PEOPLE OF THE BOOKSTORE

Judaism Through Books, Not by the Book (JULIE SALAMON, 8/09/03, NY Times)

"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. [...]

"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.

Speaking of Leon Wieseltier and Jewish messianism... Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2003 8:22 AM