Book Group

About

Our Shir Hadash Book Group is open to everyone and meets at 10:45 a.m. on one Sunday bi-monthly. Check the calendar for the latest upcoming session, and contact office@shirhadash.org to inquire about what the next book will be.

Come Read With Us

We love to enjoy reading, learning, and discussion together. Whether you are able to come bi-monthly or only occasionally, we hope you'll enjoy the thoughtful and interesting selection of books and come discuss the books with us!

NEW! Due to COVID19, we will be switching to eBooks. Each member needs to sign up for borrowing privileges with the Library and then download their copies individually. 

To apply for eBook borrowing privileges, you can apply by filling out the Application for Jewish Community Library borrowing privileges. 

Once the Library receives your application, you will be sent your user name and password. You'll then be able to download eBooks and audiobooks through their eBook supplier, OverDrive.

Upcoming Books:

September 13, 2020

The Aleppo Codex by Matti Friedman

A thousand years ago, the most perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible was written. It was kept safe through one upheaval after another in the Middle East, and by the 1940s it was housed in a dark grotto in Aleppo, Syria, and had become known around the world as the Aleppo Codex. Journalist Matti Friedman's true-life detective story traces how this precious manuscript was smuggled from its hiding place in Syria into the newly founded state of Israel and how and why many of its most sacred and valuable pages went missing. It's a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out, would do anything to get their hands on an ancient, decaying book. What it reveals are uncomfortable truths about greed, state cover-ups, and the fascinating role of historical treasures in creating a national identity. 

November 13, 2020

Jews and Words by Amos Oz & Fania Oz-Saltzberger

Why are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism’s most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham with the Jews of every subsequent generation.

Amos Oz is the internationally renowned author of more than twenty works of fiction and numerous essays on politics, literature, and peace. He is also professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. Fania Oz-Salzberger is a writer and history professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa.

December 20, 2020

The Hill of Evil Counsel by Amos Oz

Refugees drawn to Jerusalem in search of safety are confronted by activists relentlessly preparing for an uprising, oblivious to the risks. Meanwhile, a wife abandons her husband, and a dying man longs for his departed lover. Among these characters lives a boy named Uri, a friend and confidant of several conspirators who love and humor him as he weaves in and out of all three stories. The Hill of Evil Counsel is "as complex, vivid, and uncompromising as Jerusalem itself".

February 28, 2020

The Book of V. by Anna Solomon

We will be discussing the Jewish Community Library’s One Bay One Book choice for 2020–2021  The Book of V. by Anna Solomon. In this new novel, rooted in the Book of Esther, three characters' stories in different time periods overlap and ultimately collide. Lily is a young wife and mother in contemporary Brooklyn, and Vee is the wife of an ambitious young Senator in Washington, D.C. during the early 1970s. Their narratives are interspersed with an imaginative account of the stories of Vashti and Esther, illuminating how women’s lives have and have not changed over thousands of years. 

The Book of V. can serve as a starting point for discussions about:

• The characters of Vashti and Esther and their legacies in Jewish lore and celebration
• The ways in which Jewish women's experiences are not adequately reflected by our history and tradition, beginning with the Bible
• Sexism, class privilege, and power
• Sexual harassment in the Bible and in modern times
• Societal and familial gender dynamics and role expectations
• The challenges of balancing care for ourselves and care for others 
• The history of the women's rights movement, and the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s 
• The dynamics of women’s relationships