Gaon Books at the URJ Biennial 2013

Thank you to the hundreds of people who came by the Gaon Books booth in the first two days of the URJ Biennial, to those who stopped to look at the books and talk, to those who bought books from Ruth Sohn's Crossing Cairo about being Jewish in Egypt to Reb Zalman's A Hidden Light about early Hasidic rabbis in eastern Europe, Patricia Shapiro's The Privilege of Aging about Jewish women and the new super agers, Arthur Gross-Schaefer's The Rabbi Wore Moccasins, about a rabbi/lawyer  who solves a murder mystery, and Gloria Abella Ballen's just published The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet that was described by a buyer as "ravishingly beautiful" and to the buyers of all the other books. Here are some of the photos at the booth and of a few of the people who stopped by.

We welcome you to visit Gaon Books in Booth 104 at the URJ Biennial in San Diego this week. We will be displaying all Gaon books, and we will be featuring recent titles, especially those of three authors who will be there signing their books - Gloria Abella Ballen, The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet. 

Also Arthur Gross-Schaefer will be signing his book, The Rabbi Wore Moccasins.

And Rabbi Ruth H. Sohn will be signing her book

Crossing Cairo: a Jewish Woman's Encounter with Egypt.

The hours for the signings of each author are listed

on the Gaon Books page of the URJ Biennial website.

We hope to see you there.

In Celebration of the

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books honors Sephardic Legacy

Sephardic Legacy: Stories and Songs from Jewish Spain is Dr. Samelson’s record of his family’s Sephardic heritage from the Turkish tradition, using the Ladino romance (Judeo-Spanish ballad) as the means of telling this story. He summarizes Sephardic history, as well as the history of the Sephardic ballad, which developed from the Spanish romance tradition. Many of the romances included here were collected from his family members. Sephardic Legacy is a unique record of Sephardic culture and history.

William Samelson, Ph.D. is a Professor Emeritus, Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Texas. He was born in Poland and lived there until the age of eleven when he was interned in various Nazi labor and concentration camps in Poland and Germany. He was a member of the partisans at the age of thirteen. Captured by the Nazis, he was taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp where he spent three and a half years. He was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, and emigrated to the United States in 1948.

Dr. Samelson holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at Kent State University, The University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Samelson has written extensively on the Holocaust and lectured widely on it. Among his publications are All Lie in Wait, One Bridge to Life, Warning and Hope.

For more information on Sephardic Legacy, go to:

www.gaonbooks.com/SephardicLegacy.html

Celebrating the Jewish Book Month -- Moroccan Sephardic Romancero

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books Proudly Presents

Moroccan Sephardic Romancero is an anthology of Sephardic Romances in the Moroccan tradition, based on four decades of research. Starting in the 1970s’ the author has collected more than two hundred variations on ballads from people living in the different countries of the Moroccan Diaspora. 

For all of us who work on the traditional Romancero—and for all Hispanists whatever their speciality—we need to thank and congratulate Shoshana Weich...for having created and published a splendid book that is invaluable and full of pleasant surprises for the study of one of the most important branches of Spanish poetry: the traditional Romancero. 

Samuel G. Armistead, University of California

Susana Weich-Shahak’s anthology of the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero vividly brings to life the Judeo-Spanish ballads transmitted by Moroccan women over the course of time and in scattered locales.  Through its careful presentation of more than two hundred songs and details of their transmission processes, this volume serves both to document a remarkable repertory in great detail and to memorialize the women who sustained these songs. This is a collection that speaks eloquently to the importance of music in Jewish life.  

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Harvard University

Susana Weich-Shahak

Translator's Note:

Translating Susana Weich-Shahak’s Moroccan Sephardic Romancero has been a pleasure and honor. Having followed her writings for close to twenty years, I have been privy to the consistency of her detailed attention to the historical, textual and musical nuances within Judeo-Spanish song. Her fieldwork has been extensive, collecting songs from Morocco and from various countries in the Moroccan Diaspora, especially first generation émigrés to Israel. Bringing this anthology of Moroccan Sephardic repertoire to an English speaking public I hope will elucidate the complexities in this rich oral tradition to a wider audience.

Vanessa Paloma

Casablanca, 2013

For more information about the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero, go to www.gaonbooks.com/MoroccanRomancero.html

In Celebrating the Jewish Book Month -- The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books Proudly Presents

The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet by Gloria Abella Ballen is a new book, a fusion between mysticism, art, and Jewish spiritual traditions. Abella Ballen leads the viewer through the labyrinth of the twenty-two letters that changed the world. The letters brought us the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the Ten Commandments. The adventures of David and his songs came to us on the wings of these twenty-two letters, as did the wisdom and poetry of Solomon. The lyrical images of Abella Ballen spread across the pages in full color filled with insight into religious truths drawn from the well of Jewish traditions. 

The Hebrew letters, their shapes and colors give enlightenment and wisdom. Otiyot Mach’kimot. In Jewish mysticism they are also the building blocks of the universe. Enjoy the flight of consciousness this glorious book affords you.

--Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal

The melodious art of Gloria Abella Ballen, who also dreams of flying alphabets, fixes the Hebrew letters in time. Suddenly, we appreciate not only the texts they deliver but the texture they are made of.  

--Ilan Stavans

Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture

Amherst College

Gloria Abella Ballen is a student of the Hebrew aleph bet, doing research on the Sephardic illuminated manuscripts at the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as well as studying the Zohar and contemporary works such as The Alphabet of Creation by Ben Shahn and The Book of Letters by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.

Prof. Abella Ballen has been visiting lecturer on Jewish art, Jewish illuminated manuscripts, and her own work from the Mishkan Omanim, Herzliya, Israel to the University of Essex and the Camberwell School of Art in the U.K. and University of Xinjiang in China among others. She has exhibited at Christie’s in London and Louis Stern in Los Angeles, from the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City to the Bellevue Art Museum in Seattle. In addition to her graduate degree in art from SUNY-Buffalo, she did specialized work with Larry Rivers and John Cage.

Abella Ballen has taught at the University of the Andes in Bogota and Inter American University in Puerto Rico. She is of a Sephardic family, born in South America. She has exhibited in the United States, Israel, Japan, Colombia, Mexico and England and received awards for her work from the Latin American Graphics Biennial, Pan American Graphic Arts, UNESCO and National Endowment for the Arts and others. Her art is in museum, corporate and private collections, from Colombia (National Museum) to the United States (Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Occidental Petroleum, Mayo Clinic, et.al.) and Canada (Royal Bank of Canada).

For more visit

http://www.gaonbooks.com/HebrewAlphabet.html

https://www.facebook.com/ThePoweroftheHebrewAlphabet

New e-books -- Crossing Cairo and The Privilege of Aging

Crossing Cairo Kindle

In Crossing Cairo, Rabbi Ruth Sohn has written an exceptional family portrait of the experience of living in Egypt with her husband and children. Would it be possible to cross the boundaries of language, culture and religion to form real friendships and find a home among Egyptians? As she navigates new routines of daily life to make friends, find an Arabic teacher, and get to know the mysterious veiled woman that came with the rental of their apartment, Sohn takes us on a remarkable journey as she encounters the many faces of Cairo. In the Epilogue she returns to Cairo after the fall of Mubarak to find a newly exuberant and infectious patriotism and hope. Throughout this probing contemplation of self and other in a world that is foreign and in many ways inimical to her own as an American Jew, Sohn shows how even the seemingly mundane events of daily life can yield unexpected discoveries. 

"With remarkable evenhandedness and...openness, Sohn has written a provocative and mesmerizing book of extraordinary passion and insight. I could not put it down!" Rabbi David Ellenson, President Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

The Privilege of Aging -- Kindle

In The Privilege of Aging Patricia Shapiro (M.S.W.) opens a window for us into the lives of women from 75 to 102 years old and explores their successes and challenges, longevity and vitality. Each woman has lived a different path of life, and their examples show us that the resources for successful aging are within us. Anthropologist Doris Francis says that we need "to seize the challenges and honors of growing old." 

"Patricia Gottlieb Shapiro introduces us to ordinary women who model growth, resiliency, creativity and vibrancy in later life. These women are our guides; they beckon all of us to age fearlessly." Rabbi Dayle A. Friedman, M.A., M.S.W., B.C.C. Author of Jewish Visions for Aging Director, Growing Older: Wisdom + Spirit Beyond Midlife

Women and Aging Today -- Elegance and Resilience

Pat Shapiro

The Privilege of Aging

Award-winning author Pat Shapiro has written a new book entitled The Privilege of Aging, portraits of 12 women from 75 to 102 years old. After looking at the lives of these women who are living active, dynamic lives in their 80's and 90's, she asks what is common to their lives to allow living to advanced ages. She has identified 10 factors that contribute to aging successfully and happily, and that resilience is one of the most important of these factors. These interviews and life stories are varied and fascinating, and they keep the reader's attention in page after page of new insights. This is a generation of Jewish grandmothers like none before them.

Women and aging is a subject of national importance, as can be seen in CNN's articles on Style and Elegant Senior Women. CNN looks at the evolving elegance of older women, emphasizing what Shapiro argues that this generation of seniors is living well, better than seniors did in the past. The CNN stories on women and aging in style can be seen at:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/29/living/advanced-style-coloring-book/index.html?hpt=li_bn3 and
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/27/living/aging-fashion-style






Pat Shapiro, M.S.W., has written extensively on women and aging and gives talks on the subject across the United States. The Privilege of Aging was recently selected by the Jewish Book Council for its Author's Network, and Shapiro has been invited to JBC sponsored Jewish Book Festivals from the Southwest to the East Coast. For more information on the author's work, visit her website at: www.wisewomenalive.com

For more information about The Privilege of Aging, go to: www.gaonbooks.com.

You are invited to launching of The Privilege of Aging at

Collected Works Bookstore

Galisteo and Water Streets in downtown Santa Fe

Wednesday, August 7, at 6:00 pm

The author will be present. 
She will talk about women and aging and sign books.

Jews, the Muslim World and Ramadan

As Ramadan is starting across the Muslim world, 

we are in Morocco to celebrate the birth and brit of a son to our daughter, Vanessa Paloma, and her husband, Maurice Elbaz.

In this unusual land, which has the only Jewish Museum in an Arab land and where Jewish studies organizations are formed in otherwise Muslim universities, I encountered an interesting recent publication in the magazine, Zamane, on Jews in Morocco. The issue (May, 2013) is entitled, "Morocco, Jewish Land". In this land Jews are considered one of the founding peoples of the country along with Berbers and Arabs.

This issue of Zamane looks at the unique role of Jews in this Muslim country.

For more on Jews and Muslims look at these Gaon Books publications:


Ruth Sohn, Crossing Cairo, A Jewish Woman's Encounter with Egypt

Raphael Elmaleh and George Ricketts, Jews under Moroccan Skies

Vanessa Paloma, The Mountain, the Desert and the Pomegranate: Stories from Morocco and Beyond

Susana Weich-Shahak, Moroccan Sephardic Romancero

William Samelson, Sephardic Legacy

Mati Milstein, My New Middle East

Egypt, Turmoil, and the Jewish Experience -- Ruth Sohn

Understand Egypt Today from a Jewish Perspective.

Ruth Sohn's new book, Crossing Cairo, is the best contemporary description of life in Cairo and the concerns of the people there. As a Jewish woman living in Cairo with her husband (Reuven Firestone) and two sons, she describes life in a personal way rarely seen. You walk with her in the streets and share the foods, including her favorite spice shop.

Sohn gives an insight to the Middle East today that will help you to understand the region better.

Dr. Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion, Smith College says of this book:

"Ruth Sohn’s Crossing Cairo is simply FASCINATING. A treasure-trove of candid reflections on society, religion, politics, history and national memory in today’s Egypt. I especially admire her honesty in voicing her religious anxiety as an American Jew while living for half-a-year with her family in Cairo; the little vignettes about the Jewish community there (made up of a few locals, Israelis and others) are priceless. I strongly recommend the book for anyone interested in Egypt or planning to visit it."

Rabbi Ruth Sohn

Director of the Leona Aronoff Rabbinic Mentoring Program

Rabbi of the Lainer Beit Midrash

Hebrew Union College

Los Angeles, CA 

Gaon Books Authors Isabelle Medina Sandoval and Sandra K. Toro talk about their latest books

Gaon Books Authors at Collected Works Bookstore

 Last night, June 18, at Collected Works Bookstore Isabelle Medina Sandoval (shown here) and Sandra Toro (below) talked about their more recent books, both on crypto-Jewish life in New Mexico. Several dozen people attended the event and were active discussants wanting to know more about the crypto-Jewish experience.

Dr. Medina Sandoval's most recent book is: Hidden Shabbat: The Secret Lives of Crypto-Jews. She is from a family in Mora, New Mexico, which was an area of crypto-Jewish life during the Spanish colonial period. Her family maintained their identity as Jewish up to the contemporary period, and the author tells the stories of her grandmothers back several generations. Based on historical research and information from her own family, Medina Sandoval weaves a story of how people lived their lives. Keeping identity with her tradition, she wore a New Mexican colcha (traditionally woven shawl) for her talk. See the previous blog for more information.

Sandra K. Toro's most recent book is Secrets Behind Adobe Walls, and it is about crypto-Jewish life during the eighteenth century in New Mexico. The central figure is a medical doctor,  Benjamin Mendez who is newly arrived to the Santa Fe territory, and he brought the knowledge of Europe with him. Her story covers the infamous "Witch Trials" of Abiquiu, and the experience of the epidemics of European diseases that attacked so many Indians, far more than the U.S. Cavalry ever did. Then, there is a love story with twists and turns in the plot that will keep you intrigued. See the previous blog for more information.

After the talks and the question and answer period, the authors signed books and talked with the audience and book buyers until the store closed.

Collected Works is an independent bookstore that has an active program of talks by local and national authors. It had a major role in the cultural life of Santa Fe.

See Gaon Books on Facebook

For more information go to www.gaonbooks.com

 Gaon Books authors (Isabelle Medina Sandoval and Sandra K. Toro) will read and discuss their recent books on crypto-Jewish life in New Mexico at Collected Works in Santa Fe on June 18 at 6 pm.

Both of these books are sequels to previous titles written by these authors on Spanish Jews who had to flee the Inquisition and hide their Judaism at times to stay alive.

Isabelle Medina Sandoval is from a family in Mora in the mountains of northern New Mexico where crypto-Jewish families lived in isolation and distance from the long arm of the Inquisition. Medina Sandoval writes about her family and has done extensive historical research and bases her writing on that research. She is a widely published poet.

Hidden Shabbat is an beautiful piece of literature and important in preserving our New Mexico history and culture.  I recommend it for both youth and adults who want to understand New Mexico.

Dr. John B. Mondragón, Professor Emeritus Univ. of New Mexico

This book is a masterpiece of scholarship and literature.  Isabelle Medina Sandoval skillfully threads the untold cabalistic histories of several generations with the artistry of storytelling to reveal the secret Jewish-Hispanic tapestry that is rightfully part of New Mexico history.  Her passionate writing captures the past and present-day Crypto-Jewish struggle with anguish, pride, and secrecy.  In the end, Sandoval shares the vulnerability as well as courage of the present, and the optimism that the cabalistic light will shine brighter in the future.

Daniel Díaz-Huerta, Executive Director

New Mexico Center for Crypto Judaic Studies & Culture

Sandra K. Toro is an award-winning, best-selling author who teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico, and previously she worked in Washington D.C. as a reporter and producer of public affairs programs for ABC and PBS. Toro is an active speaker on writing and the representation of writers.

Through her exquisite prose, Sandra K. Toro recreates the lives of New Mexico’s crypto-Jews. She pays homage to the centrality of family and faith in the lives of early modern crypto-Jews, projected onto a backdrop of Spanish interaction with Native American beliefs and peoples. Secrets behind Adobe Walls rekindles our memory of that dramatic era.

-- Prof. Roger L. Martinez, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Sandra Toro brings to life the turbulent history and clash of cultures, religion and politics of colonial New Mexico.  Set against the story of New Mexico’s hidden Jews, those who outwardly practiced Catholicism and secretly practiced Judaism, Toro’s meticulously researched novel is a fast paced and fascinating look into the fears and fires that ignited prejudice in the 18th century.

-- Susan Seligman, New Mexico Regional Director, Anti-Defamation League

Sandra Toro has crafted a spell binding story that is part medical mystery, part high adventure and part love story that revolves around crypto-Jews  in colonial New  Mexico.  Once you start it, you won’t want to put it down.

-- Paula Paul, author of Sins of the Empress

See also Collected Works

June 6 -- Anniversary of the Riots of Seville and the Turning Point in the History of Sephardic Jews

On June 6, 1391 Ferrand Martinez led an attack on the Jewish quarter of Seville, destroying most of the twenty-three synagogues, burning Jewish houses and killing many people. The Jewish community had been protected by the King and the Archbishop of Seville, but both had died shortly before. Ferrand Martinez had been advocating attacks on the Jews for some time, and he took advantage of the power vacuum to lead the mobs against the Jews.
In the face of so much death and destruction, many Jews chose to convert to Christianity rather than be killed.
Vicente Ferrer led the attacks on Jews to the north, and in July and August of that year the riots spread to Valencia, Toledo and eventually to Barcelona. The image to the left shows Jews forced to listen to a sermon denouncing them, which went on for the next decades.
The Jewish community in Barcelona had been one of the largest on the Iberian Peninsula, and it was completely destroyed. Those who were not killed, fled, and that was the end of the Jewish community in that city.
Of the estimated 200,000 Jews in Spain in 1391, it is thought that one-third of them converted to Christianity over the next 25 years under the unrelenting pressures on them. This created the large population of Conversos, or New Christians, still discriminated against. They lived under the suspicion of practicing Judaism secretly, and in 1480 the Spanish Inquisition began to examine New Christians for Judaizing and many thousands were arrested, tortured, and burned at the stake.
In 1492, a century after the events of 1391, the remaining Jews were expelled from Spain, and Sephardic Jews spread around the Mediterranean basin from Morocco to Italy, Greece and Turkey. Judaism was eliminated in Spain. The Spanish Inquisition continued until it finally was abolished by royal decree in 1834.
In November, 2012, 520 years after 1492, with Spain tottering economically, the Spanish government officially invited Sephardic Jews to return to Spain with an offer of a fast track to Spanish citizenship.

Dr. Tamar Frankiel on The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet by Gloria Abella Ballen

The new book by Gloria Abella Ballen on The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet will be out later this year, and Dr. Tamar Frankiel,  has written the following about it.

The Hebrew letters, understood as building blocks of the universe, have inspired commentators and artists since ancient times.  But rarely do the letters find a lover so tender and passionate as Gloria Abella Ballen. With this book, you hold in your hands over 200 pages of artistic genius, exalted by the mystical quest and tamed by a deep caring for meaning and tradition.

What is perhaps most surprising is that I do not tire of looking at these pages. Just when I think to move along and flip through the pages, a new piece will catch my eye and I slow down again.  Almost certainly, you will want to see these larger, closer; you will want to step back and look from a distance. You will wish you could feel the textures.

But especially, you will smile. This book awakens a subtle yet profound joy..." 

Dr. Tamar Frankiel

President of the Academy for Jewish Religion

Los Angeles, California

This is a landmark artistic  interpretation of the mystical qualities of the aleph-bet, and it is a book that will inspire you and leave you filled with joy.

Coming Soon.

Watch for the Announcement of the Publication.