DescriptionBoth funny and moving, this story of a most unusual Bar Mitzvah beautifully captures the spirit of one of the most important days in a young man's life. Featuring a special guest appearance by author James Howe himself as the rabbi!
DescriptionIn this hilarious title story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute.
DescriptionFor Ronit Krushka, 32, single and living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Orthodox Judaism is a suffocating culture she fled long ago. But when she learns of the death of her estranged father, the preeminent rabbi of the London Orthodox Jewish community in which she was raised, she leaves behind her Friday-night takeout, her troublesome romance, and her boisterous circle of friends to return home. Her dual mission there is to mourn her father and to collect a single heirloom of her mother's. But as she reconnects with old acquaintances and the traditional ebb and flow of the community, Ronit becomes more than a stranger in her old home: she becomes a threat. Set at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, Disobedience explores a devout and closed world to discover the importance of moving on - and what we lose when we do.
DescriptionThe Pagan Rabbi Isaac Kornfeld, a learned rabbi, has hanged himself in a park. His old friend pays a condolence call upon a bereaved wife. And he is shocked to find her cold, unforgiving, as she tells the story of her husband's great struggle between the flowering nymph of his passions and the book-laden old Jew of his soul. "Envy, or Yiddish in America" Ostrover the Story Teller is the only Yiddish writer in America whose work is regularly translated and published. Edelshtein the Poet seethes with jealousy. If he, Edelshtein, had a translator, he'd be famous too! Tongueless in America, imprisoned in Yiddish, Edelshtein plots and yearns and staggers through the snows of Manhattan, looking for a translator to save him from his fate.
DescriptionSet in Manhattan, this is a story of classic scope in which the characters hunger for love, wrestle with faith and doubt, and struggle to bind themselves to something sacred in the midst of modern chaos. Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradict…
DescriptionAs A Driven Leaf is a novel in which fictional and historical characters comfortably coexist. It is a gripping tale of the renegade Talmudic sage, Elisha ben Abuyah, caught in a personal struggle between his own faith and the compelling culture of Rome, circa 70 CE. The genius of Milton Steinberg's great work is that it illuminates the political and intellectual conflicts of Rabbinic times in a way that shows their relevance to Jewish faith, nationhood, and personal development in every era, including our own.
