On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters and situations that tell you this could only be New York. The parents who are determined to get their children literally to fly at the school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier at the local deli who is more Jewish than Gopnik s grandfather - his gloriously peculiar analyst who argues that a name can be damaging to the human psyche, saying Adam s name is very ugly - the birder who takes Adam to see the huge flock of feral parrots that have taken over Flatbush. No one knows how they got there or how they survive the brutal winters, but they do. And flourish on it. These birds are so bold. They are real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude . Through the Children s Gate is written with Gopnik s signature mix of mind and heart, elegantly and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life.

On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters and situations that tell you this could only be New York. The parents who are determined to get their children literally to fly at the school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier at the local deli who is more Jewish than Gopnik's grandfather - his gloriously peculiar analyst who argues that a name can be damaging to the human psyche, saying Adam's name is very ugly - the birder who takes Adam to see the huge flock of feral parrots that have taken over Flatbush. No one knows how they got there or how they survive the brutal winters, but they do. And flourish on it. 'These birds are so bold. They are real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude'. Through the Children's Gate is written with Gopnik's signature mix of mind and heart, elegantly and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life.

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2010 A gripping story of a lone Jewish woman battling land sharks to keep her community alive Rachel lives alone by the sea. Her children have long migrated to Israel as have her Bene Israel Jew neighbours. Taking care of the local synagogue and preparing exquisite traditional Jewish dishes sustains Rachel's hope of seeing the community come together again at a future time. When developers make moves to acquire the synagogue and its surrounding land, Rachel's vehement opposition takes the synagogue committee and the town by surprise. Written with warmth and humour, Book of Rachel is a captivating tale of a woman's battle to live life on her own terms. Continuing the saga of the unique Bene Israel Jews in India, it adds to Esther David's reputation as a writer of grace and power.

A seventeen-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl leaves her home in New York for the summer to film a television show in California.

"In his captivating new book, based on new evidence and a series of interviews, author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer offers a richly journalistic portrait of Russia's dwindling yet still vibrant and influential Jewish community. This is simultaneously an in-depth exploration of the texture of Jewish life in Putin's Russia and an emigre's moving elegy for Russia's Jews, which forty years ago constituted one of the world's largest Jewish populations and which presently numbers only about 180,000. Why do Jews continue to live in Russia after the antisemitism and persecution they had endured there? What are the prospects of Jewish life in Russia? What awaits the children born to Jews who have not left? "With or Without You" asks and seeks to answer some of the central questions of modern Jewish history and culture"--

"Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with desperate hope. She's always biblical to me, not just because the Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to war, though she sees in that son another's son--a boy killed on a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much needed Psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first articulated by Fanny Howe: 'Where did the days go? Where to now?' And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all the poems in this painful and wise book: 'Are my children safe?' 'We will need a new language, ' Back warns. Good then that she's giving it to us."--Kazim Ali "'What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking, ' and the book itself is the answer: Poetry --this poetry--is necessary, irreplaceable, urgent. This is the best work of an important Israeli-American poet, translator, peace activist and scholar who reminds us, through the courageous beauty of her poems, that not to be political in these times is to collaborate with the forces of darkness. And what is political for Back couldn't be more intensely personal, as the mother of an air-force paramedic who suffers from PTSD. Narrating the endless cycle of violence of her region, Back's poems protest, grieve, and rescue language from its political and commercial appropriations. Throughout she adopts the irreverent tradition of textual allusion in Jewish poetry, allowing herself to radically rewrite the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Psalms, and feminize the Jewish liturgy. This is one of the best new books of poetry I have read in recent years!"--Chana Kronfeld "Poetry may make nothing happen, as Auden infamously wrote, but Rachel Tzvia Back's poetry makes something delicately yet fiercely come forth: the grief of mothers, the fear of soldiers, the tenderness of a younger brother's hand, the stones and sand against which cyclamens struggle to flower in Israel/Palestine. This is a poetry that honors the vast silence out of which and into which we go, and the silences before and after extreme violence. Drawing on ancient epic and myth, alert to the rhythms of land- and sea-scapes, Back's poems arise from a background of unending war, refugee crises, the 'sea of small feathered/things' and 'of mortar fire fired.' These are incantations offered in part to heal a son, to recognize injury, to sound out grief and guilt, but also to register difficult flashes of beauty and the presiding elemental forces of "eastern winds," sun, moon, season, and sea. Back's lyrics are as purposive, stealthy, and precise as the step of the tutelary cat in some of her poems. Her beautifully spare lines offer 'a narrow bridge and all the world'." --Maureen McLane

With his father gunned down in a petty robbery and his aunt haunted by the threats of the Gestapo, Richard Michelson's experiences growing up in Brooklyn were far from ordinary, yet they remain all too common--too much a part of ongoing violence--to be dismissed as merely private events, safely past. In Counting to Six Million he writes out memory, anxiety, and grief, worry over his wife and children, and the recurring clashes between love and cruelty that test wisdom with suffering, day after day.