Best Contemporary Jewish Writing

The Many Identities of a Jew

To Jewishness 3

The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity 8

Poems: Reversion and What Kind of Times Are These 15

Justify My Love 17

Ten Ways to Recognize a Sephardic 'Jew-ess' 29

Redemption on East Tremont: The kindness of Christians and a seder's matzah helps the daughter of Mendel Beilis fix the old fears 36

News About Jews 40

Gay and Orthodox 42

Slipping the Punch 55

The Night Game 70

From The Roots of a Public Life 73

From And What Is My Lifespan? 79

Stories: Grandmother Eve, Consecrating the Ordinary, Blessing, and The Reward 80

The Legacy: A Parable About History and Bobe-mayses, Barszcz, and Borscht and the Future of the Jewish Past 86

Reclaiming the Spirit in Judaism

Nishmat 95

Starting on My Spiritual Path 97

On Renewing God 103

Eternity Utters a Day 113

A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age 115

Is God in Trees? 127

The Emergence of Eco-Judaism 134

A Theology of Illness and Healing 145

Death and What's Next 150

Eros and the Ninth of Av 152

From The Book of Jewish Values 155

Poems: Yom Kippur Sonnet and Science Psalm 162

Rereading Sacred Texts of Our Tradition

From And Peace and Justice Shall Kiss 169

From Imagining the Birth of a Nation 186

From The Red Tent 193

From The Bible and You, the Bible and You and Other Midrashim 199

Aaron's God--and Ours: A Yom Kippur Reflection 200

Our (Meaning Women's) Book-of-Esther Problem 205

Living in the Shadows of the Holocaust

Cattle Car Complex 213

Force Fields 221

The Sanctuary 228

The Trivialization of Tragedy 230

Hereditary Victimhood: The Holocaust's Life as a Ghost 241

The Meaning of the Holocaust: Social Alienation and the Infliction of Human Suffering 252

Israel in Conflict

The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past 265

Land for What? 281

Occupation and Antisemitism 284

A Novelist's Optimism: Reclaiming the Jewish Tradition 297

From Booking Passage 300

Poems: From In My Life, On My Life; Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?; and The Jewish Time Bomb 323

Hovering at a Low Altitude 326

The Pleasure of Jewish Culture

Making Judaism Cool 331

Old Man 339

Poems: When You Come to Sleep with Me, Come Like My Father and Hebrew 342

Esther and Yochanan 346

The Twenty-seventh Man 352

Against Logic 367

The Healing Power of Jewish Stories 371

The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer 375

Bellow at 85, Roth at 67 392

Jewish Writing and the Spiritual Journey: A Speculative Journey 409

The One Hundred Best Contemporary Jewish Books 417

The Editor 423

The Contributors 425

Credits 431