Orange County Jew: a Memoir
Orange County Jew: a Memoir

Author: Martin Aaron Brower

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2010-03-16

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1449073506

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When Martin Brower moved his family from heavily Jewish Los Angeles to barely Jewish Orange County, California, in 1974, his Los Angeles friends were amazed at his bravery and his foolishness. Orange County was considered anti-Semitic and lacking in culture. However, during the years following World War II, Orange County was transformed from a small rural community with citrus groves, row crops and cattle -- first into a bedroom community for neighboring Los Angeles County and then into a dynamic urban empire. As the Countys population and employment base exploded, Orange Countys Jewish population grew from a small enclave of Jewish shopkeepers into a vibrant Jewish community in excess of 100,000. To the surprise of many, Orange County now boasts one of the leading centers of Jewish life in the nation, complete with 30 synagogues, a grand new Jewish Community Center, one of the nations largest Jewish day schools and one of its finest homes for the aging. In his book Orange County Jew: A Memoir, Brower superimposes the growth of the Jewish community over the amazing development of Orange County itself, and uses as a framework the personal story of his own 36 years as a resident of Orange County and as a player among its major real estate development companies and its entrepreneurial leaders.

Oranges for Eve: My Brave, Beautiful, Badass Journey to the Feminine Divine
Oranges for Eve: My Brave, Beautiful, Badass Journey to the Feminine Divine

Author: Rabbi Tamara Kolton Ph. D.

Publisher:

Published: 2019-12

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780578540368

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Oranges for Eve: My Brave, Beautiful, Badass Journey to the Feminine Divine is a manifesto of feminine light, truth & POWER. Because... the time has come for women to stop eating the poisonous bitter apples of old patriarchal lies! Rabbi Tamara Kolton was the senior rabbi at an unusual atheistic temple. But there came a time when she was keeping a secret. This is a story of self-discovery and the deep healing that every woman needs in her life. It is also the story of the most misunderstood woman in history: Eve. Yes, Eve of the garden, the snake and the damn apple. We are taught that Eve was a sinner. But that is not true. Eve is the Mother of Spiritual Bravery. For thousands of years, women have been shamed and silenced. But we are waking up as a collective and refusing to be silent anymore. What do you truly yearn for deep down in your gut? What would you do if you had the audacity to act on your own behalf? Your yearnings, your urges to transform your life and take those big, even terrifying leaps, actually are a call to bravery and spiritual fulfillment from your true spiritual mother, the radical, beautiful, Eve. We are going to answer the call. In this book, Rabbi Tamara Kolton will guide you on a healing journey in which you will tenderly be asked to love your shame and fear away and step onto a path of spiritual healing and bravery. Through magnificent exercises and gorgeous memoir, you will: Journey deep inside the myth of the Garden of Eden and experience Eve for who she REALLY is. Discover God in the feminine and how this fierce, feminine and nourishing energy can truly transform your life and heal our world. Connect with feminine LIGHT, TRUTH & POWER! Because Eve was no sinner. Eve was a spiritual badass. You can be too. This book will show you how.

Orange County
Orange County

Author: Gustavo Arellano

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2008-09-16

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1439123209

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Bestselling author of ¡Ask a Mexican! Gustavo Arellano returns with Orange County, a seamlessly woven history of California's Orange County with Gustavo's personal narrative of growing up within its neighborhoods. The story began in 1918, when Gustavo Arellano's great-grandfather and grandfather arrived in the United States, only to be met with flying potatoes. They ran, and hid, and then went to work in Orange County's citrus groves, where, eventually, thousands of fellow Mexican villagers joined them. Gustavo was born sixty years later, the son of a tomato canner who dropped out of school in the ninth grade and an illegal immigrant who snuck into this country in the trunk of a Chevy. Meanwhile, Orange County changed radically, from a bucolic paradise of orange groves to the land where good Republicans go to die, American Christianity blossoms, and way too many bad television shows are green-lit. Part personal narrative, part cultural history, Orange County is the outrageous and true story of the man behind the wildly popular and controversial column ¡Ask a Mexican! and the locale that spawned him. It is a tale of growing up in an immigrant enclave in a crime-ridden neighborhood, but also in a promised land, a place that has nourished America's soul and Gustavo's family, both in this country and back in Mexico, for a century. Nationally bestselling author, syndicated columnist, and the spiciest voice of the Mexican-American community, Gustavo Arellano delivers the hilarious and poignant follow-up to ¡Ask a Mexican!, his critically acclaimed debut. Orange County not only weaves Gustavo's family story with the history of Orange County and the modern Mexican-immigrant experience but also offers sharp, caliente insights into a wide range of political, cultural, and social issues.

Jew Boy
Jew Boy

Author: Alan M. Kaufman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1501714902

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Jew Boy is Alan Kaufman's riveting memoir of being raised by a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust. This pioneering masterpiece, the very first memoir of its kind by a member of the Second Generation is Kaufman's coming-of-age account, by turns hilarious and terrifying, written with irreverent humor and poetic introspection. Throughout the course of his memoir, Kaufman touches on the pain, guilt, and confusion that shape the lives and characters of American-born children of Holocaust survivors. Kaufman struggles to comprehend what it means to be Jewish as he deals with the demons haunting his mother and attempts to escape his wretched home life by devoting himself to high school football. He eventually hitchhikes across the country, coming face-to-face with the phantoms he fled. Taking us from the streets of the Bronx to the highways of America, the kibbutzim and Israeli army to personal rebirth in San Francisco, and finally to a final reckoning in Germany, Jew Boy shines with the universal humanity of a brilliant writer embracing the gift of life. Kaufman's fierce passion will leave no reader untouched.

All Who Go Do Not Return
All Who Go Do Not Return

Author: Shulem Deen

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2015-03-24

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 155597337X

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A moving and revealing exploration of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and one man's loss of faith Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world—only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at eighteen is arranged and several children soon follow. Deen's first transgression—turning on the radio—is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library, and later the Internet. Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs, until, several years later, his faith unravels entirely. Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows. His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception, and begins a long struggle to hold on to those he loves most: his five children. In All Who Go Do Not Return, Deen bravely traces his harrowing loss of faith, while offering an illuminating look at a highly secretive world.

Los Angeles Jew
Los Angeles Jew

Author: Martin Aaron Brower

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2009-03-31

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 146787096X

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During the 80 years of this author's life, the Jewish population of the City of Los Angeles exploded from a mere 65,000 Jews to 520,000 Jews, establishing Los Angeles as the third largest Jewish population center in the world.Yet, little has been written about this transformation, with most Jewish generational novels concentrating on the New YorkJewish experience.And yet,the Los Angeles Jewish experience was completely different from that of New York. The author, a native of Los Angeles,addresses the Los Angeles Jewish experienceas a personal memoir -- sometimes sad, sometimes funny, and always engrossing.

Rose Hill
Rose Hill

Author: Carlos E. Cortés

Publisher: Heyday.ORIM

Published: 2017-07-04

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1597142182

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A Jewish Mexican American author chronicles his family’s tumultuous, decades-long spars over religion, class, and culture in this candid, inspiring memoir. The son of a Mexican Catholic father with aristocratic roots and a mother of Eastern European Jewish descent, Carlos E. Cortés grew up wedged between cultures. He grew up “straddling borders, balancing loves and loyalties, and trying to fit into a world that wasn’t quite ready.” His request for a bar mitzvah sent his father into a cursing rage. He was terrified to bring home the Catholic girl he was dating, for fear of wounding his mother. When he tried to join a fraternity, Christians wouldn’t take him because he was Jewish, and Jews looked sideways at him because his father was Mexican. In Rose Hill, Cortés recounts his family’s experiences from his early years in legally segregated 1940s Kansas City to his return to Berkeley in the 1950s, and to his parents’ separation, reconciliation, deaths, and eventual burials at the Rose Hill Cemetery. Cortés elevates the theme of intermarriage to a new level of complexity in this closely observed and emotionally fraught memoir.

The Art of Leaving
The Art of Leaving

Author: Ayelet Tsabari

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 081298899X

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An intimate memoir in essays by an award-winning Israeli writer who travels the world, from New York to India, searching for love, belonging, and an escape from grief following the death of her father when she was a young girl NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS This searching collection opens with the death of Ayelet Tsabari’s father when she was just nine years old. His passing left her feeling rootless, devastated, and driven to question her complex identity as an Israeli of Yemeni descent in a country that suppressed and devalued her ancestors’ traditions. In The Art of Leaving, Tsabari tells her story, from her early love of writing and words, to her rebellion during her mandatory service in the Israeli army. She travels from Israel to New York, Canada, Thailand, and India, falling in and out of love with countries, men and women, drugs and alcohol, running away from responsibilities and refusing to settle in one place. She recounts her first marriage, her struggle to define herself as a writer in a new language, her decision to become a mother, and finally her rediscovery and embrace of her family history—a history marked by generations of headstrong women who struggled to choose between their hearts and their homes. Eventually, she realizes that she must reconcile the memories of her father and the sadness of her past if she is ever going to come to terms with herself. With fierce, emotional prose, Ayelet Tsabari crafts a beautiful meditation about the lengths we will travel to try to escape our grief, the universal search to find a place where we belong, and the sense of home we eventually find within ourselves. Praise for The Art of Leaving “The Art of Leaving is, in large part, about what is passed down to us, and how we react to whatever it is. . . . [It] is not self-help—we cannot become whatever we put our mind to—yet it suggests that we can begin to heal from what has broken us, if we only let ourselves. . . . Tsabari’s intense prose gave me pause.”—The New York Times Book Review “Shortlist” “Told in a series of fierce, unflinching essays . . . an Israeli Canadian author explores her upbringing and the death of her father in this stark, beautiful memoir.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review) “The Art of Leaving will take you on an emotional journey you won’t soon forget.”—Hello Giggles “Candid, affecting . . . [Ayelet Tsabari’s] linked essays cohere into a tender, moving memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica
A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica

Author: Aron Rodrigue

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-01-11

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 080478177X

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This book presents for the first time the complete text of the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, transliterated from the original script, translated into English, and introduced and explicated by the editors. The memoirist, Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820–1903), wrote about Ottoman Jews' daily life at a time when the finely wrought fabric of Ottoman society was just beginning to unravel. His vivid portrayal of life in Salonica, a major port in the Ottoman Levant with a majority Jewish population, thus provides a unique window into a way of life before it disappeared as a result of profound political and social changes and the World Wars. Sa'adi was a prominent journalist and publisher, one of the most significant creators of modern Sephardic print culture. He was also a rebel who accused the Jewish leadership of Salonica of being corrupt, abusive, and fanatical; that leadership, in turn, excommunicated him from the Jewish community. The experience of excommunication pervades Sa'adi's memoir, which documents a world that its author was himself actively involved in changing.

The Book of Mormon Girl
The Book of Mormon Girl

Author: Joanna Brooks

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-08-07

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1451699697

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From her days of feeling like “a root beer among the Cokes”—Coca-Cola being a forbidden fruit for Mormon girls like her—Joanna Brooks always understood that being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints set her apart from others. But, in her eyes, that made her special; the devout LDS home she grew up in was filled with love, spirituality, and an emphasis on service. With Marie Osmond as her celebrity role model and plenty of Sunday School teachers to fill in the rest of the details, Joanna felt warmly embraced by the community that was such an integral part of her family. But as she grew older, Joanna began to wrestle with some tenets of her religion, including the Church’s stance on women’s rights and homosexuality. In 1993, when the Church excommunicated a group of feminists for speaking out about an LDS controversy, Joanna found herself searching for a way to live by the leadings of her heart and the faith she loved. The Book of Mormon Girl is a story about leaving behind the innocence of childhood belief and embracing the complications and heartbreaks that come to every adult life of faith. Joanna’s journey through her faith explores a side of the religion that is rarely put on display: its humanity, its tenderness, its humor, its internal struggles. In Joanna’s hands, the everyday experience of being a Mormon—without polygamy, without fundamentalism—unfolds in fascinating detail. With its revelations about a faith so often misunderstood and characterized by secrecy, The Book of Mormon Girl is a welcome advocate and necessary guide.