On the Nightstand - Hebrew College Today

Looking for a great book? Several faculty share their current personal favorites.

DAVID GORDIS:

Cultures of the Jews by David Biale (Schocken Books, 2002) "A new, somewhat idiosyncratic major collection of essays about diverse forms of Jewish culture throughout history."

Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic by Moshe Idel (State University of New York Press, 1995) "A collection of essays by principal student and heir of Gershon Sholem."

No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century by Walter Laqueur (Continuum Pub Group, 2003) "A political analyst's study of terrorism in the modern world."

Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001) "A magisterial biography of Churchill."

Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Religion, Ideology, and the Crisis of Modernity (New Perspectives on Jewish Studies) edited by Laurence J. Silberstein (New York University Press, 1993) "A collection of essays on fundamentalism, both in the Jewish community and outside of it."

JUDITH KATES:

The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite edited by Elizabeth Wyner Mark (Brandeis University, 2003) "I was especially interested in this collection of essays because it was edited by a woman I know to be a thoughtful and original student of Judaism and because, most unusually, it very much includes women's voices and perspectives in the conversation."

Fateless by Imre Kertész (Hydra Books, 1996) "Since this Hungarian Jewish author was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, more of his work has been translated. This is the first English translation of the novel that my friend, Israeli poet Tuvia Ruebner, particularly recommended, a powerful story based on his childhood in German concentration camps."

Ten Thousand Lovers by Edeet Ravel (Perennial, 2003) "A very disturbing, but important novel by an Israeli-born writer now living in Canada. She dares to take on some of the really tough human problems connected to the centrality of Tzahal in Israeli life and the effects of the matzav on men and women as individuals."

STEVE COPELAND:

"At any given time I'm always reading some seven books at once. Right now, I'm reading two books exploring figurative versus literal understanding—Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2003) and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (Doubleday, 2003), a novel about a 15-year-old autistic young man who's gifted at math and science and relates well to animals, but has problems understanding the emotions involved in interacting with people—as well as the figurative truths of literature, the arts and religion. I'm also reading Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2002), Yeshaiyahu Leibowitz's Sheva Shanim Shel Sichot al Parshat HaShavuah (Seven years of discourses on the weekly Torah reading) (Keter, 2000) and two books of poetry—Henri Cole's new collection, Middle Earth (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2003), and a new volume of Hebrew poetry, Shoveret Kerach (Breaking the ice) (Karmel, 2003) by one of my many close friends in Israel, Orna Silverman."