Yom Kippur: Our Reading Recommendations

By Michael Reich

With Yom Kippur upon us, we in the English Department would like to take a moment to celebrate Jewish writers, readers, and thinkers who have been changing the world. 

As I sit and write this reading list, myself Jewish (more Long Island cultural than a true practitioner) I reflect on how earlier in my life, I was shamed for my heritage and became both afraid and unwilling to really learn more about my background. Much later in life, I sought to remedy this – but Jewish religious tradition and culture is expansive. I see this moment as one that can allow us, those who are interested and able, to take a deep dive into this expanse, to read thoughtfully, to learn, to laugh, to commemorate, to reflect, to grow. 

Here are the books we’re reading and the movies we’re watching to celebrate Jewish writers and culture this holiday season. We’re excited about them; please do read along with us.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka (trans. Ross Benjamin)

A new uncensored translation of Kafka’s diary entries from 1909-1923. This volume, which the New York Times dubs an “invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre,” includes reflections, sketches, letter drafts, and dreams. 

Psalms: A Companion Volume, by Hayyim Angel (Kodesh). Unlike the narrative books of the Bible, the Book of Psalms is a collection of poems and songs based on different experiences and emotions that the biblical poets wish to memorialize and preserve for eternity. Based on traditional and modern sources, Rabbi Hayyim Angel's Psalms: A Companion Volume explores the history, meaning, significance, and theological ramifications of several individual Psalms as well as the book as a whole.

Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems, edited by Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins

Poets & Writers describes Between Paradise and Earth: Eve Poems as a collection that “offers an extended meditation on the Abrahamic religious traditions’ originary female figure. Editors Nomi Stone and Luke Hankins have amassed an array of lyrical inquiries into this 'first' woman and her relationship to our understanding of gender and its intersection with other identities such as race and class."

The Promise of a Normal Life, by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Hailed as “radiant and transporting” (Margot Livesey), The Promise of a Normal Life is a poet’s debut novel, so evocative of life as lived that it transports you to a time and place you can practically see, touch, and feel. The unnamed narrator is a fiercely observant, introverted Jewish-American girl who seems to exist in a private and separate realm. She's the child of a first-generation doctor and lawyer—whose own stories have the loud grandeur of family legend—in an America where Jews are excluded from the country club across the street. Her expectations for adulthood are often contradictory. In the changing landscape of the 1960s, she attempts to find her way through the rituals of life, her geography expanding across the country, across the ocean, and into multiple nations. 

You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, directed by Sammi Cohen

I'd be remiss if I didn’t add this recent film which Courtney Howard from Variety says “plays like a cross between Judy Blume’s ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ and John Hughes’ ‘Sixteen Candles.’” Up your alley? Check it out.

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We’d also like to take this opportunity to share the work of our Jewish Studies faculty and Fordham's Center for Jewish Studies.  Here are the books that faculty have published in the last five years: 

Orit Avishai: Queer Judaism

Ayala Fader: Hidden Heretics

Emanuel Fiano: Three Powers in Heaven

Magda Teter: Blood Libel and Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism

Sarit Kattan Gribetz: Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism

Jewish Studies has also opened an exhibition titled "The Light of the Revival," featuring the artwork of Eugeny Kotlyar, a Jewish Ukrainian stained glass artist, who created stained-glass windows for Ukrainian synagogues. Many of them feature holiday imagery and biblical passages.  You can see the exhibit catalog here. Those who can get to the Rose Hill campus can visit the exhibition in the Walsh Family Library at the new Henry S. Miller Judaica Reading Room on the 4th floor.

Last year, Jewish Studies hosted a webinar with the authors of a new book titled Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History, which can be watched here.  It is all about the etrog, one of the four species used during the holiday of Sukkot, and its fascinating history.

Jewish Studies also has a large collection of Haggadot at the library, and the many exhibitions and events hosted about Purim (e.g. here) and Passover (e.g. here and here), as well as colleagues' work related to Holocaust and Holocaust commemoration around the time of Yom Hashoah (e.g. here and here).

Most of Jewish Studies’ past events can be watched on their YouTube Channel here.