TI Book Group -

TI’s Book Group meets once a month for stimulating discussions of contemporary literature by Jewish authors, on Jewish and Israeli topics, and/or of current relevance to the Jewish Community.

Open to all! New participants are always encouraged to join.

Book Group is also always available by Zoom.

Join the Zoom Meeting here

Upcoming Sessions

Nov 12
Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy
by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

An intimate memoir from a founding editor of Ms. magazine who grew up in a Jewish immigrant family mired in secrets, haunted by their dread of shame and stigma, determined to hide their every imperfection—and in denial or despair when they couldn’t.

“A frank and often amusing tabulation of well-kept family secrets… a story of high-stakes melodrama and surreptitious relations, in which runaway brides, false marriages, lost children and other moral crises abound. But there is more here than mishegas.” —Jake Nevins, New York Times

“The richness of Pogrebin’s stories, the complexity and beauty of her storytelling, and her devastatingly honest soul-baring make Shanda a powerfully stunning piece of life and art.”
—Mayim Bialik, actor, author, neuroscientist, and co-host of Jeopardy

The word “shanda” is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense 20th-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public humiliation either drove their aspirations or crushed their spirit.

In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family. Beginning with her own long-suppressed secret, the story spirals through the hidden lives of her parents and relatives—revealing the truth about their origins, personal traumas, marital misery, abandoned children, religious transgressions, sexual identity, radical politics, and supposedly embarrassing illnesses. While unmasking their charades and disguises, Pogrebin also showcases her family’s remarkable talent for reinvention in a narrative that is, by turns, touching, searing, and surprisingly universal.

Dec 17
The Goddess of Warsaw: A Novel
by Lisa Barr

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

“Utterly gripping. . . a transformative and immersive story so powerful and captivating that I could not put it down. . . . Truly one of the best books I’ve read.”—Liv Constantine, bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish

“Lisa Barr’s new historical fiction, The Goddess of Warsaw, gifts the reader with jaw-dropping moments worthy of a Tarantino film, a story that could not be more timely, and a heroine whose ferocity and valor knows no bounds.”—Natalie Jenner, author of the instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society

The Goddess of Warsaw is an enthralling tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and those she loves, then and now.

Los Angeles, 2005. Sienna Hayes, Hollywood’s latest It Girl, has ambitions to work behind the camera. When she meets Lena Browning, the enormously mysterious and famous Golden Age movie star, Sienna sees her big break. She wants to direct a picture about Lena’s life—but the legendary actor’s murky past turns out to be even darker than Sienna dreamed. Before she was a Living Legend, Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a Polish Jew whose life and family were destroyed by the Nazis.

Warsaw, 1943. A member of the city’s Jewish elite, Bina Blonski and her husband, Jakub, are imprisoned in the ghastly, cramped ghetto along with the rest of Warsaw’s surviving Jews. Determined to fight back against the brutal Nazis, the beautiful, blonde Aryan-looking Bina becomes a spy, gaining information and stealing weapons outside the ghetto to protect her fellow Jews. But her dangerous circumstances grow complicated when she falls in love with Aleksander, an ally in resistance—and Jakub’s brother. While Lena accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, she sacrifices much in the process.

Over a decade after escaping the horrors of the ghetto, Bina, now known as Lena, rises to fame in Hollywood. Yet she cannot help but be reminded of her old life and hungers for revenge against the Nazis who escaped justice after the war. Her power and fame as a movie star offer Lena the chance to right the past’s wrongs . . . and perhaps even find the happy ending she never had.

A gripping page-turner of one of history’s most heroic uprisings and an actress whose personal war never ends, The Goddess Of Warsaw is filled with secrets, lies, twists and turns, and a burning pursuit of justice no matter the cost.

Jan 14
Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century
by Tobias Buck

The gripping narrative of one of the last Nazi criminal trials in Germany—that of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard charged with aiding the murder of more than 5,000 people—and a larger exploration of Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust, from silence to memory to today’s rising tide of fascism and antisemitism.

Bruno Dey’s trial formed part of an extraordinary series of Holocaust cases brought by German prosecutors in recent years in a belated attempt to deliver justice to the victims and reverse decades of judicial neglect. It also surfaced at a pivotal moment for Germany and its thinking about the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide continues to occupy a crucial space in German public life, but many of the country’s long-held certainties and convictions around the Holocaust are starting to fray. This reflects in part the passage of time, and the fact that the last surviving witnesses—victims and perpetrators alike—are rapidly fading away.

But it’s also the result of profound changes in German politics and society. The far-right has made electoral gains and is openly challenging the country’s historic commitment to Holocaust remembrance. At the same time, there is a small but vociferous group of intellectuals on the left who question Germany’s memory culture from a different angle, asking what political lessons the country should draw from the Holocaust today. What does it mean for the country’s new Muslim citizens from Syria and Afghanistan, many of whom arrived with their own traumas, to be expected to assume the nation’s guilt?

Final Verdict investigates questions that touch on German history, politics, and memory culture, and on the author’s own family history. Buck revisits the silence that surrounds his own family’s experiences and conduct during the Nazi period. In the face of rising anti-Semitism in Germany, the United States, and globally, Final Verdict examines the case for Holocaust justice in the twenty-first century—and the lessons that Germany’s struggle with its Nazi past holds for the world today.

Feb 11
Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging
by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl

From the first Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi, a stirring account of one woman’s journey from feeling like an outsider to becoming one of the most admired religious leaders in the world

Angela Buchdahl was born in Seoul, the daughter of a Korean Buddhist mother and Jewish American father. Profoundly spiritual from a young age, by sixteen she felt the first stirrings to become a rabbi. Despite the naysayers and periods of self-doubt—Would a mixed-race woman ever be seen as authentically Jewish or chosen to lead a congregation?—she stayed the course, which took her first to Yale, then to rabbinical school, and finally to the pulpit of one of the largest, most influential congregations in the world.

Today, Angela Buchdahl inspires Jews and non-Jews alike with her invigorating, joyful approach to worship and her belief in the power of faith, gratitude, and responsibility for one another, regardless of religion. She does not shy away from difficult topics, from racism within the Jewish community and the sexism she confronted when she aspired to the top job to rising antisemitism today. Buchdahl teaches how these challenges, which can make one feel like a stranger, can ultimately be the source of our greatest empathy and strength.

Angela Buchdahl has gone from outsider to officiant, from feeling estranged to feeling embraced—and she’s emerged with a deep conviction that we are all bound to a larger whole and mission. She has written a book that is both memoir and spiritual guide for everyday living, which is exactly what so many of us crave right now.

Mar 11
Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew
by Michael W. Twitty

“Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives…Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others’, and exploring different cultures, Twitty’s book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews.”—Library Journal

“A fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities.”—Booklist

The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food.

In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them.

The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of Color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant and meaningful cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty’s own passage to and within Judaism.

As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul.

Koshersoul includes 48-50 recipes.

Apr 29
The Last Dekrepitzer
by Howard Langer

WINNER NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD

The fiddler busking in the Columbus Circle subway station in 1965 is the Dekrepitzer Rebbe, the sole survivor of the obscure Dekrepitzer Hasidic sect known before the war for its rebbes’ fiddling. The Last Dekrepitzer follows the life and spiritual quest of Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher a/k/a Sam Lightup, from his isolated shtetl in the mountains of southern Poland, where he is brought up to be the future rebbe, to the wharves in Naples, where he jams with Black soldiers waiting to ship home at the end of the war. Dressing him in the uniform and dog tags of an AWOL soldier, they smuggle him home to rural Mississippi. He lives for years among the Blacks, speaks Black English, preaches and plays the blues with the Brown Sugar Ramblers trio. His marriage to a Black woman, Lula Curtin, legal by Jewish law though forbidden under Mississippi law, results in a cross burning that forces them to flee to Manhattan. He plays on the streets of Harlem and Midtown with the Reverend Gary Davis, the great blind guitarist whose mission is saving souls for the next world. Shmuel Meir’s devout wife, though she knows herself to be the Dekrepitzer Rebbitzen, is spurned by the Jewish community. Through it all, Shmuel Meir fiddles his prayers in defiance of God. But God gives the Dekrepitzer Rebbe no peace.

Vera, or Faith: A Novel: Shteyngart, Gary: 9780593595091: Amazon.com: Books May 27
Vera, or Faith
by Gary Shteyngart

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends
“Pull up a beach chair: The book of the summer is here. . . . A poignant Harriet the Spy–esque delight.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Genius . . . [a] miracle.”—The Washington Post
“A novel you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever.”—Karen Russell
“Very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful.”—Elif Batuman
“A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A must-read.”—Los Angeles Times
“Shteyngart is one of the best comedians in literature today.”—BookPage (starred review)

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There’s Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who’s barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.

Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love’s survival in this great, mad, imploding world.

Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James’s classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, “one of his generation’s most exhilarating writers.”