Two Very Different Books; Both Giving Much Pleasure

Are you a Great Quotation Lover like me? Did you used to leaf through your copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations almost daily, digging up what The Brilliant Had Said about important things? Well, I was so very pleased to read and here review The Quotable Jewish Woman (“Wisdom, Inspiration & Humor from the Mind & Heart”), edited and compiled by Elaine Berstein Partnow.

This low-priced, 440-page-plus paperback by the always reliable Jewish Lights Publishing is a must for every home library, especially since so many of the quotations are from obscure magazines and low-selling books, but so very precious, healing, and insightful to know. I long to quote dozens of my favourites, but here are just a few: the brilliant historian Barbara Tuchman, in a long-lost 1989 TV interview: “We’re a public that is brought up on deception, through advertising. . . . We’re accustomed
to being deceived. We allow ourselves to be deceived. Advertising is really responsible for a lot in the deterioration of American public perceptions.” Ain’t THAT the truth?

And one of my favourite giants of modern feminism, Gloria Steinem, was quoted as saying the following powerful words in a U.S. magazine in 1992: “At age 11, girls are sure of what they know. But at 12 or 13, when they take on the feminine role, they become uncertain. They begin to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Their true selves go underground. We women become ourselves again after 50. When the feminine role is over, we re-emerge.” Isn’t that spot-on? True, my personal hero Alice Munro, the awesomely-talented Canadian short story writer, wrote something similar in a grand about her magnificent story, “Boys and Girls,” but then, this anthology, while limited to women, is also limited to Jewish women.

I don’t want to seem lazy, but quoting endlessly from this extremely satisfying and often inspiring collelction seems the best way to tell you how much I love the anthologizer’s very hard work, digging up these often obscure, brief gems. There are several dozen topics, such as “Change,” “Children,” “Death & Grief,” “Family and Relatives,” “Money, Business and Economics” and “Youth & Adolescence,” nearly every one of each section containing a golden nugget or two. Let me conclude my review of this book with a sweet two-liner from arguably the greatest leader of modern feminism, whom I once had the joy of interviewing for an afternoon, Betty Friedan: “Ever since I was a little girl I remember my father telling me that I had a passion for justice. But I think it was really a passion against injustice, which originated from my feelings of the injustice of antisemitism.” How true that is. It was hardly by chance that Jewish women—and men—were long in the forefront of nearly every movement toward decency and humanity of the past few centuries: Feminism, Civil Rights, Anti-War-Movements, and, of course, communism (no matter how miserably that concept turned out to be.).


The second book I wish to recommend highly is scholarly and complex, but many of you will find it invaluable: Under Crescent and Cross—The Jews in the Middle Ages, an award-winning study by Mark R. Cohen, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. I found myself placing yellow stickers in every other page, as I read how little-known Jewish and non-Jewish sources show that Muslims and Jews did not live together in a peaceful “interfaith utopia,” nor were they persecuted as much as they had been in Christian lands. In less than 200 pages, this superb historian explains why, for the first time, medieval Islamic relations may not have been perfect, but they were, indeed, far less confrontational and violent than between Christians and Jews in Western lands. I loved this book, and while it’s hardly light beach- reading, the summer is almost over anyway, and I sense that you may gain much from it, as I did.

Meanwhile, may I here wish all the readers of my book reviews in KOLEL.ORG
a healthy, happy, meaningful New Year 5771—how the years fly!