A welcome Jewish resource for making the journey through loss.
Grant presents a Reform Jewish guide to the mourning process.
How can Jewish tradition, literature, and wisdom help someone who has suffered the loss of a loved one navigate the mourning process? In this anthology, the editor, the director of the New York rabbinical program of Hebrew Union College and the author, co-author, or co-editor of multiple other Jewish resources, presents a guidebook full of materials designed to assist the mourner through the process of grieving during the first year after a loss. Grant and Segal, her consulting editor, gather traditional and nontraditional materials from a variety of sources and movements within Judaism. The work includes songs and poems from Jewish religious thinkers ranging from lay liturgist and poet Alden Solovy (whose “In Sorrow” is included: “Air. / All I need is air. / A breath to give oxygen / To the anguish within”) to Rabbi Rachel Barenblat and the late Rabbi Rachel Cowan as well as classic Hebrew poems by Zelda and Rivka Miriam (whose “Tearing” observes, “There was a peaceful tearing / like the peaceful tearing of twilight / when the warp and woof are parted for an instant / so that their continuing can take place), translated by Rabbi Steven G. Sager. The anthology also contains a couple of non-Jewish sources, including Rumi and e.e. cummings. This book, written in response to the disruptive effects of the recent Covid pandemic on Jewish funerary practices, is presented specifically as a Jewish guide and includes plenty of Jewish liturgical excerpts as well as instructions to say the kaddish at the end of each unit. The concluding chapters offer information on enhancing the practices undertaken during various phases of Jewish mourning. Still, the themes explored in each unit, from pain and brokenness to acceptance and gratitude, have the potential to engage other audiences.
A welcome Jewish resource for making the journey through loss.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780881236071
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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