David Bird and Ron Klinger made a great hit with KOSHER BRIDGE, which was enthusiastically applauded world-wide by the leading bridge critics. In THE RABBI AND THE WEAKER SEX, the retitled KOSHER BRIDGE 2, the cast returns in splendid form and the Rabbi, kindly and considerate, maintains an essential balance between the hilariously warring factions and the excellence of the bridge ensures that readers will be properly instructed while being immoderately entertained. If you did not read the first book you can start with this one. We guarantee you will come back for more.
“For a generation of women who grew up watching Sex and the City, Manhattan is the Promised Land—or as Rebecca Dana puts it in her hilarious, self-deprecating new memoir, it’s ‘my Jerusalem—the shining city off in the distance, the only place to go’…[An] insightful tale of two fish out of water.”—O Magazine Rebecca Dana worshipped at the altar of Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, dreaming of moving to New York. After college, life in the city turned out just as she’d planned: glamorous parties; beautiful people; the perfect job, apartment and man. But when it all comes crashing down, she is catapulted into another world. She moves into Brooklyn’s Lubavitch community, and lives with Cosmo, a young Russian rabbi and jujitsu enthusiast. While Cosmo faces his disenchantment with Orthodoxy, Rebecca finds that her religion—the books and films that made New York seem like salvation—has also failed her. Shuttling between the worlds of religious extremism and secular excess, faith and fashion, Rebecca goes on a search for meaning. A mix of Shalom Auslander and The Odd Couple, Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde is a thought-provoking tale for the twenty-first century. Includes a Readers Guide
The secrets of the confessional are too important to be kept secret, and Jonathan Romain shares them all in this rollercoaster of crises, emotional traumas, moral dilemmas, attempts at seduction, multiple murders, machiavellian families, hijacked weddings, catastrophic funerals and a maze of other people's sexual fantasies. Rabbi Romain's previous careers - as a radio agony uncle, prison chaplain, postman and nightclub bouncer - have helped him navigate the human jungle, and now he takes us with him on a remarkable journey spiced with wit and wisdom. Revealing the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, Confessions of a Rabbi is a candid, poignant and often hilarious insight into the human condition.
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr is inadvertently frozen in 1890 and, after being transported to twenty-first century Memphis, is accidently thawed by fifteen-year-old Bernie Karp, who begins to follow the rabbi's teachings with unforeseen consequences.
In Demonic Desires, Ishay Rosen-Zvi examines the concept of yetzer hara, or evil inclination, and its evolution in biblical and rabbinic literature. Contrary to existing scholarship, which reads the term under the rubric of destructive sexual desire, Rosen-Zvi contends that in late antiquity the yetzer represents a general tendency toward evil. Rather than the lower bodily part of a human, the rabbinic yetzer is a wicked, sophisticated inciter, attempting to snare humans to sin. The rabbinic yetzer should therefore not be read in the tradition of the Hellenistic quest for control over the lower parts of the psyche, writes Rosen-Zvi, but rather in the tradition of ancient Jewish and Christian demonology. Rosen-Zvi conducts a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the some one hundred and fifty appearances of the evil yetzer in classical rabbinic literature to explore the biblical and postbiblical search for the sources of human sinfulness. By examining the yetzer within a specific demonological tradition, Demonic Desires places the yetzer discourse in the larger context of a move toward psychologization in late antiquity, in which evil—and even demons—became internalized within the human psyche. The book discusses various manifestations of this move in patristic and monastic material, from Clement and Origin to Antony, Athanasius, and Evagrius. It concludes with a consideration of the broader implications of the yetzer discourse in rabbinic anthropology.
Sex, Lies, and Rabbis: Breaking a Sacred Trust by Charlotte Rolnick Schwab, Ph.D. is a powerful book, a combination of memoir and nonfiction, about what happens when clergy, specifically, rabbis, are deified. It is about the betrayal and the cover up of the betrayal of teen aged girls and women by male rabbis, and thereby, the betrayal of these rabbis wives, families, congregations, communities, denominations, and all Judaism. Two murders are connected to rabbis sexual abuse. One rabbi is awaiting retrial for allegedly hiring a hit man to murder his wife because of his sexual misconduct. This author writes about her own frightening, shocking experience as the wife of a rabbi-perpetrator of sexual abuse of other women, his violence toward her, and threat to kill her if she told about his nefarious double life. The book delineates in one volume: the crisis in the rabbinate, in congregational Judaism; what needs to be done to bring about healing and change; gives description of cases of rabbis sexual abuse as told to the author (these cases are all composites; the victims/survivors identities are disguised), and as reported in the media, including the two murders related to rabbis sexual abuse; the alarming extent of this problem; outlines policies that synagogues and denominations need to adopt; provides definitions of sexual abuse; discusses the kinds of personalities of rabbis which can lead to rabbis becoming sexual predators; and offers some suggestions for prevention. The book offers a Resources List and extensive Bibliography, including articles from Jewish and secular newspapers around the country, about rabbis sexual abuse. The book provides a healing program geared toward Jewish victims/survivors or rabbis sexual abuse; it can be adapted for victims/survivors of abuse by other clergy and of other kinds of abuse, including abuse by batterers. Women who suffered abuse of any kind will find this book validating and helpful for healing and recovery. "12 Steppers" will be especially interested in this book. The book is helpful to people of all religions who are experiencing the crisis of their religious authorities sexual abuse and covering up of that abuse, including Buddhists, Catholics, and Protestants. It is an urgent read for all Jewish people concerned about the safety of their teen aged children and women, and about the future of their religious organizations and communities. Books have been written about Catholic priests and Protestant ministers and sexual abuse; this is the first about rabbis sexual abuse. Rabbis Arthur Gross-Schaefer and Marcia Zimmerman, and Rev. Nils Friberg praise the book on the book jacket. Maj-Britt Rosenbaum, MD, psychiatrist and former Director of the Long Island Hillside Medical Center Sexuality Center, wrote the Preface. Gary Schoener, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, who treat both clergy-perpetrators and victims, wrote the Foreword.
Does modernity trample on tradition, or can it in fact be a vehicle for the sacred? How can one determine whether an interpretation is legitimate, anachronistic or corrupted? Does sexual obsession have a textual origin, and is it woman's destiny to be veiled? In Eve's Attire confronts these questions and more to suggest another interpretation of religious traditions surrounding the female body and the erotic. As current fundamentalist religious discourse expresses a growing fixation on modesty, women are increasingly reduced to those parts of their bodies that arouse desire, effectively "genitalised" until the totality of their bodies becomes taboo. In resistance to such interpretations of religious text, which see even a woman's voice as an erotic organ to be silenced, Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur looks not only at religious texts themselves, but also at their interpreters, as she unpicks readings that make the woman a temptress, and modesty the instrument of her oppression. She shows us how nakedness, as expressed by Adam, Eve or Noah, refers to a culture of desire and not a wish to suppress it and explores how the veil was originally intended: not to reject, but to approach the other. Through her analysis of the meaning of modesty and nudity in Judaism, Delphine Horvilleur explores the societal and religious obsession with the female body and its representation and asks questions about how we can engage more critically with interpretations of sacred texts. Translated from the French by Ruth Diver
"Neurotica" is a stellar collection of 27 tales of sexual longing, consummation and frustration--of straight and gay sex; married, unmarried and adulterous sex; filthy, platonic and pathetic sex; awful toys and solo sex--by many of the masters and the freshest new voices of the Jewish-American literary tradition.
Bethsaida, located on the Sea of Galilee, is mentioned more frequently than any other town in the New Testament except for Jerusalem and Capernaum. It was the home of Jesus’ closest friends, possibly nine of the apostles and his aunt Salome. The name means “house of fishermen”, and it was renowned as a place of healing. Many of the “mighty works” of Jesus were performed here (one text mentions fifty three). It was to Galilee that the apostles returned after his execution and here Christianity was spawned. Galilee was destroyed by an earthquake in the early second century, which had a major impact on the topography of the area. Bethsaida, originally located on the shore, was now a mile and a half from the Sea of Galilee. This made fishing impractical and the town was not rebuilt, unlike other towns associated with Jesus. It was a pile of rubble for nearly 2000 years. There are twenty-nine extant journals of pilgrims who attempted unsuccessfully to find it. In 1987, a probe by Dr Rami Arav verified that this site did go back to Roman times and beyond. It is the only archaeological site that goes directly back to the time of Jesus. Here, his words and actions come alive, and, as such, the town has to be taken into account in the search for the historical Jesus.
