New Acquisitions at the Hendel Library

Hendel Family Library  

Spring/Summer 2025 – New acquisitions

 

Adult 

1. Beinart, Peter.  Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: a Reckoning. – After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, he argues, Jews must tell a new story.  
2. Brener, Ann.  Books like Sapphires: from The Library of Congress Judaica Collection. – Books Like Sapphires features highlights of Hebrew literary works in the Library of Congress. It is a book about books, but it is also a book about patrons, first among them Jacob Schiff, whose munificence founded the Hebraic Section in 1912 to ensure the survival of the Jewish cultural heritage.  
3. Fine, Gila.  The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: rereading the women of the Talmud. – Women in the Talmud are generally marginal and almost always anonymous – the daughters, sisters, and wives of prominent rabbis. The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic explores the stories of the exceptions, the six named heroines of the Talmud.  
4. Freedland, Jonathan.  The Escape Artist: the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world. – In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz–one of only four who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. 
5. Grade, Chaim.  Sons and Daughters, a novel. – Originally serialized in the 1960s and 70s, in New York-based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer-the rich, Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate.  
6. Keret, Etgar.  Autocorrect: Stories. – A darkly funny collection of stories explores themes of identity, reality, and meaning.  
7. Langer, Howard.  The Last Dekrepitzer. – The fiddler busking in the Columbus Circle subway station in 1965 is the Dekrepitzer Rebbe, the sole survivor of the obscure Dekrepitzer Hasidic sect known before the war for its rebbes’ fiddling. The story follows the life and spiritual quest of Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher a/k/a Sam Lightup, from his isolated shtetl in the mountains of southern Poland, where he is brought up to be the future rebbe, to the wharves in Naples, where he jams with Black soldiers waiting to ship home at the end of the war.  
8. Lippmann, Sara.  Smashing the Tablets: radical retellings of the Hebrew Bible. – Provocative new readings of biblical texts by major contemporary Jewish writers.  
9. Penkower, Monty.  Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: the Hamas War against Israel and the Jews. – Penkower offers the first daily account of the war forced upon the State of Israel by Hamas’s brutal attack on its southern communities near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. 
10. Stein, Steve.  A Fool’s Kabbalah.  – In the ruins of postwar Europe, the world’s leading expert on the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism goes on a hair-raising journey to recover sacred books stolen by the Nazis.
11. Tuck, Lily.  The Rest is Memory, a novel. – First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead. 
12. Wright, Lawrence.  The Human Scale, a novel. – In this sweeping, timely thriller, a Palestinian American FBI agent teams up with a hardline Israeli cop to solve the murder of the Israeli police chief in Gaza.  Wright’s novel explores the complex history between Israel and Palestine, 

 

 

Youth (Y)/Children (C) 

1. Cypess, Leah.  The Truth about the Tooth Fairy (Miriam’s Magical Creature Files) (C) – Miriam, a young Orthodox Jew, uses her detective skills to investigate and debunk the Tooth Fairy’s existence, but her investigation takes an unexpected turn that leads her to question whether the Tooth Fairy might be real after all. 
2. Finkelstein, Norman.  Amazing Abe: how Abraham Cahan’s newspaper gave a voice to Jewish immigrants. (C) – A tribute to Abraham Cahan, founder of a prominent Yiddish language newspaper whose discussion of everything from voting rights to baseball offered crucial guidance to Jewish immigrants.  
3. Gordon, Cambria.  Trajectory. – As the United States enters World War II, seventeen-year-old Eleanor wants to do something to help her Jewish relatives in Poland, so she puts her brilliant math skills to work for the US army to fine-tune a top-secret weapon that will help defeat the enemy. 
4. Horn, Dara.  One Little Goat: a Passover Catastrophe. (Y) – A lost afikoman, a time-traveling talking goat, and a never-ending seder illuminate the meaning of Passover in this hilariously deadpan graphic novel.
5. Koffsky, Ann.  The Peddler and the President. (C) – The true story of the lifelong friendship between President Harry Truman and salesman Eddie Jacobson and its impact on the founding of Israel.
6. Krensky, Stephen.  Amazing Annie: the round-the-world bicycle adventures of Annie Kopchovsky. (C) – In the late 1800s, Annie Kopchosky sets out to achieve the unprecedented feat of biking around the world. 
7. Lakritz, Deborah.  Things That Shimmer.  (Y) – Set in 1973, Melanie desperately wants to be accepted by the Shimmers, the popular girls in her class, but when she gets to know Dorit, the new girl from Israel, she must choose between popularity and true friendship.
8. Levy, Joshua.  Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. – Finn and Ezra don’t have a lot in common–except, of course, that they’re trapped in a bar mitzvah time loop, reliving their celebrations in the same New Jersey hotel over and over and over again. Not ideal, particularly when both kids were ready for their bar mitzvahs to end the moment they began. No way out. Until Finn and Ezra meet and realize they’re not alone. 
9. Lyons, Erica. On a Chariot of Fire: The Story of India’s Bene Israel. (C) – Two thousand years ago, a ship sailed east, alone on an endless sea. The people onboard were fleeing the same war that the Maccabees fought in the ancient land of Israel. They took with them their faith and their traditions, knowing they would sail for more than a year. 
10. Michelson, Richard.  Next Year in the White House: Barack Obama’s first presidential Seder. (C) – The true story of how the first Passover celebration in the White House came to be. 
11. Olitzky, Kery.  Miryam’s Dance.  (C) – It’s Friday and Miryam has lots of chores to prepare for her family’s Shabbat evening meal–collect fruit, borrow an egg, and fill a jug of water from the well. But it’s hard to focus when the drums in the next village keep calling to her.. 
12. Yudasin, Rivkah.  Secret Journey.  (Y) – Rabbi Yitzchak Zilbers family bake Matzah for Pesach in communist Russia.