Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/books/page/3/)
Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story
R.F. Georgy
Parthenon Books, 2014
The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust
Noam Chayut
Verso, 2013
In the wake of Israel’s bloody struggle in Gaza, it may be healing to read Absolution—a Palestinian Israeli love story by R.F. Georgy that rehumanizes what media reports reduce to political sloganeering. Here you can reconnect with the human spirit, transcending the normal boundaries of political positions to momentarily rekindle your belief in love.
Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story by R. F. Georgy
The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust by Noam Chayut
In the wake of Israel’s bloody struggle in Gaza, it may be healing to read Absolution—a Palestinian Israeli love story by R.F. Georgy that rehumanizes what media reports reduce to political sloganeering. Here you can reconnect with the human spirit, transcending the normal boundaries of political positions to momentarily rekindle your belief in love. Another story that offers hope in this moment is Israeli Noam Chayut’s memoir of his life as a young soldier on the front line of Operation Defensive Shield, a devastating offensive against Gaza by Israel. Chayut’s memoir takes you into the inner life of a principled and caring soldier whose acceptance of the standard narrative of the Holocaust initially allows him to believe that Israel’s wars are necessary and just.
The Days Between
Marcia Falk
Brandeis University Press, 2014
Marcia Falk’s collection of blessings, poems, and “directions of the heart” for the Jewish High Holiday season is another gem by this inspired poet, whose Book of Blessings was an inspiration to a generation of feminists and their allies. With matching pages of Hebrew and English, Falk has captured some of the rich wisdom of Jewish spirituality that permeates the High Holiday prayer book (machzor), translating it into a language accessible even to resolute atheists.
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry edited by Deborah Ager and M.E. Silverman. Review by David Danoff.
Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons by David Bollier. Review by Miki Kashtan.
To Mourn a Child: Jewish Responses to Neonatal and Childhood Death Edited by Jeffrey Saks and Joel Wolowelsky and Kaddish: Women’s Voices Edited by Michal Smart and Barbara Ashkenas. Review by Erica Brown.
Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East by Zvi Zohar. Review by Tzvi Marx.
Fromm’s quest was to free the cultivation of spirituality and ethics from their theistic, authoritative moorings in the Hebrew Bible and forge them—with elements of Hasidic mystical relatedness and themes from Marxism, Christianity, and Buddhism—into a new ethical humanism.
A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
Edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora
Princeton University Press, 2014
This collection of scholarly yet accessible articles by dozens of Jewish and Muslim experts is the definitive source for understanding a complex relationship between Muslims and Jews from the seventh century to the present day. Its 1,146 pages cover pressing political issues like whether Jews are demeaned in Islam and whether Jews faced real (as opposed to just remembered) anti-Semitism in Islamic societies. It also explores the ways in which contemporary Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are both products and causes of the political struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet the richness of this fantastic and exciting book lies also in its descriptions of how Jews and Muslims have learned from each other in the arenas of philosophy, science, art, literature, and mysticism.
All at Once
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014
by C.K. Williams
Writers Writing Dying
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012
by C.K. Williams
On Whitman
Princeton University Press, 2010
by C.K. Williams
In his preface to On Whitman, C. K. Williams says only Shakespeare compares with Walt Whitman in providing him an “inexhaustible” source of inspiration. Yet “with both, but particularly with Whitman, I need a respite, surcease, so as not to be overwhelmed, obliterated. This is more raw than Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence,’ more primitive.”
On the dust jacket for the Whitman monograph, Michael Robertson calls Williams “one of our most Whitmanesque poets.” The idea of Williams as a Whitman for our time is not wrong, but it is incomplete and potentially misleading. Yes, Williams arrived in his third collection of poems at a long, sinuous free-verse line that reminds one, at first glance, of Whitman. Yes, one finds in Williams great sympathy for the suffering of others and a willingness to open poetry to a wide range of human experience, including parts of it many of us would rather not see.
by Jay and Ramaswamy, Scruton, Giroux, Sassen, and Nagler
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times
Matthew Fox
New World Library, 2014
Second Wave Spirituality
Chris Saade
North Atlantic Books, 2014
Like Rumi, the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart was—according to Matthew Fox’s brilliant and inspiring account—deeply ecumenical, encompassing wisdom that one can find in Jewish, Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu mystical traditions, as well as in shamanism and indigenous spirituality. Eckhart advocated for social, economic, and gender justice. He also championed an earth-based spirituality and a cosmic consciousness, and taught that we are all artists whose vocation is to birth the Cosmic Christ (or Buddha Nature). All these elements have inspired Fox and influenced his Creation Spirituality. In this book, Fox imagines dialogues between Eckhart and Carl Jung, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Heschel, and many others.
In her book, Slow Dancing with a Stranger, Comer details her excruciating journey through the maze of Alzheimer’s, an unforgiving disease. Through this book, she is changing the conversation from acceptance of what is to demanding what should be.
Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture by Peter Gabel. Review by Kim Chernin.