The Program Director is Matthew Brogan Nextbook 180 W. 80th Street Suite 201 NYC, NY 10024 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 646-277-2405 phone 646-505-5265 fax
Here's a recent article from the NYT (I include as it's now no longer free) August 9, 2003 Judaism Through Books, Not by the Book By JULIE SALAMON In a recent episode of "Sex and the City," Charlotte, the elegant Episcopalian who has converted to Judaism for her boyfriend, Harry, prepares a festive Sabbath dinner. He arrives, admires the table and switches on a Mets game. When Charlotte asks him to turn off the television, he appears to have complied. She proceeds with the ritual blessings, only to realize that Harry is still watching the game ??? on mute. Charlotte is furious. "I gave up Christ for you, and you can't give up the Mets!" she snaps. This clever moment captures an essential conundrum for many Jews, especially in an open and pluralistic society. Harry felt so wedded to his Jewish identity that he had warned Charlotte that he could not marry outside his religion. So she undertook serious study and by-the-book conversion. And then discovered, in her Sabbath face-off with the Mets, that part of being Jewish was disagreeing about what it means to be a Jew. It's the kind of question that rabbis have long pondered. But now Nextbook, a new project to promote Jewish cultural literacy nationwide, is hoping to raise such issues in secular places like public libraries, museums, symphony halls and the Internet. Thanks to its founder, the Jewish philanthropy Keren Keshet-the Rainbow Foundation, it has several million dollars with which to do it. "There are so many paradoxes around the idea of Jewish tradition," said Jonathan Rosen, an author who was for 10 years the culture editor of The Forward, the Jewish weekly, and is now working with Nextbook. "What is a Jewish book? For some people Jewish literature starts with Sholom Aleichem and ends with Philip Roth. The Forward was a Yiddish newspaper for general readership, and then it was in English. What does that mean? Tradition itself is full of abrupt transformations." Nextbook, based in New York, will use literature to introduce the tradition ??? or at least the transformations ??? to people who have not shown a particular interest in either. It is distributing reading lists of 300 titles (more will follow), along with the books themselves, to public libraries. There is also a lively Web site, nextbook.org, orchestrated by Blake Eskin, another author who used to work at The Forward. His models are online digests like Arts Journal (artsjournal.com) and Romenesko (poynter.org/medianews), aggregates of information on particular subjects. Drawing on a wide variety of publications and other sources ??? highbrow and low, left and right, Jewish and secular, domestic and foreign ??? Mr. Eskin evokes the spirit of an earlier age, when the Jewish intelligentsia argued the world in coffeehouses or in living rooms. The organizers are working hard to avoid even a whiff of Hebrew school. The reading lists, in brightly designed pamphlets, are divided into categories that don't sound sectarian, like Sense of Place and Discovering Myself. Also being sent to bookstores, they include both unsurprising choices (Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoir "In My Father's Court") and intriguing ones (Nathanael West's classic Hollywood novel, "The Day of the Locust"). "We thought public libraries could be a nonthreatening gateway that Jews could easily enter to learn about themselves," said Arthur Fried, who helps run Keren Keshet-the Rainbow Foundation, established in a bequest by Zalman C. Bernstein. Bernstein, formerly Sanford C. Bernstein, accumulated a fortune on Wall Street and changed his name to Zalman as part of a late-in-life embrace of Orthodox Judaism. "Some Jews don't want to enter through a synagogue or a Jewish community center or any of the regular channels," Mr. Fried said. Mr. Rosen was hired to help conceive Nextbook and a series of short books about historic Jewish figures and subjects, to be published by Schocken Books, an imprint of Alfred A. Knopf. The series will include Robert Pinsky writing on King David, Sherwin Nuland on Maimonides and Leon Wieseltier on messianism. Mr. Rosen hesitated to predict the Nextbook audience or to pinpoint its goal. "On the one hand, it's very simple," he said. "The promotion of Jewish culture and literacy among Jews and non-Jews. Working at that place where literary culture, secular culture and Jewish culture and tradition all meet. But sometimes they don't meet. Sometimes they walk right past each other." For Julie Sandorf, Nextbook's director, literature is directly tied to at least one search for Jewish identity: her own. She is a sort of professional idealist, whose career until now has been raising money to develop housing for the homeless. Though her parents are Jewish, her upbringing in Port Washington, N.Y., was so devoutly secular, she said, that the family's Passover meal included neither religious ritual nor an explanation of the holiday. Still, Ms. Sandorf said she felt awful when her own daughter, then 3 and attending nursery school on the Upper West Side, "announced over Christmas vacation: `Mommy, I want to be a Christian. I don't want to be a Jewish.' " Ms. Sandorf decided it was time to learn about her history and tradition. But she didn't head for a synagogue. That evening she went to a bookstore and bought a book about Hanukkah. Eventually, she and her family joined a Jewish congregation, and her daughter had a bat mitzvah. Yet Ms. Sandorf stressed that Nextbook's approach was secular. "This is not about religion," she said. "This is about giving people the opportunity to learn about Jewish culture, history and ideas." That is a distinction, she acknowledged, that many Jews would not accept. "There's always that tension," she said. "How do you separate the culture from the religion? It's very hard because they are intertwined." Nextbook's programs begin this fall in Chicago and Seattle and then will expand to Washington and other cities. They include readings by authors like Michael Chabon and Amos Oz, and discussions like "What Is the Kaddish?," linked to the Seattle Symphony's performance of Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish." (Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead.) The idea is to find a Jewish connection to events that are already planned, explained Matthew Brogan, Nextbook's program director. So when the Einstein exhibition that recently closed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York moves to the Field Museum in Chicago, Nextbook plans to present lectures on science and Judaism or on science and Jewish literature. The Nextbook group approaches the project with realism as well as enthusiasm. "I don't think Nextbook is the answer to the future of Judaism or Jewish renewal," Mr. Eskin said. "I think there are a lot of people asking the question, `What does it mean to be a Jew?' This is one more way to help them figure that out." Victoria Kahn [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arlington, Virginia =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
