Books are pouches of wisdom embroidered with pearly words.
--Moshe ben Ezra
Books to start your own Jewish library (in no particular order):
Books to begin your journey: • To Life: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking by Rabbi Harold Kushner • Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America by Letty Cottin Pogrebin • God Was Not in the Fire-The Search for a Spiritual Judaism by Daniel Gordis (hands down, the Jewish book I've recommended most frequently) • The Yellow Wind by David Grossman • O Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre • The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski • Wrestling with the Angel: Jewish Insights on Death and Mourning by Jack Riemer Books to sustain you: • A Spiritual Life-A Jewish Feminist Journey by Merle Feld • To Begin Again: The Journey Toward Comfort, Strength and Faith in Difficult Times by Rabbi Naomi Levy • Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology by Arthur Green • Rethinking Synagogues: A New Vocabulary for Congregational Life by Lawrence A. Hoffman
Jewish Living • The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel • For Those Who Can't Believe: Overcoming the Obstacles to Faith by Harold Schulweis • Danny Siegel's Bar and Bat Mitzvah Book: A Practical Guide to Changing the World Through Your Simcha by Danny Siegel • A Time to Mourn, A Time to Comfort by Ron Wolfson and David Wolpe
Israel • Poems of Jerusalem by Yehuda Amichai • Open Closed Open: Poems by Yehuda Amichai • The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land by Donna Rosenthal • Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu,1963-1976 by Yonatan Netanyahu
Holidays • The Jewish Holidays by Michael Strassfeld • A Day Apart: Shabbat at Home by Noam Zion and Shawn Fields-Meyer
Prayer • Talking to God by Rabbi Naomi Levy • The Book of Blessings by Marcia Falk
Text • The JPS Hebrew English Tanakh • The Bedside Torah: Wisdom, Visions and Dreams by Bradley Artson • The Book of Legends/Sefer Ha-aggadah: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash edited by Hayyim Nachman Bialik
Ethics • To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility by Jonathan Sacks • Giving Your Money Away by Danny Siegel • Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World by Sidney Schwarz and Ruth Messinger Shoah • Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi • Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman • Night by Elie Wiesel
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