Notable Books
Notable Books Lake Effect Rich Cohen (New York: Knopf, 2002) Rich Cohens first two books, Tough Jews and The Avengers, dealt with Jewish gangsters and with Holocaust resistance fighters. In Lake...
...The authors review how Biblical and rabbinic Judaism have marked various life-cycle events—such as circumcision, bar mitzvah, marriage, divorce, and death—but then suggest how "holistic Judaism," might modify and multiply existing ceremonies...
...The book includes the staple recipes of any good Jewish diet such as brisket and farfel—and Davis cleverly names the chapters ("Dinner Starts at Five" and "Since When Are You a Vegetarian...
...What remained was a hodgepodge of high school strivers, slackers, and drifters, a world in which Cohen felt very much at home...
...Davis should know—he is a food writer for several major magazines...
...to make you feel like your bubbe is in the kitchen...
...Notable Books Lake Effect Rich Cohen (New York: Knopf, 2002) Rich Cohens first two books, Tough Jews and The Avengers, dealt with Jewish gangsters and with Holocaust resistance fighters...
...A look at the history of Jewish liberals...
...The decade of rebellion was over...
...Cohen's locale was the Chicago suburb of Glencoe in the late 1970s and early 1980s...
...Jews first arrived in the Catsldlls around the end of the 1800s as farmers and later converted many of those farms to small boarding houses or bungalow colonies...
...With hundreds of classic recipes and some nouveau twists, Davis reintroduces Jewish cooking to a generation which may have fond memories of Jewish fare but never learned how to prepare it properly...
...A Time fir Every Purpose Under Heaven offers a contemporary Jewish handbook to the "four-step lifedance...
...Toward that end, these post-halacbic Jews have devised and cataloged rituals for weaning, the onset of menstruation, and many other events that could be liberating, or else more constraining, than the 613 commandments of halachah—Steven G. Keilman Jewish Food Isn't an Oxymoron Mitchell David (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002) "Somewhere between the Exodus from Egypt and the migration to New York City's Upper West Side," Mitchell Davis writes, "Jewish food got a bad rap...
...The book is designed to capture the flavor of Jewish life in the area long known simply as "the mountains...
...Lake Effect, although it has its moments of fine description, is ultimately too desultory and too self-indulgent to fully succeed.—Jonathan Groner A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven: The Jewish Life-Spiral as a Spiritual Path Arthur Ocean Waskow and Phyllis Ocean Berman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002) Arthur Ocean Waskow and Phyllis Ocean Berman do not stand on ceremony...
...Over an entire life and within each part, they find a recurrent structure of withdrawal, encounter, transformation, and reentry...
...But an early reference to Cohen's family's Jewishness is never followed up, and that thread remains unexplored, perhaps intentionally...
...Beware: The recipes don't follow kashrut, but you may be too busy indulging in nostalgia to realize it.—DR In the Catsk/Hs—A Century of Jewish Experience in "The mountains" Phil Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) In the CatskiUs focuses on Jewish life in upstate New York's famed "Borscht Belt...
...Torn at the Roots—Jewish Liberalism in Crisis, Michael Staub (New York: Columbia University Press...
...In Lake Effect, Cohen turns away from explicidy Jewish subjects and embraces a traditional American genre— a memoir of adolescence...
...They dance on it...
...Within just a few decades, Jews owned many large resorts, and the Catsldlls, which had become a popular destination for vacationing New York City Jews, also became established as an American Jewish cultural icon.—NIK Books Received Zen Judaism—For You, a Little Enlightenment, David M. Bader (New York: Harmony Books...
...Humorously meshes the teachings of Judaism and Buddhism...
...And they explicate and celebrate ceremonies that mark each stage...
Vol. 27 • August 2002 • No. 4
