Five Essential Books for Our Times

What follows are five recent books I’ve found quite helpful to re-frame my thinking about our current world. While I do wholeheartedly recommend them, please understand that I do not necessarily espouse everything in them. For example, Dara Horn’s thoughts on Jewish versus secular narrative seems pure fudge, while Yardena Schwartz unnecessarily indicts certain Israeli politicians and policies. Generally, though, in all five books the facts presented, as well as the conclusions drawn, stand on their own.

1) Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, 2015

One of the Torah giants of our time, Rabbi Sacks hardly needs any introduction or haskamah. However, in case you missed this gem in the great ocean of Torah commentary he published, Rabbi Sacks’ examination of the psychological and textual roots of religious hatred is extraordinary. Especially welcome is his remarkable reading of Bereshit and its murderous sibling rivalries: Cayin and Hevel, Yishmael and Yitzchok, Esav and Yaakov, the Shvotim and Yosef.

Throughout, Rabbi Sacks seamlessly weaves issues and arguments from multiple perspectives, arriving at breathtaking solutions to ancient enmities.

To the naysayers who object to seforim like this one, claiming that Rabbi Sacks is merely writing for true believers, I would answer that even those of us who revere the man and his peerless leadership need a bit of chizuk, along with some some fresh insights, while anger rages all around us.

2) Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, 2021

“What oft was thought,” Alexander Pope wrote in An Essay on Criticism, “but ne’er so well expressed.”

So it is here. Of course, we knew for decades that the world loved poor little Anne Frank because she was a dead victim. And despised strong, successful, self-reliant Jews. Yet it helps us to hear it – the thesis of this book — again.

A worthy addition to many studies, most recently David Mamet’s burning indictment The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews, novelist and essayist Dara Horn’s Dead Jews frames the argument cleanly and precisely. Backed with telling insights and incisive anecdotes, her thoughts seem to arise in virtually every conversation, especially now, during the sudden, frightening explosion of antisemitism.

3) Jeremy Eicher, Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, 2023

Quite simply, music critic Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo stands as one of the best books I’ve ever read – and ever, in my case, is a very long time. Written in the latest style, a genre-defying steamer trunk full of ideas crammed into an airline carry-on, Time’s Echo is by turns music history and criticism, biography, history, history of ideas, political science, autobiography, architecture, and travel. While ostensibly a study of four major composers – Richard, Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich – and their attempts to write music about the unthinkable, it is far more about the history of European Antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the post-World War II attempts to erase or obviate it in Germany, America, England, and the Soviet Union.

Traveling in time back to Felix Mendelssohn’s attempts to assimilate into German culture, and the German rejection of all Jews, including Schoenberg’s Mendelssohn-like conversion, Eichler deftly describes each composer’s desperate attempt at integration into a society often inimical to him – and to contemporary events.

Aside from his expert handling of the music and the various performances, Eichler neatly weaves in visits to often desolate and dispiriting places, where the records of rich Jewish life, and all that went into destroying it, have gone unmarked, often deliberately destroyed, literally erased.

4) Yardena Schwartz, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 2024

Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, perhaps the single most difficult feat in writing about mass murder is not to shriek, but instead to let events speak for themselves.

So it is with Ghosts of a Holy War. Clearly documenting the Jerusalem Mufti and his radical Islamic successors created false narratives about Jewish intent in order to declare jihad on Jews, and how much of the Arab Street quickly turned violent, veteran journalist Yardena Schwartz nevertheless points out how many Arabs stood against them, refused to take part, even saved Jews at the risk of their own lives.

Relying on letters, contemporary documents, news reports, historical accounts, and extensive interviews, Schwartz recounts not only the horrific 1929 Chevron pogrom, but also draws a subsequent line through history to the 10/7 massacre. Indeed, the incitement, and willingness to murder, has hardly abated, as she duly notes, has nothing to do with settlements, disputed land, even statehood. Instead, the objection is to Jewish existence.

5) Yair Agmon & Oriya Mevorach, One Day in October: Forty Heroes, Forty Stories, 2024

The best art, Sir Philip Sidney said, is that which hides art. So it is here, in Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach’s One Day in October, their brilliant job of reporting the stories of 40 people caught up in the deadliest attack in modern Israeli history.

Wisely stepping off stage, Agmon and Mevorach employ others’ voices to tell these heart-breaking, tear-inducing tales. What emerges is the dignity, decency, and real divinity of the Jewish people – even, or especially, in those dreadful, dark moments.  Forty moments of courage, of unimaginable bravery. Of self-sacrifice, faith, and resolve. Where lives were changed, for the living and the dead, forever.

Caution, please. Accompany your reading with a box of tissues. You’ll need it.