Sandee Brawarsky

1 month ago | hadassahmagazine.org | Sandee Brawarsky |Binnie Kirshenbaum |Susan Josephs |Lucy Adlington |Kelsey Osgood

Email Print Counting BackwardsBy Binnie Kirshenbaum (Soho Press)This novel, author Binnie Kirshenbaum’s eighth, focuses closely on a loving, happily married couple—he is a scientist; she is an artist—as the husband’s health plunges because of early-onset Lewy body dementia. With dark humor and much insight into love and grief, Kirshenbaum details the couple’s unraveling lives as they shift from sharing dreams to an unexpected place of despair.

2 months ago | hadassahmagazine.org | Sandee Brawarsky

Email Print Many a bar mitzvah boy beginning in the 1980s received the celebratory volume Great Jews in Sports by Robert Slater, first published in 1983. The frequently reissued book, most recently in 2005, is a collection of biographies of outstanding athletes—including a few women—written to spread Jewish pride. There was no companion book for bat mitzvahs until Slater and his wife co-authored Great Jewish Women in 1994.

Jan 7, 2025 | hadassahmagazine.org | Sandee Brawarsky

Email Print Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after AuschwitzBy Menachem Z. Rosensaft (Ben Yehuda Press)Menachem Rosensaft’s 150 soulful poems, set in the style of the Book of Psalms, reflect on events of the Holocaust and the possibility of belief in its wake. The son of survivors, Rosensaft imagines in some of the poems the voice of his older brother, who was murdered by the Nazis. Burning Psalms doesn’t offer comfort, but rather questions and rebukes.

May 22, 2024 | hadassahmagazine.org | Shira Dicker |Leah Cohen |Kevin Winkler |Sandee Brawarsky

Email Print Lolita at Leonard’s of Great Neck and Other Stories from the Before TimesBy Shira Dicker In this debut collection of stories, Shira Dicker, a self-described daughter of the first wave of feminism, portrays bold Jewish women in a New York world that is post-Vietnam war and pre-pandemic. She writes energetically, capturing a time and place so well, not with nostalgia but with clarity, compassion and humor.

Sep 20, 2023 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Julia Kornberg |Ilan Stavans |Sandee Brawarsky

In the fall of 1973, Clarice Lispector was working on her Sunday crônica (column) for Jornal do Brasil, one of Rio de Janeiro’s leading newspapers. “For as long as I’ve known myself,” she wrote, “social issues have been more important to me than anything else. In Recife the shantytowns were my first truth.