Books and Music

JEWDAYO

a DAILY BLAST of KNOWLEDGE and PRIDE

Did you know that Marcel Marceau, the world’s most famous mime, began to practice his art to help silence Jewish children he was escorting to safety in Nazi-occupied France?

Did you know that five Jews were among the eleven activists tried for treason with Nelson Mandela?

Did you know that Gertude Elion, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was a school teacher, unable to find a job in industry because of sex discrimination?

Did you know that Louis Armstrong, the pioneer of jazz, wore a Jewish star throughout his life to honor the New Orleans family that bought him his first cornet?

You’ll know all of this, and much, much more, once you start using this marvelous day book to keep track of your own important dates. JEWDAYO lists an event and inspiring quotation from progressive Jewish history for every day of the year.  270 illustrated pages, indexed, with ample room for your notes. $21.95. Created by Jewish Currents editor Lawrence Bush.

$21.95, Add to Cart

The Generation That Lost Its Fear

A Memoir of Jewish Self-Defense and
Revolutionary Activism in Tsarist Russia

by Moishe Katz
Translated from the Yiddish by Lyber Katz

Moishe Katz (1885-1960) was a leftwing journalist for Yiddish newspapers in Russia and the U.S., most notably, the Morgn Freiheit. Early in the 20th century, as the Tsarist regime in Russia sought to stifle revolutionary and reform movements through repression and pogroms, Katz helped to organize armed Jewish self-defense and workers’ committees in several cities. The Generation That Lost Its Fear recounts those days in hindsight from the 1950s, when Katz and his comrades again faced repression, this time in the U.S. during McCarthyism.

The book offers a vivid narrative of an era when young Jews took real risks to fight tyranny in Russia and bring economic justice and an end to Jewish persecution. It is a story with tremendous relevance for our own era of repressive regimes, fundamentalist attacks on human rights, and popular uprisings that are demanding systemic change.

$19.95, Add to Cart

Unintended Wanderings through Torah

A Book of Poems by Isidore Century

Isidore Century is a “master of the simply prosy poetic style with a complex profound poetic ending,” says Midstream. His books include From the Coffee House of Jewish Dreamers (Ben Yehuda Press), and his poetry has been published in Chelsea Review, Midstream, Jewish Currents, Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards, Jews., and Best Jewish Writing 2003, among other publications.

About From the Coffee House of Jewish Dreamers
“[F]unny, deeply observed, written with a knowingness and rhythm of things old and new . . . poetic, original midrashim.”  —Jewish Week

“[S]o rich, so full of life . . . the book is full of minor miracles.”
—Nikki Stiller, Home Planet News

$13.95, Add to Cart

Child of the 20th Century: Growing up Jewish in Holland, Belgium, Palestine, Israel, America. And Texas.

A Memoir by Abbie Lipshutz

For nine decades Abbie Lipshutz has been a fighter, lover, writer, dillettante musician and classical music commentator. He is a clinically happy soul who possesses Offensive Charm and Unjustified Arrogance, qualities that have served him well over the years. He was a kibbutznik in Palestine in the early 1940s, a veteran of the Dutch Prinses Irene Brigade in World War II, and a volunteer in Israel’s War of INdependence. He made a living for half a century as a diamond dealer throughout the American South. Child of the 20th Century is the memoir filled with the sights, sounds, scents, songs and surprises of a progressive life well lived.