Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice Studies in Tradition and Modernity
Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice Studies in Tradition and Modernity by David Ellenson The Jewish Publication Society, 2014 | 376 pp. US$45.00
These essays center on a description and examination of the complex push and pull between Jewish tradition and Western culture. David Ellenson addresses gender equality, women’s rights, conversion, issues relating to who is a Jew, the future of the rabbinate, Jewish day schools, and other emerging trends in American Jewish life. As an outspoken advocate for a strong Israel that is faithful to the democratic and Jewish values that informed its founders, he also writes about religious tolerance and pluralism in the Jewish state.
Monastery by Eduardo Halfon; Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, trans. Bellevue Literary Press, 2014 | 160 pp. US$14.95
In Monastery, the nomadic narrator of Eduardo Halfon’s The Polish Boxerreturns to travel from Guatemalan cities, villages, coffee plantations, and border towns to a private jazz concert in New York’s Harlem, a former German U-Boat base on the French Breton coast, and Israel, where he escapes from his sister’s Orthodox Jewish wedding into an erotic adventure with the enigmatic Tamara. His passing encounters are unforgettable; his relationships, problematic. At once a world citizen and a writer who mistrusts the power of language, he is pursued by history’s ghosts and unanswerable questions.
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