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Body and Jewish souls: review of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body

The Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2009

Who knew that Dr. Ruth, the grandmotherly sex expert, was a Haganah fighter in Israel’s War of Independence? How often the Nazis’ considered the “final solution” a public health program? And when we think of the nose job do we categorize it as a form of therapy, as some did in the 19th century?

Surprises such as these are sprinkled throughout Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body. Konner, who earned both his PhD and MD at Harvard and is a professor at Emory University, is a well-known and well-published scholar. And it is in Konner’s able hands that the Jewish body comes to life, representing the individual and collective, the literal and metaphorical, the corporeal and spiritual, and the historical and contemporary. The result is a dense, entertaining text comprised of a variety of topics that ordinarily might not appear between the covers of the same book—from religious law to golem to Jewish boxers to Kafka to current genetic research. Though Konner’s rich and provocative study is at times a bit scattered and occasionally over-simplistic, it ultimately pushes readers to consider the Jewish people, past and present, in a new light.

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 No honeymoon in Tehran: review of Azadeh Moaveni’s Honeymoon in Tehran

The Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2009

If the turmoil surrounding Iran’s recent presidential elections offers a glance at the inner psyche of Iranians, Honeymoon in Tehran offers a penetrating stare. Though the deceptively light title suggests that readers are getting a romance (and they do) the heart of the book is the turbulent love story between the Iranian-American author, Azadeh Moaveni, and Iran.

Moaveni was born and raised in northern California, amongst an enclave of successful Iranians-in-exile, her parents included. As an adult, Moaveni spent 1999 to 2001 in Iran wrestling with her identity during a time that the country wrestled with its own—the result was a journalism gig with Time magazine as well as her first book, Lipstick Jihad.

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Waiting for Taha: review of Adina Hoffman’s My Happiness Bears no Relation to Happiness: a poet’s life in the Palestinian Century

The Jerusalem Post, June 5, 2009

The story begins with an unlikely friendship between a Jewish American woman who has come to call Jerusalem home and a Palestinian poet, old enough to be her father, who today lives in Nazareth just miles from a home that no longer exists.

The story begins with a young Palestinian boy eking out a living for his parents and siblings during the British Mandate period.

The story begins with the tumultuous events of 1948, with villagers who weren’t fully aware of the magnitude of the events around them and with young Jewish soldiers who were, by some accounts, equally naïve.

Adina Hoffman’s “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness” is about all of these narratives, more, and none. And in the space where all these stories converge—where they fade in, fade out, and bleed into each other—dwells Taha Muhammad Ali, a lesser-known Palestinian poet and the subject of Hoffman’s biography.

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 Identity and crisis: review of Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh’s Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military

The Jerusalem Post, May 15, 2009

An Israeli Arab friend of mine, Saleh, is married to an American woman. He is conflicted: Though part of him would prefer to raise his children here among his family, he chooses to raise them in the US. One of the reasons he gives is that his two boys, as the children of a Muslim Arab, will not be able to join the army and thus will not reap the benefits of serving the State of Israel. When Saleh comes to visit the village he grew up in, a stone’s throw from Lebanon, he looks at the army age young men standing around, “doing nothing,” and he doesn’t want his sons to join their ranks.

But what happens when Israeli Arabs join the other ranks – those of the IDF? This question serves as the touchstone for Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh’s academic yet accessible Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military.

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