Jewish News

 Madam—The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age   Debby Applegate  553 pp  Doubleday, 2021 Frank Sinatra, Walter Winchell, Lucky Luciano, Dorothy Parker, Duke Ellington, Dutch Schultz, Robert Benchley, Desi Arnaz—and likely FDR. This is just a partial list of Jazz Era writers, celebrities, musicians, gangsters, politicians, and other notables who had one thing [...]

Tuesday, December 6, 12 pm Watch from Home–Register for the link to join   The Matchmaker’s Gift: A Novel Linda Cohen Loigman St. Martin’s Press 320 pages, 2022 Do you believe in love at first sight? Do you believe in soulmates? The Matchmaker’s Gift is a dual-timeline novel about Sara Glikman Auerbach, and her granddaughter, [...]

Klezmer for the Joyful Soul Debbie Burke Queen Esther Publishing LLC 206 pages; 2021 Debbie Burke, a local author who has written several books on jazz and two novels, published a book last year on klezmer music. In Klezmer for the Joyful Soul, she interviews 30 klezmer musicians, scholars, historians, and cantors about the fascinating [...]

Bound In The Bond Of Life (Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy) Edited by Beth Kissileff and Eric Lidji University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020 242 pages   The utterly shocking and deeply unsettling 83-minute attack on Shabbat morning, October 27, 2018, on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, resulting in the [...]

Rafael Medoff Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2019. 387 pages. Professor Rafael Medoff is an orthodox ordained rabbi and prolific author who is the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies as well as the co-editor of its online Encyclopedia of American Response to the Holocaust. The Jews Should Keep Quiet [...]

The Serpent Papers Jeff Schnader The Permanent Press, March 2022 ISBN: 978-1-57962-648-8 302 pages, $29.95 I recently finished reading The Serpent Papers, a new novel about the Vietnam era by Jeff Schnader, a local retired physician and EVMS professor turned author. And I can’t stop thinking about it. College life in America during the peak of the [...]

X Troop— The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II Leah Garrett Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021 351 pages Ask most American Jews about Jewish warriors and they will promptly mention the Maccabees and contemporary Israeli soldiers. In X Troop—The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II, author and historian Leah Garrett, provides a long overdue [...]

Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power Yaakov Katz May 2019 St. Martin’s, 320 pages ISBN: 978-1-250-19127-4 Shadow Strike is a must read for followers of Israel’s military history, as well as for those that follow serious world events that may affect all of us in the coming years. At the heart [...]

Jewish summer camp is such a crucial part of the American Jewish experience that many Jewish adults, even in their older age, likely remember the names of many of the kids in their cabins from when they were 11 years old. One of those cabins more than 60 years ago contained a couple of interesting [...]

Outsmart Your Pain! The Essential Guide to Overcoming Pain and Transforming Your Life Lisa Barr, MD Illustrations by Tim Sovine Synergy Health Quest, LLC, 2018 ISBN 13: 978-1-7320011-0-7 In the opening pages of Outsmart Your Pain!, Lisa Barr, MD, says, “The science of pain is always changing.” Two pages later, she notes, “The purpose of [...]