Six-Words Memoirs on Jewish Life

Six-Words Memoirs on Jewish Life PDF Author: Larry Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984735013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Get Book Here

Book Description
The popular Six-Word Memoir(r) project examines a subject bursting with words: Jewish life. With contributions from machers like Larry David, Jonathan Safran Foer, Henry Winkler, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Gary Shteyngart, Maira Kalman, Walter Mosley, Art Spiegelman, A.J. Jacobs and Ed Koch, along with hundreds of first-time writers, Six-Word Memoirs on Jewish Life offers stories of faith and family, duty and identity, celebration and tsuris that will inform, delight and inspir

Six-Words Memoirs on Jewish Life

Six-Words Memoirs on Jewish Life PDF Author: Larry Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984735013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Get Book Here

Book Description
The popular Six-Word Memoir(r) project examines a subject bursting with words: Jewish life. With contributions from machers like Larry David, Jonathan Safran Foer, Henry Winkler, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Gary Shteyngart, Maira Kalman, Walter Mosley, Art Spiegelman, A.J. Jacobs and Ed Koch, along with hundreds of first-time writers, Six-Word Memoirs on Jewish Life offers stories of faith and family, duty and identity, celebration and tsuris that will inform, delight and inspir

Six Word Memoirs On Jewish Life

Six Word Memoirs On Jewish Life PDF Author: Larry Smith
Publisher: Six-Word Memiors
ISBN: 9780984735068
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The popular Six-Word Memoir(R) project examines a subject bursting with words: Jewish life. With contributions from machers like Larry David, Amy Schumer, Henry Winkler, Jonathan Safran Foer, Liana Finck, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Josh Gondelman, Maira Kalman, Walter Mosley, Gary Shteyngart, and Art Spiegelman, along with hundreds of never-before-published writers, Six-Word Memoirs on Jewish Life offers stories of faith and family, duty and identity, celebration and tsuris that will inform, delight and inspire.

My Life in Jewish Renewal

My Life in Jewish Renewal PDF Author: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442213299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
This powerful memoir chronicles the life of one of America’s most celebrated rabbis—Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, or “Reb Zalman” as he is fondly known to friends and followers. The book traces his life from a youth in the shadow of the Nazis through the tumultuous 1960s in America to his position as a renowned religious leader today. Often controversial for his attraction to cultural mavericks and religious rebels, Reb Zalman’s colorful lifetime includes a striking cast of characters across faith traditions, including Timothy Leary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, and more. The book traces Reb Zalman’s work creating the vibrant Jewish Renewal movement that emphasizes spiritual experience and continues to touch Jews around the world today. Reb Zalman often illustrates his talks with anecdotes from his life, and My Life in Jewish Renewal brings together the life story of this beloved leader for the first time. Reb Zalman often illustrates his talks with stories from his life, and My Life in Jewish Renewal brings together the complete life story of this beloved leader for the first time.

Not Quite What I Was Planning

Not Quite What I Was Planning PDF Author: Larry Smith
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061750913
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time. One Life. Six Words. What's Yours? When Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving. From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-sized pieces. From authors Jonathan Lethem and Richard Ford to comedians Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris, to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.

This Jewish Life

This Jewish Life PDF Author: Debra B. Darvick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781934879368
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
In "This Jewish Life: Stories of Discover, Connection, and Joy," fifty-five voices enable readers to experience a calendar's worth of Judaism's strengths-community, healing, transformation of the human spirit and the influence of the Divine. Within these pages are stories of joyous engagement and poignant loss. Readers will meet a teen who followed the path of Judaism after a chance encounter and men and women who turned to Judaism in their struggles with drug addiction and spousal abuse. Structured to mirror a complete year of Jewish life cycle events and holidays, this unique book showcases a bar mitzvah service in rural Illinois, a commitment ceremony in a California metropolis, a Soviet family's first Passover Seder, and much more. These stories will carry readers, Jew and non-Jew alike, through twelve months of Jewish Living

The Impossible Just Takes a Little Longer

The Impossible Just Takes a Little Longer PDF Author: Art Berg
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006051213X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
A postscript to this edition includes a touching letter that Berg's young daughter wrote about her father for the Books for a Better Life Awards ceremony. On December 26, 1983, Art Berg was traveling to see his fiancée when his car went off the road. A broken neck left him a quadriplegic. Doctors told Berg he would never walk, hold a job, or have children. But they could not have been more wrong. Berg was determined to prevail, and would one day wear his own Super Bowl ring. In The Impossible Just Takes a Little Longer, Berg recounts his harrowing and inspirational story while imparting larger lessons about life, fear, and passion. Never giving up, Art resolved to embrace life even more fully, and established a thriving career as a motivational speaker, giving more than 150 speeches each year. Tragically, Art Berg died in February 2002, but his inspiring story -- a singular vision of passion and conviction -- lives on in The Impossible Just Takes a Little Longer.

Shush! Growing Up Jewish under Stalin

Shush! Growing Up Jewish under Stalin PDF Author: Emil Draitser
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520942256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word "Jewish"—even in casual conversation—he lowered his voice. This behavior was a natural by-product, he realized, of growing up in the anti-Semitic, post-Holocaust Soviet Union, when "Shush!" was the most frequent word he heard: "Don't use your Jewish name in public. Don't speak a word of Yiddish. And don't cry over your murdered relatives." This compelling memoir conveys the reader back to Draitser's childhood and provides a unique account of midtwentieth-century life in Russia as the young Draitser struggles to reconcile the harsh values of Soviet society with the values of his working-class Jewish family. Lively, evocative, and rich with humor, this unforgettable story ends with the death of Stalin and, through life stories of the author's ancestors, presents a sweeping panorama of two centuries of Jewish history in Russia.

Between Dignity and Despair

Between Dignity and Despair PDF Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195313585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Six Memos from the Last Millennium

Six Memos from the Last Millennium PDF Author: Joseph Skibell
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477307362
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
A storyteller’s take on the Talmud and the timeless wisdom contained within its tales provides “a fresh look at an ancient source” (Kirkus Reviews). A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother’s and her husband’s egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and 4235 (190 and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one approaches it as a collection of tales with surprising relevance for contemporary readers? In Six Memos from the Last Millennium, Joseph Skibell, critically acclaimed author of A Blessing on the Moon and other novels, reads some of the Talmud’s tales with a storyteller’s insight, concentrating on the lives of the legendary rabbis depicted in its pages to uncover the wisdom they can still impart to our modern age. He unifies strands of stories that are scattered throughout the Talmud into coherent narratives or “memos,” which he then analyzes and interprets from his perspective as a novelist. In Skibell’s imaginative and personal readings, this sacred literature frequently defies our conventional notions of piety. Sometimes wild, rude, and even bawdy, these memos from the last millennium pursue a livable transcendence, a way of fusing the mundane hours of earthly life with a cosmic sense of holiness and wonder.

A Separate Circle

A Separate Circle PDF Author: Wendy Lowe Besmann
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572331259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
"An insightful and well-written book. One of the best studies of local Jewish history extant."--Leonard Dinnerstein, University of Arizona For more than a century and a half, the Jewish citizens of the area in and around Knoxville, Tennessee, have maintained the rituals and traditions that define them as a separate people, even as they have blended quietly with their non-Jewish neighbors. Wendy Lowe Besmann paints a vivid picture of this community, bringing alive the stories of merchants, grocers, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and scientists and university professionals who have come to call the area home. Drawing on interviews and other sources, she traces the growth of local synagogues, explores the role of Jewish community centers, looks at how children were shaped by school and Temple life, and even recalls the community's summer vacations at nearby Neubert Springs. With broad historical sweep, Besmann examines what life was like for Knoxville's early Jewish community and how the events of their lives were affected by American expansion and depression, by social upheaval and urban migration. Successive waves of immigrants, from the traveling peddlers of the late nineteenth century to the doctors, lawyers, and engineers of the late twentieth, have both adapted to the culture of East Tennessee and shaped it in subtle ways. As they did in cities all over the South, Knoxville's Jewish population followed jobs, meaning that most of them did not grow up in the region. Besmann looks at topics as diverse as patterns of chain migration, the role of Jewish merchants in the Civil War, and the contributions of a Jewish-owned music store to the career of Elvis Presley. She describes the vital role of ritual and celebration in the community, from the importance placed on religious education to the songs played at bar mitzvahs. The Author: Wendy Lowe Besmann is a freelance writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, Self, and Better Homes & Gardens. She lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.