Cain’s emotional, societal, and spiritual influences. As jurors, when we mete out Cain’s punishment, must we factor in his family history, psychological makeup, and the human impulse to sin?

In this highly eclectic and gripping compilation of insights by Jewish commentators on the Cain and Abel story, courtroom scenes are juxtaposed with the author’s commentary, advancing novel insights and introspection. As each of us grapples with Cain’s actions, we confront our own darkest traits.

If Cain is a symbol for all humanity, what can we do to avoid becoming like him? Furthering this conversation, Rabbi Dan Ornstein includes a discussion and activity guide to promote open dialogue about human brokenness and healing, personal impulses, and societal responsibility.

Ani Maamin:
Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth,
and the Thirteen Principles of Faith
by Joshua Berman
2020
MAGGID

For two centuries the academic study of the Bible has confronted the believing Jew with the most challenging of questions: Are the accounts of the Tanakh historically accurate? Was there an Exodus? Why does the Torah provide multiple versions of its law and its stories? What are the warrants for believing the Torah is a divine text? Can a Jew seeking intellectual honesty maintain fidelity to the Thirteen Principles of Faith? The credentials Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman brings to address these issues are unparalleled. An internationally acclaimed speaker, writer and educator, Rabbi Berman is also a professor of Tanakh at Bar-Ilan University and the author of two books published by Oxford University Press on the five books of the Torah.

This landmark work is the first full-length treatment of these charged issues by an Orthodox thinker, offering the believing Jew an academically and traditionally based approach of spiritual and intellectual integrity.

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The Star and the Scepter:
A Diplomatic History of Israel
by Emmanuel Navon
November 1, 2020
JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY

The first all-encompassing book on Israel’s foreign policy and the diplomatic history of the Jewish people, The Star and the Scepter retraces and explains the interactions of Jews with other nations from the ancient kingdoms of Israel to modernity.

Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Navon argues that one cannot grasp Israel’s interactions with the world without understanding how Judaism’s founding document has shaped the Jewish psyche. He sheds light on the people of Israel’s foreign policy through the ages: the ancient kingdoms of Israel, Jewish diasporas in Europe from the Middle Ages to the emancipation, the emerging nineteenth-century Zionist movement, and Zionist diplomacy following World War I and surrounding World War II.

Navon elucidates Israel’s foreign policy from the birth of the state in 1948 to our days: the dilemmas and choices at the beginning of the Cold War; Israel’s attempts to establish periphery alliances; the Arab-Israeli conflict; Israel’s relations with Europe, the United States, Russia, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the United Nations, and the Jewish diasporas; and how twenty-first-century energy geopolitics is transforming Israel’s foreign relations today.

Navon’s analysis is rooted in two central ideas, represented by the Star of David (faith) and the scepter (political power). First, he contends that the interactions of Jews with the world have always been best served by combining faith with pragmatism. Second, Navon shows how the state of Israel owes its diplomatic achievements to national assertiveness and hard power—not only military strength but economic prowess and technological innovation. Demonstrating that diplomacy is a balancing act between ideals and realpolitik, The Star and the Scepter draws aspirational and pragmatic lessons from Israel’s exceptional diplomatic history.

THE ORCHARD
A NOVEL
BY DAVID HOPEN
November 17, 2020
ECCO

A novel written by a Yale Law student (Yale grad, Oxford masters.. shep some nachas...) from opulent South Florida

A coming-of-age story about a devout Jewish high school student whose plunge into the secularized world threatens everything he knows of himself.
Ari (Aryeh) Eden’s life has always been governed by strict rules. In ultra-Orthodox Borough Park Brooklyn, his days are dedicated to intense study and religious rituals, and adolescence feels profoundly lonely. So when his family announces that they are moving to a glitzy Miami suburb, Ari, 17, seizes his unexpected chance for TEENAGE REINVENTION.

Enrolling in an affluent Jewish yeshiva high school, Kol Neshama Academy, with his whole soul... Ari is stunned by his peers’ dizzying wealth, ambition, and shameless hedonistic pursuit of life’s pleasures.

When the academy’s golden boy, Noah, takes Ari under his wing, Ari (renamed Andrew by his new buds) finds himself entangled in the school’s most exclusive and wayward group. These friends are magnetic and defiant — especially Evan, the charismatic but brooding genius of the bunch, still living in the shadow of his mother’s death. Evan has a hold over Sophia, Aryeh / Andrew's obsessive love interest.

Influenced by their charismatic rabbi, the group begins testing their religion in unconventional ways. LSD for visions of the Lord. Speedboat races to test their courage. Soon Ari and his friends are pushing moral boundaries and careening toward a perilous future — one in which the traditions of their faith are re-purposed to mysterious,... TRAGIC ends.

Mesmerizing (or overwrought, depending on your reading desires) and playful, heartrending and darkly romantic, philosophical and Jewish, The Orchard probes the conflicting forces that determine who we become: the heady relationships of youth, the allure of greatness, the doctrines we inherit, and our concealed desires.

These Violent Delights
a novel
by Chloe Gong
November 17, 2020

Perfect for fans of The Last Magician and Descendant of the Crane, this heart-stopping debut is an imaginative Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, with rival gangs and a monster in the depths of the Huangpu River.

The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery.

A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love…and first betrayal.

But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.

ECO BIBLE
VOLUME 1
An Ecological Commentary on Genesis and Exodus
Rabbi Yonatan Neril and Rabbi Leo Dee.
The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development
November 17, 2020

PW: In this insightful analysis, Rabbis Neril and Dee explore what the first two books of the Hebrew Bible say about “living in balance with God’s creation, through a lifestyle that is not only aware of but protects the natural world.” They combine their own insights with those of more than 100 rabbis and Jewish thinkers from a variety of time periods, such as Maimonides, Arthur Waskow, Jonathan Sacks, and Shlomo Riskin, to provide glosses on obvious passages, such as how Genesis 2:15 (“The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it”) illustrates humanity’s role as both the master and servant of nature. But they also find relevance in less-intuitive verses, such as Exodus 9:31–32, which they use to make the case for crop diversification. While some of the commentaries are superficial, such as a section on overpopulation in Exodus 1:7–9, for the most part the authors cite and analyze passages that will inspire contemplation on how to live in harmony with nature and the power of conservation.

This ‘earth Bible’ is an illuminating read for anyone interested in Jewish and Christian social issues, and an important contribution to eco theology and the spiritual ecology movement. Volume 1 explores Genesis and Exodus; Volume 2 (2021) explores Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Together they cover 450 verses in the Five Books of Moses / Pentateuch / Old Testament. By linking faith and science, the book connects religion with contemporary scientific thought regarding human health, biodiversity, and clean air, land, and water.

Dr. Bill Brown, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, calls Eco Bible “a rich repository of insights…for people of faith to move forward with wisdom, inspiration, and hope, all for the sake of God’s good creation.”

Eco Bible reveals what Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet calls “the ever-increasing number of fresh understandings of the Bible’s verses," while quoting over 100 rabbis from Biblical times to the present. Until now, their ecological insights on the Bible could only be found scattered across hundreds of books.

Applying Biblical ethics to stewardship, conservation, and creation care is not just an idea for today, but is essential for a future where we live in balance and thrive on a planet that remains viable for all life. At a time of both ecological and spiritual crisis, an ecological reading of the Bible can have profound impact on human behavior, since billions of people worldwide consider it a holy book.

This green Bible commentary affirms a spiritually grounded vision for long-term sustainability and immediate environmental mindfulness and action, including many suggested action items. Eco Bible uniquely explores the Bible’s deep inspiration for fulfilling the blessing of all life, changing course to preserve God’s creation, and sustaining human life in harmony with nature and all God’s creatures. Rabbis Yonatan Neril and Leo Dee are co-editors and lead contributors."

No Time Like the Future:
An Optimist Considers Mortality
by Michael J. Fox
November 17, 2020
Flatiron

Although not Jewish, Fox is Jewish adjacent. Coronavirus, pandemic, and quarantines have forced many to face mortality and life goals. Fox's book helps readers add a new perspective

A moving account of resilience, hope, fear and mortality, and how these things resonate in our lives, by actor and advocate Michael J. Fox.

The entire world knows Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the teenage sidekick of Doc Brown in Back to the Future; as Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties; as Mike Flaherty in Spin City; and through numerous other movie roles and guest appearances on shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Diagnosed at age 29, Michael is equally engaged in Parkinson’s advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the world’s leading non-profit funder of PD science. His two previous bestselling memoirs, Lucky Man and Always Looking Up, dealt with how he came to terms with the illness, all the while exhibiting his iconic optimism. His new memoir reassesses this outlook, as events in the past decade presented additional challenges.

In No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality, Michael shares personal stories and observations about illness and health, aging, the strength of family and friends, and how our perceptions about time affect the way we approach mortality. Thoughtful and moving, but with Fox’s trademark sense of humor, his book provides a vehicle for reflection about our lives, our loves, and our losses.

Running through the narrative is the drama of the medical madness Fox recently experienced, that included his daily negotiations with the Parkinson’s disease he’s had since 1991, and a spinal cord issue that necessitated immediate surgery. His challenge to learn how to walk again, only to suffer a devastating fall, nearly caused him to ditch his trademark optimism and “get out of the lemonade business altogether.”

The Freezer Door
by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
November 24, 2020

A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces – in the opinion of the author – are bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity.

When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right?
When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music.
Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be. —The Freezer Door

Note: The Seattle Freeze is the idea, true or false, that it is difficult for newcomers to make friends in Seattle.
The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life.

The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity. It is told in a mix of prose and poetry, She takes the reader through her daily life experiences visiting Capitol Hill (Seattle) landmarks from Volunteer Park to the Broadway Market, reflecting on queerness, embodiment, trauma, loss, desire, belonging and gentrification. She seeks out places where people let down their guard and do not reject otherness. She hangs at the Pony gay bar, a place not welcoming of her radical queer, anti capitalist, anti-consumerist values or those on the transfeminine spectrum. She goes to places she assumes are corrupt, looking for the kernel that is not corrupt.

The author grew up in a Jewish family in the Washington DC are (Potomac) and attended Brown University in Providence RI briefly nearly 3 decades ago, b4 heading West, where she now resides. Sycamore is genderqueer and uses she/her pronouns. She has described herself as, "A genderqueer, faggot, and a queen, on the trans continuum, in a gender bending, gender blur kind of place. But the words I relate to the most are probably 'faggot' and 'queen.' 'Queer' would be more of a broader political identity." She is the author of Sketchtasy (Arsenal Pulp Press 2018); The End of San Francisco (City Lights 2013, memoir); Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press 2012); So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008); and Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts 2003). She is the editor of four additional nonfiction anthologies, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007), That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2004; 2008), Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Haworth 2004; Routledge), and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write about Their Clients (Haworth 2000; Routledge)

DECEMBER 2020 BOOKS
Hanukkah 2020 is the evening of December 10 – 18, 2020

DIJ - Do It Jewish:
Use Your Jewish Creativity!
by Barbara Bietz
Daria Grinevich (Illustrator)
December 1, 2020
Intergalactic Afikomen

It’s like a Jewish creativity mentor in a book!
Learn from Jewish creativity mentors & use your own Jewish creativity in areas ranging from Jewish cooking to Jewish filmmaking.

Germania:
A Novel of Nazi Berlin
by Harald Gilbers
December 1, 2020
St. Martin's Press
Mystery / Thriller
Highly anticipated

From international bestselling author Harald Gilbers comes the heart-pounding story of Jewish detective Richard Oppenheimer as he hunts for a serial killer through war-torn Nazi Berlin in Germania.

Berlin 1944: a serial killer stalks the bombed-out capital of the Reich, preying on women and laying their mutilated bodies in front of war memorials. All of the victims are linked to the Nazi party. But according to one eyewitness account, the perpetrator is not an opponent of Hitler's regime, but rather a loyal Nazi.

Jewish detective Richard Oppenheimer, once a successful investigator for the Berlin police, is reactivated by the Gestapo and forced onto the case. Oppenheimer is not just concerned with catching the killer and helping others survive, but also his own survival. Worst of all, solving this case is what will certainly put him in the most jeopardy. With no other choice but to futher his investigation, he feverishly searches for answers, and a way out of this dangerous game.

My Little Golden Book About
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
by Shana Corey
Margeaux Lucas (Illustrator)
December 1, 2020
2 – 5 years old

A Little Golden Book biography about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, written for preschoolers.

This Little Golden Book is a compelling introduction to an inspiring woman, written for the youngest readers. From a young age, Ruth Bader Ginsburg knew that she wanted to fight for girls and women to have equal rights. She studied and worked very hard and became just the second woman--and the first Jewish woman--to be a United States Supreme Court Justice. This is a terrific read for future trailblazers and their parents!

Fodor's Essential Israel
(Full-color Travel Guide)
by Fodor's Travel Guides
June 23, 2020
postponed to DECEMBER 2020
Fodor's Books

Whether you want to visit Jerusalem’s Old City, float in the Dead Sea, or party in Tel Aviv, the local Fodor’s travel experts in Israel are here to help! Fodor’s Essential Israel is part of the award-winning Fodor’s Essential series recognized by Booklist as the “Best Travel Guide in 2019.” guidebook is packed with maps, carefully curated recommendations, and everything else you need to simplify your trip-planning process and make the most of your time.

This new edition has been fully-redesigned with an easy-to-read layout, fresh information, and beautiful color photos.

Fodor’s Essential Israel includes: AN ILLUSTRATED ULTIMATE EXPERIENCES GUIDE to the top things to see and do MULTIPLE ITINERARIES to effectively organize your days and maximize your time MORE THAN 40 DETAILED MAPS to help you navigate confidently COLOR PHOTOS throughout to spark your wanderlust!
UP-TO-DATE and HONEST RECOMMENDATIONS for the best sights, restaurants, hotels, nightlife, shopping, performing arts, activities, side-trips, and more PHOTO-FILLED “BEST OF” FEATURES on “Most Sacred Sites,” “Best Museums,” and “Israel’s Natural Wonders”
TRIP-PLANNING TOOLS AND PRACTICAL TIPS including when to go, getting around, beating the crowds, and saving time and money
SPECIAL FEATURES on “Israel Through the Ages,” “Jerusalem: Keeping the Faith,” “The Dead Sea, A Natural Wonder,” “Masada: Desert Fortress,” “The Wines of Israel,” and “Jesus in the Galilee”
HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL INSIGHTS providing rich context on the local people, politics, art, architecture, cuisine, geography and more
LOCAL WRITERS to help you find the under-the-radar gems
HEBREW AND PALESTINIAN ARABIC LANGUAGE PRIMERS with useful words and essential phrases
COVERS: Jerusalem, Jaffa, Bethlehem, Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea, Masada, Haifa, Nazareth, Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee, the Golan Heights, Eilat, the Negev, Beersheva, Petra, and more

*Important note for digital editions: The digital edition of this guide does not contain all the images or text included in the physical edition.

Putin's People:
How the KGB Took Back Russia
and Then Took On the West
by Catherine Belton
June 23, 2020
FS&G

Interference in American elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about, and who has orchestrated it?

In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche-a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.

Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach-and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match-Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.

AN ANGEL CALLED TRUTH
AND OTHER TALES
FROM THE TORAH
BY RABBI JEREMY GORDON
(New London Synagogue, Abbey Road)
AND EMMA PARLONS
DECEMBER 10, 2020
BEN YEHUDA PRESS
Ages 10-13

A collection of micro-tales. There is a tale for each of the portions of the Torah, as read in Jewish communities around the world. And one for each of the Jewish Festivals as well. These tales are funny, engaging and largely told from the perspective of the 10-13 year olds who are our audience. We've told stories from the perspective of young-people who feature in the Biblical narrative, young-people who feature in classic Rabbinic commentary on our Biblical narratives and young-people we've just made up.

JANUARY 2021 BOOKS

Belonging:
The Key to Transforming
and Maintaining Diversity,
Inclusion and Equality at Work
by Sue Unerman,
Kathryn Jacob, Mark Edwards
January 19, 2021
Bloomsbury

A groundbreaking investigation into diversity and equality in the workplace, arguing that both men and women need to be active participants to promote meaningful progress.

There's never been more discussion and activity around diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Every week, ever more high-profile statistics, stories and initiatives are swirling around: from gender and ethnicity pay gap differentials to #MeToo fallout, and from the focus on more diverse company boards to the prevalence of company-wide unconscious bias training, it seems that every company and organization has finally grasped that change needs to happen.

Following interviews at over 200 businesses about the irrefutable business case for diversity at work, Sue Unerman, Kathryn Jacob and Mark Edwards have discovered one major problem that is holding back the move towards greater diversity: where are all the men?

The book sets out to understand why more men aren't engaged with D&I initiatives in organizations--at one extreme they may be feeling actively hostile, and threatened by the changing cultural landscape. Others may be unmotivated to change: they may see diversity as a good thing in the abstract but can't see what's in it for them. Many will be open-minded and supportive, while still feeling unsure about what to do.

Belonging will speak to both men and women, because:

- Men need to understand how they can benefit from more diverse cultures and how they can become champions of new ways of working; and
- Women need to have an awareness of where men are right now, and identify the most effective ways of bringing them on board to ensure that diversity initiatives do not fall at the first hurdle.

SARGEANT SALINGER
BY JEROME CHARYN
January 5, 2021
Bellevue

a reimagning

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war-from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.

After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.

Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin. He lives in New York.

Exercised:
Why Something We Never Evolved
to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding
by Daniel Lieberman
(Harvard)
January 5, 2021
Pantheon

If exercise is healthy (so good for you!), why do many people dislike or avoid it? If we are born to walk and run, why do most of us take it easy whenever possible? And how do we make sense of the conflicting, anxiety-inducing information about rest, physical activity, and exercise with which we are bombarded? Is sitting really the new smoking? Can you lose weight by walking?

Does running ruin your knees? Should we do weights, cardio, or high-intensity training? In this myth-busting book, Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a pioneering researcher on the evolution of human physical activity, tells the story of how we never evolved to exercise—to do voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. Using his own research and experiences throughout the world, Lieberman recounts without jargon how and why humans evolved to walk, run, dig, and do other necessary and rewarding physical activities while avoiding needless exertion. His engaging stories and explanations will revolutionize the way you think about exercising—not to mention sitting, sleeping, sprinting, weight lifting, playing, fighting, walking, jogging, and even dancing.

Exercised is entertaining and enlightening but also constructive. As our increasingly sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases such as diabetes, Lieberman audaciously argues that to become more active we need to do more than medicalize and commodify exercise. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, Lieberman suggests how we can make exercise more enjoyable, rather than shaming and blaming people for avoiding it. He also tackles the question of whether you can exercise too much, even as he explains why exercise can reduce our vulnerability to the diseases mostly likely to make us sick and kill us.

Founding God’s Nation:
Reading Exodus
by Leon R Kass
(Chicago)
January 5, 2021
Yale University Press

In this long-awaited follow-up to his 2003 book on Genesis, humanist scholar Leon Kass explores how Exodus raises and then answers the central political questions of what defines a nation and how a nation should govern itself. Considered by some the most important book in the Hebrew Bible, Exodus tells the story of the Jewish people from their enslavement in Egypt, through their liberation under Moses’s leadership, to the covenantal founding at Sinai and the building of the Tabernacle. In Kass’s analysis, these events began the slow process of learning how to stop thinking like slaves and become an independent people. The Israelites ultimately founded their nation on three elements: a shared narrative that instills empathy for the poor and the suffering, the uplifting rule of a moral law, and devotion to a higher common purpose. These elements, Kass argues, remain the essential principles for any freedom-loving nation today.

The Light of the Eyes:
Homilies on the Torah
by Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl
Rabbi Arthur Green (Translator)
(Hebrew College, Boston)
January 19, 2021
Stanford University Press

What do American Jews know of Hasidism? They know about Chabad, Satmar, and other current forms of the movement. But Rabbi Green helps us to recover the writings of an early Hasidic master

Hasidism is an influential spiritual revival movement within Judaism that began in the eighteenth century and continues to thrive today. One of the great classics of early Hasidism, The Light of the Eyes is a collection of homilies on the Torah, reading the entire Five Books of Moses as a guide to spiritual awareness and cultivation of the inner life.

This is the first English translation of any major work from Hasidism's earliest and most creative period. Arthur Green's introduction and annotations survey the history of Hasidism and outline the essential religious and moral teachings of this mystical movement. The Light of the Eyes, by Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, offers insights that remain as fresh and relevant for the contemporary reader as they were when first published in 1798.

You can take a course on the work, pre publication starting October 19, 2020 via zoom at Hebrew College. In an interview with JTA, Rabbi Green responded that, “...I love the Me’or Aynayim. It’s a different face of Hasidism than people see today. People who look at Hasidism today experience three kinds of Hasidism. There’s Chabad, which is very much worldly, messianically oriented. Do more mitzvahs and that will bring the redemption closer. There’s Breslov, which is also redemption-centered — have faith in me, have faith in Rebbe Nachman and he will save you. And then there’s Satmar, which is Hasidism as traditionalism. Do it exactly the same way as they did it in the 18th century. The kind of Hasidism of [the founder of the Hasidic movement] the Baal Shem Tov, which is loving and gentle and forgiving and world-embracing, that kind of Hasidism has somehow gotten lost. And the Me’or Aynayim is one of its best spokesmen. So I want to use the Me’or Aynayim in some ways to bring that gentle kind of Hasidism back into the world. You can serve God in everything you do, you find sparks of holiness everywhere, all of life is about seeking out divinity wherever you find it and raising it up and making it one again. The Me’or Aynayim is not an ascetic. He’s a very earthy guy and really believed that holiness was to be found everywhere. And if you punish yourself, you were denying God because God is in everything — all your thoughts and all your deeds. Within the 18th-century Jewish context, he was a kind of free-spirited person, which isn’t to say that he was careless about the law at all. But it was a love of life and a love of normal earthy human beings that motivated him, and in trying to find a spirituality that would work for such people... Hasidism went through very big changes. It began as a movement of radical innovation. And remember the Hasidim were condemned by the great rabbis in the 18th century. They were persecuted. But by the turn of the 19th century, the rabbis and the Hasidim both looked around and they saw a much more dangerous enemy on the horizon: modernity or haskalah [Jewish enlightenment]. And the rabbis and the Hasidim made peace with one another to fight this common enemy called the modern world.... the Baal Shem Tov and the Me’or Aynayim... wanted an intense spiritual life. At the same time, they wanted to raise families and therefore have to support those families and live in this world. And so it’s a very worldly kind of spirituality for people who want both. And since I’m one of those people, I have fallen in love with it, as you can tell. And this is about sharing that love.

Making Great Strategy:
Arguing for Organizational Advantage
by Glenn R. Carroll, Jesper B. Sørensen
(Stanford Business School
JANUARY 26, 2021
Columbia Business School Press

Making strategy requires undertaking major-often irreversible-decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. All leaders must formulate a clear course of action, yet many lack confidence in their ability to think systematically about their strategy. They struggle to apply the abstract lessons offered by conventional approaches to strategic analysis to their unique contexts.

Making Great Strategy resolves these challenges with a straightforward, readily applicable framework. Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll show that one factor underlies all sustainably successful strategies: a logically coherent argument that connects resources, capabilities, and environmental conditions to desired outcomes. They introduce a system for formulating and managing strategy through a set of three core activities: visualization, formalization and logic, and constructive argumentation. These activities can be implemented in any organization and are illustrated through examples and case studies from well-known companies such as Apple, Walmart, and The Economist.

This book shows that while great strategic thinking is hard, it is not a mystery. Widely applicable and relevant for managers and leaders at all levels, especially executive teams charged with setting the course of their organizations, it is essential reading for anyone faced with practical problems of strategic management.

The Passover Guest
by Susan Kusel
Sean Rubin (Illustrator)
January 19, 2021
Neal Porter Books

Muriel assumes her family is too poor to hold a Passover Seder this year, but an act of kindness and a mysterious magician change everything.

It's the Spring of 1933 in Washington D.C., and the Great Depression is hitting young Muriel's family hard. Her father has lost his job, and her family barely has enough food most days, let alone for a Passover Seder. They don't even have any wine to leave out for the prophet Elijah's ceremonial cup.

With no feast to rush home to, Muriel wanders by the Lincoln Memorial, where she encounters a mysterious magician in whose hands juggled eggs become lit candles. After she makes a kind gesture, he encourages her to run home for her Seder, and when she does, she encounters a holiday miracle, a bountiful feast of brisket, soup, and matzah. But who was this mysterious benefactor? When Muriel sees Elijah's ceremonial cup is empty, she has a good idea.

This fresh retelling of the classic I.L. Peretz story, best known through Uri Shulevitz's 1973 adaptation The Magician, has been sumptuously illustrated by noted graphic novelist Sean Rubin, who based his art on photographs of D.C. in the 1930s. An author note with information about the holiday is included. Susan Kusel is a synagogue librarian and children's book buyer for an independent bookstore. She has served as a member of the Caldecott Medal selection committee and the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. The Passover Guest is Kusel's first picture book. She lives in Arlington, VA.

PEE WEES
CONFESSIONS OF HOCKEY PARENTS
BY RICH COHEN
January 12, 2021
FS&G

A New York Times bestselling author takes a rollicking deep dive into the ultra-competitive world of youth hockey

Rich Cohen, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse and Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, turns his attention to matters closer to home: his son’s elite Pee Wee hockey team and himself, a former player and a devoted hockey parent.

In Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent, Cohen takes us through a season of hard-fought competition in Fairfield County, Connecticut, an affluent suburb of New York City. Part memoir and part exploration of youth sports and the exploding popularity of American hockey, Pee Wees follows the ups and downs of the Ridgefield Bears, the twelve-year-old boys and girls on the team, and the parents watching, cheering, conniving, and cursing in the stands. It is a book about the love of the game, the love of parents for their children, and the triumphs and struggles of both.

War of Shadows:
Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret
Struggle to Drive the Nazis
from the Middle East
by Gershom Gorenberg
January 19, 2021
PublicAffairs

Rommel's army is a day from Cairo, a week from Tel Aviv. The SS is ready for action. Espionage brought the Nazis this far. Espionage can stop them - if Washington wakes up to the danger.

As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets.

Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began.

War of Shadows is the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.

Keeping Secrets:
A Novel
by Bina Bernard
January 19, 2021
Arcade

For fans of All the Light You Cannot See and The German Girl, Keeping Secrets is a remarkable debut, by a veteran American magazine journalist exploring her own family's flight from Poland.

Hannah Stone, now a successful New York City journalist, was smuggled out of Poland as a child with her parents after surviving the Holocaust. They remade themselves in America, harboring the deep scars of stories never told. Now in her thirties, Hannah learns a family secret that sends her back to where she came from, on the investigative journey of her life.

Replayed in cinematic flashbacks, of the family’s immigrant experience and war years on the run, alternating with the contemporary family drama in the U.S. and Communist Poland, Keeping Secrets hinges on the mystery of a sister who was left behind.

In this sweeping, suspenseful debut, Keeping Secrets reveals the agonizing choices World War II thrust upon so many, examining the enormous price of guilt and the very heart of identity.

Being Ram Dass
by Ram Dass
Rameshwar Das
Anne Lamott (Introduction)
January 12, 2021
Sounds True Press

Perhaps no other teacher has sparked the fires of as many spiritual seekers in the West as Ram Dass. While many know of his transformation from Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert to psychedelic and spiritual icon, Ram Dass tells here for the first time the full arc of his remarkable life.

Being Ram Dass begins at the moment he was fired from Harvard for giving drugs to an undergraduate. We then circle back to his privileged youth, education, and the path that led him inexorably away from conventional life and ultimately to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. Populated by a cast of luminaries ranging from Timothy Leary to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kornfield, Aldous Huxley to Charles Mingus-this intimate memoir chronicles Ram Dass's experience of the cultural and spiritual transformations that resonate with us to this day.

Ram Dass's life and work prefigured many current trends: the conscious aging and death movement, the healing potential of psychedelics, the use of meditation and yoga in prisons, the ubiquity of those same practices in the wider culture, and more. Here, with his characteristic mix of earthiness and transcendence, Ram Dass finally tells all.

The Ex Talk
A Novel
by Rachel Lynn Solomon
January 26, 2021
Berkley

Public radio co-hosts navigate mixed signals in Rachel Lynn Solomon's sparkling romantic comedy debut.

Shay Goldstein has been a producer at her Seattle public radio station for nearly a decade, and she can't imagine working anywhere else. But lately it's been a constant clash between her and her newest colleague, Dominic Yun, who's fresh off a journalism master's program and convinced he knows everything about public radio.

When the struggling station needs a new concept, Shay proposes a show that her boss green-lights with excitement. On The Ex Talk, two exes will deliver relationship advice live, on air. Their boss decides Shay and Dominic are the perfect co-hosts, given how much they already despise each other. Neither loves the idea of lying to listeners, but it's this or unemployment. Their audience gets invested fast, and it's not long before The Ex Talk becomes a must-listen in Seattle and climbs podcast charts.

As the show gets bigger, so does their deception, especially when Shay and Dominic start to fall for each other. In an industry that values truth, getting caught could mean the end of more than just their careers.

FEBRUARY 2021 BOOKS

How to Not Die Alone:
The Surprising Science
That Will Help You Find Love
by Logan Ury
February 2, 2021
Simon and Schuster

Ury grew up in South Florida with fond memories of Shabbat dinners and Jewish day school. At Harvard, the psych department attracted her, and after graduation, on the West Coast at Google, she helped lead the bahavioral econ group with Dan Arieli... and then made her way to Hinge

A funny and practical guide to help you find, build, and keep the relationship of your dreams. Have you ever looked around and wondered, “Why has everyone found love except me?” You’re not the only one.

Great relationships don’t just appear in our lives—they’re the culmination of a series of decisions, including when to get out there, whom to date, how to end it with the wrong person, when to commit to the right one, and everything in between. But our brains often get in the way. We make poor decisions, which thwart us on our quest to find lasting love.

Drawing from years studying psychology and relationships, behavioral scientist turned dating coach Logan Ury reveals the hidden forces that cause those mistakes. But awareness on its own doesn’t lead to results. Knowing you shouldn’t date “bad boys” or “manic pixie dream girls,” for example, doesn’t make them any less appealing—you have to actually change your behavior. Ury shows you how.

This book focuses on a different decision in each chapter incorporating insights from behavioral science, original research, and stories about people just like you. You’ll learn:
-What’s holding you back in dating (and how to break the pattern)
-What really matters in a long-term partner (and what really doesn’t)
-How to overcome the perils of online dating (and make the apps work for you)
-How to meet more people in real life (while doing activities you love)
-How to make dates fun again (so they stop feeling like job interviews)
-Why you should go on that second date (trust me on this one)
-How to know whether to stay or go (and how to end things with compassion)
-Why “the spark” is a myth (but you’ll find love anyway)

And so much more.

This data-driven, step-by-step guide to relationships, along with hands-on exercises, is designed to transform your life. How to Not Die Alone will help you find, build, and keep the relationship of your dreams.

City of a Thousand Gates:
A Novel
by Rebecca Sacks
February 2, 2021
Harper

A novel of great humanity, compassion, and astonishing immediacy, this inventive and unique debut captures the emotional reality of contemporary life in the West Bank and the irreconcilable Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a collage of narrative voices and different viewpoints centered on a particular set of events.

Brave and bold, this gorgeously written novel introduces a large cast of characters from various backgrounds in a setting where violence is routine and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them.

Hamid, a college student, has entered Israeli territory illegally for work. Rushing past soldiers, he bumps into Vera, a German journalist headed to Jerusalem to cover the story of Salem, a Palestinian boy beaten into a coma by a group of revenge-seeking Israeli teenagers. On her way to the hospital, Vera runs in front of a car that barely avoids hitting her. The driver is Ido, a new father traveling with his American wife and their baby. Ido is distracted by thoughts of a young Jewish girl murdered by a terrorist who infiltrated her settlement. Ori, a nineteen-year-old soldier from a nearby settlement, is guarding the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem through which Samar—Hamid’s professor—must pass.

These multiple strands open this magnificent and haunting novel of present-day Israel and Palestine, following each of these diverse characters as they try to protect what they love. Their interwoven stories reveal complicated, painful truths about life in this conflicted land steeped in hope, love, hatred, terror, and blood on both sides.

City of a Thousand Gates brilliantly evokes the universal drives that motivate these individuals to think and act as they do—desires for security, for freedom, for dignity, for the future of one’s children, for land that each of us, no matter who or where we are, recognize and share.

Probable Impossibilities:
Musings on Beginnings and Endings
by Alan Lightman
February 9, 2021
Pantheon

Professor Lightman grew up in a Jewish family, where at the age of 9, he had an out of body experience where he felt part of the universe and sensed his place in it. He went on to become a leading scientist and award winning writer

From the acclaimed author of Einstein's Dreams, a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities, and impossibilities, of nothingness and infinity--and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between.

Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom the Washington Post has called "the poet laureate of science writers," explores these questions and more--from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaging consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger, and smaller, than ourselves.

Widowish:
A Memoir
by Melissa Gould
February 1, 2021
Little A

Melissa Gould’s hopeful memoir of grieving outside the box and the surprising nature of love.

When Melissa Gould’s husband, Joel, was unexpectedly hospitalized, she could not imagine how her life was about to change. Overwhelmed with uncertainty as Joel’s condition tragically worsened, she offered him the only thing she could: her love and devotion. Her dedication didn’t end with his death.

Left to resume life without her beloved husband and raise their young daughter on her own, Melissa soon realized that her and Joel’s love lived on. Melissa found she didn’t fit the typical mold of widowhood or meet the expectations of mourning. She didn’t look like a widow or act like a widow, but she felt like one. Melissa was widowish.

Melissa’s personal journey through grief and beyond includes unlikely inspiration from an evangelical preacher, the calming presence of some Real Housewives, and the unexpected attention of a charming musician.

A modern take on loss, Widowish illuminates the twists of fate that break our world, the determination that keeps us moving forward, and the surprises in life we never see coming.

Think Again:
The Power of Knowing
What You Don't Know
by Adam Grant
February 2, 2021
Viking

The bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people's minds, which can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We think too much like preachers defending our sacred beliefs, prosecutors proving the other side wrong, and politicians campaigning for approval--and too little like scientists searching for truth. Intelligence is no cure, and it can even be a curse: being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people's minds--and our own. As Wharton's top-rated professor and the bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he's right but listen like he's wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You'll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox. Think Again reveals that we don't have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It's an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.

Why the Innocent Plead Guilty
and the Guilty Go Free:
And Other Paradoxes of Our
Broken Legal System
by U.S. Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff
February 16, 2021
FS&G

A senior federal judge’s incisive, unsettling exploration of some of the paradoxes that define the judiciary today, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free features essays examining why innocent people plead guilty, why high-level executives aren’t prosecuted, why you won’t get your day in court, and why the judiciary is curtailing its own constitutionally mandated power.

How can we be proud of a system of justice that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but rarely prosecute rich white executives who commit crimes having far greater impact? How can we applaud the Supreme Court’s ever-more-limited view of its duty to combat excesses by the president?

The federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, explores these and other puzzles in Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, a startling account of our broken legal system. Grounded in Rakoff’s twenty-four years as a federal trial judge in New York in addition to the many years he worked as a federal prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Rakoff ’s assessment of our justice system illuminates some of our most urgent legal, social, and political issues: plea deals and class-action lawsuits, corporate impunity and the death penalty, the perils of eyewitness testimony and forensic science, the war on terror and the expanding reach of the executive branch. A fundamental problem, he reveals, is that the judiciary is constraining its own constitutional powers.

Like few others, Rakoff understands the values that animate the best aspects of our legal system-and has a close-up view of our failure to live up to these ideals. But he sees within this gap great opportunities for practical reform, and a public mandate to make our justice system truly just.

The Ravine:
A Family, a Photograph,
a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
by Wendy Lower
February 16, 2021
HMH

A single photograph—an exceptionally rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family—drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholar

In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler’s Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter’s rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. And—only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower’s brilliant ten-year investigation of this image—the shins of another child, slipping from the woman’s lap.

Wendy Lower’s forensic and archival detective work—in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States—recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killers—and, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistance—are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi genocide.

MILK FED:
A Novel
by Melissa Broder
February 21, 2021
Scribner

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.

THOSE WHO ARE SAVED
A NOVEL
By A;exis Landau
February 23, 2021
Putnam

\In the spirit of We Were the Lucky Ones and We Must Be Brave, a heartbreaking World War II novel of one mother's impossible choice, and her search for her daughter against the odds.

As a Russian Jewish émigré to France, Vera's wealth cannot protect her or her four-year-old-daughter, Lucie, once the Nazis occupy the country. After receiving notice that all foreigners must report to an internment camp, Vera has just a few hours to make an impossible choice: Does she subject Lucie to the horrid conditions of the camp, or does she put her into hiding with her beloved and trusted governess, safe until Vera can retrieve her? Believing the war will end soon, Vera chooses to leave Lucie in safety. She cannot know that she and her husband will have an opportunity to escape, to flee to America. She cannot know that Lucie's governess will have fled with Lucie to family in rural France, too far to reach in time.

And so begins a heartbreaking journey and separation, a war and a continent apart. Vera's marriage will falter under the surreal sun of California. Her ability to write--once her passion--will disappear. But Vera's love for Lucie, her faith that her daughter lives, will only grow. As Vera's determination to return to France and find Lucie crystalizes, she meets Sasha, a man on his own search for meaning. She is stronger with Sasha than she is alone. Together they will journey to Lucie. They will find her fate.

THE SLAUGHTERMAN'S DAUGHTER
A NOVEL
BY YANIV ICZKOVITS, PhD
Translated from Hebrew By Orr Scharf, PhD
February 23, 2021
Schocken

An irresistible, picaresque tale of two Jewish sisters in late-nineteenth-century Russia, filled with "boundless imagination and a vibrant style" (David Grossman), and enough intrigue and misadventure to stupefy the Coen brothers.

With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn't like the other women in her shtetl in Russia's Pale of Settlement--certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose "philosopher" of a husband, Zvi-Meir, has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her father's profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession--she's now the wife of a cheesemaker and a mother of five--Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg. Which might come in handy when, heedless of the dangers facing a Jewish woman traveling alone in czarist Russia, she sets off to track down Zvi-Meir and bring him home--with the help of the mute and mysterious ferryman Zizek Breshov, an ex-soldier with his own sensational past.

Yaniv Iczkovits spins a family drama into a far-reaching comedy of errors that will pit the czar's army against the Russian secret police and threaten the very foundations of the Russian Empire. The Slaughterman's Daughter is a rollicking and unforgettable work of fiction.

My Lifelong Fight Against Disease:
From Polio and AIDS to COVID-19
by William A. Haseltine, MD
February 16, 2021
Amplify

Anticipating a career in medicine, Dr. William A. Haseltine was in his first weeks of graduate studies at Harvard when a legendary physician-scientist offered this advice: “You can do more for human health through science than you ever could as a doctor.” That advice hit him “like a thunderbolt”—and he took it.

Since then, Dr. Haseltine has helped combat cancers, worked to contain the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and unlocked the power of the human genome to develop dozens of new pharmaceutical cures. His discoveries in molecular biology and genomics, amplified through his counsel at the highest levels of government and in the public eye, have improved the health and lives of millions of people around the world.

For the first time, Dr. Haseltine tells his life story—which is still unfolding—in My Lifelong Fight Against Disease, including facing devastating public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlighting exhilarating moments of medical discovery. In writing the story of his wide ranging career, Dr. Haseltine’s goals are simple: to encourage the next generation to make their own significant contribution to human life, and for all readers to appreciate science as a humanistic enterprise.

A compulsively readable and fast paced insider’s account of some of the most brilliant medical breakthroughs in modern history, My Lifelong Fight Against Disease is a candid, evocative, and ultimately revelatory exploration into what it means to make science your life.

MARCH 2021 BOOKS

SEX POINTS
Reclaim Your Sex Life with the
Revolutionary Multi-point System
by Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus
The Orthodox Jewish Sex Guru,
March 9, 2021
Hachette Go

The "Queen of Vibrators" and the "Orthodox Sex Guru" shares her easy, proven system to help women have a healthy, robust sex life.

IN the series UNORTHODOX, the character os Esty has sexual and vagina issues with her husband. Dr. Marcus could have treated her vaginismus so that she could have have had healthy sex with her husband and not have had to fee to Berlin into the arms of the grandson of a former SS Nazi

Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus believes a healthy, fulfilling sex life is a right for all women. But many women don't quite believe that themselves; they think that a diminished sex drive is natural, pain during sex is to be expected, and no orgasms?...well, too bad! As a veteran sex therapist, Dr. Marcus has seen everything and knows firsthand that all that is rubbish.

Most of the books you find on how to have a good sex life focus on emotional intimacy and behavior--or, like the Cosmo quizzes say, sexy lingerie and a beach vacation. But there's more to it than that. For most women, while there are relationship and emotional components that are critical to a healthy sex life, there is also a hefty physiological or medical component driving their desire. And until you know what's really going on, all the lingerie and sexy couples' time won't really help. Your sex life is complex, made up many different aspects of your life; these variables shift and change over time--and all the variables need to work together to make your sex life work.

Sex Points is the first book that helps women and identify analyze for themselves what factors are affecting their sex life and then gives a wide variety of ways to approach different problems. The book breaks down these variables in an easy-to-use system--one that uses a threshold of 100 points for a healthy sex life. Divided into four key areas--pain, arousal, libido, and orgasm--each variable has its own point value. The Sex Points Assessment helps you determine exactly what is keeping you from having a great sex life-where you are missing points. Specific chapters address the issues with practical suggestions. Whatever it is, the points system gives you a concrete picture of your situation and then gives you the tools to fix it.

Covering everything from how to choose a vibrator to recapturing orgasms, to rekindling lust, embracing taboo fantasies, and parsing complicated relationships, to what sex really means (hint: it's not just intercourse!), Sex Points is a revelatory guide to ensure women get the rich sex life they deserve.

You're Leaving When?:
Adventures in Downward Mobility
by Annabelle Gurwitch
March 2, 2021
Counterpoint

From the New York Times bestselling author of I See You Made an Effort comes a timely and hilarious chronicle of downward mobility, financial and emotional.

With signature "sharp wit" (NPR), Annabelle Gurwitch gives irreverent and empathetic voice to a generation hurtling into their next chapter with no safety net and proving that our no-frills new normal doesn't mean a deficit of humor. In these essays, Gurwitch embraces homesharing, welcoming a housing-insecure young couple and a bunny rabbit into her home.

The mother of a college student in recovery who sheds the gender binary, she relearns to parent, one pronoun at a time. She wades into the dating pool with a reupholstered vagina and flunks the magic of tidying up.

You're Leaving When? is for anybody who thought they had a semblance of security but wound up with a fragile economy and a blankie. "What do we do when we've already reinvented in midlife?" Gurwitch offers stories of resilience, adaptability, low-rent redemption, and the kindness of strangers. Even in a Zoom.

See also her Opinion essay from November 15, 2020 in The New York Times on her discovery she has Stage 4 lung cancer after a Covid-19 test procedure discovered it. We wish her a full recovery.

Mine!:
How the Hidden Rules of Ownership
Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman
Columbia Law, UCLA Law
March 2, 2021
Doubleday

A hidden set of rules governs who owns what--explaining everything from whether you can recline your airplane seat to why HBO lets you borrow a password illegally--and in this lively and entertaining guide, two acclaimed law professors reveal how things become "mine."

"Mine" is one of the first words babies learn. By the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you reclining or the squished laptop user behind? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it's okay to knock-off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, but in New York you lose the space and the chair?

Mine! explains these puzzles and many more. Surprisingly, there are just six simple stories that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the story that steers us to do what they want. But we can always pick a different story. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. As Michael Heller and James Salzman show--in the spirited style of Freakonomics, Nudge, and Predictably Irrational--ownership is always up for grabs.

With stories that are eye-opening, mind-bending, and sometimes infuriating, Mine! reveals the rules of ownership that secretly control our lives.

PLUNDER
A Memoir of Family Property
and Nazi Treasure
A Quest for Memory, Property, and Treasure
By Menachem Kaiser
March 16, 2021
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

From a gifted young writer, the story of his quest to reclaim his family’s apartment building in Poland—and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows

The project description states that the book focuses on the author’s “mission to reclaim ownership of the apartment building his Jewish family was forced to abandon during WWII, a search that expands to encounters with a bizarre subculture of explorers hunting for Nazi gold; their astounding connection to an unknown Kaiser relative who survived the war after years as a slave laborer who excavated a vast system of secret underground tunnels; and finally to controversial questions that challenge the meaning of reclamation and of family obligation.
Brooklyn based Kaiser is a Fulbright Fellow (Lithuania) and has an MFA from the University of Michigan. His works has appeared in WSJ.

Shooting Midnight Cowboy:
Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation,
and the Making of a Dark Classic
March 16, 2021
FS&G

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and New York Times–bestselling author of the behind-the-scenes explorations of the classic American Westerns High Noon and The Searchers now reveals the history of the controversial 1969 Oscar-winning film that signaled a dramatic shift in American popular culture.

Director John Schlesinger’s Darling was nominated for five Academy Awards, and introduced the world to the transcendently talented Julie Christie. Suddenly the toast of Hollywood, Schlesinger (Jewish and gay) used his newfound clout to film an expensive, Panavision adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. Expectations were huge, making the movie’s complete critical and commercial failure even more devastating, and Schlesinger suddenly found himself persona non grata in the Hollywood circles he had hoped to conquer.

Given his recent travails, Schlesinger’s next project seemed doubly daring, bordering on foolish. James Leo Herlihy’s novel Midnight Cowboy, about a Texas hustler trying to survive on the mean streets of 1960’s New York, was dark and transgressive. Jerome Hellman was Exec Prod. Perhaps something about the book’s unsparing portrait of cultural alienation resonated with him. His decision to film it began one of the unlikelier convergences in cinematic history, centered around a city that seemed, at first glance, as unwelcoming as Herlihy’s novel itself.

Glenn Frankel’s Shooting Midnight Cowboy tells the story of a modern classic that, by all accounts, should never have become one in the first place. The film’s boundary-pushing subject matter-homosexuality, prostitution, sexual assault-earned it an X rating when it first appeared in cinemas in 1969. For Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger-who had never made a film in the United States-enlisted Jerome Hellman, a producer coming off his own recent flop and smarting from a failed marriage, and Waldo Salt, a formerly blacklisted screenwriter with a tortured past. The decision to shoot on location in New York, at a time when the city was approaching its gritty nadir, backfired when a sanitation strike filled Manhattan with garbage fires and fears of dysentery.

Much more than a history of Schlesinger’s film, Shooting Midnight Cowboy is an arresting glimpse into the world from which it emerged: a troubled city that nurtured the talents and ambitions of the pioneering Polish cinematographer Adam Holender and legendary casting director Marion Dougherty, who discovered both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight and supported them for the roles of “Ratso” Rizzo and Joe Buck-leading to one of the most intensely moving joint performances ever to appear on screen. We follow Herlihy himself as he moves from the experimental confines of Black Mountain College to the theaters of Broadway, influenced by close relationships with Tennessee Williams and Anaïs Nin, and yet unable to find lasting literary success.

By turns madcap and serious, and enriched by interviews with Hoffman, Voight, and others, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic is not only the definitive account of the film that unleashed a new wave of innovation in American cinema, but also the story of a country-and an industry-beginning to break free from decades of cultural and sexual repression.

Israel:
A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth
by Noa Tishby
April 6, 2021
Free Press

A personal, spirited, and concise simple, easy to digest chronological timeline spanning from Biblical times to today that explores Israel.

Israel. The small strip of arid land is 5,700 miles away but remains a hot button issue and a thorny topic of debate. But while everyone seems to have a strong opinion about Israel, how many people actually know the facts?

Here to fill in the information gap is Israeli American Noa Tishby, who arrived in Hollywood two decades ago. Offering a 360-degree view, Tishby brings her straight-shooting, engaging, and slightly irreverent voice to the subject, creating an accessible and dynamic portrait of a tiny country of outsized relevance. Through bite-sized chunks of history and deeply personal stories, Tishby chronicles her homeland’s evolution, beginning in Biblical times and moving forward to cover everything from WWI to Israel’s creation to the real disputes dividing the country today.

She tells the story from the perspective of her life and family. One of her grandmothers was a founder of Israel’s first kibbutz, Degania Alef. Her grandfather, Hanan Yavor, was an envoy to several African nations. According to Tishby, if you believe in democracy, freedom of speech, human rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights, you are an idiot not to support the State of Israel

AQUARIUM
A NOVEL
BY YAARA SHEHORI
Translated from Hebrew by Todd Hasak-Lowy
April 13, 2021
FS&G

An incredible story following two sisters, both deaf and raised in cultlike seclusion by deaf parents, and the shattering consequences that unfold when that isolation comes to an end

Sisters Lili and Dori Ackerman are deaf. Their parents-beautiful, despondent Anna; fearsome and admired Alex-are deaf too. Alex, a scrap-metal collector and sometime prophet, opposes any attempts to integrate with the world of the hearing; to escape its destructive influence, the girls are educated at home. Deafness is no disability, their father says, but an alternative way of life, preferable by far to that of the strident, hypocritical hearing.

Lili and Dori grow up semi-feral, living in a world they have created together. Lili writes down everything that happens, just the facts. And Dori, the reader, follows her. On the block where the girls spend their childhood, the family is united against a hostile and alien world. They watch the hearing like they would fish in an aquarium.

But when the outside world intrudes, the cracks that begin to form will span the rest of their lives. Separated from the family that ingrained in them a sense of uniqueness and alienation, Lili and Dori must relearn how to live, and how to tell their own stories.

Sly, surprising, and as sharp-fanged as its protagonists, Yaara Shehori's Aquarium is a stunning debut that interrogates the practices of storytelling-and storyhearing.

Unstoppable:
Siggi B. Wilzig's Astonishing Journey
from Auschwitz Survivor and
Penniless Immigrant to
Wall Street Legend
by Joshua Greene
Deborah E. Lipstadt (Foreword)
April 6, 2021
Insight Editions

Unstoppable recounts the fascinating life of Siggi Wilzig, who survived the hell of Hitler and Auschwitz to become one of the biggest success stories in post-World War II American business—a true embodiment of the American Dream. At a time of national division, this testament to the triumph of the human spirit over horrific tragedy through fortitude and faith offers an inspiring message that will both resonate with readers today and offer enormous hope for a better future.

Unstoppable is the story of an American hero—a man who survived the hell of Auschwitz to become one of the most successful, mesmerizing, and outrageous personalities in postwar America. Siggi Wilzig was a force of nature: a Holocaust survivor who arrived in New York penniless and without formal education at just twenty one years old yet went on to build a $4 billion oil-and-banking empire. This is the ultimate immigrant story, an epic rags-to-riches adventure that follows Siggi from starvation on death marches to dinner at the White House—a story that starts in Auschwitz and ends with one of the most lucrative bank sales in Wall Street history. A survivor’s saga in a category of its own, Unstoppable does not dwell on tragedy, but instead celebrates Siggi’s ingenuity, hope, resolve and message: no matter how cruel or unjust the world may be, humans can overcome the past to achieve a bright future.

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

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