All TI members are welcome, including those who haven't finished or even started the book. The group goes till 9 pm or until people run out of things to say.

For reminder emails, location and Zoom links, TI members can contact Janice Mehler via the ShulCloud Directory (you must be logged in to access the directory).

Upcoming 2024-2025 Reads:

Nov: Christ Stopped at Eboli
by Carlo Levi (translated from Italian, originally published in 1947, 268 pages)
Levi spent a year as an antifascist political prisoner in a town in Southern Italy. This is his account of people who lived as their ancestors had for centuries. A classic, and does have Jewish content despite the name.

December: The Red Balcony 
by Jonathan Wilson (2023, 260 pages)
Set in Mandatory Palestine, a British Jew is sent as assistant to the defense counsel in the trial of the two men accused of murdering a leader of the Jewish community in Palestine whose efforts to get Jews out of Hitler’s Germany and into Palestine may have been controversial enough to get him killed.  Plus a star-crossed romance.

Jan: Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict
by Oren Kessler (2023, 230 pages plus notes)
A nearly-forgotten uprising by Palestinians that lasted three years and radicalized both Jewish and Arab communities.

February: Garden of the Finzi-Continis
by Giorgio Bassani 
Relationship between the protagonist and the Finzi-Contini family from WWI to the rise of fascism. 

March: Foreign bodies: pandemics, vaccines, and the health of nations
by Simon Schama (2023, ~400 pages)
Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring: This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before. The central character is Jewish.

April: The Hebrew Teacher
by Maya Arad (2023, 300 pages)
Three novellas set in the SF Bay Area concentrating on life for Israelis there.  First work to be published in English by this young leading Israeli author.

May: On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice
by Adam Kirsch (2024, 139 pages)
This is a clear exposition of a fairly new way of thinking about nations built on replacing indigenous people and cultures. It is directly and currently apt.

June: The Hidden Palace: A Novel of the Golem and the Jinni
by Helen Wecker (2021, 436 pages)
In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I Helene Wecker follows Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world.

July: The Amen effect: ancient wisdom to mend our broken hearts and world
by Sharon Brous (2024, 218 pages)
An inspiring book about community and connection, and the many vehicles by which they come. It draws on Jewish wisdom and contemporary social science.

August: Three Floors Up
by Eshkol Nevo (283 pages)
Residents of three floors of an upper middle class Tel Aviv apartment building deal with their different situations and stresses that reflect and expose modern Israeli society.

September: The Incorruptibles
by Dan Slater (2024, 300 pages plus notes and illustrations)
This is a deep dive into the early 1900s and the Jewish role in crime in NYC.  Some of it was shocking and upended some aspects of the more warm and rosy picture presented in other books,

Books from the 2023-2024 season:

January — The Family Markowitz by Allegra Goodman

February — Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance by Wendy Lesser

March — The Postcard by Anne Berest

April — Plunder by Menachem Kaiser

May — Kantika by Elizabeth Graver

June — My Friend Anne Frank by Hannah Pick-Goslar with Dina Kraft

July — Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

August — Golda Meir by Deborah Lipstadt

September - Mother India by Tova Reich

2023 READS:

January —The Prison Minyan by Jonathan Stone

February —War of Shadows: Codebreakers Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg

March —The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

April —People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn

May  — The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

June — East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" by Philippe Sands

July — The Tunnel by A.B. Yehoshua

August — Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power by Neil Gabler

October — Spies of No Country: Israel's Secret Agents at the Birth of the Mossad by Matti Friedman

November — Single Jewish Male Seeking Soulmate by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

December — Once We Were Slaves: the Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family by Laura Arnold Leibman

To see all the prior reads click here.