Books for Shabbat Book Club (Winter 2011):

12:45 - 2:00 pm

NOTE: We have switched the order of the books for the next two sessions. In February, we will discuss:

Saturday, February 5, 2011

   Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by Rebecca Goldstein

This biography of 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) may seem out of place in the Jewish Encounters series, devoted to Jewish thinkers and themes, because Spinoza denied the importance of Jewish identity, and Amsterdam's Jewish community expelled him for heresy. But Goldstein, author of The Mind-Body Problem and Incompleteness and a professor of philosophy, reconstructs Spinoza's life and traces his metaphysics to his efforts to solve the dilemmas of Jewish identity. The philosopher grew up in a community of Jews who had fled the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. As Goldstein argues, Spinoza's "determination to think through his community's tragedy in the most universal terms possible compelled him to devise a unique life for himself, insisting on secularism when the concept of it had not yet been conceived." For Spinoza, "salvation" lay in achieving the radical objectivity of pure reason, which dissolves the contingent facts of one's personal history and religious and ethnic identity. Spinoza's effort to live as neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim was unthinkable in the 17th century, but his arguments for political and religious tolerance were forerunners for the U.S. Constitution. In this admirable biography, Goldstein shows that Spinoza is paradoxically Jewish, "[f]or what can be more characteristic of a Jewish thinker than to use the Jewish experience as a conduit to universality?" From Publishers Weekly

Saturday, March 5, 2011

5.    Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge by Ed Kritzler

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition forced many Jews to flee the country. The most adventurous among them took to the high seas as freewheeling outlaws. In ships bearing names such as Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, they attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is the entertaining saga of a hidden chapter in Jewish history, and of the cruelty, terror and greed that flourished during the Age of Discovery. Among the many daring figures to feature in the book are: 'the Great Jewish Pirate' Sinan, Barbarossa's second-in-command; Rabbi Samuel Palache and his brother, Joseph, who went from commanding pirate ships to founding the first openly Jewish community in the New World; and Abraham Cohen Henriques, and arms dealer who used his cunning and economic muscle to find safe havens for other Jews. Filled with high-seas adventures including encounters with Captain Morgan and other legendary pirates - and detailed portraits of cities stacked high with plunder, such as Port Royal, Jamaica, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean captures a gritty and glorious era of history from an unusual and eye opening perspective. Edward Kritzler is a historian and a former reporter for USA Today. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

7.    Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging, Derek Rubin (Editor)

Promised Lands features 23 stories by Elisa Albert, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Janice Eidus, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Lauren Grodstein, Aaron Hamburger, Dara Horn, Rachel Kadish, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Joan Leegant, Yael Goldstein Love, Rivka Lovett, Tova Mirvis, Lev Raphael, Nessa Rapoport, Jonathan Rosen, Thane Rosenbaum, Joey Rubin, Edward Schwarzschild, Steve Stern, Lara Vapnyar, Adam Wilson, and Jonathan Wilson.

This vibrant anthology showcases new, unpublished short stories by a rapidly growing crop of highly talented young Jewish American fiction writers. Cohering around the core Jewish theme of the Promised Land, all the stories were written especially for this volume. With the kind of depth and imagination that only fiction allows, they offer striking variations on the multivalent theme of the Promised Land and how it continues to shape the collective consciousness of contemporary American Jews. This anthology provides a rich reading experience and a unique window onto Jewish American life and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A scholarly introduction by Rubin provides literary context, discusses the organization of the volume, and illuminates expected and unexpected connections among the stories.

May 11, 2010 (Sunday)

8.    The Reader by Bernard Schlink  

"The Reader" is an intensely moving novella in which Michael, a fifteen-year old German boy, falls in love with a thirty-six-year old woman, Hanna, a streetcar conductor. A story as old as the hills, yet their affair became a life-altering event for both of them. The narrative is divided into three sections: one, the affair, two, Hanna's trial as the perpetrator of war crimes atrocities while she was serving as an SS guard in concentration camps, and three, Hanna's years of imprisonment following the trial and Michael's half-life seeking answers and salvation.
In Part One Michael thinks he has betrayed Hanna by disavowal, by not admitting her existence to his friends. That is nothing compared to his betrayals of her during the trial and in her prison years. In the sections of the book in which Michael is trying to probe his own moral predicaments and dilemmas, his philosophical positions, his reasoning is complicated and convoluted.

The book gives no easy answers. We cannot forgive Hanna for what she did. She had a secret that she tried desperately to keep.