The true story of the Jewish engineer whose original designs for the Volkswagen (VW) Beetle were stolen by the Nazis will be published in Canada this month.
Journalist Paul Schilperoord, author of The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz, the Jewish Engineer Behind Hitler’s Volkswagen, first stumbled across a mention of Ganz while researching an article he planned to write about the car’s history.

“I was simply intrigued that a Jewish engineer… was behind the Volkswagen Beetle, the most successful project the Nazis ever did,” Schilperoord told the Jewish Tribune by phone from his home in Florence, Italy.

More than 21.5 million VW Beetles were built over a period of 65 years. Ganz received no remuneration and no credit for his designs; even his nickname for the car, “May Bug,” was appropriated by the Nazis.

The book describes how a competitor in the auto industry – first alone, then in collustion with car manufacturers, and finally with the help of high-level friends within the Nazi party – worked to destroy Josef Ganz. Read a review here.

New York Times Review

NPR Review and 30 minute audio conversation with the author

"When University of Chicago professor William Dodd assumed the post of U.S. ambassador to Germany in 1933, he hoped for an undemanding position that would allow him spare time to write a book.

At the time, few in the United States or Europe considered then-Chancellor Adolf Hitler a serious threat, and few expected him to remain in power long. Dodd was no exception, says Erik Larson, author of In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. Having studied in Germany as a college student in the 1890s, Dodd began his term as ambassador with "a predisposition to like the Germans and to like Germany," Larson tells NPR's Jennifer Ludden.

He arrived in Berlin, Larson says, with "almost a deliberate desire — deliberate objectivity, let's say — to view things as objectively as possible, without prejudging."

But over the subsequent four years, the Dodd family grew uneasy as they watched Hitler consolidate his power and impose increasingly severe restrictions on Germany's Jewish population. Matters came to head as Dodd clashed with the Nazi Party and the State Department and eventually resigned over the failure of officials back home to recognize the threat the Nazis posed." from NPR

Desperate for a good read prior to winter vacation, I stumbled upon Kosher Chinese at our local Barnes & Noble. Like most great finds, this book is an unexpected pleasure. This is the story of a young Jewish college graduate's two year Peace Corp stint in central China. Humerous and whimsical, Michael Levy provides a quick read of the challenges he faced in and out of the classroom while trying to teach English at a Chinese university.

"Levy explores a society in flux—while mining the entertaining if familiar terrain of cross-cultural misunderstandings. He struggles to explain English terminology to students who unknowingly translate their names into expletives, is coerced into eating the specialty at Dog Meat King, and finds that the community distrusts him not merely because he is American, but because he is Jewish. But Levy turns his perceived otherness to his advantage, earning the nickname "Friendship Jew" and being tapped to lead a student organization, the Guizhou University Jewish Friday Night English and Cooking Corner Club, a rare extracurricular activity in a culture Levy finds devoid of such opportunities. "There were no glee clubs, school newspapers, yearbooks... expressions of creativity were mere distractions, as was critical thinking." Pop culture references abound: Sex and the City, Star Wars, The Matrix are all name checked as if to suggest that Levy is grasping for familiarity in a foreign land, but their ubiquity becomes tiresome. Humor works best when Levy uses them to point to matters of deeper significance, such as the Westernization of China. As one of the local teachers encapsulates it, "Wal-Mart is the future, and Chairman Mao is the past."- From Publishers Weekly

"As years go, 1938 was not an auspicious one for Austria, least of all for its affluent Jews; Adolf Hitler would annex his native country in March, heralding increasingly violent anti-Semitic persecution. But 1938 was "a good year to be a mover in Vienna," as Tim Bonyhady wryly notes in "Good Living Street," a history of his Austrian forebears, the Gallias, who managed to send away most of their artworks and personal belongings ahead of their timely flight in November, days after the ominous brutality of Kristallnacht.

Mr. Bonyhady's account covers roughly a century of the Gallias' story, beginning with the lives of his great-grandmother, Hermine, one of a handful of Viennese socialites whose portraits were painted by Gustav Klimt, and her husband, Moriz. They both came from prosperous provincial families that had settled in Vienna in the late 19th century.

In describing how Jews from throughout the Hapsburg empire began flocking to Vienna during that period, Mr. Bonyhady does well to chart the vicissitudes of Jewish life under Austrian rule, from Archduke Albert V and his vicious program of imprisonment, expulsion and murder in the 15th century to Emperor Franz Joseph, who in 1848 granted Austrian Jews many previously denied rights, most notably freedom of movement." Click here to read the complete review at the WSJ.

"Examples come quickly to mind when the subject of anti-Semitism and England arises. Shakespeare's motives in writing "The Merchant of Venice" remain a subject of healthy debate, but countless productions of "The Merchant of Venice" over the centuries made Shylock the crudest of Jewish villains. About the repulsiveness of Dickens's Fagin in "Oliver Twist" there can be no debate, though the author did try to make amends in later editions by removing some of the references to Fagin's Jewishness. And then there are the recent furors over T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. The charges seem to have stuck to the American-born poet, all the more for his fervent embrace of a very traditional Englishness—as if something about the mother country made it more natural for his bigotry to thrive there.

Yet there is another tale to be told. In her admirable and provocative "The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill," Gertrude Himmelfarb asks us to rethink the history of Jews in England. While paying deference to the massive, necessary scholarship on anti-Semitism, she argues that too little attention has been given to a different side of that history—to the influential writers and political thinkers who helped to promote "a favorable view of Jews" and how they helped make England "a model of liberality and civility."" Read more from the WSJ.

"Two new books about Israeli leaders share some common ground. Both are written by authors who were intimately acquainted with their subject. Both depict this subject as someone of great strategic vision and willpower, able to make and carry out fateful decisions shied from by others. Both are openly partisan narrations.

Yet starting with the slimness of one book and the bulk of the other, this is as far as the likeness goes. Shimon Peres's "Ben-Gurion: A Political Life" is the work of a prominent politician himself. Done "in conversation" with Israeli journalist David Landau, it is an urbane account of Israel's first and longest-serving prime minister by someone who, though nearly 40 years younger, worked closely with him for two decades. It is admiring of Ben-Gurion and takes his side against his opponents, but it never lapses into hero worship or loses its grip on the historical realities amid which its story is set.

This cannot be said of "Sharon: The Life of a Leader," an adulatory description of a father's career by a son who can find no fault with it. At times, Gilad Sharon's book reads less like a biography than an extended eulogy, even though Ariel Sharon is not dead but comatose from a massive stroke suffered nearly six years ago."

Read more of the book reviews here.

"Great cities generally have a reason for being where they are. New York, Athens, Alexandria and Shanghai are seaports, gateways to a continent. London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin straddle a navigable river. Montreal, Madrid and Beijing command strategic heights.

Alone among great cities, Jerusalem has no obvious purpose. It lacks access to a sea or waterway and surveys nothing grander than scrubby hills on one side and desert on the other. The ancient trade routes from Asia to Europe ran 150 miles north through Aleppo and south through Petra. In military terms the city is indefensible, easy to besiege. For want of water, it spouts rivers of blood.

There have been many histories of Jerusalem, from Jeremiah's sixth century B.C. monody to "For Jerusalem," a premature happy ending (written in the 1970s) by a successful mayor, Teddy Kollek. But Mr. Sebag Montefiore's book is the city's first "biography"—a panoptic narrative of its rulers and citizens, heroes and villains, harlots and saints. In 550 pages, Mr. Sebag Montefiore barely misses a trick or a character in taking us through the city's story with compelling, breathless tension. The lone drawback to his book's impressive scope is a lack of nuance in appreciating the filigree detail of Hebrew and Arabic." Read more of the book review here.

"Baseball, as Alpert puts it, “was America.” The respect and love of Robinson and his attainments allowed many liberal Jews, who identified with the black struggle in America, to combine an attachment to the national pastime — especially to the newly integrated Brooklyn Dodgers — with the belief in the value of the social equality, which they learned at home. At the same time that they were becoming more American, they could hold on to ethnic distinctiveness and to the value of justice crucial to it.

Alpert recognizes this intricate process of identity construction on her very first page, where she tells us that her own American Jewish progressivism was shaped in part by her mother, who taught her about Robinson, Jews and the Negro League, and by Jewish support and activism for the integration of professional baseball. Thousands of other Jewish children heard the same teachings. For example, in 1947, my grandmother presented 7-year-old me with a fully uniformed, batwielding Jackie Robinson doll, along with a speech — not her last — about social equality.

During Alpert’s research, however, she discovered that the role Jews played in black baseball was decidedly less heroic and more complex than she had been led to believe. Beginning in the Depression era, a small number of Jews of Eastern European descent ventured into the sports business and came to wield an economic and social power in black baseball that was denied them in other arenas. They inevitably competed with a minority of black owners and agents less well capitalized, and sometimes, in order to stimulate attendance, encouraged (but did not invent) a vaudevillian style of play uncomfortably resembling minstrelsy."

Read the complete review here.

Booklist says: Wilkes, an award-winning writer and a Catholic, spent one year with Jay Rosenbaum, the 42-year-old rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, a Conservative synagogue in an upper-middle-class community in Worcester, Massachusetts. Wilkes followed Rabbi Rosenbaum on his daily rounds--leading the services, performing weddings and conducting funerals, teaching children, and counseling couples. Wilkes interviewed the rabbi, the rabbi's wife, and some of the synagogue members. The rabbi had been at Beth Israel for six years, had started many new programs, and had begun to reverse the demographic trend, attracting younger families into what had been an aging synagogue. But he wanted his people to live more intensely Jewish lives. Consequently, the book explores the complex question, What is the place of the Jewish religion in today's lifestyle? In seeking the answer, Wilkes has written an important book, focusing on a religion at a perilous juncture in time.

Click here to read an interview with the author, Paul Wilkes.

"Markus Zusak has not really written "Harry Potter and the Holocaust." It just feels that way. "The Book Thief" is perched on the cusp between grown-up and young-adult fiction, and it is loaded with librarian appeal. It deplores human misery. It celebrates the power of language. It may encourage adolescents to read. It has an element of the fanciful. And it's a book that bestows a self-congratulatory glow upon anyone willing to grapple with it.

To be sure, "The Book Thief" attempts and achieves great final moments of tear-jerking sentiment. And Liesel is a fine heroine, a memorably strong and dauntless girl. But for every startlingly rebellious episode — Rudy's Führer-baiting impersonation of the black American athlete Jesse Owens, the building of an indoor snowman for a Jew in hiding, the creation of books and drawings that frame Liesel and Max's experiences as life-affirming fairy tales — there are moments that are slack.

"The Book Thief" will be appreciated for Mr. Zusak's audacity, also on display in his earlier "I Am the Messenger." It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures. And because there's no arguing with a sentiment like that." Read the complete review by the NY Times.

The website is now the book.

Very Funny!

Two new book reviews on the Holocaust by the Jewish Forward

Arendt on trial, by Michelle Sieff

Struggling to be heard, by Elissa Strauss

Hosting a Seder? Thinking about Passover? JewishBoston.com can help!

Maxwell House won't cut it this year? Ready for a change? This is not your grandfather's seder!

Enjoy your own The Wandering is Over Haggadah, downloadable right from here. This thirty-minute version includes optional supplements, discussions, and Passover songs.

Think it's too long? Not long enough? You can choose either the PDF version or the Microsoft Word option, which enables you to add or delete whatever you'd like. Go ahead, have Passover your way.

Click here to download this Haggadah.

Two relatively new books tell the story of American Jewry, weaving together its past and present by examining tradition and making it relevant to today’s reader.

Where Sue Fishkoff’s "Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority" (Schocken, 2010) is robust and detailed, Leah Koenig’s "The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook: Daily Meals for the Contemporary Jewish Kitchen" (Universe, 2011) is spacious and adaptable.

With the "The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook," Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America has attempted to free itself from the matzah ball-and-chain and community cookbooks of its nearly 90-year past and plunge itself into the present-day reality of America’s Jewish kitchen.

An increased interest in local and healthy food, and the amplified availability of kosher-certified products -- with an assist from popular television shows -- have created a market of ever-more sophisticated American Jewish consumers, and Koenig doesn't shy away from using trendy food items such as quinoa, miso and pomegranate.

Throughout "Kosher Nation," Fishkoff regards her subjects with objectivity. Even the most zealous figures -- like the Chasid on a one-woman campaign to prevent Jews from ingesting insects -- become sympathetic and even relatable. It is clear that Fishkoff was fascinated by the subject; the reader cannot help but be fascinated, too.

For anyone who remembers when Oreos became kosher, notices when sushi is served at an Orthodox wedding or simply wants to take a bite out of Jewish Americana, "Kosher Nation" offers a readable, in-depth exploration into the cultural shifts and subtleties surrounding the rise of an industry.

Paired with "The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook," readers have a chance to re-examine food traditions far beyond the holiday table.

Dipping back into the origins of the kosher industry in America and then cooking recipes that reflect a contemporary kosher reality prove a filling and fulfilling experience.

Click here to see a list of My Jewish Learnings Top 100 Jewish Books

My Jewish Learning looks at the life and scholarship of Chaim Potok. As a doctor of philosophy, a rabbi, and a biblical commentator, Chaim Potok (1929-2002) had a lot to say. He would often wake at four or five in the morning, driven to wakefulness--because, he would say, of the sentences in his head. But foremost among his talents, Potok was a writer. Often his most profound thoughts and arguments would come not from his own mouth, but from the mouths of his fictional characters. Click here for details.

This coming April marks 150 years since the outbreak of the American Civil War. The role of Jews in that conflict became a subject of historical inquiry in the context of rising anti-Semitism, about a quarter-century after hostilities ended. An article defending the patriotism of American Jews, appearing in 1891 in the prestigious North American Review, recalled that, on both sides of the Civil War, “the American Israelites stood shoulder to shoulder with their fellow-citizens of all other races and creeds.” One J.M. Rogers, who described himself as a former Union soldier and Army recruiter, responded in a letter to the editor, “I cannot recall meeting one Jew in uniform or hearing of any Jewish soldier.” This hardly surprised Rogers, “For we know from the Hebrew scriptures that the children of Abraham were terrible warriors.”

Read the complete review here.

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer, and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never lost touch with each other, or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik.

Dining together one night at Sevcik's apartment—the two Jewish widowers and the unmarried Gentile, Treslove—the men share a sweetly painful evening, reminiscing on a time before they had loved and lost, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. But as Treslove makes his way home, he is attacked and mugged outside a violin dealer's window. Treslove is convinced the crime was a misdirected act of anti-Semitism, and in its aftermath, his whole sense of self will ineluctably change.

The Finkler Question is a funny, furious, unflinching novel of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and the wisdom and humanity of maturity.

Click here for a review.

Why I Wrote "Jews & Money"
By Abraham H. Foxman
National Director of the Anti-Defamation League

It wasn't any particular comment during the financial crisis that led me to write "Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype." Rather it was the cumulative effect of a host of anti-Semitic statements focusing on money matters together with the uncertain environment in which Jews were living that provided the imperative for me to return to the world of authorship, my vow never to return notwithstanding.

Still, a number of the comments made a deep impression on me. One was the claim that Lehman Brothers, immediately before its collapse, transferred $400 billion to Israeli banks. It reminded me of the Hezbollah charge soon after 9/11 that they had "learned" that 4,000 Israelis did not show up for work at the World Trade Center that day. These conspiracy theories are so outlandish that one is tempted to ignore them. But, as absurd as they are, they do take hold. There's no room for complacency.

Then there was a comment on an online news site: "Ho hum, another Crooked Wall Street Jew. Find a Jew who isn't Crooked. Now that would be a story."

Click here and read the entire article.

Robert D. Putnam is one of those Harvard University professors respected for his scholarly research and celebrated for the masterful way he connects it to the narrative of modern life. When he wrote that Americans were “bowling alone” — and therefore no longer building up “social capital,” the trust, informal networks and energetic communities necessary for a healthy, engaged democracy — his indictment of civic life in a book with that catchy title drew the attention of White House policymakers and influenced a generation of political scientists.

So the October publication of his latest book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” was greeted with much anticipation, and it does not disappoint. Crunching decades of data, Putnam and co-author David E. Campbell went searching for the roots of interfaith tolerance and found that even though religious practice in America trends toward polarization, it is tempered by an acceptance based on familiarity. Knowing someone of another faith — and increasingly, Americans do — makes us more tolerant of those who hold that faith.

To emphasize the point, the authors offer their own polyglot stories in the book’s introduction. Campbell is a Mormon, the child of a Mormon mother (who was born a Catholic) and a Protestant father, who eventually converted to Mormonism. Putnam was raised as an observant Methodist, but upon marrying his wife nearly 50 years ago he became a Jew.

Read the full review here.

In the two decades following the establishment of the state of Israel, approximately 850,000 Jews were forcibly driven out of Arab lands. Their expulsion marked the beginning of the end of 2,500 years of Jewish life in North Africa, the greater Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. Until recently, their story has been largely unrecognized and untold in the English-speaking world. That is the task undertaken by the British historian Martin Gilbert, known for his multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill and many works on Jewish history, in his new book, In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands.

Ambitious to a fault, Gilbert begins his saga a full millennium before the birth of Muhammad in the late 6th century C.E., and by the end of his first 100 pages has covered the first centuries of Islam, the age of the Crusaders, and the spread of the Ottoman empire. The remaining two-thirds of the book are devoted to the past 100 years. Here he traces the competition between the Jewish and Arab national movements during World Wars I and II, the various reactions to the 1947 UN partition resolution and the creation of Israel, Jewish life in Muslim lands since 1948, and the integration of Jews from Muslim lands into Western countries and, of course, Israel.

Read the full review here.

The fourth in the great and undiminished Roth’s recent cycle of short novels follows Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), and The Humbug (2009), and as exceptional as those novels are, this latest in the series far exceeds its predecessors in both emotion and intellect. In general terms, the novel is a staggering visit to a time and place when a monumental health crisis dominated the way people led their day-to-day lives. Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1940s (a common setting for this author) experienced, as the war in Europe was looking better for the Allies, a scare as deadly as warfare. The city has been hit by an epidemic of polio. Of course, at that time, how the disease spread and its cure were unknown. The city is in a panic, with residents so suspicious of other individuals and ethnic groups that emotions quickly escalate into hostility and even rage. Our hero, and he proves truly heroic, is Bucky Canter, playground director in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark. As the summer progresses, Bucky sees more and more of his teenage charges succumb to the disease. When an opportunity presents itself to leave the city for work in a Catskills summer camp, Bucky is torn between personal safety and personal duty. What happens is heartbreaking, but the joy of having met Bucky redeems any residual sadness. --Brad Hooper

Read the review from The Forward here.

When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by
Gal Beckerman

Late in the twentieth century, the three great population centers for Jews were the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Israel. This absorbing and inspiring story moves between those three nations to recount one of the most extraordinary episodes in recent Jewish history. This was the survival (and in many cases a rediscovery) of a sense of Jewish identity among Soviet Jews, which led thousands of them to demand the right to emigrate to Israel. Beckerman is a reporter for the Jewish daily publication The Forward. His narrative moves between the centers and also moves back in time to describe Jewish life in the Soviet Union. His description of the Nazi slaughter of Latvian Jews is horrifying, but the slow strangulation of Jewish culture under Stalin and his successors is almost as repellent, because it had the clear intention of causing spiritual death. Once a remarkable rebirth of Jewish consciousness and assertiveness emerged, supporters in the U.S. played a vital role, through demonstrations and indefatigable lobbying efforts to pressure the Soviet government to allow Jewish “refuseniks” to emigrate. This is an outstanding chronicle of a great effort conducted by determined and courageous men and women. --Jay Freeman

Read a review from The Jewish Forward.

Al Jaffee’s inventive work has enlivened the pages of MAD since 1955. To date he has pickled three generations of American kids in the brine of satire, and continues to bring millions of childhoods to untimely ends with the knowledge that parents are hypocrites, teachers are dummies, politicians are liars, and life isn’t fair.

Jaffee’s work for MAD has made him a cultural icon, but the compelling and at times bizarre story of his life has yet to be told. A synopsis of Jaffee’s formative years alone reads like a comic strip of traumatic cliff-hangers with cartoons by Jaffee and captions by Freud. Six-year-old Jaffee was separated from his father, uprooted from his home in Savannah, Georgia, and transplanted by his mother to a shtetl in Lithuania, a nineteenth-century world of kerosene lamps, outhouses, physical abuse, and near starvation. He would be rescued by his father, returned to America, taken yet again by his mother back to the shtetl, and once again rescued by his father, even as Hitler was on the march.

When he finally settled back in America as a twelve-year-old wearing cobbled shoes and speaking his native English with a Yiddish accent, schoolmates called him “greenhorn.” He struggled with challenges at least as great as those he had met in Europe. His luck changed, however, when he was chosen to be a member of the first class to attend New York City’s High School of Music and Art. There his artistic ability saved him.

He would go on to forge relationships with Stan Lee, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Elder, launching a career that would bring him to MAD magazine. There he found himself at the forefront of a movement that would change the face of humor and cartooning in America.

A cliff-hanger of a life deserves a page-turner of a biography, and that is what Mary-Lou Weisman and Al Jaffee have delivered.

Read a full review from The Forward and from The NY Times.

The Forward, the Jewish Daily, has just published it's Fall 2010 book review.

Click here for their recommendations.

The Forward also has a new review of Wearing Europe’s Tattoo
Cynthia Ozick’s Novel of Ambition. Click here for the review.

Less than two decades after Theodor Herzl inaugurated the Zionist movement with his book "Der Judenstaat" ("The Jewish State"), the British government, in 1917, issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to use its best efforts to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people.

Hailed as a milestone by Zionists—and still mourned in the Arab world as the first step toward what it regards as the "catastrophe" of the founding of the state of Israel—this extraordinary promise, made in a public letter written by Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, proved to be even more momentous than it seemed at the time. It is now the subject of Jonathan Schneer's analytical narrative and contextual history, "The Balfour Declaration."

By issuing the declaration, as Mr. Schneer notes, Britain was making a promise that seemed to contradict one that it had made to Arab leaders, who had risen up against the Ottoman Empire in 1916-18 in the expectation that they would be rewarded with postwar Arab nation-states. But at that moment in history—in the middle of World War I, with the outcome very much in doubt—Britain was prepared to make all sorts of promises, some contradictory.

And so it came to pass that Britain's war cabinet, in search of support and wartime allies and in keeping with Britain's prewar affinity for the Zionist goal, agreed to consider a draft document from the London Zionist Political Committee about a Jewish homeland. The draft proposed that "Palestine be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people" and that Britain "use its best endeavours to secure the achievement of this object." Contemplating the events of 1917, it is worth heeding some of Mr. Schneer's opening words: "The Balfour Declaration was not, in and of itself, the source of trouble in a land that previously had been more or less at peace, but nor was it a mere signpost on a road heading undivertibly toward a cliff. No one can say what the course of events in Palestine might have been without it. What did come was the product of forces and factors entirely unforeseen."

Click here for the complete review.

The premise for Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, is simple. How has a nation of just seven million people, only a little more than 60 years old, surrounded by enemies and with no natural resources, produced more start-up companies and produced more Nasdaq-quoted companies than Europe, Japan, China, India and Korea combined? What magic dust does Israel possess to foster this entrepreneurial spirit?

This book tries to answer that question, while also examining the potential threats to Israel’s future wellbeing. It has a lively opening with case studies of innovation from recent years including one about a young Israeli who has developed a car battery that could make electric vehicles financially viable.

When it was founded in 1948 as a homeland for the Jews, Israel was a geographically small and arid territory. To survive, it had to become self sufficient in so many different ways. In the early years, that meant devising innovative irrigation systems to nourish the desert soil and allow for agricultural use and to counter food rationing.
The constant influx of Jews from around the world has also played a key part in the country’s growth, bringing in new skills and ideas and swelling the domestic market for goods, which was important in the context of an Arab boycott.
The Israeli military also lies at the heart of much of the innovation, with many ex-soldiers heading up leading tech companies.

The book concludes with a synopsis of a long meeting between the authors – both American Jews – and ex-PM Shimon Peres, also a former Nobel Prize winner. His advice is to forget the “old industries.” Pick five new ones and go for them hammer and tongs. Be a world leader. It sounds like good advice.

Click here for the complete review.

Moses Montefiore, a world-renowned figure in the 19th century, was virtually forgotten by the 20th and is remembered today, at times, simply by the resonance of his name. A hospital in the Bronx is named for him, another in Pittsburgh, and a Jewish quarter in Jerusalem just outside the Old City. The accomplishments of some of Montefiore's descendants—including a pugnacious Anglican bishop—may remind us the progenitor's renown, but his story certainly needs to be retold. It is a remarkable one.

Born in Livorno in 1784 to an Italian-Jewish family with British connections, Montefiore moved to London with his family when he was a small child. He began his working life in London's merchant world and then becoming a broker at the stock exchange. He had a most spectacular career, marrying into the Rothschild family and eventually joining its banking enterprise. By an early age he had acquired a great fortune. He was accepted by the best social clubs and even became a member of the Royal Society. He was knighted at the age of 51 and made sheriff of the city of London, a largely ceremonial position but a highly prestigious one.

Montefiore was a man of probity in a larger, public sense. As much as he liked making money, he liked even more giving it away to those who needed it more than he did. And so, at what will now be considered early middle age, he retired from business and devoted the rest of his life (he died in 1885, at the age of 101) to acting as a one-person first-aid flying brigade, donating his money to worthy causes and traveling to places where his brethren in faith were persecuted—from Morocco to Palestine, from Russia and Rumania. He became a folk hero of the persecuted, who attributed to him extraordinary powers. He traveled everywhere at a time when travel was often difficult. He went Jerusalem for the last time at age 91, braving cholera and pirates.

Ms. Green writes deftly and tells Montefiore's story with a admirable thoroughness.

Click here to read the complete review.

In April 1933, during the early months of Nazi rule in Germany, the "Aryan Paragraph," as it came to be called, went into effect. A new law banned anyone of Jewish descent from government employment. Hitler's assault on the Jews—already so evidently under way in his toxic rhetoric and in the ideological imperatives of his party—was moving into a crushing legal phase. German churches, which relied on state support, now faced a choice: preserve their subsidies by dismissing their pastors and employees with Jewish blood—or resist. Most Protestant and Catholic leaders fell into line, visibly currying favor with the regime or quietly complying with its edict.

Such ready capitulation makes the views of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young Lutheran theologian in Hitler's Germany, all the more remarkable. Within days of the new law's promulgation, the 27-year-old pastor published an essay titled "The Church and the Jewish Question," in which he challenged the legitimacy of a regime that contravened the tenets of Christianity. The churches of Germany, he wrote, shared "an unconditional obligation" to help the victims of an unjust state "even if they [the victims] do not belong to the Christian community." He went further: Christians might be called upon not only to "bandage the victims under the wheel" of oppression but "to put a spoke in the wheel itself." Before the decade was out, Bonhoeffer would join a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and pay for such action with his life.

In "Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy," Eric Metaxas tells Bonhoeffer's story with passion and theological sophistication, often challenging revisionist accounts that make Bonhoeffer out to be a "humanist" or ethicist for whom religious doctrine was easily disposable. In "Bonhoeffer" we meet a complex, provocative figure: an orthodox Christian who, at a grave historical moment, rejected what he called "cheap grace"—belief without bold and sacrificial action.

Mr. Loconte is a senior lecturer in politics at the King's College in New York City and the editor of "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm." Read the full review here.

"The Ghosts of Martyrs Square," Michael Young's luminous account of the past five tumultuous years of Lebanon's history. What was it that Mr. Young, then 20 years old, saw that morning? There were Muslim worshipers on deck "bent in prayer." There was a tall woman, an East European croupier from the ship's casino, walking past the faithful "in an afterthought of a miniskirt." There were "dozens of Lebanese still electrified by the night of gambling, their safari suits sodden with perspiration and scotch." Taken together, Mr. Young writes, it was a picture of "Lebanon's peculiar liberalism, a liberalism infused with the ideal of the many instead of the one."

Today Mr. Young, the son of an American father and a Lebanese mother, edits the opinion pages of the Daily Star, Beirut's English- language daily. It is a background—and a perch—that allows him to write with authority on a subject typified by antithesis, paradox, surprise and inescapability.

Mr. Young's book is peopled by characters who are blind to the ways in which their own sectarian identities limit their ability to effect political change. Of the liberal idealists of the March 14 movement, Mr. Young writes that they had "misdiagnosed the nature of their protests, seeing them as a lever for change when they ended up being mainly a mechanism for balance" within the country's sectarian system.

Lebanon's inherent pluralism can impose a political equilibrium that resists tyranny and creates spaces for personal freedom, it is also incapable of establishing conditions for a genuinely democratic political order. Lebanon, Mr. Young observes, allows its people to be who they are but not what they want to be. Those who seek to impose their will on the country by force of personality or by dint of political vision invariably come to ruin.

This is not, however, a counsel to leave well enough alone, much less (as some Western analysts would prefer) to deliver Lebanon into the hands of whoever can provide a semblance of stability. "If Lebanon can find a more durable social contract in the years to come," Mr. Young writes, "it will do so thanks to the efforts of modest men and women, those who have a realistic understanding of the recompenses and constraints of their system, not the visionaries who will burden the system with their egoism."

It is a gentle suggestion for which there is much to be said. So too for this book, which transcends the usual limitations of the current-events genre to offer a masterly portrait of the human condition in circumstances of unique stress.

Mr. Stephens is the Journal's foreign affairs columnist and a deputy editorial-page editor. Read full review here.

Judaism: A Way of Being, David Gelernter, Yale, November 2009

Today, as Jews celebrate Passover and tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt during the traditional Passover ritual meal, the Seder, they will figuratively re-enact the story of their own creation as a nation. The transition from slavery to freedom—the wandering through the Wilderness, during which the Jews receive the Ten Commandments, and the eventual arrival in the land of Israel—is the dominant historical theme in Judaism. But as David Gelernter explains in "Judaism: A Way of Being," the Exodus can be understood as a metaphor for the creation of the world. Just as God parted the waters of the Red Sea to enable the Jews to flee Egypt and escape bondage, he first divided "the waters from the waters" to create the firmament and make an earthly place for life itself.

Throughout "Judaism," Mr. Gelernter uses imagery to amplify understanding. He notes that Judaism is filled with powerful images—the seven-branched Temple menorah, the Star of David, the tablets of the Ten Commandments. To grasp the essence of Judaism is to read the messages of these images or at least to contemplate their potential meaning. When Moses, upon first encountering God, sees a burning bush that is not consumed, Mr. Gelernter infers a metaphor for all of Jewish history: "Jews are slaughtered yet Israel is not consumed." The book includes images of Mr. Gelernter's own devising, too: color plates of eight paintings by the author, each named by a Hebrew phrase. Perhaps the most evocative shows orange brushstrokes across a burgundy-and-purple field of Rothko-like color. Hebrew letters spell out a phrase that is sung aloud in synagogue each sabbath at the conclusion of the Torah-reading service. It is from Lamentations and can be translated thus: "Make us new again, as we used to be." Read full rview here.

Reviewed by Jay Lefkowitz, Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2010

Have a Little Faith, Mitch Albom, Hyperion, September 2009

In Have a Little Faith, Mitch Albom offers a beautifully written story of a remarkable eight-year journey between two worlds--two men, two faiths, two communities--that will inspire readers everywhere.

Albom's first nonfiction book since Tuesdays with Morrie, Have a Little Faith begins with an unusual request: an eighty-two-year-old rabbi from Albom's old hometown asks him to deliver his eulogy.

Feeling unworthy, Albom insists on understanding the man better, which throws him back into a world of faith he'd left years ago. Meanwhile, closer to his current home, Albom becomes involved with a Detroit pastor--a reformed drug dealer and convict--who preaches to the poor and homeless in a decaying church with a hole in its roof.

Moving between their worlds, Christian and Jewish, African-American and white, impoverished and well-to-do, Albom observes how these very different men employ faith similarly in fighting for survival: the older, suburban rabbi embracing it as death approaches; the younger, inner-city pastor relying on it to keep himself and his church afloat. Albom and the two men of God explore issues that perplex modern man: how to endure when difficult things happen; what heaven is; intermarriage; forgiveness; doubting God; and the importance of faith in trying times. Although the texts, prayers, and histories are different, Albom begins to recognize a striking unity between the two worlds--and indeed, between beliefs everywhere. Have a Little Faith is a book about a life's purpose; about losing belief and finding it again; about the divine spark inside us all. It is one man's journey, but it is everyone's story. - Publishers Weekly

I did not enjoy this authors fictional books, but I found this short story to be insightful and a good read. - Michael Cohen, 1/8/10

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller, Thomas Nelson, September 2009

Years after writing a best-selling memoir, Donald Miller went into a funk and spent months sleeping in and avoiding his publisher. One story had ended, and Don was unsure how to start another.

But he gets rescued by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his memoir. When they start fictionalizing Don's life for film--changing a meandering memoir into a structured narrative--the real-life Don starts a journey to edit his actual life into a better story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details that journey and challenges readers to reconsider what they strive for in life. It shows how to get a second chance at life the first time around.

In desultory fashion, Miller sets out to change his own life—to be the kind of guy who seeks out his father, chases the girl and undertakes a quest. Along the way, he comes to understand God as a master storyteller who doesn't quite control where his characters are going. An unexpected bonus of this book is Miller's insights into the writing process. - Publishers Weekly

While not about Judaism, this book explores our role in the world and discusses the type of people we want to become. I enjoyed the book very much. - Michael Cohen, 1/8/10

We Were Merchants by Hans Sternberg and James Shelley, LSU Press, 2009

This oversize book, generously illustrated with black-and-white photographs, recounts the journey of Erich and Lea Sternberg, Jewish immigrants who escaped with their daughter and two sons from the Nazi terror in Germany in the 1930s and, speaking no English, went into the department-store business in the Deep South. "We Were Merchants" also describes how the Sternberg family— Erich and Lea would eventually be joined at work by their sons, Hans and Josef, and daughter, Insa—spent the next half-century building up what became the country's largest family-owned department store, acquiring other stores along the way. The story of Goudchaux's success is related by Hans Sternberg with James E. Shelledy, a former newspaper reporter who teaches journalism at Louisiana State University. The book also yields some simple but oft-forgotten truths about what makes great brands, and some enduring lessons for retailers.

Hidden in the book's anecdotes are bedrock principles that get mere lip-service from most retailers today: loyalty to employees, giving back to the local community and customer care. Readers might have been happy to take the devotion of Goudchaux's customers on faith, but the book is unhelpfully sprinkled with sometimes treacly tributes from longtime patrons.

Reviewed by Mark Robichaux, The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2009

America's Prophet, Moses and the American Story by Bruce Feiler, Morrow, 2009

Feiler even scored an Oval Office audience with then-president George W. Bush (a fan of his book on Abraham). Bush famously referred to Jesus as his favorite philosopher; one suspects that after reading Feiler’s new book, the former commander in chief would change his answer to Moses.

In clear, engaging prose, Feiler demonstrates how the figure of Moses appealed to Americans across political and religious spectrums. Puritans and freethinkers, slaves and slave owners, capitalists and communists, Mormons and Jews, gay rights activists and computer moguls have looked to Moses as a leader and to the Exodus narrative as a template for their causes. This persistence of Moses in the American imagination, Feiler argues, is attributable to the fact that the motifs of the biblical narrative — overcoming oppression, balancing a desire for liberty (Exodus) and the need for order (Sinai), establishing a just social order — have proved so pertinent to our historical experience.

Feiler concludes that “Moses actually helped shape American history and values, helped define the American dream, and helped create America.” That’s not quite right, of course. It wasn’t Moses who shaped America, but Americans who saw themselves as the “newly chosen” (or, in Lincoln’s famous phrase, “almost chosen”) people and attempted to shape the country accordingly. But as Feiler has shown, Americans also shaped the Moses whom they took for a model and a teacher — a prophet fashioned and constantly refashioned in our own likenesses.

Reviewed by Jerome Copulsky, The Jewish Daily Forward, October 16, 2009

Sarah's Key, Tatiana de Rosnay, St. Martin's Press, 2009

From the Publisher: Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life. Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

While this book is a work of fiction, the Vel' d'Hiv round did indeed occur on July 16, 1942, during the occupation of France by the Germans. The roundup, in Paris, was conducted by the French police on Jewish French citizens. The victims, including thousands of children, were sent to French concentration camps and then to their deaths at Auschwitz. Few survived. French president Jacques Chirac apologized in 1995 for the role of French policemen and civil servants in the roundup.

Overall the book is excellent, especially the first half that deals with most of the historical details. It is amazing that this incident is not more well known. Here is a link to a Youtube video with the author.

Reviewed by Michael Cohen - 10/15/09

Why Are Jews Liberals? by Norman Podhoretz, Doubleday, 2009

In a conference call with more than 1,000 rabbis before Rosh Hashanah, President Barack Obama encouraged the religious leaders to use their sermons on the Jewish New Year to promote health-care reform. It is more than ironic that liberal Jews, who call for a complete separation of church and state, saw nothing wrong with the president scripting their sermons. The reason may be that the script came from a modern sort of Jewish holy book, what Norman Podhoretz calls the "Torah of liberalism."

"Why Are Jews Liberals?" is a fine and bracing examination of a question that has vexed Mr. Podhoretz for decades. He displays, along the way, the skill for supple reasoning and pugnacious argument that was the hallmark of his long editorship of Commentary magazine. Mr. Podhoretz grew up on the political left and remained there until the late 1960s, when he moved to the right. In "Why Are Jews Liberals?" he ponders, with a sense of deep frustration, why so few other Jews have made his journey.

During Rosh Hashanah services last weekend, I saw these words embedded in a stained-glass window at my synagogue: "God, the Torah and Israel are One." I'm still willing to accept that most American Jews believe these are the cornerstones of their faith. What is less clear is whether for many liberal Jews their Torah is Jewish law or the Torah of liberalism that Mr. Podhoretz describes with unsettling clarity. Check out the complete review here

Reviewed by Richard Baehr, The Wall Street Journal - 9/25/09

The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza by Alan M. Dershowitz, Camera Monograph Series, 2009

It seems that any rational and unbiased human being would understand the need to defend oneself from suicide murders, and unprovoked and indiscriminate missile attacks. Yet it seems that Israel continues to be consistently condemned for trying to protect its citizens. This book is a collection of interview transcripts and editorials the author has published over the last nine months in support of Israel and it’s right to defend itself. Dershowitz questions why the international community cannot distinguish between self defense and terrorism. He asks why terrorism or the murder of innocent Israeli children is accepted and a democracy is not allowed to protect its own people. Why can Hamas use human shields, and the death of it’s own people to win a war of propaganda without being held responsible for needless deaths? Dershowitz clearly makes the case for the double immoral crimes of Hamas and exposes those who support this evil tactic of sacrificing human lives.

The book’s cover says it all:

Reviewed by Michael Cohen – 8/30/09

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich, Doubleday 2009

Whenever I walk near my daughter while she is on the computer the screen immediately goes blank. It is clear that I am not invited to see what is happening in the teenage world of Facebook. But Facebook is no longer limited to “young people” but is now an international phenomena of millions of people communicating in ways never before imagined. Ben Mezrich chronicles the rise of Facebook from the dorm rooms of Harvard University to the top of the social networking world. Using a dramatic narrative style, Mezrich’s book is not Pulitzer Prize writing by any means but does tell the story to two geeky Jewish outsiders and their rise to social stardom. Critics are not kind to the book with regard to the narrative style or the possible looseness of the facts but you get the basic story that was not without some entertainment value. Perfect for an afternoon on the beach or a long plane flight, I’m sure a movie is soon to follow, as was a previous Mezrich book, Bring Down the House, that went to the big screen as the movie 21.

Enjoyed the book but wait for the paperback:

Reviewed by Michael Cohen – 8/30/09

$20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better, Christopher Steiner, Grand Central Publishing 2009

When the price of gasoline recently soared toward $4 people couldn’t wait to get rid of their gas guzzling SUV’s and find a more energy efficient hybrid vehicle. Now that gas has returned to a less painful price smaller cars again sit for months on car dealer’s lots. If we thought there was a panic at $4 gas one can only imagine the ways our lives will change with gas at $20 a gallon. Christopher Steiner lays out the possible changes to our lives as gas rises in $2 increments from $4 gas to $20 gas. Not all of these changes may be bad but change will be significant. It seems that our society has always found new technologies to prevent the need to change our behaviors but our reliance on fossil fuels and petroleum products will force everyone to reconsider our lifestyle choices.

It is clear that the fossil fuel resources are limited as well and becoming more difficult and expensive to acquire. It is also clear that burning fossil fuels causes pollution and our dependence on petroleum products has affected our foreign policy and relations with our nations. Energy independence is a topic that gets a lot of headlines but little action. The price of gas is one budget item we are all very familiar with but most people don’t realize the number of things we use daily that are derived from fossil fuels such as plastic products, roof shingles, asphalt for roads as well as our entire infrastructure from transporting goods to being able to live in single family homes in suburban areas.

While change is frightening it is also an opportunity to free ourselves to explore and reexamine opportunities closer to home. The author describes how $20 a gallon gas will help us lead healthier, safer and more community oriented lives.

Whether or when the author’s views become reality, I found this book to be very sobering, interesting and a fast read. I enjoyed the book and highly recommend it.

Reviewed by Michael Cohen – 8/30/09

The Last Ember, Daniel Levin, Riverhead Publishing, 2009

It may be a coincidence — or just good marketing — but it seems as if many publishers are launching mysteries that deal with myths, antiquities or icons before Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" comes out Sept. 15.

After all, Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" made fiction about symbols and religion palatable for the masses. Getting on the Brown bandwagon before his new novel is published makes good business sense. But whoever thought antiques would be fodder for action?

While Daniel Levin's debut deals with Brown-like subjects, this New York-based author is no copy cat. "The Last Ember", out today, is an exciting, action-packed story about history, religion, archaeology, antiques and tension in the Middle East. Realistic characters with believable motives further elevate "The Last Ember."

Reviewed by By Oline H. Cogdill, jewishworldreview.com - 8/3/09

Second opinion from the Jerusalem Post

Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year, Alistair Horne, Simon & Schuster, 2009

For Henry Kissinger, 1973 was a banner year. He won the Nobel Peace Prize, topped Gallup's poll as the most admired American and, at the peak of his power, got married. The year looked pretty good for President Richard Nixon, too -- at the start. He had just won re-election in a 48-state landslide, and he seemed to be on the verge of a final peace agreement with Vietnam. He was also looking forward to building on his 1972 foreign-policy triumphs: his historic trips to China and to Moscow.

This is where Alistair Horne's story begins. In "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year," Mr. Horne tracks Richard Nixon's calamitous fall and, more important for his purposes, the rise and triumph of Mr. Kissinger, the only senior official in the administration not touched by the Watergate scandal. We already know how the Nixon drama unfolded -- impeachment hearings, prosecutions, the resignations of top advisers and ultimately the resignation of the president himself. But there was more at stake than the fate of the Nixon presidency. Its unraveling took place during one of the most challenging periods in the history of U.S. foreign policy.

Reviewed by Jonathan Karl, The Wall Street Journal - 7/2/09

A Time to Every Purpose, Jonathan Sarna, Basic Books, 2008

The title of the book refers to a passage derived from Ecclesiastes, and Sarna uses it to illustrate how Jews ascribe meaning to their days while marking the passage of time with rites and customs connected to Jewish celebrations. In each chapter addressed to his daughter, Sarna discusses the Jewish holidays in detail, including the meaning and evolution of these holidays. Sarna refers to the Jewish calendar to discuss modern issues facing American Jews today. For example, he highlights Chanuka to focus on assimilation, discusses anti-Semitism in the context of Tisha B’Av, and the environment in the context of Tu B’Shevat.

The author brings in some personal history, such as how the meaning of Rosh Hashana was transformed for him the year he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He also laments the decline of the world Jewish population due to intermarriage and other reasons with startling facts:

More than 60 years after the Holocaust, the worldwide Jewish population still has not recovered. Where once there were 18 million Jews worldwide, now there are only about 13 million. Outside of Israel, only 1.2 of every thousand people in the world is Jewish, probably the smallest percentage of the world that we have been in more than two thousand years. We are — let’s face it — a tiny drop in the world’s bucket. Our numbers are less than the statistical error in the Chinese census.

Reviewed by Hilary Daninhirsch, The Jewish Chronicle - 6/4/09

In March 1861, blond, blue-eyed Jacob Rappaport of New York is hiding in a barrel on a boat headed to New Orleans. Rappaport, a 19-year-old Jewish private in the Union Army, has been ordered to kill his own uncle, a rabid Confederate plotting President Lincoln's assassination. So begins Dara Horn's "All Other Nights," an enjoyably fast-paced amalgam of historical romance, spy novel and political thriller -- laced with American Jewish history.

In New Orleans, Jacob visits a Jewish burial ground, even though stepping through the gates violates an "entire edifice of law and custom" forbidding him, as a descendant of the biblical high priest, from contact with the dead. Then again, he is about to commit murder. His religious faith, it turns out, was in turmoil well before his unapologetically anti-Semitic higher-ups ordered him to kill his uncle. Having joined the military after rejecting an arranged marriage, Jacob has asserted his independence, but he has lost his moral compass.

Disguised as a Confederate who has turned against his native North, Jacob arrives at the home of his uncle, Harry Hyams, in time for a Passover Seder prepared and served by slaves. A fellow guest is Judah Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of state, the highest post held in America by a Jewish politician up to that point. Jacob despises Benjamin's slaveholding and pro-South politics but can't help admiring his political brilliance. During the Seder, where Jacob intends to kill his uncle with poison, Hyams discusses his plan to kill Lincoln -- an assassination plot that Benjamin dismisses as egotistical nonsense: "Glory isn't for the Jews, Harry."

Reviewed by Emily Bingham, Wall Street Journal - 4/3/09

A “last lecture” is an honor given to university professors to speak to their colleagues, students and friends as if they were delivering their last lecture.  It is an opportunity to provide a verbal legacy.  Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch was selected by his university for this honor in the spring of 2007.  Dr. Pausch was a Professor of computer science, an award winning teacher and researcher, and a well known expert in his field in the science of human computer interaction and design.  Soon after receiving the honor of providing a last lecture he was diagnosed with a terminal case of pancreatic cancer and was faced with the realization that he would truly be giving his last lecture.  When he went before his university in the fall of 2007, this husband and father of three young children gave a truly inspiring lecture of hopes and dreams.  This book is the written and published companion to his final public address and is appropriately titled, The Last Lecture.  The reader will be awed not only by the way the author chose to live the last months of his life but be inspired to live life to the fullest and treasure each day.  Dr. Pausch would live to the fall of 2008 before succumbing to his illness.

This story is a must read and one of the most thought provoking books I have read.

Reviewed by Michael Cohen - 2/23/09

For those who enjoy history and art, The Forger’s Spell is an interesting true story of forgery at it’s highest level.  The author, Edward Dolnick, recounts how a middling painter, Han van Meegeren, was able to fool the art world for seven years during World War II with forgeries of the great master Vermeer for millions of dollars.  The story explains how a twentieth century painter’s genius was not in artistic skill but psychological manipulation to take in millions from the Nazi’s and cash starved museums.  The story also reviews how the Nazi’s plundered art during World War II and how their greed led the forger’s success.  The book expands on the documentary, The Rape of Europa, which played at our Altoona Jewish Film Festival in Altoona in 2008.  This story is well told although the detail may be lengthy to some readers.

This is a good book for those who enjoy art history.

Reviewed by Michael Cohen - 2/23/09

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, Little, Brown & Co, 2008

Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell, seeks to discover why some people succeed far more than others.   Gladwell explores success from the perpectives of opportunity as well as legacy.  Through true stories of success, Outliers shows that success is more complex than hard work and intelligence.  Extraordinary success may be attributed to many factors including family, birthplace, birth date as well as culture and class.  Gladwell shows that being in the right place at the right time can have a powerful affect on success in the business world, sports and academics.  Using examples of youth ice hockey, airplane safety, Jewish immigrants, all subjects of interest to me as well as Asian rice farming, music and public education, and others, Oultliers is a fast and informative read that will challenge the way you will see successful people and corporations.

I highly recommend this book. 

Reviewed by Michael Cohen - 1/29/09