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Our JUNE 2019 Update

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Welcome to MyJewishBooks.com, where we list new, diverse, and eclectic books of Jewish interest and sort them by publication date (we do not categorize by fiction and non-fiction). All net proceeds go to tzedaka. Look at the hyperlinks to the left for books by publication data or season.

Be sure to visit our pages for releases in Summer 2019, releases in Spring 2019, releases in Winter 2018/2019, releases in Fall 2018, and all the rest of our pages (oFrah, Passover, Hanukkah, MLK books, Tu b'shvat books, and more).

The 100 Most Jewish Foods:
A Highly Debatable List
by Alana Newhouse
(EIC OF TABLET.COM)
March 19, 2019
Artisan

Tablet’s list of the 100 most Jewish foods is not about the most popular Jewish foods, or the tastiest, or even the most enduring. It’s a list of the most significant foods culturally and historically to the Jewish people, explored deeply with essays, recipes, stories, and context. Some of the dishes are no longer cooked at home, and some are not even dishes in the traditional sense (store-bought cereal and Stella D’oro cookies, for example). The entire list is up for debate, which is what makes this book so much fun. Many of the foods are delicious (such as babka and shakshuka). Others make us wonder how they’ve survived as long as they have (such as unhatched chicken eggs and jellied calves’ feet).

As expected, many Jewish (and now universal) favorites like matzo balls, pickles, cheesecake, blintzes, and chopped liver make the list. The recipes are global and represent all contingencies of the Jewish experience.

You might be surprised to learn the Jewish histories of Sweet n Low and Bazooka bubble gum.

Contributors include Ruth Reichl on Lamb, Elissa Goldstein on leftovers, Alana Newhouse on Kiddush cookies and Haminados, Gabriel Sanders, Éric Ripert on Gefilte FIsh, Joan Nathan, Michael Solomonov, BKG/Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on Flanken, Dan Barber, Gail Simmons, Yotam Ottolenghi, Tom Colicchio, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, Maira Kalman on Herring (and Chekhov), Action Bronson, Daphne Merkin on Beet Horseradish, Shalom Auslander, Merissa Nathan Gerson on Honey and honeycake, Marc Tracy on Hebrew National Hot Dogs, Gabriela Geselowitz on Joan Nathan's Azerbaijani Style Eggplant, David Sachs, Rosie Schaap (yes of the grape Schaap's) on Concord Grape Huice, Wayne Hoffman on Chicken, Marjorie Ingall on Bokser, Paola Gavin on Roman Artichokes, MaNishtana on Haroset, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Eve Jochnowitz on Dill, Leil Leibovits on Treyf, and Phil Rosenthal, and many many others. Presented in a gifty package, The 100 Most Jewish Foods is the perfect book to dip into, quote from, cook from, and launch a spirited debate.

The Guarded Gate:
Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law
That Kept Two Generations of Jews,
Italians, and Other European
Immigrants Out of America
by Daniel Okrent
May 2019
Scribner

By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to “inferiors” in the 1920s.

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.

Mrs. Everything:
A Novel
by Jennifer Weiner
June 11, 2019
ATRIA

From Jennifer Weiner, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Who Do You Love and In Her Shoes comes a smart, thoughtful, and timely exploration of two sisters’ lives from the 1950s to the present as they struggle to find their places—and be true to themselves—in a rapidly evolving world. Mrs. Everything is an ambitious, richly textured journey through history—and herstory—as these two sisters navigate a changing America over the course of their lives.

Do we change or does the world change us?

Jo and Bethie Kaufman were born into a world full of promise.

Growing up in 1950s Detroit, they live in a perfect “Dick and Jane” house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life.

But the truth ends up looking different from what the girls imagined. Jo and Bethie survive traumas and tragedies. As their lives unfold against the background of free love and Vietnam, Woodstock and women’s lib, Bethie becomes an adventure-loving wild child who dives headlong into the counterculture and is up for anything (except settling down). Meanwhile, Jo becomes a proper young mother in Connecticut, a witness to the changing world instead of a participant. Neither woman inhabits the world she dreams of, nor has a life that feels authentic or brings her joy. Is it too late for the women to finally stake a claim on happily ever after?

In her most ambitious novel yet, Jennifer Weiner tells a story of two sisters who, with their different dreams and different paths, offer answers to the question: How should a woman be in the world?

The Lost Girls of Paris
by Pam Jenoff
January 29, 2019
PARK ROW

1946, Manhattan

One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs—each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station.

Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.

Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances.

WITNESS
Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom
by Ariel Burger
(Rabbi Ariel Burger)
November 13, 2018
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt HMH
I recall when a childhood neighbor went off to Boston University and how she got to take a class with Eli Wiesel and it influenced her life. So I was excited to read this new book.

Rabbi Burger, a devoted protégé and friend of the late Elie Wiesel shows us the Nobel Peace Prize recipientas a master teacher.

Ariel Burger first met Elie Wiesel at age fifteen. They studied together and taught together. Witness chronicles the intimate conversations between these two men over decades, as Burger sought counsel on matters of intellect, spirituality, and faith, while navigating his own personal journey from boyhood to manhood, from student and assistant to rabbi and, in time, teacher.

In this profoundly hopeful, thought-provoking, and inspiring book, Burger takes us into Elie Wiesel’s classroom, where the art of listening and storytelling conspire to keep memory alive. As Wiesel’s teaching assistant, Burger gives us a front-row seat witnessing these remarkable exchanges in and out of the classroom. The act of listening, of sharing these stories, makes of us, the readers, witnesses.

GOD IS IN THE CROWD:
Twenty-First-Century Judaism
by Tal Keinan
September 25, 2018
Spiegel & Grau
Part call to action and part riveting personal story, an original proposal for discovering relevance in Judaism and ensuring its survival from a pioneering social activist and Harvard MBA business leader who served as a pilot in the Israel Air Force.

God Is in the Crowd is an original and provocative blueprint for Judaism in the 21st century, told through the lens of Keinan's unusual personal story. Keinan's analysis of the threat to Jewish continuity is sobering: as Jewry has become concentrated in just two parts of the world, America and Israel, the Jewish people has lost the subtle code of governance that made Judaism relevant in the Diaspora. This "code," as Keinan explains it, is a derivative of Francis Galton's wisdom of crowds (aka swarm intelligence or collective intelligence). Keinan argues forcefully that the science of crowd wisdom has played a key role in Jewish survival over the centuries and must be resurrected now, since the alternative is the extinction of the Jews. Born to a secular Jewish family in Florida, Keinan's interest in Judaism was piqued by a Christian minister at Exeter. That interest took him down an unlikely path to becoming a fighter pilot in the Israel Air Force. Through the prism of his own dramatic personal story and the lessons he learned from his professional life, Keinan embarks on an investigation of the core values of Judaism in the twenty-first century, and looks to the relationship between American and Israeli Jews to enrich world Jewry in a post-Diaspora age. God Is in the Crowd presents an innovative plan in which the wisdom of the Jewish crowd is harnessed to endow Judaism with new purpose and ensure its survival.

BORN TRUMP:
Inside America’s First Family
by Emily Jane Fox
(writer, Vanity Fair)
June 19, 2018
Harper

An examination of the Trump children and what is was like to grow up Trump

Chapter One, Page One, Inauguration Day 2017. Ivanka and Jared rush to the White House Lincoln Bedroom. Shabbat approaches. They have borrowed candle holders from the White House butler. They need to kindle the Sabbath candles before sundown...

As a writer at Vanity Fair covering the Trump family, Emily Jane Fox has spent the last year doing a deep dive into the lives of the President’s children. She’s developed a personal relationship with Ivanka and has cultivated sources close to Eric, Donald Jr., and Tiffany. She has scoured their Instagram accounts, combed through all their public speeches, spoken to their childhood friends, college acquaintances, business associates, close advisors, and campaign operatives. She’s become the foremost expert on the Trump kids and, now, in this exclusive account, Fox chronicles the experiences of the Trump children, individuals who possess more control than any other First Children in the history of the presidency.

Wonderfully gossipy, Born Trump examines what shaped the Trump children into who they are—a shared familial history that will inevitably form American history in the coming years. Born Trump explores what it was like to grow up Trump and what this reveals about living in Trump’s America, in turn painting an intimate portrait of the 45th President of the United States from the perspective of his most inner circle. Given their father’s need to be in the spotlight, his bellicose and litigious nature, and how often his personal life played out in public, it seems astonishing that his children remain so close to him. And yet this is part of the Trump ethos—like royalty, they stand together, encased not in palaces, but in Trump Tower.

Fox looks at the childhood privileges and traumas, the individual adolescences and early adulthoods that have been lightly chronicled in the tabloids but never detailed thoughtfully or in depth, the family business that brought them back together and the dynamics therein, the campaign that tested the family in ways the children could not have imagined, and now, the wide-open slate in front of them in Washington, D.C.

Full of surprising insights and previously untold stories, Born Trump will quench the ever increasing desire for a greater understanding of who these people are, how they were raised, and what makes them tick.

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