WHAT IT MEANS TO BE JEWISH: The Voices of Our Heritage

Abrams crafts a portrait of Jewish experience, identity, religion and culture through the words and eyes of contemporary thinkers. Though she includes traditional biblical and Talmudic sources, the strength of this anthology is its focus on 20th-century voices, from Elie Wiesel and Golda Meir to Woody Allen and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Abrams, who previously published four books on medical issues under the name Ina Yalof, says forthrightly that "when male and female authors wrote equally well on the same topic," she usually gave preference to the women's writings; until the 1970s, women's voices were "often too gentle to be heard." Themes include identity, education, language, life cycle, holidays, humor, immigration, Holocaust, Israel, prayer and Jewish wisdom; non-Jewish writers reflect on Jewish inspiration in a section called "How Others See Us." Deborah Lipstadt's moving account of the first time she was counted in a minyan (prayer quorum), Amos Oz's portrait of his father on the night of Israeli independence and Maurice Samuel's description of shtetl streets "as tortuous as a Talmudic argument" are among the intriguing stories that could motivate readers to seek beyond the limits of these pages. Each section contains an introduction, but the brief identification of sources needs expansion. Abrams reproduces her own path back to Judaism, attained partially through the guidance of books, rabbis and teachers. This anthology, too, may well lead readers—Jewish and non-Jewish—to deepen their study of the rich resources of Judaism. (Sept.)