Please join us for the next and last People of the Book Club!

When: Wednesday, October 17th, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Where: AJWS 8th floor conference room, 45 West 36th St.

RSVP: cdubofsky@ajws.org

About the book: Journalist LeBlanc spent more than 10 years following two Latina women from the Bronx, and in this ambitious work, she tells their stories, beginning in the late 1980s with their young teen years. Older Jessica becomes a mistress to an enormously successful heroin dealer, and Coco falls for Jessica’s brother, an aspiring gangster. The two women find love, weather abuse, have babies, endure their own and their partners’ prison terms, and struggle with health problems, social systems, motherhood, their own mothers, the violence of their communities, and the uncertain future. LeBlanc’s prose is sprawling and dense with cinematic detail–what people wore, ate, drove, listened to; where they lived; what they said–and she studiously removes herself from the story, letting her characters’ day-to-day lives unfold in scenes that are both gripping and mundane and, like life, defy easy organization. What emerges is an important, unvarnished portrait of people living in deep urban poverty, beyond the statistics, hip-hop glamour, and stereotypes.

Please note: the People of the Book Club will not be meeting tonight. Stay tuned for details about our next book! 

Join us for the next People of the Book Club!  

What: Do It Anyway by Courtney Martin

When: Wednesday, August 8^th , 6.00-8.00 pm

Where: AJWS 8th floor conference room, 45 West 36th St.

RSVP: Email Chanel at cdubofsky@ajws.org

About the book: That age-old quest for meaning—Who am I? What is my calling? How can I make the world better?—gets a 21st-century makeover. Courtney E. Martin abandons the empty “save the world” rhetoric and ’60s nostalgia that her generation was raised on and doggedly pursues the gritty truth about social change in contemporary America. It’s complicated. It’s challenging. And, yet, it’s still possible. In Do It Anyway, Martin deeply explores the lives of eight activists—not superhuman heroes, but ordinary young people searching for their own way to make a difference. Among others, we meet Raul Diaz, a prison re-entry social worker at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles; Nia Robinson, an African American climate change activist out of Detroit; Maricela Guzman, a former soldier fighting to end violence against women in the military through the Service Women’s Action Network; and Rosario Dawson, an actor struggling to use her celebrity for social change while staying authentic in her activism. In direct opposition to an older generation’s cry that young people are apathetic and disengaged, Do It Anyway reveals a new generation of activism and calls on young people to transcend school-required community service and paper-pushing nonprofit jobs in favor of the kind of work that keeps you up at night because you believe in it so deeply.

Please join us for the next People of the Book Club! The discussion will be facilitated by Amarilys Estrella, AJWS program officer for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Light refreshments will be provided.

When: Wednesday, June 6th, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. 

Where: AJWS 8th floor conference room, 45 West 36th St. 

Who: The discussion will be facilitated by Amarilys Estrella, AJWS program officer for the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Special discount! RSVP for details about a 15% discount on the book at a local bookstore.

RSVP: slipkin@ajws.org

About the book: It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Raphael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas – “The Butterflies.” Now, three decades later, Julia Alvarez, also a daughter of the Dominican Republic and long haunted by these sisters, immerses us in a tangled and dangerous moment in Hispanic Caribbean history to tell their story in the only way it can truly be understood – through fiction. In this novel, the voices of all four sisters – Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and Dede – speak across the decades, to tell their own stories – and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule.

Next Tuesday night, Pursuers in NYC will gather for a discussion of Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission, about an American Muslim whose design is selected for the national 9/11 memorial site. As a preview, facilitator Jon Moscow of Jews Against Islamophobia shared his thoughts about his work on this issue and reading the book. Want to join the discussion? Click here!

How did you get involved with Jews Against Islamophobia?

I have been an active member, and at various times a Board member and co-chair, of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) since the mid ‘90s. In 2010, JFREJ was a strong supporter of Cordoba House/Park51, the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan. When we discovered that the Simon Wiesenthal Center was opening a Museum of Tolerance in New York, but was actively opposing Park51, we thought that it was important for a Jewish voice to call attention to this hypocrisy. In conjunction with Jewish Voice for Peace, and Jews Say No! we organized a demonstration at the “Museum of Intolerance” and created Jews Against Islamophobia as a coalition to do on-going work.

Personally, I wanted to be involved in opposing Islamophobia because as a Jew I think it is important to oppose bigotry in all its forms. My parents taught me that the only way to ensure that Jews are safe from oppression is to oppose all forms of oppression. In his essay, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” Isaac Deutscher traces the history of secular Jewish radicalism in Europe to Jews’ position as “the other.” It makes sense to me for Jews to speak up when any group is being defined as “the other,” as is happening to Muslims when they are the targets of Islamophobia.

What role do you think the book can play in addressing Islamophobia?

Amy Waldman breaks through stereotypes and generalizations and presents all her characters as complex individuals. This strikes at the unidimensional portrayal of Muslims which is at the heart of Islamophobia. Although largely written before Park51, the book describes ranges of behaviors and reactions we saw in the Park51 controversy and before that in the attacks on Debbie Almontaser and the Kahlil Gibran International Academy. It provides an opportunity for discussion of those events and the roles and responsibilities of various players.

What are you looking forward to about the book club?

I really enjoyed the book and it will be enjoyable to talk about it and to use it as a springboard to discuss a lot of the issues—personal as well as political—that it raises. I’m looking forward to our talking about the book as literature as well as about its subject matter. A book is always a conversation between author and reader so there will have been as many conversations with Amy Waldman as there are participants in the group and I’m looking forward to our sharing those conversations.

Please join us for the next People of the Book Club!

What: The Submission by Amy Waldman

When: Tuesday, March 27th, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. 

Where: AJWS 11th floor conference room, 45 West 36th St. 

Who: The discussion will be facilitated by Jon Moscow of Jews Against Islamophobia.

Special discount! RSVP for details about a 15% discount on the book at a local bookstore.

RSVP: slipkin@ajws.org

About the book: A jury gathers in Manhattan to select a memorial for the victims of a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberations complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner’s name—and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam. Their conflicted response is only a preamble to the country’s. The memorial’s designer is an enigmatic, ambitious architect named Mohammad Khan. His fiercest defender on the jury is its sole widow, the self-possessed and mediagenic Claire Burwell. But when the news of his selection leaks to the press, she finds herself under pressure from outraged family members and in collision with hungry journalists, wary activists, opportunistic politicians, fellow jurors, and Khan himself—as unknowable as he is gifted. In the fight for both advantage and their ideals, all will bring the emotional weight of their own histories to bear on the urgent question of how to remember, and understand, a national tragedy.

While the Jewish social justice movement is growing and thriving today, with a diverse range of organizations tackling issues across the country and beyond, this isn’t the first time that progressive organizing has taken a strong foothold in the Jewish community. Pursue recently sat down with Ezra Berkley Nepon to learn more about New Jewish Agenda, a significant force for Jewish progressives in the 1980s, as Ezra’s book on the history of the organization awaits a Spring 2012 release:

How did you first learn about the New Jewish Agenda, and what inspired you to dig more deeply into its history?

I learned about New Jewish Agenda (NJA) because I was reading a lot of fantastic Jewish feminist writing like Bridges Journal and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s The Issue Is Power. I kept seeing references to NJA and I wondered what this organization was, that had so many inspiring activists and thinkers involved. When I realized that NJA had been active as a national progressive Jewish movement from 1980 to 1992, but there was really no public record of their work, I was even more curious. As I learned about this organization that was courageous in their work as “a Jewish Voice Among Progressives and a Progressive Voice Among Jews,” I felt as though I was finding the progressive Jewish home I had been looking for. I was hungry for NJA’s story, so I went digging in their boxes at the NYU Tamiment Archive to find out more.

What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your research?

I knew that there was a long history of Jewish American activism working for Middle East peace and justice, but I didn’t know a lot of specifics like the fact that Jewish activists had called for a freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank as early as 1983. New Jewish Agenda brought a resolution on this issue to the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations – a huge public education opportunity. I also didn’t know that Jewish activists were actively engaged in Central American solidarity, work for worldwide nuclear disarmament, anti-apartheid organizing, and really every major political issue of the 1980s. I was thrilled to learn that NJA had such a range of progressive campaigns and built analysis that is still really informative.

What do you hope contemporary social justice-minded Jews will take away from the story of NJA?

NJA was an exciting in-gathering of secular and religious Jewish activists who accomplished a huge body of work and shifted conversations on international issues. At the same time, NJA was a feminist organization that recognized that the personal is political. Activists in NJA addressed anti-Semitism on the Left and the silencing of dissent within mainstream Jewish organizations, and they didn’t shy away from looking at internal issues of classism, racism, and homophobia. They had a truly intersectional political analysis that is still illuminating, two decades after they shut down.

What do you do when you’re not working on this project? Do you have any ideas for future research?

These days I’m pursuing an M.A. with a focus called Transformative Language Arts, working as a grassroots fundraising consultant, and I just starred in a really fun short video called “Little Orphan Gender Revolutionary Annie” where Orphan Annie sings about gender self-determination and dances on a toy theater stage. 

Right now I’m really excited to study and document the creative work of my friend Jenny Romaine, who has a brilliant methodology around creating New Yiddish Theater that mixes archival texts with modern culture. I’m inspired by Jenny’s work on a creative and scholarly level, and I also just love performing in the spectacles she manifests.

To learn more about the book and how you can help support its publication, click here. To hear more from Ezra, check out this recent interview on radio613.

Please join us for the next People of the Book Club!

What: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

When: Wednesday, January 18th, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Where: AJWS 10th floor conference room, 45 West 36th St.

Who: The discussion will be facilitated by Jamie Zimmerman, AJWS alumna and a third-year medical student at Mt. Sinai. Jamie is also a documentary filmmaker who studied anthropology as an undergraduate at UCLA and has travelled/worked in Peru, Thailand, India, Uganda, Mozambique, Costa Rica, Zambia, the Upper East Side and East Harlem.

Special discount! RSVP for details about a 15% discount on the book at a local bookstore.

RSVP: slipkin@ajws.org
 
About the book: When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run “Quiet War” in Laos. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia’s pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Lia’s doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg–the spirit catches you and you fall down–and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is told from the point of view of three narrators: two black women who work as maids (Aibileen and Minny) and one white woman (Miss Skeeter) living in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. Together, the three narrators complete a book entitled Help, containing anonymous first-person accounts from several black maids in Jackson describing what it’s like to work for the white families in town. Stockett writes in three convincing voices, each woman finely drawn and complex in their narration, emotional struggles, and social interactions. Seeing the story from three angles draws the reader immediately into the unbalanced world that Help tries to right.

We are at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement; society, here, is white upper-middle class women’s society, ruled by the town’s queen bee, Hilly Holbrook. The white women’s voices are compromised; they struggle with their husbands, their children, and with each other. Instead of lifting each other up, these women live in a society where the loudest and most pervasive voice dictates the flow and ebb of conversation and rules: what a woman should wear, talk about, who she should talk with.

As much as the white women of the book create boundaries between themselves and each other, the black women are in constant communication through phone, church, or visits to each other’s homes, ready to support each other through gossip, job losses, and domestic and racial violence. But when it comes to communicating to their white employers, Minny is the only one who tells the truth to their face, “I’ve been trying to tell white women the truth about working for them since I was fourteen years old” (p. 151). She’s often punished for this truth, in the form of gossip and job losses. Aibileen, conversely, chokes down the truth of what she wants to say, when she’s confronted with racist, segregationist comments from her employer and Hilly Holbrook, “I’m surprise by how tight my throat get. It’s a shame I learned to keep down a long time ago” (p. 10). Stockett’s empathetic portrayal of the black community’s struggle with voice across racial boundaries, particularly in the character of Aibileen, sets the reader up for the redemption that Help brings to the maids’ voices, a forum to tell their stories in an authentic way.

Stockett has received criticism for writing in black vernacular, not portraying historical events accurately, and depicting a cruel and violent time in America’s history as soft, easy-to-read, and overtly emotional. While I can understand the need for some Civil Rights literature to be stark, historically accurate, dark and violent as befit the period, Stockett nonetheless draws the reader into a world that has often been overshadowed: with all its flaws and consequences, this is a world where women’s words matter.

What do you think? Join us for a conversation on the many facets of The Help this Wednesday at the Pursue office.

Amanda Faye Lacson, MA, is a graduate of Goddard College’s Transformative Language Arts concentration, which examines how language can be used for social and personal transformation. Her thesis, Unveiling Aphrodite: Examining the Mythology of Romantic Love spanned topics and writing styles she holds close to her heart: mythology, romantic love, intimacy, family, women’s issues, identity, psychology, poetry, and creative nonfiction. More recently, Amanda has been exploring the role of food, cooking, and eating together as a method of creating intimate and family relationship. Amanda also facilitates writing workshops, including a monthly writing circle with Swirl, which focuses on the exploration of race, family, and social myths on a person’s identity. Learn more about her work at amandafayelacson.com.

It’s a good question, and a tall order: if you had to name one book that changed your life, what would it be? Nancy Schwartz, the woman behind Getting Attention, a nonprofit marketing resource website, recently posed the question to a range of nonprofit professionals and compiled a final list of 129 selections. In the age of bite-size digital content and distracted multi-tasking, it’s inspiring to see how many substantive choices there are not only for expanding your knowledge but also for immersing yourself in depth on a particular topic.

Check out this excellent resource for people working or looking to work in the nonprofit field. From Dr. Seuss’s Oh! The Places You’ll Go! to more practical tomes like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, there’s sure to be something that peaks your interest. In the meantime, for another kind of immersive book experience, consider attending the next People of the Book Club meeting on November 9th in NYC.

Click here to download The Book That Changed My Life from Getting Attention.

It was only 10½ hours after the close of this year’s Hazon Food Conference that I was faced with a new food justice-related challenge. In a moment of optimism several weeks earlier, I had agreed to write a review of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland for my CSA’s newsletter during the same weekend of the conference. Unsurprisingly, in the battle between well-intentioned optimism and an active conference, the conference won. In between a standing room only discussion on the 2012 Farm Bill, a community-wide beit midrash in which my chevruta and I tackled Maimonides and Mark Bittman, and a session on learning how to brew beer (with samples generously provided and enthusiastically consumed), the review went unwritten.
 
But a commitment is still a commitment, even if it meant I had to write the review hunched over in a middle seat on a red-eye flight home to Brooklyn. In fact, I reasoned, maybe it was even a good thing that I waited to write the review until after the conference. Tomatoland  takes on food (bet you can guess which one) and examines how and why it makes it to our tables. The extensively researched explanations are occasionally horrifying and always enlightening. And the issues of how food arrives to our tables, who is impacted in the process, and why people eat certain kinds of food are the same issues that led many of us to attend the conference initially.

Pursue, which worked with Hazon to create an engaging track of food justice-related programming, ensured that these topics received plenty of attention at the conference. Those of us in Pursue’s inaugural food justice cohort had the added benefit of networking with our fellow cohort members, a group of people also interested in the intersection between Judaism, food, and social justice, and who probably also spend their free time reading books about tomatoes.

My fellow cohort member Sasha has written an excellent piece about some of the food justice programming. Rather than repeat her descriptions of the conference’s great food justice sessions, I’ll tell you instead about a few of the food justice activities our cohort has been up to recently and how the conference has impacted us. In our Facebook group, we’ve debated the merits of CSAs vs. food cooperatives vs. community gardens, argued over whether it was beneficial for SNAP (the federal food stamp program) to ban purchases of soda, and swapped our food /social justice/Judaism reading lists. We’ve learned more about the inspiring campaigns and issues that make up our day jobs and side activities and shared resources for getting existing and future ideas connected to the larger Jewish food movement. Many of us are now starting to think about Global Hunger Shabbat and how we can use what we learned at the conference to bring these issues to our larger communities.

All of us in the cohort are optimistic that the knowledge and connections we gained as a result of the conference will inform our future work in the Jewish food justice community and the world at large. I’m so grateful for Hazon and Pursue for giving us the opportunity to learn more about the relationship between Judaism, food, and social justice, and for giving me so much to think about on the plane ride home.

Katy Schwalbe is a labor union researcher, a co-chair of this year’s Limmud NY conference, and an unabashed foodie. You can read her review of Tomatoland here and learn what spices she’s running low on here.