Book Reviews

When I give this book, the parents look at the gold Caldecott Medal on the front cover and smile, but look up quizzically – a book for a newborn?

These topics lead to a sizable 600-plus page volume, but the book is incredibly well organized, allowing ease of reading for one who is studying the topic for a quick search for a particular halacha.

Read it and weep--AND laugh

Not everyone can write or relate a dvar Torah, but everyone likes and can ask a riddle.

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Coming a number of years after the previous volume, Lau’s series humanizes the Sages, giving information about the time period and place they lived in, character attributes gleaned from Mishna and both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds.

Failure to acknowledge the hierarchy of values causes us to risk losing sight of the forest for the trees.

Dee shows us that the very foundation of our lives and the precepts we live by, our ethics, morals, and culture, our education, the worlds of physics, and science all emanate from the foundations of the Torah...

Nechama was a dedicated and tireless teacher who spent decades creating and disseminating her gilyanot (worksheets).

The book contains multitudes, all woven together so beautifully. The story is complex, as are the characters. It is fast-paced and character-driven. A page-turner.

Miller makes his readers work hard, but he rewards them with startling insights, such as the idea that Ruth’s relationship with Boaz was a double yibum – for Ruth’s deceased husband Machlon but also for Elimelech and Naomi, who is too old to bear a child in her dead husband’s name.

Although the manuscripts of the Rebbe’s writings were brought to Israel many years ago, this publication reveals extensive new information on the details surrounding their burial and discovery.

Norman seems to enjoy sharing the difficult moments in his life which often became the clearest examples of Hashem’s guidance.

A quick survey of these essays reveals how the overriding medical and halachic concern of certain pikuach nefesh for the individual patient is weighed so very carefully against potential or probable pikuach nefesh and the general health and welfare of the community at large.

The book is exquisitely illustrated and young children will find it very easy to relate to every page.

Here is a volume about a man sublime, Absolutely, incontrovertibly outstanding in his time. A profound character study of ancestor Noach Rendered in syncopated and metered rhyme.

If you’re a frum person seeking traditional answers to modern questions, this is a resource you’ll want to have on your shelf.

The Rebbe’s suggestion – just combine the shuls! Never mind the significant ideological differences and different nusach.

One of the more forceful and vital chapters is towards the end of the book when Rabbi Bleich discusses vaccinations.

Achieving a deep-level reading of the Chumash requires an understanding of the syntactical relationships.

Ashira Greenberg is a pretty, talented and articulate young lady who, at the tender of age of seventeen, has just published a book.

It may seem jarring to open the haggadah commentary with such a somber tone, but it is impossible to ignore the indelible imprint of the Holocaust on Rabbi Berkovits's thought.

Jews around the world are reflecting on the Jewish New Year season that recently passed. It seems that everybody is struggling with their resolutions to be better and to do better. All of us are worrying about the daunting lead-up to life's next chapter: Thanksgiving season. Xmas parties. Awkward situations, she'elot that make you blush to ask them. Bills. More bills. Tempers. Fourth quarter reports. Bosses cut losses by firing staff. Fear. Panic. You wonder what was gained by going through the Yamim Noraim. I have good news for you: The Spirit of the Seasons by Rabbi Jonathan Shooter can show you insights into the Yamim Tovim to soothe your soul and psyche.

One of the book’s most creative and powerful essays discusses the so-called “IKEA effect,” which asserts that people value things in accordance with the amount of effort they put into getting or building them.

This story inspired my parents to name me Rachel; they too had to wait for years to be reunited while my father, Natan Sharansky, was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag.

Receiving a difficult medical diagnosis can easily spell trauma, anguish, and hopelessness for a patient and his loved ones. Yet even amidst the dark skies of such a situation, Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein affectionately known simply as YY assures us that there is still hope.

Rabbi Klapper grounds our Orthodoxy in a commitment to a halachic process in which poskim and a community of faithfully observant Jews exercise joint responsibility over the shape of halacha.

Full disclosure: I’m a geek. By that I mean that I read math theory books for fun. And, having a long career in kiruv, I have used metaphors from quantum mechanics in my presentations, to varying degrees of success.

If all one does is pick up the book and flip through it to look at the photos and captions and charts such as these, they will gain a wide window into Jewish history, scholarship and life.

The stories are written in Rabbi Krohn’s inimitable style and their subjects range from Gedolei HaDor to “ordinary” men, women and children; from the shores of America to the epicenter of the Holy Land.