While reading the first 20 pages of “Fleishman is in Trouble” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House), I wondered why critics were making such a fuss about the book. It was one of the big novels of the summer and two friends had given it the highest rating on the Goodreads website. Was I…
One of the fascinating things about Torah study is that there is always something new to learn. Sometimes these ideas can be found by mining the writings of the sages (the ancient rabbis) and other times through reading the thoughts of contemporary spiritual leaders. Both of these can be fou…
Confession time: reading novels about young adults, especially those set in modern times, makes me grateful that my teen years are over. That’s because these novels often focus on the teens’ fears about their future. Of course, the main characters of three of these works might feel bette…
When I was a teenager, few books were published for that age group, except for unappealing romance novels, and even fewer of those contained Jewish characters. I quickly moved to adult books that featured more serious themes. As an older adult, I find myself fascinated by the large number of…
Someone once asked me how best to understand the Bible if they were unable to read the original Hebrew. I gave them the advice I’d received years earlier: read two or three different translations and note when they disagree or use a different expression. That signals a problematic word or …
