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April 11, 2014
A spotlight on literary picks
Klein Halevi and Chesler are among Jewish book award winners.
FERN SIDMAN JNS.ORG
We have once again come to the tail end of awards season when North Americans find themselves glued to their televisions and computers – imbibing a plethora of star-studded tributes, a maelstrom of images and the perfunctory salacious gossip that accompanies it. Be it the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Golden Globes, the Grammys or the Academy Awards, there are always a host of films, recordings and personalities to cheer on. But recognizing outstanding achievement in the world of the arts is not limited to popular musicians and heroes of the silver screen. The values of literacy and scholarship also find a place at this time of year.
For the last 64 years, the Jewish Book Council has spotlighted the best of Jewish books and their authors through its presentation of the annual National Jewish Book Award. On March 5, the winners in nearly 20 categories of Jewish books assembled at the Centre for Jewish History in New York City to celebrate another year of nominees and winners.
“I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, the veteran journalist and author of Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, which received the Jewish Book of the Year Award from the council. “After 12 years of research and writing, I now have some closure.”
Like Dreamers provides a palpable portrayal of the lives of seven Israeli paratroopers, some from the political right and others from the left, and the nexus of the 1967 Six Day War that both simultaneously galvanized them and tore them asunder in so many respects.
“I feel like I’ve been writing this book since I was 17,” said Halevi, who was born in 1953. “I wanted to give American Jews a deeper connection to this story of our nation; I wanted to present the real story to them. And who is my ideal audience? Someone like myself. If I hadn’t made aliyah, I would still be as passionate about Israel as I was as a youth growing up in Brooklyn.”
Spending his formative years in Brooklyn in the shadow of the Holocaust and at a time when Zionist youth movements were shaping the lives of future generations of Jews, Halevi vividly recounted his activist days in the Jewish Defence League in the 1960s and 1970s in his first book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, written in 1995.
His second book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, from 2001, details his spiritual journey as a religious Jew into the worlds of Christianity and Islam in Israel.
Like Dreamers has caught the attention of book critics around the world, and garnered several critical reviews in major publications.
“Halevi expertly employs a traditional journalistic form: he isolates seven paratroopers from that ‘mythic moment’ and reconstructs their lives, before and since, to render a complicated history intimate, human, relatable,” Jodi Rudoren wrote in her October 2013 review of Like Dreamers for the New York Times. “His meticulous, sensitive, detailed reporting – the book is the work of more than a decade – is incredibly effective at making the small big.”
From Boro Park to Afghanistan
Dr. Phyllis Chesler – a second-wave feminist icon turned redoubtable champion of Israel’s survival and an advocate for women-only prayer at Jerusalem’s Western Wall – is another Brooklyn native who was recognized with a National Jewish Book Award. Chesler’s An American Bride in Kabul – a powerful memoir of her youthful romance with a Westernized Muslim man from Afghanistan who she met while attending college in New York, and her subsequent captivity in his native Kabul – won in the biography, autobiography and memoir category.
Raised an Orthodox Jew in the highly religious Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Chesler rebelled at a young age. Her 15th book chronicles her harrowing experience in the early 1960s of being held against her will by her husband and his devout family. Beyond the compelling narrative, however, reviewers have described the book as a “geo-political time bomb,” as it also explores and grapples with the history of the Jews of Afghanistan, the genesis of contemporary terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism.
She decided to share her story so many decades later, Chesler said, because this chapter in her life had served to forge the feminist values that define her life’s work.
“Afghanistan and its people seem to have followed me into the future and right into the West,” she explained. “Islamic hijab and niqab and burqas are here in America, on the streets and in the headlines.” Chesler says she does not oppose the hijab, but does oppose the wearing of burqas.
Afghanistan, Chesler said, has seen many difficult days since her time in captivity as “the country which sheltered [Osama] Bin Laden after he was exiled from Saudi Arabia and Sudan, [where] he hatched his 9/11 plot in an Afghan cave,” and where, even today, “the entire civilian world is being held hostage by al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-like jihadists.”
She added, “Israel and the Western democracies are all up against tribal cultures whose values are very different from our own. It is crucial for us to understand what those differences are.”
Chesler is no stranger to taking on controversial subjects in her writing. Her first book, Women and Madness, was published in 1972 to critical acclaim and sold close to three million copies. Her other books include bestsellers such as Women’s Inhumanity to Women (2002), The New Antisemitism (2003), The Death of Feminism (2005) and Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody (2011).
Sharing her initial feelings on learning that An American Bride in Kabul had been honored by the Jewish literary world, Chesler said, “I was pleased, proud, satisfied and very surprised. Then, I felt as if I truly belonged to the ages, not just to this age. But me? The rebel girl from Boro Park had a place there, too? Now that I’ve received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, together with so many other truly distinguished authors, I feel daunted, sober. I feel the weight of responsibility even more.”
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