What It Means to Be Jewish: The Voices of Our Heritage Book

Several years ago, when Ina Abrams began what she calls "a renewal of my life as a Jew," she began wondering how practicing Jews saw the world. She collected the most compelling answers to that question in the anthology What It Means to Be Jewish: The Voices of Our Heritage. The volume--a grab bag of quotations from scripture, rabbinic tradition, pop culture, politics, literature, and poetry--is arranged thematically, including chapters pondering the topics of covenant and identity, Jewish holidays and culture, Jewish immigrants to America, the Holocaust, and prayer. Most of Abrams's selections are "first-person writings": a young writer's memories of his first Hasidic wedding in Brooklyn, for instance, or a child's poem describing the "last butterfly" that flies over the wall of the ghetto at Theresienstadt. A strikingly large number of the contemporary writers included here are women, including Cynthia Ozick and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. What It Means to Be Jewish collects Judaica's greatest thoughts, in a format that's easy to read and hard to put down. --Michael Joseph GrossRead More