ELVIS IN JERUSALEM
Post Zionism and the Americanization of Israel
by Tom Segev, Haim Watzman (Translator)
May 2002. Holt. A very quick read
In Israel, collectivism is dead, Americanism is thriving. Private parties now supplant group celebrations. If Paul Newman were to reprise his role as Ari Ben Canaan from the 1961 film, Exodus, he might portray a capitalist in Ramat Aviv Gimmel, and not a committed Kibbutznik. More people pay homage to the Elvis statue at an Elvis Diner on the road to Jerusalem, than to a Herzl statue that stands outside of Herzliya, a bastion of prosperous capitalism. Tom Segev, a revisionist New Historian, and a master at challenging long held myths of Israel’s history, offers a lively polemic against cherished and rigid notions of Israel's national unity and culture. Aside from the thesis, the book is worth reading if only for the bounty of tidbits of social history and the voices of Israel’s scholars that are included. See the May 2002 page or click for more information.
ALEPH BET YOGA
By STEVEN A RAPP
March 2002. Jewish Lights Press. Hatha yoga meets the Jewish alphabet (aleph bet). Rap explains the 29 yoga forms that resemble Hebrew letters (22 letters plus final forms plus the vowels of kamatz and patach). The lamed… wow. He goes on to explain yoga and Jewish spirituality in the context of the letter. FLAT LAYING BINDING to help you when doing yoga. For each letter there is a Hebrew verse and English quote upon which to reflect. Includes a bibliography. Click to read more.
OFRAH'S APRIL 2002 SELECTION
How can anyone read given the events in Israel over Pesach? But you must continue and not despair. Did you hear the OPRAH is giving up on the book club?? Well, baby, OFRAH is still going strong! … Which brings me to my selection for April. American seek justice, not revenge; but sometimes, a little revenge needs to be exacted:
Revenge: A Story of Hope
by Laura Blumenfeld
April 4, 2002. Simon and Schuster. In 1986, the father of Washington Post reporter, Laura Blumenfeld, was shot by a 25 year old Palestinian gunman in Israel, in the walled Old City of Jerusalem. The shooter was part of a PLO faction, and his family was part of the PFLP and sees suicide bombers as ‘seeds of peace.’ Laura was a student at Harvard, and Rabbi Blumenfeld’s wife, Norma, was in Hawaii with her lover at the time of the shooting (Okay…). Anyway, Laura vowed revenge against the gunman, Omar al-Khatib. Twelve years later, in 1998, the shooter was to be released from jail and Laura decided to exact her revenge. Posing as a journalist (which she is), she traveled to Sicily (to learn the fine art of revenge), Iran, and Bosnia. She collects stories of revenge. Should revenge be carried out in court? With the words of the poet? Or with a gun and knife? Can you exact the best revenge when you know your enemies Achilles heel? Is revenge psychological, physical, or can it be a reversal of power? Is it enough to humiliate and shame a Palestinian, or is success the best revenge? Laura interviewed the family and parents of the terrorist (she draws her father’s initials in the dust of their dining room table as they chat), and she became a pen-pal of her father's shooter. And then one day......
OFRAH'S MARCH 2002 SELECTION
An amazing Feminist book on a life and survival in Nazi death camps. I highly recommend this for this month
Still Alive:
Coming of Age During the Holocaust and Beyond
(The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Womens Series)
By Ruth Kluger (Professor Emerita, UC-IRVINE)
November 2001, Feminist Press. Move over Elie Wiesel, and make room for Professor Kluger. What was a childhood under the Nazi's in Austria like? How about a school art project of making swastikas with colored paper? Born in 1931, this is the story of the destruction of her high-German, utterly rational Viennese Jewish family from 1938-1945, followed by her new beginnings in Germany and New York, an her mother's death at home in California. IT HAS ALREADY BEEN A BEST SELLING BOOK IN GERMANY. Kluger survived a childhood in the children's barracks at both Theresienstadt and the Birkenau Auschwitz Gross Rosen death camps, where she, like everyone else, became subhuman self-hating trash. The fear of death pervades. Kluger, an unbeliever, became a Jew during her 19 months at Theresienstadt, a place of utter awfulness, which forced her to learn to become a social animal and lose her neurotic tics. Everyone knew that "being sent east" to Poland meant death. The kids knew not to take showers (gas). Her portraits of her paranoid mother are astounding. Her mother taught her by example how to remain a person in an awful senseless cruel paranoid place, as she showed compassion to another woman who broke down into insanity on a transport. But at the same time, you read about mother-daughter tensions even in the face of life in a death camp. Her chapter on the last days of her mother, nearly a century old, are utterly amazing to read.
OFRAH'S FEBRUARY 2002 SELECTION
ME TIMES THREE
by Alex Witchel
(A New York Times reporter, and wife of Frank Rich, the former Butcher of Broadway for The Times)
January 2002. Everything's going right for Sandra Berlin. She is living in Manhattan, climbing the editorial ladder at ultra-chic fashion magazine Jolie!, (ELLE) and she's just become engaged to Bucky Ross, her high-school sweetheart. Bucky's her knight in shining WASP armor (she is from Polish Jewish stock), a successful ad executive and a descendant of Betsy Ross, and their future promises a life of comfortable suburban bliss: the Tudor mansion, the beautiful children, the country club. And then, three weeks later, at a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sandy meets Bucky's other fiancée. Who tells her about Bucky's third fiancée. Which begins Sandy's journey through the unfamiliar world of heartbreak and betrayal-and the most excruciating blind dates in the history of singledom. As she tries to piece her life back together, she relies on the common sense and compassion of her best friend, Paul-a rising young film agent, gorgeous, gay, and moneyed-to keep her sane. But even Paul has his secrets, and soon Sandy is forced, on her own, to reexamine her past and, more important, what she wants for her future. Me Times Three is comic and tender, outrageous and wise-a shrewd, dead-on portrait of a certain slice of New York life. It's a story about wished-for ideals versus hard realities, about being who you are versus the desire to fit in, and, finally, about how love can surprise us in the most unexpected ways. Click to read more.
OFRAH'S JANUARY 2002 SELECTION
CHAINS AROUND THE GRASS
A novel by Naomi Ragen
Fall 2001. The Jerusalem Post said "Chains around the Grass, is the kind of book that you never want to end. It is a timeless tale that not only offers real insight into human character and family relationships but also generously offers the reader a way to relate to at least one aspect or one character in the story." Set in the 1950's in New York City, CHAINS AROUND THE GRASS is a portrait of a Jewish-American family that glows with affection, tenderness, and courage when tragedy changes the lives of all those are left behind. A passionately personal and heartfelt book, based heavily on autobiographical material, this is the book Ms. Ragen says that she became an author to write. Sara is barely six years old when her beloved father unexpectedly vanishes from her life. Her mother, Ruth, a dreamy and reluctant housewife, is now left with three small children to bring up, and the knowledge that she will somehow have to pick up the pieces, if she is to survive and fend for the family. But Sara takes up a vigil at the window of their dismal apartment, refusing to accept that her father won't be coming back. She searches the movements of other men for traits of her father. Throughout the book, she likens herself to the child character played by Shirley Temple in the The Little Princess. Numerous times, Sara describes how she refuses to believe her father is really gone forever. To this bittersweet and moving tale of childhood and the loss of innocence, the author brings the added intensity of a personal memoir. There seems no way out of the family's poverty or their life in a low-income housing project. Jesse, the older brother, is beaten by the situation only adding to the family's burden. While Sara deals with the pain internally, becoming an introverted little girl and a virtual prisoner in her own home, content to looking out the window at the chained off grass below. The family is not strictly Orthodox Jewish at first, but after the death of her father, Sara is enrolled in a private, Jewish day school not far from her home. Sara feels inadeuqte at the affluent school, but in her study of Judaism she is slowly able to help her family to overcome the death of her father, and even give her mother and siblings strength. This is Naomi Ragen at her best, her writing charged with a searing, emotional truth as she unravels a tale of childhood, betrayal and the unending resilience of family love. Click the book cover to read more.
OFRAH'S DECEMBER 2001 SELECTION
What Makes Women Sick? Maternity, Modesty and Militarism in Israeli Society
by Susan Sered
Anthropologist Susan Sered examines Israeli society and the health of its citizens. Her most recent book, What Makes Women Sick? Maternity, Modesty and Militarism in Israeli Society, analyzes the cultural causes of the poor health of Israeli women. Exploring the implications of religious, medical, political and military attitudes and policies, Sered argues that Israeli women are - literally - sickened through systematic exclusion from positions of power and authority at the same time that they are extolled for their maternal role. Professor Sered currently directs the Religion, Health and Healing Initiative at Harvard University and also is affiliated with Bar Ilan University in Israel. Scrutinizing the Israeli military, medical, and religious establishments, Susan Sered discloses the myths, policies, and pressures that encumber and endanger Israeli women in their roles as soldiers, brides, and mothers. Framed by the question of why the life expectancy and health status of Israeli women is poor in comparison to women in other developed countries, What Makes Women Sick conjoins medical anthropology, gender studies, and women's health to show how female bodies in Israel are controlled through public policy, symbolic discourses, and ritual performances. Looking at issues such as disputes over women serving in combat, the rape of a former "Miss Israel," and government incentives for bearing children, Sered develops a passionate ethnography of Israeli society that resonates universal truths about women, power, and authority. Click to read more.
OFRAH'S NOVEMBER 2001 SELECTION
This month, I started to read a book on FDR and his imprisonment of Japanese Americans (By Order of the President), as well as the new Humash from the Masorti Movement (Etz Hayim). My recommendation for the month of November 2001 is by a classic Jewish author, Chaim Potok:
OLD MEN AT MIDNIGHT
By CHAIM POTOK
October 2001. Knopf. 304 pages. Chaos Theory Meets The Novel
Chaim Potok, the master of the fictional clashes between cultures and countries (My Name is Asher Lev, The Chosen, the one about Kyoto, Wanderings), JTS Grad, and celebrated author, has written three related novellas about one woman who touches the lives of three men. (but is the story about the woman? Or is it actually about the stories of the men she meets?) Ilana Davita Dinn is the listener to whom three men relate their lives. In the first story, it is 1947, and Ilana is as a young 17 year old woman. She listens to the story of Noah Stemim, the Ark Builder, a man who builds torah arks for synagogues and what happened when the Nazis invade his Polish town. He is the only survivor from his town. In the next story, she is a newly minted teacher at Columbia University in the 1950's, and reads the story of a KGB agent, Leon Shertov, who as a young man during the Russian Civil War is saved by a doctor who he later meets during the Kremlin doctors' plot. Shertov sends Ilana three long letters. In the third story, Ilana is a famous writer and neighbor to an elderly, distinguished Professor of military warfare, Benjamin Walter (you mean Walter Benjamin?), who is trying to write his memoirs who gets distracted by Ilana's presence over the rhododendron hedge and the illness of his wife. Benjamin Walter is famous for being able to detect connections and patterns across historical periods and geographies (kind of like Potok). Yet he is unable to find the patterns and connections of his own life. But, secretly, as you read this novel, you find that you know little of Ilana; the portrait of her is withdrawing as you get deeper into the book. (Is she secretly the shechina? Should Leonard Nimoy take a picture of her female presence?)
OFRAH'S OCTOBER 2001 SELECTION
I would like to retreat to a children's book for this month:
DAUGHTERS OF FIRE
HEROINES OF THE BIBLE
By Fran Manushkin. Illus by Uri Shulevitz
September 2001. Age 9-12. From Eve to Esther to Yael, full page illustrations, with insightful stories on biblical women. Biblical stories of valorous women-from who have helped shape the human character and spirit. Rarely, though, has the essence of these heroines been revealed as poignantly as it is in Daughters of Fire. Fran Manushkin's sensitive retellings of stories from the Bible and Jewish tradition portray strength and honor, but also jealousy and fear, and Caldecott Medalist Uri Shulevitz's heroic illustrations highlight the bold, passionate essence of each woman and her world. The result is a collection of tales with heroines who are, above all, human
OFRAH'S SEPTEMBER 2001 SELECTION
LESBIAN RABBIS
THE FIRST GENERATION
Edited by Rebecca T. Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, and Shirley Idelson
August/September 2001. Rutgers. PAPERBACK EDITION.
Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation documents a change in Jewish life as 18 lesbian rabbis reflect on their experiences as trailblazers in Judaism's journey into an increasingly multicultural world. They were leaders in school and on the pulpit. In honest essays, they discuss their decisions to become rabbis and describe their experiences both at the seminaries (RRC and HUC will ordain lesbians as rabbis, JTS and Orthodox seminaries will not ordain an openly lesbian or gay student) and in their rabbinical positions. They also reflect on the dilemma whether to conceal or reveal their sexual identities to their congregants and superiors, or to serve specifically gay and lesbian congregations. The contributors consider the tensions between lesbian identity and Jewish identity, and inquire whether there are particularly "lesbian" readings of traditional texts. These essays also ask how the language of Jewish tradition touches the lives of lesbians and how lesbianism challenges traditional notions of the Jewish family. The book was born in 1997 at a meting of B'not Esh, a 21-year-old women's collective. Fifty rabbis were invited to contribute essays. All were recetive, except for one who wrote that lesbianism had nothing to do with her profession or Jewish practice. Rabbi Rebecca T. Alpert is a rabbi and codirector of the women's studies program at Temple University. She is the author of Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach and Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition. Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell is a rabbi and director of the Pennsylvania Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. She is the editor of the Jewish Women's Studies Guide. Rabbi Shirley Idelson is a rabbi who serves as associate chaplain at Carleton College and associate for Jewish Life at Macalester College.
HOW I FIND HER
By Genie Zeiger
2001, A daughter writes of her life with her mother, afflicted with Alzheimers. This tender memoir explores the complex shifts in relationship between mother and daughter as an elderly mother slowly declines. Zeiger takes an uncompromising look at the caretaker`s dilemma as a vibrant mother deteriorates into illness and dementia. `How I Find Her` articulates a daughter`s grief, the struggle of letting go, and the unexpected gift of redemption following her mother`s death.
OFRAH'S AUGUST 2001 SELECTION
BREAST CANCER WARS
Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America
by Barron H Lerner MD (Columbia College of Surgeons)
(May 2001).
When Dr Lerner was an undergraduate, his mother discovered she had breast cancer. She quietly had it treated, and quietly recuperated. Lerner thought that was how it was done. When he aged and became a physician and historian, he learned that there was more to breast cancer, its treatment, its politics, and its support groups than he and his family were aware. This may be a controversial book. Survivors and physicians and families have deeply held, emotional views on the treatment of breast cancer, particularly the societal embrace of a "war on cancer" rather than an emphasis on prevention. Lerner focuses on the rise and fall of the radical mastectomy pioneered by surgeon William Halsted. To prevent what he theorized was the centrifugal spread of cancer to the lymph nodes, Halsted determined that it was necessary to remove not only the breast but also the nodes and two chest-wall muscles, leaving the patient feeling disfigured and with serious side effects. Lerner details CLEARLY the arguments that many in the scientific community made against this eventually DISCREDITED theory and against radical mastectomy, including those advanced by surgeon George Crile. Crile favored less aggressive operations and disagreed with the cancer establishment's relentless publicity campaign for early detection. He and others were convinced that it was the biology of the cancer, rather than how early it was diagnosed, that determined whether or not a tumor would metastasize. Dr. Lerner provides excellent portraits of the players in this controversy and helps you to understand why they chose their paths and beliefs. Lerner also explores the strong impact the 1970s women's movement had on cancer treatment, with women demanding more information from physicians and input into their treatment options. Pub Weekly calls it "Provocative and highly engaging."
HIGH MAINTENANCE
by JENNIFER BELLE
May 2001. Ms Belle has followed up her successful novel, GOING DOWN. The author of the outrageous, hilarious Going Down-named Best New Novelist by Entertainment Weekly-returns with her second novel: the story of an obsessive love affair between a woman and an apartment. High Maintenance is another brilliantly twisted New York story that is as funny, sad, painful, ridiculous, wild, daring, and lovable as its predecessor. Set in the manic world of New York real estate, it tells the story of Liv Kellerman, a young woman who's just left her husband and, more importantly, left their fabulous penthouse apartment with its Empire State Building view. On her own for the first time in her life, she relocates to a crumbling Greenwich Village hovel and contemplates her next move. Before long she finds her true calling: selling real estate. With her native eye for prime properties and an ability to lie with a straight face, Liv finds success and soon is swimming with the sharks-the hardcore, cutthroat brokers who'll do anything to close a deal. Along the way she picks up a maniacally ardent architect who likes to bite her, a few hilarious bosses, strange and exasperating clients, and a gun, and brings them with her on her search for the one thing she's really after-a home. Belle's gift for creating strange and winning characters and her acute observations of both the absurd and the poignant in everyday life are the hallmarks of her fiction. High Maintenance is generous and unsparing, tough and exciting and terrifically smart-a hot new property on the market.
DISCOVERING NATURAL ISRAEL by Michal Strutin
The flora and fauna of Israel, a place where there over 500 species of birds, about seven times as many as nest in Europe, and 2700 species of plants (twice as many as in Egypt). Michal Strutin has been involved with nature writing from her time as an editor at Outside and National Parks magazines. In Discovering Natural Israel: From the Coral Reefs of Eilat, through the mountains above Eilat, to the Emerald Crown of Mount Carmel (Where Haifa's mountains meet the Sea), to Gamla in the Golan, Michal Strutin shows travelers natural wonders often obscured by political realities: from Rosh Hanikra to Gamla to Ein Gedi, from Makhtesh Ramon, (Israel's Grand Canyon) to the hot springs of Gader. Strutin encounters two-foot long parrot fish grazing on coral in the Red Sea; wafer-thin, often motionless gazelle camouflaged in the Negev Desert; colonies of griffon vultures in the Golan; skinks; fringe-toed lizards; hyraxes and countless other mythic-seeming beasts. And no politicians.
OFRAH'S MAY 2001 SELECTION
Hi friends. I am happy to recommend this new book by Debra Nussbaum Cohen, a good Jewish journalist, and if I recall correctly, a former member of Telem(?). The book is so good, it makes one want to get pregnant and give birth, just so it can be applied.
Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter:
Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls--New and Traditional Ceremonies
by Debra Nussbaum Cohen
Jewish Lights Publishing. 2001. 192 pages.
The introduction opens with, "Mazal Tov, You've Had a Baby Girl!"
Each child comes with your hopes and dreams. Everybody is familiar with a bris, or brit milah circumcision ceremony and in modern times, a festive celebration, for healthy baby boys on their eighth day after birth. But what do you do when you have a daughter? What are they, chopped liver? Since the early 1970's, Jewish parents have been celebrating their daughters in original ways (Ezrat Nashim published the first ceremonies in 1977, and the havurah and renewal movements wrote about theirs dating back to 1973). Debra Nussbaum Cohen, a resident of Park Slope Brooklyn, and mother who has known the joy of birth and the pain of loss, has created this essential guide to new and traditional ceremonies with which to welcome your new daughter to the world, the covenant, and the Jewish people. It's about time. And it will be a welcome addition to your Jewish bookshelf and life. Just consider, what you create today will be a "tradition" for your descendants! Cohen started collecting organic Simchat Bat ceremonies when she was pregnant with her first child. It is an inclusive book that has ceremonies crafted for adherents to traditional Orthodoxy, traditional Sephardic rite, contemporary rites, contemporary Orthodox, humanism, and modren mikveh rites. Part One introduces you to welcoming ceremonies and Jewish tradition, including the idea of covenant, brit milah, and the custom of gomel. Part Two consists of about four dozen pages on seriously practical considerations for your ceremony. It includes chapters on how to involve your non-Jewish loved ones or spouse, if necessary (through acknowledgement and readings); what to do in cases of adoption and cross-cultural adoption (remember, Moses was an adopted child, and Mordechai was probably an adoptive parent); and gay and lesbian parenthood (since both parents will be fathers or mothers, or should you pray for your child to make it to the chuppah, or just to be in a loving relationship). Part Three focuses on planning the event, creating programs, sanctifying the space, and deciding when to have the Simchat Bat (eighth day, 30th day, etc.). Part Four contains over 150 pages of sample ceremonies, and hundreds of readings and elements from which you can pick and choose. It includes selections for welcoming, naming, prayers of thanksgiving, parental blessings, acrostics, psalms, readings for relatives and friends, blessings for wine and bread, and rituals for brit nerot (light), brit mikvah (immersion), brit rechitzah (footwashing/handwashing), brit tallit (enfolding her into the covenant), brit kehillah (community), brit melach, and brit havdalah (transitions). The book succeeds so well, one wishes all the babies were girls (or maybe some things can be borrowed for future boys).
OFRAH'S APRIL 2001 SELECTION
I am preparing for Pesach, and am really enjoying Joan Nathan's FOOD OF ISRAEL cookbook, and I have been browsing through some new Haggadahs. Of course, I am never too busy for at least one novel. My suggestion and selection for April is below. By the way, if you are riding in a NYC taxi, always wear your seatbelt. I learned the hard way.
Secret Love
by Bart Schneider
March 2001. A new novel by Bart Schneider, the author of Blue Bossa. The book's title (Secret Love) comes from the Doris Day song in the movie "Calamity Jane." The book is set in San Francisco, in the 1960s. The summer is approaching, and Barry Goldwater will be nominated top run against LBJ. Lenny Bruce is on the scene, as is Cassius Clay, Tang OJ mix, the race to the moon, Camus, and Mario Savio. Our hero is Jake Roseman, a Jewish prominent civil rights lawyer and agitator for urban renewal, who is in love with a beautiful black activist, Nisa. Jake, who dresses in Bermuda shorts, is in his 40s at a time when 40 was middle aged. Nisa Boehm (as in La Boheme?) is younger, an actress, and the daughter of a white socialite and a black father who vanished long ago. Nisa's annoyance grows from her Chinatown apartment, as Jake keeps her at arms length from his family. Jake is conflicted. Jake's wife, Inez, has recently committed suicide, and he has two kids. His curmudgeonly senile father is a vile racist. Over the course of their sensually passionate and sexually satisfying affair, Nisa draws Jake out of his remorseful depression and mourning. As their affair continues, we meet Peter, a handsome Jewish actor, who has of course changed his surname to make it in the business. Peter also finds love. After meeting in a foggy spot, Peter enters into a relationship with Simon Sims, a young black som of a minister. Simon, has fallen from his father's faith and taken up with the teachings of the Nation of Islam. So here are Jewish Peter and Muslim, closeted, gay, black, literary, janitor Simon, in love, and on their way to a civil rights march. You can see how the stories get interwoven. Click the cover to read more.
OFRAH'S MARCH 2001 SELECTION
I found my selection below to be especially timely and poignant, in light of the problems in Israel and the PA and the new elections. My suggestion and selection for March is below.
MARTYRS CROSSING by Amy Wilentz
Simon and Shuster. March 2001. Amy is the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and a specialist on Haiti. In this novel, a young Palestinian woman, who wants to get her 2 year old child to a hospital in Israel, begs a checkpoint soldier for permission to enter Israel. This is not just any mother. It is the wife of a jailed Hamas terrorist, Hassan Hajimi. Lt Ari Doron calls his superiors, but as he does, Marina's child dies. The answer was no. Lt Doron is plagued with guilt and seeks absolution in Ramallah. At the same time, the Palestinian politicians use this case as a cause du jour. Into this mess arrives Doctor George Raad from the USA. The child's grandfather and a successful cardiologist. Click to read more extensive descriptions of the plot.
OFRAH'S FEBRUARY 2001 SELECTION
House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood
by Adina Hoffman (Jerusalem Post Film Critic)
A beautifully designed book that paints a rich portrait through slice of life vignettes of the Musrara neighborhood in Jerusalem, as seen from the point of view of a single apartment and the American immigrant author. Musrara is a gentrified neighborhood that houses tensions between the old timers and newcomers. Some of her neighbors are open, others closed; some are bigots, others are accepting. There is the mystery of the original residents of the building. There is Sa'adia, a founder of the Sephardi Black Panthers, and his younger brother Meir, the grocer. There is Ahmed the gardner, and Rafi, a lame loner. Nahama must deal with her drug addicted son. Dvora knows much more than she lets on. An excellent book, but take her idealistic politics with a grain of salt.
Razor Scooter: Clear Wheels and Black Handlebars by Razor USA LLC
THE Hottest Toy around the shuls in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Tokyo, and Tel Aviv's Sheinkin Street. Speed safely down the street to the park to read your latest Jewish Books. The Razor--which supports persons up to 224 pounds (100 kilograms)--collapses down to a mere 23 by 5 by 7 inches and weighs just 6 pounds, making it a cinch to carry or pack. Its supershiny, 100 percent aluminum alloy structure is well engineered and dent resistant, and has a simple, stylish design. Click here to order or to read more about it.
OFRAH'S JANUARY 2001 SELECTION
AND THE FLAMES DID NOT CONSUME US
A Rabbi's Journey Through Communal Crisis
by Rabbi Gary Mazo
Paperback - 172 pages. On November 1, 1994, Carol Neulander, the wife of Rabbi Fred Neulander was found murdered in Cherry Hill NJ. What is shock to the community. The wife of a leading rabbi was brutally killed. Rabbi Gary Mazo, who came to Congregation M'kor Shalom four years prior to study with his mentor, Fred Neulander, was aghast. But then the suspense grew when Rabbi Neulander was fingered as the primary suspect. Was he guilty? Is he guilty? Instead of taking sides in the debate and ongoing murder trial, Gary tells how he helped lead the synagogue's 4000 members through the process of rumour control and mongering, pondering, questioning, doubting, and crisis. This concise, eloquently-written book relates Rabbi Mazo's journey through storms of a magnitude he never expected to face. Crisis reveals character. Despite his youth and lack of experience, despite advice from colleagues to leave the perilous situation, he made the commitment to stay and bring healing to his community. Click here to order this book from Amazon.com, read more reviews, or to add your own review.
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![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0805070206.jpg)
ELVIS IN JERUSALEM![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1580231624.jpg)
ALEPH BET YOGA ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0684853167.jpg)
Revenge: A Story of Hope ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1558612718.jpg)
Still Alive: ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0375411798.jpg)
ME TIMES THREE ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1902881532.jpg)
CHAINS AROUND THE GRASS ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1584650508.jpg)
What Makes Women Sick? Maternity, Modesty and Militarism in Israeli Society ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0375410716.jpg)
OLD MEN AT MIDNIGHT ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0152018697.jpg)
DAUGHTERS OF FIRE ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0813529166.jpg)
LESBIAN RABBIS ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/cart.gif)
HOW I FIND HER ![[book cover click here]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0195142616.jpg)
BREAST CANCER WARS ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1573221856.jpg)
HIGH MAINTENANCE ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/082460413X.jpg)
DISCOVERING NATURAL ISRAEL by Michal Strutin ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1580230903.jpg)
Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0670894923.jpg)
Secret Love ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/0684854368.gif)
MARTYRS CROSSING by Amy Wilentz ![[book]](http://www.sefersafari.com/1586420011.gif)
House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood ![[bookcover]](http://www.sefersafari.com/B00004W1B5.gif)
Razor Scooter: Clear Wheels and Black Handlebars by Razor USA LLC