Books, Poetry & Short Stories

The Mezuzah and the Coronavirus

One of the fascinating aspects of the coronavirus and its impact upon our society is the impact it is having on the religious lives of people across the world. In Israel, the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi asked Jews to stop kissing mezuzahs because of the coronavirus, while a major European rabbinical group published its own directives how to contain the spread of the illness. For those who are unfamiliar with what a mezuzah is, a mezuzah is a small parchment that contains some of the most sacred Jewish prayers, most notably, the Shema. Some Jews are instructed not to touch the mezuzah, or a Torah scroll with their hands. [Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Jewish Religion, Michael Leo Samuel-Rabbi, Middle East, Science, Medicine, & Education, USA

Universities urge Pass/No Pass grades this semester

With in-person classes transferred to Internet learning at UC Berkeley, my grandson, Shor Masori, is back home in San Diego, monitoring his classes via computer.  Recently, he and his fellow undergraduates received a notice from Bob Jacobsen, Letters & Science Dean of Undergraduate Studies.  It began, “The chair of the Academic Senate has written to explain that for this semester only, the default grades that instructors will give are Pass and No Pass.” [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Middle East, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts, San Diego County, Science, Medicine, & Education, Shor M. Masori, Theatre, Film & Broadcast, Travel and Food

Pandemics, God, and social responsibility

As the coronavirus is spreading throughout the world, I am social-distancing myself from the rest of the outside world. In quiet but worrisome times like this I enjoy reading literature from history’s most thought-provoking answers—and that is how I decided to re-read Albert Camus’ 1947 short story, The Plague, about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal city of Oran; it is considered to be a classic of twentieth-century literature. [Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel]

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

Kibbutz with San Diego connections subject of new memoir

Located south of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) and about a kilometer west of Israel’s border with Jordan, Kfar Ruppin, a kibbutz with San Diego connections, is the subject of an enchanting memoir by Rachel Biale, a Berkeley, California, resident who grew up there. [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Jewish History, Middle East, San Diego County, Travel and Food

Cli-fi author helped Jewish neighbors on Shabbat

The more I work at this column-writing gig, the more I realize how true the motto of this website is that that “there’s a Jewish story everywhere.” Case in point: I was writing a draft about a hilarious new cli-fi novel from a Canadian humorist named David Millar when during one of our casual online chats about his book The Ministry For Ignoring Climate Change he told me a great little anecdote about his connection to Jewish people and Jewish culture. [Dan Bloom]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, The World We Share

Books, Internet tell of plagues through history

The plague has interested me for over 60 years. On my shelves I have Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year 1665; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976); John Aberth, the author of The Black Death, The Great Mortality of 1348-1350 (2005), the first of his several studies on mass mortality; Teofilo F. Ruiz, The Terror of History, on the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization (2011); and Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink (2017). I knew people who suffered through the 1918 Influenza epidemic. And I know three of the above mentioned authors. One of the first books I received as a gift was Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. [Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D]

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

‘Fate of Our Fathers’ tells horror of Stalin’s purges

Stalin ruled from the mid-1920s to 1953. Vladimir Berger was born in 1931. In 1937, at the age of 6, his father, Iosif Shmulevich Berger, was arrested by the secret police. Vladimir, his mother and sister never saw him again. The family went from being reasonably well off to selling what they had to make ends meet. [Book review by Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D]

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

A Talmud-based Passover tale for children

Somewhere in Eastern Europe, in a little Jewish village, a woman who had been preparing to burn the last pieces of collected chometz in anticipation of that evening’s Passover seder, was startled to see a white mouse jump up on her table, steal a piece of bread, and leave crumbs behind as it ran away. [Book review by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Jewish Religion, Trivia, Humor & Satire

‘The Super Achievers’ probes Jewish Nobelists

The Super Achievers by Ronald Gerstl reveals the remarkable disproportionate Jewish contributions to world knowledge of science and heath, and the surprisingly high number of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners in these fields. Although Jews are only 0.2% of the world’s population, Jews were awarded 24% of the Nobel Prizes in science and medicine. Similarly, while Jews account for only 2% of the American population, they received 37% of the US Nobel Prize awards in these fields. [Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Israel Drazin-Rabbi Dr., Jewish History, USA

A history of Gold Country Jews in pictures

Gold was discovered in January 1848 at Sutter Creek near Coloma, in what became El Dorado County in 1850. Five chapters focus on thirteen Northern California counties. Patterns emerge. Jews were attracted by the opportunities posed by the discovery of gold, but they did not go into staking claims and mining, they went into commerce, shifting from itinerant peddling into storefronts. Enterprising immigrants provided much needed supplies including dry goods at mercantile stores. Miner settlements went from canvas tents to wooden structures and ended with a degree of permanence and optimism, brick and stone buildings. Some boomtowns became ghost towns and were transformed into State Parks and Historic places. The magic word, according to Fred Rosenbaum, historian of Jewish California is “retail.” [Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D]

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

Works of Holocaust poets performed at LFJCC

“That was the last butterfly. Butterflies don’t live in the Ghetto” wrote Pavel Friedmann in Terezin, before he was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished in 1944. Myla Wingard opened the March 3 program in the Astor Judaic Library, Poets of the Holocaust, with an inspiring musical rendition of that iconic poem. “Never say that you are going your last way.” Those words, penned by Hirsh Glik, became the anthem of the Jewish Partisans. The Ohr Shalom Choir was joined by the audience in singing that song of defiance and hope to conclude the program in which fifteen poets were represented. [Eileen Wingard]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Eileen Wingard, International, Jewish History, San Diego County

A Czech woman’s journey through the Holocaust

Published  posthumously with the help of her author daughter Helen Epstein, Franci’s War by Franci Rabinek Epstein is a well-written step-by-step recounting of Franci’s experiences during the Holocaust. A dress designer of  good reputation in Prague, Franci was transported with her parents to Terezin, the Nazis’ “model ghetto” nearby.  She was able to secretly rendezvous with her first husband, Pepik “Joe” Solar, who had been arrested and sent away earlier than she was.  Soon, however, her parents were taken on another transport to their deaths, and with Joe leaving the ghetto daily to work as slave labor on a railroad spur, Franci often was left to her own devices [Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, International, Jewish History

The radio rabbi shares his greatest hits

Award-winning Rabbi Joseph Potasnik is the “Radio Rabbi,” having been on the New York airways at 1010 WINS and 770 WABC since 1972, and starting in 1999, serving as Jewish Chaplain for the New York City Fire Department. In the introductory chapter of his newest book Just Give Me a Minute, Potasnik confesses that people ask him questions about anything and everything. In Just Give Me a Minute, Potasnik shares his insights and answers. [Fred Reiss, Ed.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Fred Reiss, EdD, Jewish Religion

SDJW correspondent publishes sixth novel

Our correspondent in Mevasseret Zion, Israel, Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, has written a sixth novel, this one called A Ruffled Calm.  As with her previous five novels, Shefer-Vanson has illustrated the cover of her book with one of her own art pieces, seen to the right of this story. [Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, Jewish Religion, Middle East, USA