Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

by Alan Morinis

Mussar is the spiritual discipline of becoming a mensch.

Alan Morinis’ book, Everyday Holiness: the Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar, brings this 1,000-year-old tradition to life for modern audiences.

Mussar practice – a blend of study, meditation, introspection and action – was originally passed from student to teacher. The practice virtually died out with the Holocaust.

Morinis himself discovered Mussar at one of the lowest points of his life. Working as a filmmaker, writer and producer, he was riding a comet of success – until a film failed. He was forced to confront the fact that the man he had become was far, far from the man he had planned to become.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

By Erik Larson

At the start of one of the most critical periods in U.S.-German relations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself unable to find a candidate willing to accept the role of ambassador to Germany in 1933.

Germany was volatile and the assignment oxymoronic: do what you can to protest Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany unofficially while maintaining cordial official diplomatic relations.

Wiser, more experienced men than Professor William E. Dodd, who ultimately accepted the position, turned the post down.

Triangle

By Katharine Weber

On March 25, the 108th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire will be observed. The fire, which broke out near closing time on a Saturday afternoon, killed 146 workers, mostly women, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. It was the 9/11 of its time.

The tragedy spurred major reforms in working conditions in New York City’s sweatshops and helped unions gain acceptance.

Triangle tells the story in three voices. Esther Gottesfeld, the last living survivor of the fire at 106, is heard from only indirectly through interviews and trial transcripts. She has kept key secrets for a lifetime. Ruth Zion is a self-serving feminist researcher with a nose for missing information and an astute ability to suggest what fits into the blanks. Internationally renowned composer George Botkin marries Esther’s granddaughter, Rebecca, a genetic researcher.

The Woman Who Fought an Empire; Sarah Aaronsohn and Her Nili Spy Ring

By Gregory J. Wallance

Had it not been for a homesick housewife returning to her native Palestine and witnessing the Armenian genocide in 1914, the British would have faced greater challenges defeating the Ottoman Empire in 1917.

Of course, the housewife was no ordinary woman. She was Sarah Aaronsohn. The daughter of Romanian immigrants, she had grown up in Zichron Ya'akov, a settlement community about 22 miles south of Haifa.

Sarah happened to be on the train from Constantinople (modern Istanbul) to Haifa to visit her family. In March 1914, she’d married Haim Abraham, a Bulgarian Jewish businessman who lived in Constantinople. But she was unhappy, and missed the freedom and autonomy she had managing her father's household in Zichron and working with her brother Aaron, an internationally renowned agronomist. Her visit was supposed to last only a few months, but she never returned.

The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar
Translated by Hillel Halkin

When this book opens "on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Elul, the year 5760, counting from the creation of the world," Andrew P. Cohen, professor of comparative culture at New York University (NYU), is at the peak of a perfect life.

But that day, "which happened to fall on Wednesday, September 6, 2000, the gates of heaven were opened above the great city of New York, and behold: all seven celestial spheres were revealed, right above the West 4th Street subway station, layered one on top of another like the rungs of a ladder reaching skyward from the earth."

There, in the first paragraph, we are faced with the amazing and beautiful duality of this book. Page after page, author Ruby Namdar makes the real magical and the magical real.