Books, Poetry & Short Stories

Books: Menasseh ben Israel paved Jews way back to England

Menasseh served the descendants of Portuguese and Spanish exiles, Jews like him who escaped from these lands. He made a small amount of money as a printer of books, a job he had to take because the community paid him a minimal salary as one of their rabbis. He worked hard to persuade the English king to allow Jews to live in England, but died believing he was not successful. [Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Israel Drazin-Rabbi Dr., Jewish History

Hebrew Day School celebrates its 57th anniversary

Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School on Sunday, June 7, celebrated the 57th anniversary of its founding in a Zoom gathering that highlighted the life of the late Eilene Cummins, a longtime volunteer and former board president for the Orthodox school at 3730 Afton Avenue, San Diego. [Our Shtetl San Diego County column by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Jewish Religion, Middle East, San Diego County, Science, Medicine, & Education, USA

Immigrant women tell of their successes and challenges

It’s an ongoing debate whether immigration hurts our society by taking jobs away from Americans, or helps it by importing new workers, innovators and entrepreneurs. Taking the latter position, Dr. Bilha Chesner Fish, MD — herself and immigrant from Israel — interviews twenty-one different “inspiring and successful American immigrants.” [Eric George Tauber]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Eric George Tauber, USA

A tale of adventure, romance, and Russian anti-Semitism

Now in paperback, A Bend in the Stars takes its name from the idea posited by Albert Einstein that light during a solar eclipse will bend around the darkened celestial object.  One of the main characters in this novel is Vanya Abramov, a mathematician who believes his calculations together with photographs not only could prove Einstein’s theory but improve upon it. However, more than a few obstacles face Vanya’s potential bid for international recognition and perhaps even a Nobel Prize. [Book review by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison

Modern woman tells of life under the ayatollahs

Author Jacqueline Saper, part of a Jewish family, the daughter of an Iranian university professor and a British mother, an assistant airport manager, describes growing up in a wealthy and idyllic setting, a large house with opulent furnishings in the Tehran neighborhood of Yousefabad, dining in the best restaurants, attending private schools, travelling back and forth between England and Iran, and surrounded by maids and household laborers. [Fred Reiss, Ed.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Fred Reiss, EdD, Jewish History, Middle East

A ‘Mischling’ growing up in WWII Hamburg

Marione Ingram was born in Hamburg in 1938 to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, and so was defined as a ‘mischling’ (half-breed) by the Nazi authorities. Her autobiographical book begins with her account of having been sent by her mother when she was eight years old to take her younger sister to their aunt. She decided to return unbidden and found her mother in the throes of an attempt to commit suicide by putting her head in their gas oven. [Dorothea Shefer-Vanson]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, International, Jewish History

On ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’

In “The Devil and Daniel Webster” Benet depicts Daniel Webster saving a New Hampshire farmer from the Devil and from Hell. In the story, the farmer Jabez Stone was impoverished; every effort he made on his farm turned out bad. Exacerbated, he agrees to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for ten years of great prosperity. His request is granted. At the end of the ten years, Jabez rushes to the famed orator and lawyer Daniel Webster to come and save him. The Americanized Devil, who calls himself Scratch, comes to collect the farmer’s soul. [Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Israel Drazin-Rabbi Dr., Jewish Religion

Book review: Life of a Sar-El volunteer

Mark Werner is a retired corporate attorney from North Carolina, who at least once a year for the past 18 years has traveled to Israel at his own expense to sweat and grunt for three weeks as a manual laborer at various installations maintained by the Israel Defense Force.  The jobs varied from assignment to assignment, but they all involved hard work, typically in the hot sun of Israel and inside even hotter warehouses. [Book review by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Middle East, USA

Anti-Semitism and psychiatry

One of the distinct pleasures I’ve found that serving as a contributing author for San Diego Jewish World brings, is the opportunity to review material related to psychology and mental health. When I was asked to review Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry edited by H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, Ahmed Hankir and Mary V. Seeman and published by Springer this year, I welcomed the prospect. [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Jewish History, Lifestyles, Michael Mantell, Science, Medicine, & Education

How to Make COVID-19 Lemonade

You’ve heard the goody two-shoes saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” It was initially used by writer Elbert Hubbard in a 1915 obituary he wrote about actor Marshall Pinckney Wilder, when he said, “He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.” Many attribute Dale Carnegie in his 1948 book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living with using the phrase, “If You Have a Lemon, Make a Lemonade.” And note that Carnegie credited Julius Rosenwald. Regardless, you get the point. [Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Lifestyles, Michael Mantell

Poetry: Endless Night

Editor’s Note: Maile Faust, a junior at Francis Parker School, wrote this poem inspired by Elie Wiesel’s “Night,’ during her freshman year.  Her family is of mixed Jewish-Christian ancestry. Maile has seven years of ballet and 8 years of Free Style Martial Arts, in which she has earned a black belt.  An honors and advanced placement student at Francis Parker, she intends to pursue a  college degree in mechanical engineering.

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Jewish History, San Diego County, Science, Medicine, & Education

Novel tells of a woman surviving as a man in POW camp

The young wife dressed in men’s clothing, with her breasts tightly corseted. She shaved her head and pretended that shell shock had rendered her incapable of speech. Izabella and Bill, a British prisoner-of-war who had escaped from a lightly guarded Nazi-run work camp in Czechoslovakia, figured it was likely he would be recaptured, but if so, she was determined to be captured with him. And so they were, and so began the more intriguing part of the story. [Book review by Donald H. Harrison]

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison

Rescue brought Iranian Jewish children to U.S.

Escape From Iran: The Exodus of Persian Jewry During the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Sholem Ber Hecht, G&D Media ©2020, ISBN 978-1-7225-0294-2, p. 217, plus twelve pages of pictures, an appendix and index, $19.95. By Fred Reiss, Ed.D. WINCHESTER, California – Nebuchadnezzar, in the latter part of sixth century BCE, brought the vanquished Jews of

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Fred Reiss, EdD