1st Wednesday of the Month 2:45pm-4:15pm
Please click here to join with Zoom
Meeting ID: 814 9958 7658 By Phone: (646) 876 -9923
Contact Carol Kaplan ckaplan550@aol.com or the TBE office for more information. All are welcome to these lively discussions!
Our new 2020 - 2021 selections:
The Rabbi by Noah Gordon
Reviewed by Russ Bogen August 5, 2020
This best-selling novel follows the life and career of Rabbi Michael Kind as he journeys through America as a Reform rabbi. The reader watches him develop resilience, strength of character and courage as he encounters the dynamics of congregational life.
The Third Daughter by Talia Carner
Reviewed by Candace Patton September 2, 2020
Talia Carner illuminates a little-known piece of Jewish history: the sex trafficking of young women from Russia to South America in the late 19th Century. Fourteen-year- old Batya is forced to marry a wealthy stranger from abroad and enter a waking nightmare.
Mah Jongg Mondays by Fern Bernstein 
Reviewed by Elizabeth Bakst October 7, 2020
Fern, married and the mother of three boys, takes the reader into her middle-class suburban Long Island world where she decides to learn the Chinese game of Mah Jongg. The novel describes the game of life along with the game of Mah Jongg.
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
Reviewed by Mindi Weinstein November 4,2020
An epic novel rooted in the real-life friendship between two fathers, Apeirogon reveals a world of conflict that colors the lives of Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and Bassan Aranin, a Palestinian. When the two men learn of each other’s stories of loss, they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace.
The Plot Against America: A Novel by Philip Roth
Reviewed by Monica Wildonger
December 2,2020
Philip Roth imagines an alternate history wherein Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to the aviator Charles Lindbergh, a rabid isolationist. The latter organizes a new government that embarks on a program of anti-Semitism.
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots
by Deborah Feldman
Reviewed by Judi Bayer January 6, 2021 
A best-selling memoir of a young Jewish woman’s escape from the religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism. Feldman, who grew up under this code, grows into an independent-minded woman who imagines a different way of life.
Cilka’s Journey: A Novel by Heather Morris
Reviewed by Gail Margolis February 3, 2021 
A riveting story of love and resilience, this sequel to Morris’s bestseller, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, centers itself around the sixteen year old Cilka, who is taken to Auschwitz in 1942. Forcibly separated from the other prisoners, Cilka learns that power equals survival.
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum
Reviewed by Sue Osin March 3, 2021
In this revelatory history of one of Stalin’s greatest crimes, Applebaum reveals a great political atrocity. The starvation of the Ukrainian peasants was part of a larger Soviet policy against the Ukrainian nation.
Pogram: Kishinev and the Tilt of History
by Steven J. Zipperstein 
Reviewed by Sam Fraser April 7, 2021
This book serves as a useful reminder to the reader that the pogram era was the moment when exile in Europe turned deadly. The methodical slaughter of forty-nine Jews on the streets of Kishinev in April, 1903, is a pivotal event in the history of modern anti-Semitism.
