The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages
The Bible continues to be the best-selling book in history, perhaps because each reader can identify with some aspect of its ancient text. It is this notion that informs the essays of the 24 novelists, poets, scholars, and journalists who answered Andrew Blauner’s call to write an essay centered on a Biblical book or passage with personal meaning to them.
Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman Among Books
Jewish women for almost five thousand seven hundred seventy years have struggled with a tradition that moved them into a life of modesty, early marriage and motherhood. Formal education was forbidden to women, a point brought home in Maggie Anton's three novels "Rashi's Daughters I, II and III". Women inherited wisdom by what was referred to as Binah, a mystical process where they acquired all the knowledge necessary to sustain their family's needs. The progressive streams of Judaism recently have opened up their doors to women's full participation in all aspects of religious and communal life. The author Ilana Blumberg's journey is that of a woman in love with learning of Judaism whose full participation in the Modern Orthodox world is often blocked by the rules in the sacred texts she reveres.
By Fire, By Water
Palace intrigue, ethnic cleansing, murder, unrequited love, and the quest for new lands and their riches are all woven together in Michael James Kaplan's novel By Fire and By Water. The story takes place in Spain during the mid 1480's through the late 1490's in the reign of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. In that time frame four world-changing events were simultaneously occurring: the establishment of the New Inquisition in Castile and Aragon, the reconquest of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and Cristobal Colon's (Christopher Columbus) so-called discovery of the Western Hemisphere.