Download or read book Happily written by Sabrina Orah Mark and published by Random House. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South—based on her acclaimed Paris Review column “Happily” “One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls “this strange American weather.” Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. She grapples with a loss of innocence in “Sorry, Peter Pan, We’re Over You,” when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween. In “The Evil Stepmother,” Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation. And in “Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand,” the hunt for a wigmaker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister’s cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by. Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, Happily is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Mark’s voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family.

Download or read book The Big Rewind written by Nathan Rabin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-07-07 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape throughout his childhood and adolescence. As an adult, pop culture became his life. Head writer for A.V. Club for more than a decade, Rabin uses specific books, songs, albums, films, and television shows as springboards for dissecting his Dickensian life story in his acclaimed memoir The Big Rewind. Rabin writes movingly and hilariously about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment during a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. A fun book about depression, The Big Rewind is ultimately a touching narrative of a motherless child’s search for family and acceptance, and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin’s lovable, hard-luck dad. With comic dissertations on everything from The Simpsons to The Great Gatsby, and from Grey Gardens to Dr. Dre, The Big Rewind chronicles Rabin’s improbable yet all-too-true journey through life, and its fortuitous intersections with the dizzyingly wonderful world of entertainment.

Download or read book Joshua written by Andrew Kane and published by Berwick Court Publishing Co. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joshua Eubanks and Paul Sims moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for very different reasons. Joshua, a young black man, came with his single mother to escape the crime and despair of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Paul left his life of privilege in Long Island to study Judaism with the Hasidic Lubavitch movement. They live in two different worlds separated by a few city blocks, but their hearts both yearn for Rachel Weissman, the daughter of a respected rabbi, who is torn between her aspiration to become a doctor and her obligation to obey the insular restrictions of her religion. As they establish lives in their respective communities, they are increasingly expected to take sides in growing tensions that would explode into the 1991 Crown Heights riots. Joshua: A Brooklyn Tale views four decades through three lives. Andrew Kane’s novel is a love story about loneliness, a reflection on the value of community that acknowledges that it takes a village to raise a mob, a tale of public dysfunction and personal demons, and an image of the frail beauty of humanity that somehow survives.

Download or read book God ll Cut You Down written by John Safran and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unlikely journalist, a murder case in Mississippi, and a fascinating literary true crime story in the style of Jon Ronson, for fans of "Serial." A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than race—or, maybe and intriguingly, over sex. John Safran, a young white Jewish Australian documentarian, had been in Mississippi and interviewed Barrett for a film on race. When he learned of Barrett’s murder, he returned to find out what happened and became caught up in the twists and turns of the case. During his time in Mississippi, Safran got deeper and deeper into this gothic southern world, becoming entwined in the lives of those connected with the murder—white separatist frenemies, black lawyers, police investigators, oddball neighbors, the stunned families, even the killer himself. And the more he talked with them, the less simple the crime—and the people involved—seemed to be. In the end, he discovered how profoundly and indelibly complex the truth about someone’s life—and death—can be. This is a brilliant, haunting, hilarious, unsettling story about race, money, sex, and power in the modern American South from an outsider’s point of view.

Download or read book The Rebbe s Army written by Sue Fishkoff and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2009-04-22 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” With these words, the relentlessly cheerful, ideologically driven emissaries of Chabad-Lubavitch approach perfect strangers on street corners throughout the world in their ongoing efforts to persuade their fellow Jews to live religiously observant lives. In The Rebbe’s Army, award-winning journalist Sue Fishkoff gives us the first behind-the-scenes look at this small Brooklyn-based group of Hasidim and the extraordinary lengths to which they take their mission of outreach. They seem to be everywhere—in big cities, small towns, and suburbs throughout the United States, and in sixty-one countries around the world. They light giant Chanukah menorahs in public squares, run “Chabad houses” on college campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge, give weekly bible classes in the Capitol basement in Washington, D.C., run a nonsectarian drug treatment center in Los Angeles, sponsor the world’s biggest Passover Seder in Nepal, establish synagogues, Hebrew schools, and day-care centers in places that are often indifferent and occasionally hostile to their outreach efforts. They have built a billion-dollar international empire, with their own news service, publishing house, and hundreds of Websites. Who are these people? How successful are they in making Jews more observant? What influence does their late Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (who some thought was the Messiah), continue to have on his followers? Fishkoff spent a year interviewing Lubavitch emissaries from Anchorage to Miami and has written an engaging and fair-minded account of a Hasidic group whose motives and methodology continue to be the subject of speculation and controversy.

Download or read book The Rebbe written by Samuel Heilman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-25 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson that discusses his childhood in Russia, education in Germany and Paris, messianic conviction, religious leadership, legacy, and other related topics.

Download or read book New Beginnings written by Skirball Museum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The museum preserves more than 25,000 objects that reveal much about daily life, beliefs, customs, worship, human yearnings, and artistic achievement from biblical to contemporary times. They reflect Jewish life in virtually every corner of the globe as well as the museum's commitment to exploring American Jewish life in the context of American society as a whole.

Download or read book The Rebbe the Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference written by David Berger and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history, an indictment, a lament, and an appeal, focusing on the messianic trend in Lubavitch hasidism. It records the shattering of one of Judaism's core beliefs and the remarkable equanimity with which the standard-bearers of Orthodoxy have allowed it to happen. This is a development of striking importance for the history of religions, and it is an earthquake in the history of Judaism. David Berger describes the unfolding of this historic phenomenon and proposes a strategy to contain it.

Download or read book Liberal and Illiberal Arts written by Abraham Socher and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Socher is one of the sharpest observers of Jewish America in our times. These essays, tracing a journey from a yeshiva to Oberlin College and from Franz Kafka to Rabbi Kook, are a loving, cutting, whimsical, and wise look at a Jewish moment that he senses might be ending.”—Matti Friedman, author of Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel How did Humphrey Bogart end up telling Lauren Bacall a Talmudic story in the film Key Largo, and what does that have to do with Plato’s theory of recollection—or American Jewish assimilation? Precisely what poem of Robert Frost’s inspired Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and how did Walter Benjamin learn about the remarkable stones of Sinai? Abraham Socher wears his learning lightly. These witty and original essays embody the spirit of the liberal arts, but the highlight of this collection may be his devastating account of the illiberal arts at work in Oberlin College, where he taught for eighteen years.

Download or read book Psychiatry and Religion written by Dinesh Bhugra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The argument of this book is that the divide between psychiatry and religion is an artificial one and that there is much room for understanding the same phenomena from different perspectives. In it thirteen senior mental health professionals and pastoral workers come together to explore what their different philosophies have to offer each other for the benefit of the individuals in their care. The book as a whole: * sets the relationship between psychiatry and religion in historical context * provides detailed information about specific religions and the significance of their belief systems for mental health management * examines the relationship between psychopathology, psychiatry and religion.

Download or read book Jewish Lunacy written by eric and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2015-03-11 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Lunacy looks back on six millennia of Jewish history, presenting it as the history of a family by telling it through the reminiscences of Eric, who calls himself the Tygrrrr Express. He grew up hearing stories of heartbreaking pain, insightful wisdom, and sidesplitting humor from Jewish relatives and the elders in Long Island, where he grew up. Drawing upon his familys rich oral traditions, the author explores the deeply serious and humorously welcoming history of the Jewish people. Organized by topics, the book explores the lunacy of the authors growing up and uncovers the strange elements in topics as varied as sex, sports, philosophy, politics, pacifism, conspiracy theories, and religion. If you find yourself bemoaning the bleak landscape of the days news and would like a refreshing approach in reading stories that take seriously the truly significant realities of lifeGod, family, and relationshipswhile finding in them reasons and occasions for laughter, then Jewish Lunacy will take you on a journey through history and entertain you with such stories. As its subtitle promises, Jewish Lunacy tells the stories that 6000 years full of tradition and pride have given as gifts to be passed on to others.

Download or read book A Taste of Israeli Life written by Carrie Taylor Goldberg and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes the reader along on unique travel adventures, through touching and humorous anecdotes, with a Canadian learning to live like a local in Israel. From apartment dwellings to riding the rakevet, Hebrew language ulpan to donning an army uniform, it may form a bridge of understanding inside and outside of the Jewish community. Humbly learn from the Jewish community with me. Come, see the beauty of the Land and People of Israel through my eyes. Sample a taste of Israeli life—in peaceful moments and in the midst of rocket fire. Experience the wonder of my first time there, and explore deeper as over 18 months’ span familiar surroundings retained a unique place in my heart and soul. See – the historical landscape and meet the diverse peoples Hear – Hebrew, the sounding of the shofar, the cooing of the dove Smell – the varied fragrant incense, the sweet jasmine flower Taste – the famous falafal, milk and honey, fresh-picked fruit Touch – the waxy, bumpy Western Wall where multitudes have wept

Download or read book Lubavitcher Messianism written by Simon Dein and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1994 the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, died leaving no successor. For many years his followers had maintained that he was Moshiach -the Jewish Messiah and would usher in the Redemption. After his death Lubavitch divided into two opposing groups. While some messianists hold that the Rebbe died but is to be resurrected as the messiah, others hold that he is still alive, but concealed. The anti-messianists maintain that the Rebbe could have been Moshiach if God had willed it, but they disagree vehemently that as such he could come back from the dead. Using ethnographic data obtained by the author through twenty years of fieldwork, this book presents a social-psychological account of Lubavitcher Messianism and moves beyond the typical scholarly preoccupation with 'belief' and 'dissonance' to examine the role of rhetoric, religious experience and ritual in maintaining counterintuitive convictions. Through examining the parallels between early Christianity and messianism in Lubavitch this book provides a comprehensive perspective for examining messianism generally

Download or read book The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews written by Rossi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Rossi’s wild, queer coming-of-age story. Rossi was taught only to aspire to marry a nice Jewish boy and to be a good kosher Jewish girl. At sixteen she flowers into a rebellious punk-rock rule-breaker who runs away to seek adventure. Her freedom is cut short when her parents kidnap her and dump her with a Chasidic rabbi—a “cult buster” known for “reforming” wayward Jewish girls—in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Rossi spends the next couple of years in a repressive, misogynistic culture straight out of the nineteenth century, forced to trade in her pink hair and Sex Pistols T-shirt for maxi skirts and long-sleeved blouses and endure not only bone-crunching boredom but also outright abuse and violence. The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews is filled with wonderfully rich characters, hilarious dialogue, and keen portraits of the secretive hothouse Orthodox world and the struggling New York City of the 1980s: dirty, on the edge, but fully vital and embracing.

Download or read book Tradition in a Rootless World written by Lynn Davidman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-07-29 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past two decades in the United States have seen an immense liberalization and expansion of women's roles in society. Recently, however, some women have turned away from the myriad, complex choices presented by modern life and chosen instead a Jewish orthodox tradition that sets strict and rigid guidelines for women to follow. Lynn Davidman followed the conversion to Orthodoxy of a group of young, secular Jewish women to gain insight into their motives. Living first with a Hasidic community in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then joining an Orthodox synagogue on the upper west side of Manhattan, Davidman pieced together a picture of disparate lives and personal dilemmas. As a participant observer in their religious resocialization and in interviews and conversations with over one hundred women, Davidman also sought a new perspective on the religious institutions that reach out to these women and usher them into the community of Orthodox Judaism. Through vivid and detailed personal portraits, Tradition in a Rootless World explores women's place not only in religious institutions but in contemporary society as a whole. It is a perceptive contribution that unites the study of religion, sociology, and women's studies.

Download or read book Believer Beware written by Jeff Sharlet and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Killing the Buddha Anthology The second collection to spring from KillingTheBuddha.com, Believer, Beware presents true tales of sex ed in Catholic school, witches in Kansas, sects and the city, Buddhists in the barbershop, Sufis under your nose, an adolescent Jewish messiah in Queens, and more. In a world riven by absolute convictions, these ambivalent confessions, skeptical testimonies, and personal revelations speak to the subtler and stranger dilemmas of faith and doubt-of religion lost and found and lost again.

Download or read book Exploding Myths that Jews Believe written by Jeremy Rosen and published by Jason Aronson. This book was released on 2000 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To find out more information about Rowman & Littlefield titles please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.