A New Season of Book Talks That Will Inform and Inspire You

Dear Friends,

What are the new books of Jewish interest that will matter most to you? What worlds and challenges are Jewish authors imagining? What new scholarship is changing the ways we understand Jewish history, identity, and life? I hope you’ll join The Library of JTS—one of the world’s premier centers of the Jewish Book—to discover new Jewish writing that will inform and inspire you, through conversations with authors sharing their passions, discoveries, and ideas.

Sincerely,

David Kraemer
Joseph J. and Dora Abbell Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics

TOMORROW: JUDAISM ON ONE FOOT—OR IN THREE VOLUMES
   ONLINE | OCTOBER 20
How do you convey 2,000 years of Judaism in only three volumes? Dr. Burton L. Visotzky of JTS and Professor Dr. Michael Tilly of Tübingen University discuss Judaism, their new three-volume compendium offering a global view of Jewish history and culture from antiquity to modernity.
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CAN WE REMIX JUDAISM?
   ONLINE | NOVEMBER 9
In Remix Judaism: Preserving Tradition in a Diverse World, Roberta Rosenthal Kwall offers contemporary Jews a new way to connect to Jewish practice and tradition, an approach she says “comports with the sensibilities of Jews who are not, and likely never will be, observant by conventional measures.”
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TALES OF THE HOLY MYSTICAT
   ONLINE | NOVEMBER 12
Don’t let the whimsical title fool you. In Tales of the Holy Mysticat, theologian and scholar Rabbi Rachel Adler artfully muses on the behavior of her peculiar cat to take readers on a fascinating exploration of profound Jewish thought and practice. The result, writes one reviewer, is an “utterly charming and deeply illuminating meditation on Jewish mysticism, as explained by Dagesh, Adler’s rescue cat.”
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BOUND IN THE BOND OF LIFE
   ONLINE | DECEMBER 1
The 2018 shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue are the subject of this extraordinary anthology of essays, written by local journalists, academics, spiritual leaders, and other community members. Dr. Beth Kissileff, who co-edited the book with Eric Lidji, discusses how these reflections reveal a city’s attempts to come to terms with an unfathomable horror.
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MORDECAI KAPLAN IN HIS OWN WORDS
   ONLINE | DECEMBER 7
This latest volume of Communings of the Spirit, Mordecai Kaplan’s journals, covers 1942-1951. Editor and Kaplan biographer Dr. Mel Scult presents the founder of Reconstructionism—and longtime JTS faculty member—contemplating the momentous events of the 1940s. We experience Kaplan’s horror at the persecution of European Jewry as well as his joy at the founding of the State of Israel. The Kaplan we encounter is passionate as well as reflective, even philosophical—a man of contradictions but because of that, all the more interesting.
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