Books, Poetry & Short Stories

Sudden fortune challenges Jewish family

What Helen Auerbach’s  youngest daughter initially mistook for costume jewelry was in fact a 137-carat diamond, none other than the Florentine Diamond that had been missing since the end of the Habsburg Dynasty.  Helen left it to her youngest granddaughter Beck, skipping over her daughter Deborah Miller, as well as her other grandchildren Ashley and Jake. [Book review by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison

Jewish Poets-Jewish Voices to be carried May 5 on Zoom

When the Lawrence Family JCC needed to close because of the Coronavirus and all programs were cancelled, it seemed obvious that the Jewish Poets—Jewish Voices program, scheduled for Tuesday, May 5, at 7 p.m. would not take place. However, Melanie Rubin, the JCC’s innovative Director of Senior Activities and the Astor Judaica Library, and her assistant, Sarah Mattis, suggested that we could have the program after all, by doing it on the internet through Zoom. [Eileen Wingard]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Eileen Wingard, Melanie Rubin, San Diego County

The noble lie: King Christian X and the Jews

My friend and editor of San Diego Jewish World, Don Harrison, and I were having an interesting conversation I would like to share with you. We were talking about the famous Danish King Christian X, who was said to have worn a yellow Star of David together with his people to show solidarity with the Danish Jews. The yellow Star of David helped the Nazis distinguish the Jews from the Gentiles. [Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, International, Jewish History, Michael Leo Samuel-Rabbi

The eye of prophecy?

Great writers of science fiction literature often have a keen intuition of what the future might bring. Whether you read H.P. Lovecraft or H. G. Wells, whose science-fiction writings makes the impossible seem almost believable. H.G. Wells’ is probably best known for his classical story, The Time Machine, which he published in 1895. His insights into the future were prescient in many ways. Wells anticipated many technological changes, e.g., wars conducted in the air; the sexual revolution; motorized vehicles, world-wars, a federalized Europe (think: European Union), the emergence of the atomic bomb. Wells especially anticipated the dystopian genre. The same could be said about Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek series. [Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel}

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Jewish Religion, Michael Leo Samuel-Rabbi

A Toronto bagel bakery backstory

I recently received an email from a Canadian novelist named Roberta Park in Toronto, author of a new cli-fi novella titled The Disappearing Shore. “We are at an extraordinary point in human history, and my eco-lit tale addresses the fears and responsibility we must face,” she told me. She sent me a copy of her novel and I am reading it now. I also noticed on her blog that she knows the story of ”Moishe” in Jewish storytelling … [Dan Bloom]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Travel and Food

Book Review: A Rosenberg by any other name

You gotta love this book. Page 1 leads with my favorite “Ferguson” (shayn fergessen) joke which I have retold tirelessly for years. Fermaglich reveals that Winona Ryder, born in Winona, Minnesota and currently playing the role of Evelyn Finkel in the Netflix series The Plot Against America, based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, was born Winona Laura Horowitz. But this book is not about jokes and celebrities but about the real choices that the nearly three million Jews who came to America between 1880 and 1920 had to make to feel comfortable and make progress in America. [Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Jewish History, Oliver Pollak, USA

How Shakespeare might have described Covid19

Now is the springtime of our confinement
Made mournfully frightful by the toll in New York.                                                                                             
A surfeit of time spent alone in our homes
Sheltering in place and bending the curve.  …
[Parody by Laurie Baron, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Lawrence Baron, Trivia, Humor & Satire

Addressing Bible difficulties

It is only in recent times that Yeshivas (post-high-school religious schools) began again to teach Bible. The problem that the rabbis faced was that enlightenment scholars raised multiple questions about the Bible, questions that seemed to show that God did not write or inspire the Bible, but that it was composed by many different authors with different agendas, some of whom made mistakes. The Yeshiva rabbis did not know how to respond to the attacks. So, the rabbis stopped teaching Bible and told students that if they wanted to study the Torah they should do so on their own. Instead, the rabbis taught only Talmud and ethical books. This situation existed when I attended a prominent Yeshiva in the 1950s. [Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Israel Drazin-Rabbi Dr., Jewish Religion

Author probes ‘desert Islam’ versus its cosmopolitan form

The author was born into a Muslim family living in Canada, so therefore she grew up in a modern, pluralistic and capitalist society while being educated in the tradition of the Muslim religion. In the first part of her book she identifies herself as a lesbian, a journalist and a feminist with an inquirinig mind and openness to interaction with other cultures. She has studied the Koran and the various Muslim texts extensively, and has come to the conclusion that the way the religion is pursued in most Muslim countries today is in fact a travesty and a distortion of its original principles. [Book review by Dorothea Shefer-Vanson]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, International, Middle East

1997 novel about 2020 predicted a lethal pandemic

Neta Halperin, a literary critic in the leftwing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, leads off with a headline: ”The Coronavirus Novel: An Israeli Author Wrote a Book on the 2020 Pandemic 23 Years Ago” accompanied by a subheadline that reads: ”In her science fiction novel ‘2020’ published in 1997, an Israeli author described a global pandemic much like the coronavirus. Now she explains why she went there and how she managed to get things so right.” [Dan Bloom]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories

Havdalah moves west with San Diego connections

Those with Internet connections could watch the Havdalah ceremonies with San Diego connections move west on Saturday from Israel to New Jersey en route to San Diego.

In Israel, Cantor Hanan Leberman, who serves for specified holidays as a cantor at Tifeeth Israel Synagogue in San Diego, provided songs and traditional chants in the ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of the regular week.  As is customary, he drank wine, smelled spices, and watched the flames of the havdalah candle flicker shadows from his fingers to the palm of his hand. Hours later, in Vorhees, New Jersey, Cantor Alisa Pomerantz-Boro of that township’s Congregation Beth El, was accompanied by her daughter Rebecca as she marked the end of the Sabbath.  [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Jewish Religion, Lifestyles, San Diego County, Science, Medicine, & Education, Trivia, Humor & Satire

Bry sees less need in future for office space, more need for Internet connections, technology

City Councilwoman Barbara Bry, whose runoff status for mayor against Assemblyman Todd Gloria has now been confirmed by the San Diego County Registrar of Voters, said on Friday that the coronavirus pandemic likely will have both short-term and long-term impacts on the City of San Diego [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts, San Diego County, Science, Medicine, & Education, Videos

Jewish storyteller behind ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’

There’s a bright spot for children (and their adults) amidst all the sad news worldwide now about the COVID-19 pandemic. A cute children’s picture book written 30 years ago by a British storyteller and performer named Michael Rosen has been making the headlines recently, with TV broadcasts on CNN, the BBC and several TV stations in New Zealand. [Dan Bloom]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Videos