Jewish Identity

El Iluminado A Graphic Novel Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin Basic Books: 208 pp, $24.99 Halfway into the graphic novel "El Iluminado," a Spanish literature professor in an Indiana Jones hat wanders into a café in Santa Fe, N.M., and receives a pearl of wisdom from a gray-haired woman. "A Jewish soul is a Jewish soul," the woman says. "When you have it, you know. " The professor is a real person: Ilan Stavans, a Latino literary maven known for his insightful criticism, his authoritative anthologies and his quirky translation of "Don Quixote" into the mother tongue of millions of Americans, Spanglish.

On a piano keyboard, which mimics the human vocal range, the middle C is the C closest to the center. That's Joseph Skizzen - the protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited follow-up to his 1995 masterpiece "The Tunnel" - a middle-of-the-road yet slightly off-center academic who wants nothing but "the chance of an unnoticed life. " But it just might be a stand-in for the author. If Gass' body of work were a keyboard, you'd have his debut novel, "Omensetter's Luck" on one end and of "The Tunnel" at the other.

Marjorie Miller's "To Be a Jew" (Saturday Journal, Jan. 23) described movingly and honestly the path that many of us have taken in discovering our cultural and historical identities as (upper case) Secular Jews. Miller made it very clear that she hadn't adopted "her faith" during her tenure in Israel but her ethnic connections to the Jews as a people. A similar experience, although in Los Angeles rather than Jerusalem, has led some 100 families--many of them, like Miller's, intercultural--to the Sholem Community, where we and our children explore objectively the history of our people and find meaningful inspiration in its folklore, literature, humor, music, dance, theater and, of course, food.

A mother looms over the narrator - figuratively and literally - in Marcel Proust's masterpiece, the seven-volume novel “In Search of Lost Time.” Not that it's a big surprise, but thanks to an exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, we now know that a similarly dominant mother figure loomed over Proust in real life. Proust's mother, who was Jewish, is by all accounts one of the stars of the Morgan Library exhibit, which opened this month. The exhibit includes the author's notebooks, preliminary drafts, galley proofs and other documents.

Several points about Jewish day-care in the article "Jewish Identity: Group Fears the Loss of Community, Hopes to Bring Families Back to Fold" that appeared July 14 in the South Bay section of The Times, cry out for clarification. Vicki Burdman, a member of the South Bay Jewish community, is quoted (as saying), "Some Reform and Conservative Jews are uncomfortable leaving their children in an Orthodox day-care center where Orthodox principles such as strict observance of the Sabbath and stringent adherence to dietary laws are taught and practiced."

Allan Knee is perfectly pleased that audiences are interested in seeing his play "Shmulnik's Waltz." But the truth is, he wrote it for himself. "I loved the idea of a young man willing to go around the world to find love," said the New York-based playwright, whose period comedy begins previews Wednesday at Actors Alley. "It's not an intellectual idea; it's an emotional idea. I wanted to write a happy, up piece--and I wanted to go back to myself."

THE cover and title of "The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt" is noticeably edgy. The book seems aimed at a young, hip audience interested in a humorous exploration of the ways Jewish women are beleaguered by guilt. The reasons they feel guilty, we're told, are manifold: dating non-Jews, not providing enough grandchildren, failing to follow kosher laws, not calling your mother, divorcing the perfect Jewish man and so on.

"The jewel in the lotus" is a metaphorical image evoked in certain Buddhist chants, but the phrase turns into a comic but faintly discordant pun in the title of Rodger Kamenetz's book, "The Jew in the Lotus," a bit of wordplay intended to conjure up a dramatic but sometimes disturbing encounter between Judaism and Buddhism.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank Stories Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf: 210 pp., $24.95 Give Nathan Englander credit for chutzpah. The title of his new book of short fiction, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," draws on two iconic antecedents: the young diarist killed at Bergen-Belsen and the Raymond Carver story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. " Each, in its way, informs the collection; each, in its way, helps to set the terms.

El Iluminado A Graphic Novel Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin Basic Books: 208 pp, $24.99 Halfway into the graphic novel "El Iluminado," a Spanish literature professor in an Indiana Jones hat wanders into a café in Santa Fe, N.M., and receives a pearl of wisdom from a gray-haired woman. "A Jewish soul is a Jewish soul," the woman says. "When you have it, you know. " The professor is a real person: Ilan Stavans, a Latino literary maven known for his insightful criticism, his authoritative anthologies and his quirky translation of "Don Quixote" into the mother tongue of millions of Americans, Spanglish.

"Call Me Maybe" has gone Jewish, just in time for Rosh Hashana. The French arm of the Jewish Agency for Israel created "Call Me Maybe-Chana Tova," a parody video of the Carly Rae Jepsen song to ring in the Jewish New Year. ( Shana Tova is how you say Happy New Year in Hebrew). The video was posted to YouTube on Sept. 3 and had already racked up close to 675,000 views by Monday afternoon. That's hundreds of thousands more views than it had Monday morning. The Jewish Agency for Israel was instrumental in establishing the state of Israel, but now the organization has made strengthening Jewish identity in young people around the world and in Israel its mission.

The "intactivists" - anti-circumcision people who are trying to get the practice outlawed in the U.S. and elsewhere - claim that cutting off an infant's foreskin reduces his capacity for sexual pleasure as an adult. Whenever I hear that, I always say, "Huh?" That's because I'm a member of the circumcision generation. During the middle part of the last century, hospital births, and hence the circumcision of baby boys, became nearly universal in the U.S. By the mid-1960s, 90% of male U.S. babies, Gentile and Jewish alike, had their foreskins removed within days of birth.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank Stories Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf: 210 pp., $24.95 Give Nathan Englander credit for chutzpah. The title of his new book of short fiction, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," draws on two iconic antecedents: the young diarist killed at Bergen-Belsen and the Raymond Carver story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. " Each, in its way, informs the collection; each, in its way, helps to set the terms.

Israel moved Sunday to deport the offspring of hundreds of migrant workers, mostly small children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew and have never seen their parents' native countries. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the new policy was intended to stem a flood of illegal immigrants, whose children receive state-funded education and healthcare benefits, and to defend Israel's Jewish identity. "On the one hand, this problem is a humanitarian problem," Netanyahu said during a meeting Sunday of the Cabinet, which had debated the move for nearly a year.

Unconscionable. Offensive. Hurtful. Bigoted. Terrible. Hateful. These are the words being used to describe Helen Thomas' recent comment about Israel and Palestine. Editorialists across the country have condemned her statement that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go back" to Europe. Let's agree that she should not have said those things, and that a just and lasting peace in the Middle East fundamentally requires reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

Re "Is anti-Zionism hate?" (Judea Pearl), Opinion, March 15 As an American Jew raised in a large, loving Zionist family, I have seen the blindness that allows otherwise ethical people to champion a state that has stolen another people's homeland, a state in which non-Jews are despised, third-class semi-citizens. Judea Pearl's essay reflects the Zionist rationalization for 61 years of colonial aggression: Because the Jewish faith was born in Palestine, the Jews apparently had a right, after 2,000 years, to claim the Palestinian homeland as their own and send its terrorized population fleeing into refugee camps.

To start their morning Sunday, about 20 Jews attended a Mechitza Minyan service in a ballroom of a Costa Mesa hotel, praying in Hebrew, with separate seating for men and women. A few doors down, a group wearing sweat pants and T-shirts began their day by breathing deeply and twisting their bodies in a class titled "My Body, My Temple: Yoga for the Jewish Soul." A couple of hours later, a third group engaged in a discussion about Israel's national security agenda.