CRS Book Club: I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir

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REGISTER I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir by Harvey Fierstein Book Club gathers once a month to discuss literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or plays) written by a Jewish author…

CRS Book Club: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher

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REGISTER The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish.  Although he didn’t outwardly identify as a Jew in…

CRS Book Club: Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories by Hilma Wolitzer

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REGISTER Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories by Hilma Wolitzer This collection is bookended on one end by the title tale, first published in 1966, and on the other by a powerful new story written in 2020.  More than half the stories concern a middle-class New York couple named Howard and Paulette;…

CRS Book Club: The Prison Minyan by Jonathan Stone

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REGISTER The Prison Minyan by Jonathan Stone Picture this: the scene is Otisville Prison, upstate New York. A crew of fraudsters, tax evaders, trigamists and forgers discuss matters of right and wrong in a Talmudic study and prayer group, or 'minyan,’ led by a rabbi who's a fellow convict. As the only prison in the…

CRS Book Club: Kantika: A Novel by Elizabeth Graver

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REGISTER Kantika by Elizabeth Graver “In 1985, when I was twenty-one, I taped my grandmother Rebecca telling stories from her life. …Two decades passed before I returned to the tapes … Slowly, I began to write, and once I started, I couldn't stop.” The resulting multi-generational saga moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana and New…

CRS Book Club: The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land: Stories by Omer Friedlander

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REGISTER The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land: Stories by Omer Friedlander In these stories, Israel is brought to life as much more than a nation constantly making headlines for rockets and airstrikes and boycotts and occupation.  It is a nation of individuals.  From a teenage girl in love with a  Bedouin boy…

CRS Book Club: The Red Balcony: A Novel by Jonathan Wilson

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REGISTER The Red Balcony by Jonathan Wilson Based on actual events, we are presented with a gripping novel of sex, love, history and justice in the tinderbox of British Mandatory Palestine. It’s 1933, and Ivor Castle, Oxford-educated and Jewish, arrives in Palestine to take up a position as assistant to the defense counsel in the…

CRS Book Club: Night by Elie Wiesel

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REGISTER Night by Elie Wiesel Night, Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, is a candid, horrific and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.  In…