Authors 2008
Denver Jewish Community Reads…2008
Diane Ackerman
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
Pre-Festival Event — Wednesday, Oct. 22, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Kathy Neustadt Hankin and the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature
“By introducing our first Denver Jewish community book read, our hope is that a
sense of one large community, brought together by its consideration of the same
ideas,will emerge.We call it building community, one book at a time.”
— Kathy Neustadt Hankin, JCC Board President
This critically acclaimed, bestselling book is a true story in which the keeper of the Warsaw Zoo and his extraordinary wife saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw, and the city’s zoo along with it. With many of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jewish people in to empty cages. Other “guests” hid inside the Zabinski’s villa, emerging after dark. With exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina Zabinski refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of humanity and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.
Diane Ackerman is the author of the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses, among many other books of nonfiction and poetry. She lives in upstate New York.
Denver Jewish Community Reads includes:
Diane Ackerman author lecture at the JCC on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 7 p.m.
Facilitated book discussion on Sunday, Nov. 2, 4 p.m.
Books available for purchase at the JCC & MACC.
Rabbi Harvey Rides Again
1 p.m. — Pluss Theatre
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by The Jewish Experience
Sunday, Oct. 26 – OPENING DAY
Opening Day 7
Michael Wex
Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion
(When English Just Won’t Do)
Monday, Oct. 27, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Gay Curtiss-Lusher
“More than just a dictionary, Wex’s book waxes on the possible Biblical origins of
certain phrases and offers useful phrases as well. Wex’s parents must be kvelling.”
— New York Post
A hilarious follow-up to Born to Kvetch, Michael Wex’s best-selling guide to the Yiddish language. Just Say Nu is a practical guide to using Yiddish words and expressions in day-to-day situations (but not, of course, without lots of historical and cultural excursions along the way). Readers will learn how to schmooze their way through such activities as meeting and greeting, eating and drinking, praising and finding fault, maintaining personal hygiene, going to the doctor, driving, parenting, getting horoscopes, committing crimes, going to singles bars, having sex, talking politics and talking trash.
Jennifer 8. Lee
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
Tuesday, Oct. 28, noon
$26 – includes Shang Chai: Jews and Chinese Food (Kosher luncheon)
Advance payment required by Oct. 22 (not part of the Author Passport)
Sponsored by Joanne Singer
Egg rolls are as American as apple pie, and for New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee, the story of the Chinese-American experience can be told through the lens of food. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is for anyone who has ever wondered who General Tso was and why his chicken is so famous, why all Chinese restaurants use the same trapezoidal delivery cartons, and who invented the fortune cookie. Lee narrates her search for the world’s best Chinese restaurant with a mix of in-depth research and entertaining personal anecdotes, and highlights her appearance with the definitive story on the Jewish affinity for Chinese food – the remarkable story of the “Great Kosher Duck Scandal” of Atlanta.
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg
Hallel Hakohen
Tuesday, Oct. 28, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
The first Hebrew work on Torah published in Denver in 64 years.
An elucidation of the commentary of the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797) on the laws of mikveh, the Vilna Gaon is the primary inspirer of Ashkenazi yeshivas around the world. The Vilna Gaon wrote in puzzles and codes. His major work, on the Code of Jewish Law (Shulchan Aruch), appears to be mere jottings. So total was his knowledge that he was able to encapsulate his thinking with extreme concision. “The mikveh seems to be the perfect locus of ecology in Judaism,” explains Rabbi Goldberg. “If I take water and earth and configure them in a certain way, they are nothing but water and earth. But if, under the guidelines of the Torah, I configure the exact same water and earth another way, they purify a person. G-d works through water and earth.”
Martin Fletcher
Breaking News
Wednesday, Oct. 29, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Carol & Irwin Wagner
Martin Fletcher has given us a stunning and memorable account of the risks,
rewards, complexities, and enduring lessons of reporting from some of the most
dangerous places in the world. His family’s Holocaust history frames his own
eloquent insights and questions about the madness of the world that followed.
— Tom Brokaw
For the last thirty years, Martin Fletcher has lived a remarkable life under extraordinary circumstances. Currently NBC News Bureau Chief in Israel, he has shown remarkable and sometimes even foolhardy courage in the face of disaster and life-threatening peril. Breaking News is both an eye-witness account of some of the most tumultuous moments of our time and an intimate personal story of a young man’s ambitious, daring, and sometimes hilarious quest for adventure.
Stephanie Klein
MOOSE: A Memoir of Fat Camp
Thursday, Oct. 30, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Ellen Beller
Klein offers an original and touching take on the all-too-common problem of childhood obesity.
— Kirkus Reviews
With her signature acerbic wit and captivating insight, as witnessed in the wildly popular Straight Up and Dirty, Klein offers a powerful and beautifully stark portrait of Jewish adolescence. Whether Klein is describing her life as a chubby adolescent at fat camp – getting weighed on a meat scale, being denied challah, and “chunky dunking” in the lake – or what it’s like now as a fit mother, having one-sided conversations with her newborn twins about the therapy they’ll one day need, her hilarious, yet vulnerable perspective will remind you what it was like to feel like an outsider, to desperately seek the right outfit, the right slang, the best comeback, or whatever that unattainable something was that would finally make you fit in.
Mindy Schneider
Not A Happy Camper
Thursday, Oct. 30, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Ellen Beller
The memoir Bill Cosby might have written if he were a clever Jewish girl from
suburban New Jersey sent to summer camp in the Maine Woods.
— Kirkus Reviews
Mindy Schneider went to a summer camp in Maine in the 1970s that was run by a con artist who lied about the facilities and duped rich Jewish kids into spending eight weeks at a dump where it rained everyday. It was the best thing that ever happened to her. Back in those days, Mindy was certain she was the only awkward, insecure misfit. It took writing this book, and collecting anecdotes from her old camp friends, to find out she was not alone. Not a Happy Camper should appeal to everyone who loved
sleep-away camp, everyone who didn’t, and everyone who’s happy to just stay home and read about it.
Janice Silver
Aging Gracefully and Other Myths
Thursday, Nov 2nd, 1 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Aging Gracefully and Other Myths illustrates the author’s philosophy of laugh; that we all need to learn to laugh at ourselves, revealed through the prism of her life stories. This collection of hilarious personal essays includes stories about dating and marriage, moving to the suburbs, raising children and crossing that threshold of forty years old. Organized as a comic self-help book, it includes a four-step program that shows how embracing your imperfections, throwing away the script, learning to age humorously and lastly, getting a dog have helped Janice through life’s stresses. By applying this approach in your own life, you can learn how to laugh more, too.
Rabbi Simcha Weinstein
Shtick Shift: Jewish Humor In the 21st Century
Monday, Nov. 3, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Author of Up,Up and OyVey! How Jewish History, Culture andValues Shaped
the Comic Book Superhero,which received the prestigious Benjamin Franklin
Award for the best religion book of 2007.
Today’s Jewish comics are not interested in trying to blend in with the mainstream. Nor are they desperate to apologize for who they are. They are being themselves for better or worse, and have the confidence to laugh about their frailties. Weinstein calls this new comic sensibility the shtick shift. Unlike their comedic ancestors, Jewish comedians of the 21st century don’t play down or apologize for their heritage. They offer fresh perspectives on familiar themes in Jewish humor: money, family, faith, politics and bigotry. Their humor may not be subtle, and it often exhibits a bitter, twisted, edge. But at least it is honest, sometimes brutally so. Shitck Shift aims for the same level of honesty.
Rabbi David Wolpe
Why Faith Matters
Wednesday, Nov. 5, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sponsored by Kathy Neustadt Hankin
Named the #1 Pulpit Rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine.
Why Faith Matters is an articulate, nondenominational defense of established religion in America. Rabbi Wolpe presents the case for religion and proposes solutions toward engaging religion in discussions of modernity. By refuting the cold reason of the atheist with a vision of religion informed by faith, love, and understanding, Wolpe takes readers through the origins and nature of religion; popular misunderstandings of the relationship between religion, violence and progress; the place of the Bible in modern life; and the compatibility of religion and science. He concludes with a powerful argument against calls for the end of religion.
Adam Langer
Ellington Boulevard
Thursday, Nov. 6, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
“Langer has that rare combination of fierce intelligence, wicked wit and the ability to make you turn pages at wrist-splintering speed. This is one of the
very best recent novels of New York.”
— USA Today
With the humor and poignancy that made Langer’s first novel, Crossing California, a favorite book of the year among critics, Ellington Boulevard is an ode to New York. Centering on the fate of one apartment before, during and after the height of New York’s real estate boom, it’s the story of why people come to a city they can’t afford, take jobs they despise, sacrifice love, find love and eventually become the people they never thought they’d be, for better or worse.
Adam Mansbach
The End of the Jews
Thursday, Nov. 6, 7 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
“Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity,
alive to themagic of creativity yet aware of its consequences—very exciting fiction
indeed.”
— Kirkus Reviews
The ruthlessly engrossing and beautifully rendered story of the Brodskys, a family of artists who realize, too late, one elemental truth: Creation’s necessary consequence is destruction. The End of the Jews offers all the rewards of the traditional family epic, but Mansbach’s irreverent wit and rich, kinetic prose shed new light on the genre. It runs on its own chronometer, somersaulting gracefully through time and space, inter-weaving the tales of these three protagonists who, separated by generation and geography, are leading parallel lives.
Jonathan Adelman
The Rise of Israel
Sunday, Nov. 9, 2 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
“Superbly researched and passionately argued, The Rise of Israel fills a glaring
gap in the study of Zionism and the Jewish State.”
— Michael Oren, author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East
Jonathan Adelman provides a fresh perspective on one of the most controversial states in the world and avoids the highly charged ideological descriptions that often plague such discussions. Understanding the rise of Israel, a key state in the region, helps to explain a great deal about the Middle East today.
William D. Cohan
The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co.
Sunday, Nov. 9, 4 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2007, The Last Tycoons is of special interest to a Jewish audience. The bank’s founders, and the principal figures throughout its history to the present day, were Jews, and the fortunes, misfortunes and challenges that the firm and its principals faced historically were informed by the firm’s Jewish identity.
Rabbi Levi Brackman
Jewish Wisdom for Business Success
Sunday, Nov. 9, 4 p.m.
$8/adult; $6/senior, student, child
Sacred Jewish texts such as the Torah and the Kabbalah have long been considered repositories of some of the greatest wisdomever assembled. Yet only the smartest and most successful business professionals take advantage of these powerful collections of advice. Using real-world business situations as illustrative examples, this book reveals a 4,000-year old blueprint for success.
