Unnamed characters, such as Lot’s wife, Jephthah’s daughter, Pharoah’s baker and the medium of Endor, abound in the Bible. Why dispense with a name? Adele Reinhartz, currently on sabbatical from her position as professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University, has studied the question in depth. Her book “Why Ask My Name?”:…
Tag: non-fiction
Obit: Isabel LeBourdais (1909-2003)
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When Isabel LeBourdais first heard that an Ontario court had condemned a 14-year-old boy to death for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl, she was appalled that the criminal justice system showed no interest in giving a deeply maladjusted teenager the psychological therapy he so obviously required. But her opinion quickly changed once…
David Kertzer on the Vatican’s role in anti-semitism
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Forcing Jews to wear yellow badges and keeping them locked up in ghettoes were not cruelties that the Nazis invented in the 20th century, but rather practices that the popes “had championed for hundreds of years,” says the author of a new book condemning the Vatican for its role in promulgating the hatred that led…
Spirit possession in Judaism
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One day about ten years ago, a teenaged Russian immigrant to Israel witnessed a fatal traffic accident through her window. The tragedy occurred on a Friday afternoon. The next day the 17-year-old witness, Menuhah, showed her sister the spot on the road where it had occurred. There was still blood on the road and Menuhah…
Blurb about ‘Times Square Rabbi’
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Proferring an eight-step program for recovery based on the teachings of Maimonides, Rabbi Yehudah Fine prowls the mean streets of Manhattan, seeking young people to redeem from their chosen hells in his book Times Square Rabbi (Hazelden). Fine’s gritty, true-to-life realism rings completely true — and it is: this is a non-fiction account of the…
Blurb about Two-Gun Cohen
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Published by St. Martin’s Press, Two-Gun Cohen is an intriguing biography by Daniel S. Levy (distributed in Canada by McClelland & Stewart). The son of orthodox Jewish parents, the title character was a con man, card sharp and pickpocket from east-end London who was arrested, sent to reform school, then shipped to western Canada. Hustling and…
Writer explores her brother’s mysterious death
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The last time Nomi Berger saw her brother Peter, he was 19 years old and submerged in Montreal’s pot-smoking and acid-dropping hippie counter-culture. The year was 1968. Peter, who lived in a house with several others, had recently been arrested for drug possession and had fought bitterly with his parents. “Help me,” he had beseeched…
Rabbi Schild’s ‘World Through My Window’
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Rabbi Erwin Schild, rabbi emeritus of Adath Israel Synagogue in Toronto and author of World Through My Window, an anthology of sermons published in 1992, arrives in Germany this week (1996) to attend the launch of the German-language edition of his book and to initiate a six-week speaking tour in German. The book was translated…
Winchester on the Frisco quake of ’06
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Simon Winchester has just produced (1995) another non-fiction gem: A Crack in the Edge of The World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (HarperCollins). The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa opens this recent non-fiction book with a view of the earth from the moon, and a description of…
Literary Tribute to Matt Cohen
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Uncommon Ground, a fresh collection of articles, essays, excerpts and interviews just published by Knopf Canada (2002), offers a wonderfully luminescent window onto the legacy of the multifaceted and elusive Canadian writer Matt Cohen, who died in December 1999. The book is being offered as a “festschrift” or celebration of Cohen and his work. It…
