The Jewish Book Carnival: May 2013

Welcome to the May 2013 Jewish Book Carnival!

The Jewish Book Carnival is a monthly online event in which bloggers who blog about Jewish books share highlights from their own blogs. You'll find links to Jewish sites across the blogosphere, featuring interviews, book reviews, ruminations and more. 

The Jewish Book Carnival usually posts on the 15th of the month; this month in observance of Shavuot we have delayed posting until the 16th.

And now, on to the links!

The Jewish Book Council sent in a link from their blog, The Prosen People, featuring an interview with Naomi Alderman, author of The Liars' Gospel.

The Association of Jewish Libraries blog, People of the Books, shared this interview with Austin Ratner, author of Land of the Living.

Kathe Pinchuck at Life is Like a Library shares her excitement about Leadership in the Wilderness: Authority & Anarchy in the Book of Numbers  by Dr. Erica Brown.

On My Machberet, Erika Dreifus recommends some reading she was recently assigned -- A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and The Founding of Israel, by Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh.

Kathy Bloomfield at Forwordsbooks.com writes about Derekh Eretz/The Way of the Land and shares books that teach about having good manners.

Jonathan Kirsch, editor of The Jewish Journal, is excited to share a glowing review of his own new book, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan.

Barbara Krasner at The Whole Megillah sent in an interview with Leann Lieberman, author of Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust, and her editor, Sarah Harvey, at Orca Books.

Lorri  at Lorri M. Writings offers reviews of two books:

Bearing the Body by Ehud Havazelet

I Kiss Your Hands Many Times by Marianne Szegedy-Maszák 

Claire Datnow at Media Mint offers these musings on the 1963 unfinished Polish Holocaust movie The Passenger. You can read more from Claire on her GoodReads blog.

Finally, I'd like to direct you to an earlier post on this very blog, The Book of Life, featuring an audio interview with author Eugene Yelchin about his book Breaking Stalin's Nose.

Thanks to all the bloggers who submitted links for the May Jewish Book Carnival!

The June 2013 edition of the Carnival will be hosted by Kathy Bloomfield at Forwards Books! If you are a blogger and would like to participate, please send your links to Kathy by June 12 at kathyb [at] forwardsbooks [dot] com.

Eugene Yelchin: Breaking Stalin's Nose

At the 2012 Association of Jewish Libraries conference, I sat with author Eugene Yelchin during lunch and snuck in a quick interview. He's the author of the 2012 Newbery Honor book Breaking Stalin's Nose, based on his own youth in Stalinist Moscow (see http://www.breakingstalinsnose.com). He gave a very moving talk about freedom of information earlier during the conference. Yelchin is also the illustrator of Ann Stampler's picture book, The Rooster Prince of Breslov, named a 2011 Notable Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries and winner of the Jewish Book Council's National Jewish Book Award.

Read about Yelchin's books at http://www.eugeneyelchinbooks.com and about his art at http://www.eugeneyelchin.com.

AUDIO:

Click the play button to listen to the podcast now:

Or click MP3 File to open your computer's media player.


VIDEO:




CREDITS:

Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel 
Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries 
Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band 
Facebook: facebook.com/bookoflifepodcast 
Twitter: @bookoflifepod 

Your feedback is appreciated! Please write to bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com or call our voicemail number at 561-206-2473. 

The Sophie Brody Award

Emily Bergman, member of the Sophie Brody Award committee, discusses the ins and outs of choosing the best Jewish book of the year. The award is presented for Jewish literature by RUSA, an arm of ALA. See http://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/brody for more info.

AUDIO:

Click the play button to listen to the podcast now:


Or click: MP3 File to open your computer's media player. 

CREDITS:

Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel
Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries
Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band 
Facebook: facebook.com/bookoflifepodcast
Twitter: @bookoflifepod

Your feedback is appreciated! Please write to bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com or call our voicemail number at 561-206-2473.  

Hava Nagila: The Movie

Filmmaker Roberta Grossman offered a work-in-progress screening of her documentary on Hava Nagila at the Association of Jewish Libraries 2012 conference in California. Here we have her introductory remarks and the Q&A that followed the screening.The film is now opening in theaters across the country!

AUDIO:

Click the play button to listen to the podcast now:
Or click MP3 File to open your computer's media player.

VIDEO:


Trailer for Hava Nagila (The Movie) from Katahdin Productions on Vimeo.


CREDITS: 

Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel
Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries
Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band 
Facebook: facebook.com/bookoflifepodcast
Twitter: @bookoflifepod

Your feedback is appreciated! Please write to bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com or call our voicemail number at 561-206-2473.  


 

Canadian Guest Interview: Kathy Kacer with Anne Dublin

The Book of Life's Canadian correspondent, Anne Dublin, interviews author Kathy Kacer about the compilation of children's responses to the Holocaust entitled We Are Their Voice.

AUDIO:

Click the play button to listen to the podcast now:

Or click MP3 File to open your computer's media player.

CREDITS: 

Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel
Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries
Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band 
Facebook: facebook.com/bookoflifepodcast
Twitter: @bookoflifepod

Your feedback is appreciated! Please write to bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com or call our voicemail number at 561-206-2473.  

 

2013 STBA Blog Tour: Day 5

On this final day of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour, awards committee member Barbara Krasner hosts a roundtable wrap-up at her blog, The Whole Megillah. Read responses from various winners, as if they were participating in a panel presentation at a conference!

Thanks to all the winners for their participation in the blog tour, to all the bloggers for hosting, and to you, the readers, for your enthusiasm and attention!

2013 STBA Blog Tour: Day 4

Read an interview with Linda Leopold Strauss, author of The Elijah Door: A Passover Tale (Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Younger Readers Category) at Pen and Prose! A highlight: "As I was writing the story, I kept hearing the cadence of my grandparents’ Yiddish-speaking voices in my head. The repetition of phrases, the rhythms, the word combinations. And I think their voices also very much informed the way I wrote the story."

Read an interview with Alexi Natchev, illustrator of The Elijah Door: A Passover Tale (Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Younger Readers Category) at Madelyn Rosenberg's Virtual Living Room! A highlight: "In my artistic education, illustration was really not just for children. In my formative years, art was part of the idealogical system. We were living at that time on the other side of the Iron Curtain so everything was very ideological and politicized. But in the illustration field you could be a little more creative, not so rigidly following certain requirements of clichés and artistic concepts with which you didn’t necessarily always agree."