In Search of the Phoenicians (Miriam S. Balmuth Lectures in Ancient History and Archaeology) Hardcover – December 25, 2017 by Josephine Quinn (Princeton University Press)

In her book In Search of the Phoenicians Josephine Quinn has opened up the history of a people who have been thoroughly familiar to European scholars since the nineteenth century, when Ernest Renan traveled to the Near East to study them. His Mission de Phénicie (1864) drew upon observations he made in 1860–1861 and laid the foundation for a view of the Phoenicians as a nation with a coherent ethnic identity. Others such as George Rawlinson, in his History of Phoenicia (1889), took up Renan’s position, and their work was reinforced by the earlier decipherment of the Phoenician alphabet by the numismatist Jean-Jacques Barthélémy in the mid-eighteenth century. The language seemed to provide a philological foundation for the unifying vision of Renan and his successors.

Quinn has taken aim at the entire edifice of Phoenician history and culture. In doing so she has raised major questions of ethnic identity as well as shown modern claims to a presumed cultural heritage from antiquity to be part of a political agenda. Her work is richly and authoritatively documented and admirably free of ideological prejudices. At the end there can be no doubt that Quinn’s argument is decisive: there is scarcely anything left of the supposed Near Eastern nation that colonized North Africa and western Spain.

The demolition that Quinn has carried out has its immediate origins in a great exhibition, “I Fenici,” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1988. The organizer of the exhibition (which was sponsored by Fiat) was the Semitic philologist Sabatino Moscati, who had posed two decades earlier the awkward and still-unanswered question of who exactly the Phoenicians were. At Venice he tried hard to give publicity to what they did, and above all to suggest that they were really one people. Quinn aptly quotes a witticism that was current at the time: “Sabatino Moscati invented the Phoenicians, Gianni Agnelli manufactured them.”

There is no doubt that the Phoenicians, whose origins go back to the ancient Lebanese cities of Tyre and Sidon in the late second millennium BC, were prominent in the ancient Mediterranean. They were famous for commerce and seafaring. Athough their language was Semitic, the shape of their letters has been forever associated with the emergence of the Greek alphabet. As merchants they turned up in remote and unrelated places such as Delos, Carthage, and Cádiz, and their tireless god Melqart was transformed into the Greek Heracles, with European wanderings in Spain and France above all, where traces of his legendary travel can still be detected. As Quinn reminds us in the arresting opening of her book, the Phoenicians were even thought to have reached Ireland and to have become the progenitors of the Irish.

De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images
Phoenician glass masks from Carthage (modern-day Tunisia), third century BC


In the Near East the Lebanese of the twentieth century AD looked to the Phoenicians as the ancestral people from which they came, not least in order to assert that their identity is wholly distinct from that of the Arabs. This reconfiguration of the region had been encouraged by the French Mandate from 1920 onward, which issued programmatic Lebanese coinage with a Phoenician ship and a cedar tree. These were the public images with which the Mandate launched the concept of Greater Lebanon as a “Switzerland of the East,” a place that was multilingual, attractive for tourism, and hospitable to business and banking enterprises. The new Lebanon, with its distinctly Phoenician and non-Arab character, lingered on until the catastrophe of the civil war that erupted in 1975.

Quinn outlines the systematic arrogation of the claims of the Neo-Phoenicians by extreme right, anti-Arab Christians, of whom the most conspicuous were the so-called Phalange (al-Kata’ib). This struggle brought an end to the cosmopolitanism for which Beirut in particular had become both cherished and renowned. Meanwhile another wave of Phoenician enthusiasm was taking hold in Tunisia, a nation that sheltered the remains of the great ancient city of Carthage with a totally different but no less influential history of Phoenician settlement.

Modern attempts to proclaim “Lebanon First” still have a disquieting echo in nationalist propaganda today, which mirrors the uneasy relationship between the Lebanese and their Arab neighbors, a relationship with deep roots in Lebanese consciousness of their Phoenician origins. At the present time a bewildering profusion of faiths and political groups gives Lebanon a diversity that in a strange way evokes the very lack of cohesion that characterized the Phoenicians themselves throughout antiquity. Who were these people, so widely dispersed across the Mediterranean world and invoked as ancestors by peoples as diverse, and obviously unrelated, as the Carthaginians and the Irish, the Lebanese and the Tunisians?

Through the reflections of Renan in the nineteenth century on the nature of states and ethnic identities—reflections that underlay his reports from Phoenicia—we can see the thread of Phoenician settlements and influences stretching across several millennia and vast spaces from Dido’s North Africa to Heracles’s Spain. The modern state of Tunisia looked to the Phoenicians as antecedents as recently as Habib Bourguiba’s time in power from 1956 to 1987. And Phoenicia, which did not exist as a definable region until the Roman Empire (although great Phoenician port cities, such as Tyre and Sidon, did), comes into the historical record much later than the Phoenicians themselves.

Quinn is even able to write convincingly about “the invention of Phoenicia,” although who did this and when is by no means clear. But she can anchor this invention in the emergence of the modern Near East. The self-consciousness of the Lebanese as non-Arab (“there are no camels in Lebanon”) went hand in hand with the promotion of the Phoenicians as a people. Quinn’s book is a bracing exploration of what we don’t know about them. It demonstrates how explosively the conjunction of their fame with our ignorance can spawn arguments for the construction of nations and ethnic groups in search of prestigious ancestors.

Quinn has therefore, in a timely and persuasive way, tapped into the modern mania for Phoenician culture, or what has been called in French phénicité, which Moscati unleashed through his great exhibition in Venice in 1988. This was arguably the single most important shift in Phoenician studies since Renan. Moscati’s comprehensive treatment of Phoenicians, their settlements, and their artifacts not only provides the background for Quinn’s book but justifies the relentless incredulity that she has brought to the whole subject. Her work succeeds in proving that the Phoenicians were not a people or a community. She strips away the fictional premises of “Lebanon First” and Bourguiba’s Tunisia, and she has delivered a powerful lesson for many who feel free, usually for ideological reasons, to speculate on nations and nativism.

Phoenice, under that name (not “Phoenicia”), became a Roman province within Syria at the end of the second century of our era. This was due to the influence of the ruling Severan dynasty, which had links with the city of Emesa, home of Julia Domna, the wife of the emperor Septimius Severus. The city for still-unknown reasons identified itself as Phoenician. Unlike the famous Phoenician cities of earlier times, Emesa was not a port, but it serves as a reminder that the very word “phoenix” (Greek phoinix) evokes a date palm tree. The tree would have been familiar in Emesa, and as a symbol it served the Phoenicians who colonized Carthage as a reminder of their distant origins. But its appearance on their coinage was more a visual rendering of the word “phoenix” than an allusion to some remote region in Palestine or Syria. Julia Domna’s pride in Emesa had nothing to do with Carthage or with trade, either in her day or long before. Phoenice entered the Roman Empire neither as an ancient commercial people nor a territory, but simply as the place where the palm trees grew. Roman Phoenice had no connection, either at that time or before, with Carthage.

Because of Hannibal’s confrontation with Roman power, Carthage gave weight to the mythical narratives of Phoenician expansion across the Mediterranean. The tragic suicide of Dido as Aeneas left her to fulfill his divine mission to move on to Italy and found Rome is an integral part of the story of the Roman state. But it says nothing about Phoenicians, nor does the bizarre culture that had bloomed by the Bay of Carthage. The magnificent location of the city, as anyone who has been there will know, could easily have fostered dreams of empire across the water. But the customs that have been revealed in Carthage have nothing to do either with Phoenicians elsewhere or, for that matter, with the territorial ambitions of the city.

Carthaginians are probably best known for sacrificing children, a practice that is documented in over thirty Greek and Roman authors and by archaeological research on sanctuaries in Africa and elsewhere that reveal the remains of infants. Their burials are commemorated on inscriptions as an expression of thanks to Baal Hammon and his consort Tinnit. Attempts to explain away these burials by postulating premature deaths are indefensible, as Quinn rightly observes, in view of the improbability of such extensive infant mortality at the tender ages indicated by the osteological evidence. The deaths of such large numbers of children can only be explained by the practice of ritual sacrifice known to us from the ancient sources. This Carthaginian custom spread outside North Africa into Motya off the coast of Sicily and into Sardinia. But it is utterly without parallel in the Phoenician cities of the Near East, and equally unknown to the Phoenician diaspora west of Sardinia.

The funerary sanctuaries at Carthage and elsewhere have traditionally been designated “tophets,” because modern scholars, facing the hard evidence, took refuge in a name from the Hebrew Bible for a place in the Valley of Ben Hinnom in Jerusalem where the residents killed their children and made them “pass through the fire.” This is the place best known to modernity under the name “Gehenna,” which is often translated as Hell. Unfortunately the word “tophet” caught on, quite wrongly, as a way to provide a veneer of academic respectability to a Carthaginian practice that had no known name. Such an onomastic sleight of hand is a powerful example of the way in which an older generation of scholars struggled to make the unmentionable mentionable. One has simply to face the reality of what was going on. Talking about tophets at Carthage is yet another mistaken effort to link the Phoenicians of the West with the Near East.

The unsavory but by now incontestable habit of killing children in tribute to the gods was clearly not an ancestral Phoenician tradition that arrived with colonization. It sharply segregates the peoples of the Near East from those who used a variant of the same Semitic language in the orbit of the Carthaginians. For the Romans such people spoke Punic, which is a Latin way of saying “Phoenician,” although “Punic” lacks the resonance of the Greek word phoinix, which not only denoted a palm tree but the mysterious bird called the phoenix, as well as a deep red dye.

So multivalent is the word phoinix that for reasons that remain, as far as I know, still unexplained, the Greek verb phoinikizein serves to designate performing cunnilingus. The implication is that this activity was associated with Phoenicians, though it is by no means clear which Phoenicians are meant or where. Sexual practices were sometimes connected with a particular place in antiquity, as was another intriguing verb, lesbiazein, for what was done on the island of Lesbos. Curiously this does not refer, as one might expect, to sapphism but to fellatio.

In any case the very name of the Phoenicians is proof enough, through its breathtakingly divergent senses, of the lack of coherence among the many peoples to whom it was applied. “Punic” as an identifier was far less flexible as an adjective, which generally evoked Carthaginians and their faithlessness (Punica fides). “Phoenician” by contrast suggested Tyre and Sidon, but no region and no community or nation.

In fact the name “Phoenician” was so infinitely flexible, and certainly so ill defined, that when Julia Domna’s Syrian home city of Emesa became identified with Phoenice, this could readily allow the Greek writer Heliodorus, probably well over a century later, to sign off at the end of his vast novel about Ethiopians by calling himself simply “a Phoinix from Emesa.” His world could hardly be more different from the old Punic kingdom in North Africa, and his compatriots had nothing whatever to do with the people who had lived there nor, for that matter, with the residents of Tyre and Sidon centuries earlier.

Musée du Bardo, Tunis/Bridgeman Images
Terracotta mask from Carthage, sixth or seventh century BC

But this is not the whole story, because the Phoenician divinity Melqart turns up prominently even farther west in the Mediterranean world, at Cádiz and from there all the way into France. He is identified by his Greek name, Heracles. The travels of this peripatetic divinity as far as the Atlantic Ocean undoubtedly tell us much about the commerce of merchants who sailed west from Near Eastern ports, but the mythology of Heracles in Spain and France depends entirely upon Greek narratives and local survivals of alien traditions in names and physical remains. The story of Heracles’s path across Europe into Switzerland and then down into Italy has been thoroughly traced in recent years,* and it sheds light on the continuing evolution of Phoenician legends well into the imperial period. But none of this shows, as Quinn is well aware, that the Phoenicians ever were, or even were imagined to be, a coherent nation or people.

Quinn ends her work with a bravura chapter that recalls the supposedly Phoenician origins of the Irish, with whom her book had paradoxically begun. On the basis of a sixteenth-century account of a dinner party hosted by the last abbot of St. Augustine’s of Canterbury before Henry VIII dissolved the monastery, Quinn recounts the views of the abbot and his guests about the origins of nostra Britannia and its people. After the separation of Britain from Roman France, the first foreigners to arrive in the island were, we are told, the Phoenicians.

It would be hard to find any substantial basis for such a nationalist, anti-European perspective, apart from a single tile in Wales that bears a Roman name in Punic, but “fictive Phoenicians,” as Quinn calls them, became increasingly visible in Britain well into the nineteenth century. They proved useful in constructing a distinct British identity. By 1893 George Rawlinson could maintain that the Phoenicians were “the people who of all antiquity had most in common with England and the English” as well as “the first who discovered the British islands.” By then Stonehenge had already been claimed as a Phoenician site. Before long the president of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, which was proud of an imagined link between the Cornish and the Carthaginians, could assert that the Phoenicians had actually introduced clotted cream to Britain.

Frederic Leighton’s romantic painting Phoenicians Bartering with Ancient Britons(1894–1895) shows an astonishing passage from the world of the pre-Raphaelites to a nation of new Phoenicians. It is to Quinn’s great credit that after so successfully explaining away the Phoenicians as a people or nation, she is able to build upon the modern examples of Phoenician mania with which she started, as in Ireland or Lebanon, to create a far more complex account of contemporary Phoenicianism from the sixteenth century onward.

Quinn’s narrative is both exhilarating and cautionary because it shows how antiquity can be reimagined to promote ideological prejudices. One of the many lessons of her work is that ancient history is rarely stable, and dogmas that were current in both the remote and proximate past are constantly subject to correction or rejection. Even now it remains hard to sort out “fictive Phoenicians” from all the others. The Phoenicians have not been banished from the historical past, but they have been dissolved into diverse and innumerable peoples who bore their name and spoke their language, yet had no region of their own in either East or West.

In an eloquent conclusion to her book Quinn draws from her complex argument what the problem of the Phoenicians might reveal for the large and much-debated question of ethnic identity. She rightly claims that in recent decades too little attention has been paid to the concept of identity itself: “We tend to ask how identities are constructed, vary, and change, not whether they exist at all.” She contrasts personal identity as the consciousness of an individual with a broad collective identity. Nations clearly display a collective identity, although Quinn goes so far as to label such categories of identity as “fundamentally arbitrary.” Here one might legitimately quarrel with her. She faults the whole idea of collective identity at the level of a people, culture, or nation. But it is not unreasonable to claim that for the ancient Mediterranean world scholars have greatly distorted the picture, by concentrating on a small number of unusual and unusually literate societies.

By arguing that there is no good evidence that the people we call Phoenicians identified themselves as a single people or ever acted as a “stable collective,” Quinn is certainly not denying the existence of Phoenicians or that various persons called themselves Phoenician. Quite the contrary. What people call themselves speaks to us memorably about their traditions, their aspirations, and their hopes. But it may not tell us anything at all about their history.

The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House Hardcover – November 11, 2014 by Chuck Todd (Little , Brown and Company)

Chuck Todd’s Obama book says more about the author than it does about the president
'The Stranger' underscores a broader problem with the way we cover politics

What makes the president tick is the question that preoccupies every White House correspondent. What makes this president tick has become the political question of our age.

Distant, disdainful of Washington, somewhat depressive, and famously imperturbable, Barack Obama has been the object of intense fascination—and much frustration—among the Beltway press. What do they see? A talented politician uninterested in politics; a transcendent speechmaker who can be drily professorial; a cerebral pragmatist who has presided over rageful, polarized times.



As a White House correspondent for NBC since 2008, Chuck Todd has had a plum perch from which to eye his quarry. The product of all that observation is The Stranger, the latest entry in the booming genre of Obama studies. The book is ambitious: Todd attempts a comprehensive analysis, from candidacy to troubled second term, and a forecast of where Obama “will land in the history books.”

But if The Stranger is revelatory, it’s not in the way Todd intended. For all his strengths (and they are myriad), Todd has written a disappointing book, a slab of pedestrian punditry marbled with occasional insight. The Stranger purports to tell the story of a president who couldn’t transcend his environment. The story it ultimately—and unwittingly—tells is of the perceptive political geek who couldn’t escape Beltway groupthink.

What do we expect from projects like Todd’s? Certainly, the White House correspondent’s proximity to the subject holds alluring promise—we hope to learn new things about the man in that impossible office. Peter Baker’s Days of Fire, about Bush and Cheney, was one notable recent effort, offering a privileged glimpse of a White House during a calamitous time.

Todd lambasts the GOP for its obduracy but upbraids Obama for not trying harder to win it over anyway.

The Stranger attempts to do the same for the 44th president. Beginning with the compelling story of Candidate Obama and going all the way up to President Obama’s struggles with a newly inflamed Middle East, the book presents an exhaustive tick-tock that conveys the sweep of a dismal decade benighted by war, recession, and protest. (In its recounting of the eruptions that consumed news cycles past, it also reminds you just how much of what we obsess over in the Drudge era barely rises to the level of footnote in retrospect.)

Profiles of Todd have made much of the duties he has juggled these past few years, between a daily TV show for MSNBC, dispatches for NBC’s website, and an active Twitter account. The overcommitment shows. A distracted work that lumbers around and sags in parts, The Stranger is a frustrating read—repetitive, disorganized, and inelegant. The book proceeds chronologically but is prone to unwieldy tangents: An account of the healthcare reform battle and the eruption of the Tea Party lurches into a digression on Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright; a chapter about Obama’s response to the Trayvon Martin shooting contains an out-of-place meditation on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The prose is at best workmanlike, with some passages skirting the line between conversational and inarticulate. Todd notes how one particular incident “became a thing on Twitter”; of the opening act at the GOP’s convention, Todd calls it “the weird Eastwood deal.”

The disappointment is especially acute because Todd isn’t some ordinary pundit. Indeed, his rise has in its way been as rapid and surprising as that of his subject. Ten years ago, when Barack Obama achieved superstar status following his appearance at the Democratic National Convention, Todd occupied the comfortable post of editor at National Journal’s Hotline, a daily political tip sheet that was a must-read for the cognoscenti but hardly a household brand. There he cultivated a reputation for data-driven analysis and hardcore wonkery, and won a devoted following.

In 2007, Tim Russert poached him and made him NBC’s political director, just in time for the most exciting election cycle in a generation. When Russert unexpectedly died in 2008, David Gregory took over at Meet the Press, and Todd (along with Savannah Guthrie) assumed the title of NBC White House correspondent. As his duties expanded at NBC, his profile—and the respect of peers—only grew. Nate Silver even singled out Todd as one TV pundit who was elevating campaign coverage.

This fall, Todd made his next leap, replacing Gregory in arguably the most revered chair in TV journalism. The increased stature has made him a ripe target for critics. In recent years, he has come under fire from both sides of the ideological divide. Glenn Greenwald has sneered that he is “as conventional as it gets”; the right-wing Newsbusters has a dossier on him a mile long.

But compared to most Beltway journalists, Todd has evinced something like conscientiousness, and an aversion to what fellow pundit Mark Halperin has called the “freakshow” that American politics frequently devolves into. And he has shown a willingness to think creatively, and even listen to criticism. Consider his decision to have Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—a socialist!—on just his second episode of Meet the Press, something that would have been unimaginable under Russert or Gregory. Or his recent response on a Reddit AMA session when asked about the depressing state of politics. Don’t be dispirited by gridlock, he urged the questioner. “Check out the innovations taking place in the cities . . . that’s where politics is exciting again”—an unexpected and astute answer from a national political reporter.

Todd may tell readers not to despair over gridlock, but his book fixates on the subject. And how can it not: Global conflagrations abound, an underwhelming economic recovery sputters along—and government seems incapable of doing anything about any of it.

The Stranger centers its narrative on a president elected to change Washington, but who has found himself swallowed by it instead. “Obama’s logic had no place in an age of ferocious unreasonableness,” Todd writes, a pithy diagnosis of his—and our—predicament.

To his credit, Todd ascribes much of this “ferocious unreasonableness” to the right. To read The Stranger is to be reminded, after these numbing years, of just how berserk our era has been. There was a time when calling the president un-American was a beyond-the-pale transgression; now it’s not even news when a news anchor or an elected official does it. Birch-ian conspiracies once left to fester at the lunatic fringe of our politics have encroached onto center stage. It sends a shiver to recall that this president once had to stand in front of cameras in the White House briefing room and insist that, yes, he was born in America.

Then there are the numerous instances of GOP implacability. Todd reminds us that when Obama praised Republican Marco Rubio’s tax-credit proposal, Rubio had to go on talk radio the next day to appease Republican foot soldiers riled up by the president’s seal of approval; that Obama once invited GOP-ers to a White House screening of Spielberg’s Lincoln, and no one showed up; that even after furious courting by the president, not a single Republican voted for a healthcare reform bill modeled after a Republican governor’s plan.

But far too often, Todd falls back on lazy, a-pox-on-both-houses thinking. He lambasts the GOP for its obduracy but upbraids Obama for not trying harder to win Republicans over anyway—this despite Todd’s own observation that Republicans had “perfected” the strategy of total obstruction, and that Republicans had come to see opposing Obama as a simple matter of “self-interest.”

So why advise Obama to keep ramming into the wall of obstruction again and again? Here another Beltway obsession rears its head: optics. Todd reasons that “you always want to be the one that ‘gets caught trying’ ” (never mind the result). The fixation with optics also comes through in Todd’s discussion of Obama’s policies. On a range of issues, from the stimulus to healthcare reform to Syria, Todd weighs in on how the process looked, while devoting barely a second’s thought to the policy’s merits. Near the end, Todd sums up thusly: “In the Obama era and for the presidents after him, style points would take on greater weight than ever, both at home and abroad.” It’s an observation that doubles as self-justification.

The Stranger underscores a broader problem with the way we cover politicians. With its focus on and amplification of the solitary figure of the president, the Washington press corps has made it harder for the public to understand how government works—and, more specifically, why it doesn’t.

In his classic book On Bended Knee, Mark Hertsgaard observed that the evening news used to contain as many stories out of Congress, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and other agencies as out of the White House. That changed in the Reagan years, and has gotten worse since. Now, in an era of legislative gridlock, the focus on the presidency contributes to public misunderstanding—and diverts attention away from a nihilistic faction in Congress that has made even routine governance all but impossible.

There is also the relentless parochialism and small-mindedness of DC. The problem with our politics is that, as the late Meg Greenfield famously observed (and Todd recounts here), Washington is just like high school—a small town filled with insecure people. Sadly, the media would rather see the president star in that teen drama than rise above it.

Indeed, near the end of The Stranger, Todd notes that Obama “shoulders some of the blame” for gridlock by not trying hard enough to play the Washington game. The president is just “wired differently,” Todd writes, “he believes the rational should overcome the superficial.” That such a trait can be cast as Obama’s crucial flaw says much about Todd, the press, and the sad state of our politics.

The Dry: A Novel Paperback – January 2, 2018 by Jane Harper (Flatiron Books)

Jane Harper’s debut novel, The Dry (2016), is an unusually taut and engrossing novel. In many ways, it is a traditional investigative crime narrative. The protagonist, Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk, returns to the Australian country town of Kiewarra, a place he left twenty years ago, to attend the funerals of three members of the Hadler family – his childhood friend Luke, Luke’s wife and young son. The police and press have judged it to be a murder-suicide, explained by a struggling farmer having gone off the rails: “With the drought, who knows? Everyone is so desperate.”

Pressed by the Hadler family to challenge this verdict, Falk reluctantly takes leave and agrees to investigate unofficially. He soon realizes that past crimes and secrets from his own earlier life seem to be inextricably entangled with the horrific murders. The accusations made against him may prove to be unfounded, but he nevertheless feels that he carries some of the blame: “It was a cry that had come from too many lips since he’d returned to Kiewarra. If I’d known, I would have done things differently. It was too late for that now. Some things had to be lived with.”

Harper very skilfully creates suspense. Small pieces of evidence accumulate, misleading clues come to light and townsfolk provide false leads, propelling the investigation towards a gripping conclusion. What really sets The Dry apart, however, is the integration of plot and setting. The town of Kiewarra is so small that it is analogous to the self-contained world of classic detection, but the hostile landscape itself remorselessly shapes past and current events, affecting every strand of the plot. Characters who engender fear seem to share in the cruelty of the landscape, and no one is untouched by “the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land”.

The blowflies that swarm over the prologue “didn’t discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.” Harper’s opening horror film close-up of the indifferent flies feeding on “unblinking eyes and sticky wounds” conveys the pitiless effects of the worst drought conditions in a century: ‘”It’s a pressure cooker round here, mate. Little things become big things faster than you expect.”’ People who struggle to survive under such conditions are psychologically deformed in an environment that magnifies every feeling of anger, bitterness and desperation. Brutal crime and the savage natural world become inextricably linked in this expertly constructed narrative, making it intense and disturbing throughout.

Tea Fit for a Queen: Recipes & Drinks for Afternoon Tea Hardcover – October 6, 2015 by Lucy Worsley (Introduction) (Ebury Press)

Lovely elegant recipes with intelligent background from historian Lucy Worsley. The photos are mouth-watering and far less high-calorie than actually making any of the dishes. The only caveat I have is that the recipes are designed for an English audience, so they'll require a fair amount of translation for American cooks -- ingredients are given in grams rather than cups or teaspoons, oven settings are in centigrade, and some of the ingredients are not really obtainable in the U.S.

Enjoy a spot of tea and delectable cakes inspired by the rich, royal history of London's most iconic palaces


Filled with recipes that have stood the test of time as well as fascinating anecdotes and tales, Tea Fit for a Queen reveals how the tradition of afternoon tea started in royal Britain. More than 40 charming recipes include everything from delicate finger sandwiches to Victoria sponge cake, Chelsea Buns, and a Champagne Cocktail. In these pages learn about the royals and their connection to the history of tea, why jam pennies were Queen Elizabeth II's favorite tea time treat, and how mead cake came to be served during Henry VIII's reign. Discover what cake William and Catherine selected for their wedding and hear why orange-scented scones became a royal tradition at Kensington Palace. Tea Fit for a Queen presents a taste of palace etiquette to take home. Includes metric measures.

Turks : A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600 Paperback by David.J.Roxburgh (Royal Academy of Arts)

Physical description; 494 p. : col. ill., col. maps ; 31 cm. Notes; [15] p. of errata sheets inserted. Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 22 Jan. to 12 April 2005. Includes bibliographical references (p. 479-489) and index. Text in English, translated from Turkish, German and Russian. Contents; The Turks: a historical overview / Peter B. Golden -- Religions of the Turks in the pre-Islamic period / Peter Zieme -- The Turks: a chronology / Peter B. Golden -- 1. Central Asia, 600-1000 -- Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang): its peoples and its culture / Marianne Yaldiz -- 2. The Seljuks of Iran and their successors -- The emergence of Turkic dynastic presence in the Islamic world: cultural experiences and artistic horizons, 950-1250 / Oya Pancaroglu -- 3. The Seljuks and Artuqids of medieval Anatolia -- The Anatolian Seljuks / Nazan Ölçer -- 4. Muhammad of the Black Pen and his paintings -- Glimpses into the fourteenth-century Turkic world of Central Asia: the paintings of Muhammad Siyah Qalam / Filiz Çagman -- 5. The Timurids and Turkmen -- The Timurid and Turkmen dynasties of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, c. 1370-1506 / David J. Roxburgh -- 6. The Ottomans: from Mehmed II to Murad III -- Art of the Ottoman court / Serpil Bagci, Zeren Tanindi -- Catalogue entries -- The Ottoman sultans as poets / Mustafa Isen -- The Turkic languages / Osman Fikri Sertkaya. Subjects; Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain) - Exhibitions. Art, Turkish - Exhibitions. Turkic peoples - History - Exhibitions. Turks - History - Exhibitions. Art, Turkish. Turkic peoples. Art, Turkish - Catalogs. Art, Islamic - Exhibitions. Civilization, Turkic - Catalogs. Art - Exhibitions. Turkish Antiquities. Islamic Art & Antiquities - Turkey. Art, Turkish - England - London - Exhibitions. Islamic art - Exhibitions. Turkey - Antiquities - Exhibitions. Turkish Art. Persia. Ottoman empire. Asia. Genres; Bibliography. Catalogue. Illustrated.

Women in Israel: A State of Their Own (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights) Hardcover by Ruth Halperin-Kaddari (University of Pennsylvania Press)

When Israel declared its independence in 1948, it vowed to ensure equality for all citizens, regardless of religion, race, or gender. History shows, however, that this promise has been broken in the case of women, who generally live under circumstances significantly worse than those of men. Women in Israel is the first comprehensive overview of discrimination in a state dominated by a patriarchal religious order, and brings fresh insights to the efficacy of the law in improving the status of women. Providing a sociolegal perspective on women in Israel viewed, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari examines all aspects of Israeli women's lives, looking at legal issues such as affirmative action, motherhood and the workplace, and mechanisms for the advancement of women, as well as conditions of education, employment, health, family, and prostitution.

While tracing legislative evolution in Israel, Halperin-Kaddari discusses the extent to which law can create social change. Because of its unique position as an economically developed democracy and yet a state where government tries to maintain a special cultural tradition and religious identity in a heterogeneous society, Israel has failed to adopt a single national standard for women that would bring Israeli law into compliance with international human rights. Halperin-Kaddari concludes that the improvement in women's status has not been due to egalitarian consciousness, but rather is incidental to Israel's overall socioeconomic advancement.

The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbi's of the Talmud Paperback by Ephraim E. Urbach (Author), Israel Abrahams (Translator) (Harvard University Press)

Ephraim E. Urbach's "The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs" is a massive work of over 1100 pages, which at times seems all too brief. (Not so much at other times, of course.) The Kindle edition is a (mostly) well-executed alternative to the significantly more expensive hardcover edition which is also available. (It is also less expensive than the used copies offered on Amazon and elsewhere.) A notable feature of the Kindle edition is the preservation of the original page breaks, with the page numbers in nice bright red -- a blessing for anyone tracing quotations from, planning to quote Urbach, or using the indexes.

The book covers several centuries of Jewish lore, as recorded in the Mishnah (a codification of legal rulings and debates), the Talmud (the Mishnah with interpretive comments and debates by later sages), and early Midrash (homiletic expositions of Scripture), plus other sources, such Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, some of the pseudepigrapha, and those portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls published through the 1960s. The focus is, of course, on "the Wise," in the form of the recognized rabbinic teachers, the Sages of the title.

Some readers may find troubling Urbach's assumption that the religious teachings and practices reported by literature developed over time, and that some teachers were comparatively innovative, while others were decidedly more conservative. However, Urbach not only makes the assumption, he demonstrates its usefulness in understanding the ancient and medieval texts by showing that different chronological layers (identifiable by the periods to which the various named figure belonged) also show consistent shifts in terminology, and in the kinds of issues addressed.

The book is arranged as surveys on what might broadly be called theological topics. (Not a category of traditional Jewish thought during the centuries covered.) Urbach sifts through variants and parallel texts, trying to establish chronological stages in the opinions and arguments. Much of the detailed argument, especially regarding textual evidence, is relegated to the extensive notes, but Urbach does try to justify his interpretations, and not only when they run counter to the "accepted wisdom."

Depending on the edition and binding (paperback or hardcover), Urbach's "The Sages" has a shipping weight (according to Amazon) of 2.3 to 4.4 pounds -- a hefty brick of a book in any print format. That is one reason I am pleased to be re-reading it (for, I think, the third time around) in the 2006 Varda Press edition on a Kindle App, rather than, say, the 1987 Harvard University Press paperback, or the original, two-volume, hardcover edition of the translation.

The present Varda Press incarnation is not without an annoying flaw in the front-matter; a rather mysterious stray citation of "London, England," after the translator's name on the title page! (I suspect this was carried over from the Harvard U.P. imprint, where it went at the bottom of the page.) But an examination of a significant chunk of the main text just looking for typos, and for other misplaced text, turned up no other problems. I haven't noted obvious errors in a much larger block of text and notes, running to several hundred pages of each -- although of course problems with citations beyond very familiar Biblical and Rabbinic texts, and a small amount of secondary literature, would probably escape my notice.

Anyone using the book as part of a personal or formal educational program (as a opposed to a general reader) will want to have ready access to the endnotes. The first edition had them in the second volume, which was handy; it could be kept open to the appropriate page. Jumping back and forth with the hyperlinks is easy, although I find it disruptive to following Urbach's arguments. The best approach I've found (for a computer app version of Kindle) is to open the book in both the main application and the Cloud Reader, and set one of them to keep the notes pages displayed. (Of course, you have to remember not to let the Kindle software synch the two, or you may have to struggle to find your place in the main text!)

The Origin of Others (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) Hardcover – September 18, 2017 by Toni Morrison (Author), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Foreword) (Harvard University Press)

Morrison's latest contribution to world literature is a dissertation on racism; it’s origin, usability and detriments. "The Origin of Others" traces the construction of racism and how it permeates all aspects of American institutions and worldwide consciousness. Central to Morrison's critique is the denunciation of the misinformed notion that multiple races - i.e. whiteness and blackness - is a scientific fact (there is only one race – the human race). As the essays deconstructs the formulation of racism readers are exposed to how racism equates to power/control and the ends to which governments, institutions and individuals will go to maintain those benefits.

"The Origins of Others" is a perfect way to initiate discussions on racism. Book Clubs and classrooms will benefit significantly from the clarity provided this analysis. A bonus for this reader is Morrison's insight on how her body of work is primarily concerned with the exploration of racism and color-ism throughout American history. This is a highly recommended read that begs discussion and reflection.

America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison’s fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books―Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.


If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.

Great Naval Blunders Kindle Edition by Geoffrey Regan (Andre Deutsche)

This book is exactly what it says it is. I really enjoyed it. In it the author reminds us what other authors and historians routinely refuse or forget to do, and let us all know how incompetent the people in high places truly are, and how cavalier they are with human lives. Example 1 in this book is the British Admiralty, who we are always lead to believe over the centuries gave the world the finest navies-not so. We learn over and over of gross negligence and incompetence, and one name that comes up over and over is Churchill. Churchill was a moron according to the author, and if he is not, he is certainly overrated, and must have had a lot of sleepless nights, seeing the ghosts of all the men he was directly responsible for sending to their graves. Want to know how?? Check out the book. I found it to be a good quick read, and give it a strong five star rating.

Who was responsible for the design of the Admiral Popov, the circular Russian battleship that wouldn't steer straight? Why did Lord Anson set out to circumnavigate the world with a crew of Chelsea pensioners? And how did the British cruiser HMS Trinidad manage to torpedo itself in the Arctic? The answers to these questions and details of numerous other entertaining and unbelievable historical events are revealed in this absorbing survey of naval incompetence from Roman times to the Falklands War. Bestselling author Geoffrey Regan certainly sets out to prove that there is truth in the old adage "Worse things happen at sea". Crammed with intriguing and often bizarre anecdotes and over fifty illuminating illustrations, "Naval Blunders" takes a serious, but often entertaining look at the misjudgements and oversights of captains, fleet commanders, strategic planners and ship designers over the ages. Peppered with quotes from those who did their utmost (albeit unwittingly) to hinder naval progress, this entertaining and instructive book will appeal to the naval enthusiast and general reader alike.

The Jack the Ripper Files: The Illustrated History of the Whitechapel Murders Hardcover – May 3, 2016 by Richard Jones (Andre Deutsch )

Laying out all the evidence in the most comprehensive summary ever written about the Ripper, this book, by a London police officer and crime authority, has subjected every theory—including those that have emerged in recent years—to the same deep scrutiny. The author also examines the mythology surrounding the case and provides some fascinating insights into the portrayal of the Ripper on stage and screen and on the printed page. More seriously, he also examines the horrifying parallel crimes of the Düsseldorf Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper in an attempt to throw further light on the atrocities of Victorian London.

Jack the Ripper has haunted the world’s imagination since his murderous reign drew to a close in 1888. Exploring the social context of the crimes, this invaluable survey includes police reports, letters purporting to be from the notorious killer, and newspaper clippings from the time. These documents enable readers to become armchair detectives, sifting through the evidence, sorting out the complex and contradictory theories, and assessing all the clues and conclusions gathered through the decades.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Wordsworth Classics) Paperback – 1993 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Wordsworth Editions Ltd)

Already in the table of contents of this book, we encounter a mystery. TheEordsworth edition  that I read includes 11 Sherlock Holmes adventures in this book, as do most American editions and some British editions of this book. The very first edition, however, contained 12 stories. Fear not; “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” will eventually turn up, most likely in “His Last Bow,” where it has been added to most American editions. The reason for this has something to do with censorship and public morals, but I won’t go into that here. What you want to know about this book is that it is the second set of short stories featuring Holmes, collected from the monthly installments that Conan Doyle published in The Strand Magazine between 1892 and 1893.

In these eleven stories, we first meet Holmes’ brother Mycroft. We hear Holmes mention “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” We learn about some of Holmes’ earliest cases, before he met Watson. And we encounter Holmes’ great nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in a final adventure that seems to end in the death of both men. It looks as if Conan Doyle wanted to move on with his writing career and thought the thing to do was kill Holmes off. Since several more books of Holmes adventures followed this, including one titled The Return of Sherlock Holmes, it evidently didn’t stick. While it is sometimes apparent that Conan Doyle was growing tired of Holmes, the public was captivated. Just imagine the outcry when it seemed Holmes had died! I fancy it must have been the 1894 equivalent of “Bring back Firefly!” The main difference is that in the earlier event, it worked.

In “Silver Blaze,” Holmes solves the puzzle of a racehorse’s disappearance on the eve of an important race, together with the strange murder of its trainer. In “The Yellow Face,” a young husband’s jealousy is aroused by his wife’s conduct toward a strange family that has moved in next door—and the appearance of a ghastly face at an upper window does nothing to soothe his feelings. Most unusually, Holmes’ deduction in this case proves to be incorrect! “The Stockbroker’s Clerk” may bring to mind an earlier story (“The Red-Headed League”) as it depicts a robbery caper made possible by an innocent dupe.

In “The Gloria Scott,” Holmes reminisces about one of his first cases, concerning a seemingly harmless letter that somehow frightened a man to death. Another early Holmes case is “The Musgrave Ritual,” in which two trusted servants in an aristocratic household suddenly begin acting erratically, then disappear altogether. In “The Reigate Squire,” Holmes tries to take the country air to settle his overworked nerves, only to get mixed up in a case of burglary and murder. “The Crooked Man” is a riff on the good old Locked Room Murder, featuring a wife suspected of bashing in her husband’s skull. The real question, which the lady is too feverish to answer, is how their happy marriage came to blow up so suddenly and spectacularly.

“The Resident Patient” is the tale of a physician whose business partner begins acting paranoid, then hangs himself, apparently for reasons connected to another patient who has also been behaving strangely. Both Watson and Holmes are called in to consult, but it is the sleuth rather than the doctor who hits on the right diagnosis. “The Greek Interpreter,” in which Mycroft Holmes is first revealed to exist, has to do with a man being held hostage by an adventurer who wants him to sign over his sister’s fortune. “The Naval Treaty” is a document whose disappearance threatens the career prospects and mental health of an old schoolfellow of Watson’s. And in “The Final Problem,” Holmes meets his match—the genius pulling the puppet-strings of Europe’s greatest criminal organization. Checkmate at Reichenbach Falls.

In retrospect, it isn’t hard to detect signs that Conan Doyle was running out of ideas for his Holmes stories. It was probably the demand for a new adventure every month that bled him dry. At all events, one has to notice the repetition of things that have happened before, mainly in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The stockbroker’s clerk caper has too much in common with the affair of the Red-Headed League: the theme of a dupe being kept busy while robbers case the joint has been played before. And so has “The Gloria Scott”‘s theme of a scoundrel making a fortune in Australia, returning to England under a false identity, and seeming respectable enough until he is discovered and blackmailed by a former victim (cf. “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”). “The Crooked Man” resorts to two previously aired themes: disgraceful things done during the Sepoy mutiny coming back to haunt the survivors (cf. “The Sign of the Four”), and a wife finding out that the true love she believed to have died is still living (cf. “The Noble Bachelor”). “The Resident Patient” reprises the theme of villains avenging themselves on a comrade who betrayed them (cf. “The Five Orange Pips”). “The Greek Interpreter” repeats many of the same moves as “The Engineer’s Thumb,” such as an expert consultant being kept in confusion as to where his employers are taking him, etc. “The Naval Treaty” has echoes of “The Beryl Coronet,” with respect to a man’s professional reputation being ruined when something priceless is stolen from under his nose.

And as for “The Final Problem,” apart from a dramatic chase and a gruesome plot twist, there isn’t really much to it except the idea of Holmes being willing to accept his own destruction in order to ensure his adversary’s ditto. After the shock of Holmes’ apparent death settles down (and it’s had over a century to do so, by now), we are at liberty to observe that neither Conan Doyle nor Holmes ever goes into specifics about what Moriarty has done. There are no earthy, fleshy, interesting examples. It’s all generalizations without details, with little effort until almost the end to fill the canvas with descriptive color. It is almost possible to think of it as one of those dreams from which, on TV, one would awake to see Bobby Ewing stepping calmly out of the shower. I suppose we could put this vagueness down to Conan Doyle’s lack of total commitment to killing off Holmes. Be comforted. He will return. And besides that, Watson still has his notes on their earlier adventures to go through. Next up: The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Wordsworth Classics) by Lewis Carroll Paperback – by Lewis Carroll (Wordsworth Editions )

Its fantasy plot, humorous rhymes and brilliant use of nonsense was revolutionary.

What’s down the rabbit hole?

A hot summer’s day on the riverbank, and young Alice is bored. Bored, that is, until a white rabbit in a checked jacket scurries past in a great hurry, examining a pocket watch. Burning with curiosity, Alice can’t help but follow the rabbit down the hole which leads to a long passageway – and a tiny door too small to get through.

So begins Alice’s adventures in the amazing world of Wonderland. In the pages that follow a strange liquid will shrink her to only ten inches tall; a curious cake will disappear before her eyes; a mad hatter will invite her to tea – and Alice will play a very dangerous game of croquet…

The character of Alice is based on Alice Liddell, the ten-year-old daughter of an academic at Christ Church College in Oxford, where author Lewis Carroll studied and taught. Carroll would tell Alice stories to entertain her: Alice begged him to write them out and he presented them to her in 1864. He was later persuaded to publish and, after further additions, the book as we know it today appeared in 1865, including the famous illustrations by John Tenniel.

Alice in Wonderland was Lewis Carroll’s first novel and its fantasy plot, humorous rhymes and brilliant use of nonsense was revolutionary. Nineteenth-century children’s writing usually served moral or educational purpose, but Alice was written firmly and purely for the amusement of children. Critical response was lukewarm, but the book was still a great success, and remains a hugely influential classic of children’s literature.

Alice appeals to adults as well as children and over the years readers and critics have found within it all manner of riddles, puzzles, mathematical concepts and references to Carroll’s famous and not-so-famous friends.

Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in 1832 in Cheshire in the north of England. His father, the local rector, came from a family of distinguished scholars and clergymen. Dodgson continued the academic family tradition and studied mathematics and theology, eventually becoming a mathematician at Oxford University.

He first began to write comic poetry and prose in the 1850s and had several pieces published in magazines, where he first began to use the name Lewis Carroll. In 1856 he met four-year-old Alice Liddell who was to inspire the book which made Dodgson’s name, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865. The book was an immediate success, was translated into many languages and soon established itself as an English classic. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, appeared in 1871. Their revolutionary combination of word-play, humour and nonsense had never been seen before in writing for children. His other great masterpiece of nonsense is the poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and other books for children including Phantasmagoria (1869) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889).

Charles Dodgson never married and remained at Oxford all his adult life, where he wrote several books on mathematics and logic as well as devising board games and brainteasers. He was also an expert photographer, famous for his portraits of children and many artistic personalities of the day. He died in 1898.

The Third Jewish Catalog: Creating Community : With a Cumulative Index to All 3 Catalogs Paperback – December 1, 1980 by Sharon Strassfeld (Editor), Michael Strassfeld (Editor) (Jewish Publication Society)

Richard Siegel ,the lead author of the field guide to late 1960s and ’70s countercultural Judaism died last week. .

The Third Jewish Catalog: Creating Community; with a Cumulative Index to All 3 catalogs, compiled and edited by Sharon & Michael Strassfeld, Jewish Publication Society, First Edition, 1980. Hundreds of b/w photos and illustrations populate this innovative reference catalog that presents Jewish religion, rituals, culture and behavior in an easily readable format. A follow-up to the first two Jewish Catalogs, this one features the religious, ritual, and behavioral similarities and differences in a variety of Jewish communities, as well as the social responsibilities of charity, immigration and other support. It also presents a cumulative index to all three catalogs.

I did not know Richard Siegel.. His death last week passed largely unremarked in the major centers of American Jewish life. But for anyone who lived in any one of the many margins of Judaism from the late 1960s through the early 1980s his influence was enormous and unmistakable.

Siegel is perhaps best recognized as one of the three authors of The Jewish Catalog: A Do-It-Yourself Kit. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi once called The Catalog the Mishna of Jewish renewal. Or of countercultural Judaism more generally. The two other co-authors of the first volume, Michael Strassfeld and Sharon Strassfeld, went on to illustrious careers in the Jewish community. (Two other volumes appeared over the next half decade.) But The Catalog was born in Siegel’s mind. Eventually, Richard moved on as well, working largely in the Reform movement with a connection to Hebrew Union College, and philanthropic institutions like the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which might seem somewhat ironic in that he co-authored the quintessential protest book against Jewish institutional life as it existed in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

The scattering of the generation to which Richard belonged is captured quite succinctly in Bob Dylan’s “Tangled up in Blue.” “All the people we used to know / They’re an illusion to me now / Some are mathematicians / Some are carpenters’ wives / Don’t know how it all got started / I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives.” Some Jews of that generation entered the more religious, even Haredi world, as an expression of their counterculture commitments. Some moved to Israel. Some headed to academia, some left the Jewish world altogether, and some became Jewish professionals. Richard did the latter, and injected a spirit of renewal and counterculture into the banal assimilationist mainstream of American Jewish life.

The Catalog, like many other iconic texts, had inauspicious, even humble beginnings. Siegel and a classmate at Brandeis University, George Savran, came up with the idea as part of their master’s thesis at Brandeis in the late 1960s, in those heady days when Herbert Marcuse was teaching his Frankfurt School radicalism to students such as Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis. Jewish Studies at Brandeis, and America more generally, was just getting underway. Student protests against Vietnam had escalated, student strikes at Harvard and the takeover of Columbia University generated student activism nationwide, and the country was jolted by two assassinations in one year, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Many radical Jewish newsletters circulated around college campuses; Maoists, anarchists, feminists, socialists, pacifists, Zionists, black nationalists were each voicing their protests. Woodstock and the moon landing, with the iconic photo of earth hanging in space, only a month apart in the summer of 1969, were societal and scientific bombshells. The Weather Underground, a breakaway faction of the SDS, was founded in 1970 and began to engage in violent actions to “bring the war home.” In short, society seemed to be unraveling and also exploding with creativity at the same time.

Jewish youth were deeply a part of this new revolutionary activity. Jews for Urban Justice, The Radical Zionist Alliance, The Jewish Liberation Project, The Brooklyn Bridge Coalition, Flame, Genesis II, Ramparts, The Jewish Defense League, and many other Jewish student organizations were engaging in protest activities against Vietnam, for civil rights, women’s rights, Soviet Jews, and many other causes. The Six-Day War in 1967 generated intense Jewish engagement with Israel. On the spiritual front, The House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco, the Aquarian Minyan in Berkeley, Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts, The New York Havurah in Manhattan, Ezrat Nashim in New York, Fabrangen in Washington, D.C., and P’nai Or in Philadelphia began to challenge the nature of rabbi-led congregations and conventional synagogues and served as gathering points for radical Judaism to express itself in religious experimentation. Figures such as Shlomo Carlebach, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Art Green, Arthur Waskow, Paula Hyman, Max Ticktin, Aviva Cantor, Everett Gendler, Judith Plaskow, among many others served to translate the radical politics of the time into an organic Jewish frame and context.

What this nascent and somewhat diffuse group of young Jews lacked was a text that expressed their collective aspirations. This is the lacuna filled by The Jewish Catalog when it appeared in 1973. The Catalog became the book all the disparate expressions of Jewish radicalism of that period could call their own. George Savran had left the project for graduate school, and would eventually become a professor of Hebrew Bible at Indiana University and then at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem. Siegel and the Strassfelds took the master’s thesis and made it into a countercultural manifesto modeled on Stewart Brand’s 1968 Whole Earth Catalog.

‘The Jewish Catalog’ was a ritual guide, a cookbook, a telephone directory, a source for essays on Hasidism, Zionism, halakha, and ecology, among many other things
The irony of Schachter-Shalomi calling it the Mishna of Jewish renewal is that in many ways it was the inverse of the Mishna. The Mishna was a compiled text of early rabbinic teaching that sought to exercise the authority of the rabbinic elite to dictate the “how to” of exilic Jewish life. The Catalog was more of a hodgepodge of musings, including cartoons and rudimentary graphics, depicting a Judaism for the counterculture, a Judaism without authority, a Judaism against authority. Included are directions on everything from how to bake your own matzo to tie your own tzitzit, and build a sukkah. It provided its reader with addresses of countercultural Jewish venues around the globe, including Chabad Houses, Hasidic rebbes in Jerusalem, and kosher vegetarian restaurants worldwide. It was a ritual guide, a cookbook, a telephone directory, a source for essays on Hasidism, Zionism, halakha, and ecology, among many other things. In addition, in the spirit of the then-popular Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, The Catalog was a guide for Judaism on the cheap for the anti-establishment backpacking seeker, whether they were travelling in Europe or south Brooklyn.

I first encountered The Catalog in the late ’70s when I was making my way from a macrobiotic communal house in the mountains of northern New Mexico in a tiny town called Galisteo to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim. My fellow travelers and I found it refreshing. It was the kind of synthesis we were looking for as we attempted to move from one counterculture to another. It made Judaism recognizable, and attractive, and also radical and anti-establishment. At that time, I viewed it mostly as a way station, as I had my sights set on the Haredi world where I thought I could live the most radical life of alterity.

Many years later, after I realized the Haredi world was not what I hoped it would be, or could be, I encountered The Catalog again, this time as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and American Judaism. It was only then, with the benefit of some scholarly distance, that I realized what a precious document it was. I saw its limitations as well, its Orientalist view of Eastern European and Mizrahi Jews, its tepid critique of what would become the occupation, its Zionist romanticism, and its very gentle nod toward feminism. It was 1973 after all, and many of those kinds of critiques would be born later. The Catalog did suffer from the nostalgia that was dominant in those years but it held fast to the radicalism that brought a generation of Jews from suburban synagogues to a revived Jewish devotional life. It was a kind of Mishna, if by that we mean a guidepost to Jewish life and practice. And I knew then it would transcend its generational context.

One day recently I was sitting in New York’s Washington Square Park playing banjo. Next to me sat a young couple in their 20s. I saw they were intently reading a book together. I looked over and saw it was Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, which was published in 1971, two years before The Catalog. When I got up to leave I turned to them and said, “I see what you’re reading and I wanted to tell you I read that when I was your age and it makes me very happy to see that you are reading it now.” They smiled. I would say the same thing seeing 20-somethings reading The Catalog.

Whether he knew it or not, Siegel was composing an artifact of an era that would extend far beyond its intended audience. In the 1970s The Catalog was ubiquitous on Jewish bookshelves next to Irving Howe’s The World of Our Fathers or Shlomo Carlebach’s early LPs. In the spirit of both fun and serious protest The Catalog was closer to Allen Ginsberg than Rav Soloveitchik with the spirit of Ram Dass and the Baal Shem Tov and the storytelling of Nachman of Bratslav. The Catalog made Judaism seem fun, and spiritual, and serious, and organic, and radical (which in those days was a badge of honor). It became the text of Jewish counterculture, that which a generation pointed to and said “this!” And it’s still here.

The idea of The Jewish Catalog was perhaps akin to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a song that took Bob Dylan about 15 minutes to compose. I am quite sure Siegel could not have imagined that almost 50 years later we would still be talking about this book. For all of the achievements of Siegel’s later career in the world of Jewish education and philanthropy, including projects together with his wife, Rabbi Laura Geller, one of the preeminent Reform Rabbis in America, now emeritus rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, it seems clear to me that his place in American Jewish history will be defined by The First Jewish Catalog. He gave us a gift that defined a generation and has served as an inspiration to others. May his memory be a blessing to all who were touched by him.

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series) Paperback – August 29, 2017 by Devery S. Anderson (Author), Julian Bond (Foreword) (University Press of Mississippi)

I have read many books on the Emmett Till lynching-murder and this one is by far the best. It is well written, extensively researched, and sensitively impartial. Mr. Anderson does not sugarcoat things. 

Unfortunately, Emmett Till, who was a mere child and not schooled in the nuances of race relations in the South as his cousins were, thought he could joke around and get a laugh out of his young relatives by wolf whistling at Carolyn Bryant. Little did he know that this act, the behavior of a child, would lead to his brutal death and become one of the founding stones of the Civil Rights Movement the way no other death of a Negro, as we were then called, at the hands of racist Southern Whites hell-bent on preserving their way of life, did. I grew up and still reside in the South, and race relations are better but not by much. There are today pockets of my home state where minorities simply are not welcome and are made to feel uncomfortable when they go there. Still, it is difficult for me to fathom how one group of people could treat another so badly for dozens of years, and how grown men could beat, torture, and shoot to death a juvenile just because he was 'Negro' and stepped out of line with a White woman. I first learned of Emmett Till from a book on the Civil Rights Movement many years ago, when I was a teenager myself, and the shock I felt when I read about his lynching death was so powerful that it never completely left my mind. I am sorry to say that I don't feel at ease even now with Southern Whites due to Till's murder, among others - not to mention that I happen to live in an area that is very redneck though I'm sure many people here would claim that they are not 'that way'. Mamie Till-Mobley's memoir was excellent too, but she kept insisting that her son whistled to get his words out as a result of the stutter he had after suffering from a bout of polio. Even his cousin Simeon Wright admitted that it was a 'wolf whistle'. 

At any rate, Mr. Anderson's book is the definitive one on the Till case and cleared up some confusion for me, such as the verdict not being an all out acquittal as others had written, there were 2 hold outs but they were not for convicting Milam and Bryant (of course), and also Juanita Milam's true feelings towards her sister-in-law (I always assumed that they were close). It was interesting to learn what had happened to those associated with the case, including the attorneys; I was quite sad for the prosecution team dying so young, though the defense I could care less about (I truly believed that Breland was a die-hard racist). Till's death has become a legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and this book tells the incredibly tragic story in a manner that is informative yet compassionate. How anyone could give this book 1 star is beyond me but everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion.

Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America Audible Audiobook – Unabridged Kenneth Timmerman (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator), Books on Tape (Publisher) (Books on Tape)

Two nuggets of inestimable value surfaced in this book for me. First, it is the realization that the stupefying double-speak of so many Islamic voices is made possible by the fact that they say different things in English than they say in Arabic. The answer to this problem, as Timmerman so powerfully proves, is MEMRI (The Middl e East Media and Research Institute). MEMRI is a translation service that publishes transcripts in English of articles, book excerpts, speeches, TV and radio programs, sermons, pamphlets, and school books from throughout the Middle East. Wow! I continue to be amazed and horrified by the things being said across the Arab world.

The second little gem that emerged from this important book is this question: what standards of scholarship exist in the Muslim world that would allow men of advanced degrees, academicians, professors, journalists, heads of state and leaders of the most important institutions of society to believe and disseminate such an absurd collection of wacko, lunatic theories that now consume the fetid minds of the Islamic world. From the utterly stupid, but widely reported stories of Jews distributing AIDS laced chewing gum to children; to the foolish notion of Jewish blood pastries; to the newest idiocy to sweep the universities of Islam: Holocaust Denial. It is as if entire nations were being led by the most ignorant collections of back-woods, hood-wearing, good old boys who, instead of being rejected utterly for their racism and stupidity are given credence and legitimacy on the world's stage. Does the King of Saudi Arabia also believe that the moon is made of cheese? Are the Universities of Egypt convening symposia to discuss why ships don't fall when they reach the edge of the flat earth? And exactly how many Syrian Generals does it take to screw in a light bulb?

The Truth matters and the world is burning wherever silly men are allowed to tell lies to support their irrational hatred of Jews or Israel or Bush or the US or (insert object of hatred by lunatic fringe conspiracy theorists here). Read Timmerman and be amazed.

King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel Audio CD – Unabridged, 2000 by Jonathan Kirsch (Books on Tape)

David, King of the Jews, possessed every flaw and failing a mortal is capable of, yet men and women adored him and God showered him with many more blessings than he did Abraham or Moses. His sexual appetite and prowess were matched only by his violence, both on the battlefield and in the bedroom. A charismatic leader, exalted as "a man after God's own heart," he was also capable of deep cunning, deceit, and betrayal. Now, in King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel, bestselling author Jonathan Kirsch reveals this commanding individual in all his glory and fallibility. 

In a taut, dramatic narrative, Kirsch brings new depth and psychological complexity to the familiar events of David's life--his slaying of the giant Goliath and his swift challenge to the weak rule of Saul, the first Jewish king; his tragic relationship with Saul's son Jonathan, David's cherished friend (and possibly lover); his celebrated reign in Jerusalem, where his dynasty would hold sway for generations. Yet for all his greatness, David was also a man in thrall to his passions--a voracious lover who secured the favors of his beautiful mistress Bathsheba by secretly arranging the death of her innocent husband; a merciless warrior who triumphed through cruelty; a troubled father who failed to protect his daughter from rape and whose beloved son Absalom rose against him in armed insurrection. 

Weaving together biblical texts with centuries of interpretation and commentary, Jonathan Kirsch brings King David to life in these pages with extraordinary freshness, intimacy, and vividness of detail. At the center of this inspiring narrative stands a hero of flesh and blood--not the cartoon giant-slayer of sermons and Sunday school stories or the immaculate ruler of legend and art but a magnetic, disturbingly familiar man--a man as vibrant and compelling today as he has been for millennia.