Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture & Heritage is a stunning collection of 32 powerful essays celebrating Jewish joy. Whether set in the Catskills of New York, in New England, Chicago, or LA; across oceans in Israel, Denmark, Mt. Everest, or Spain; in the synagogues of youth, redwood forests, or at family seder tables, its stories, like the manna in the desert of our ancestors, sustain both body and soul. Curated by Diane Gottlieb, with a foreword by Erika Dreifus, Manna Songs speaks to the rich diversity of Jewish lives. Through tallit and candlesticks, paintbrushes and prayer, these beautiful Jewish voices reach back across generations and pass traditions forward. Readers will find humor alongside sorrow, questions beside wonder, people lost, others found. Manna Songs will delight, move, and inspire you. It will make your heart sing!
Gabrielle Ariella Kaplan-Mayer
Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship (eBook)
What’s it like when a complete unknown is actually close family? In Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship—a provocative anthology curated by B.K. Jackson, with a foreword by Libby Copeland, 28 acclaimed and emerging writers explore the transformative experience of encountering unknown close relatives. These are intimate stories by those who’ve spent years longing and searching for their unknown biological families and by others shocked to discover they have parents or siblings they never dreamed of—blindsiding revelations that demand both a radical recalibration of identity and a redefinition of family. Each addresses the myriad emotions that arise in the wake of these discoveries and encounters, demonstrating that what we don’t know can hurt us, that secrets are toxic, and that truth can bring healing, redemption, and, sometimes, estrangement. Woven through is a universal question: What does it mean to be family?