Tikkun Recommends

My Country, ’Tis of Thee
Keith Ellison
Gallery Books/
Karen Hunter Publishing, 2014

Congressman Keith Ellison is the first Muslim to have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and he has played a powerful role in introducing the Tikkun perspective into public policy debates by asserting that homeland security is best achieved through generosity rather than domination, and that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet.

Ellison subtitles his book My Faith, My Family, Our Future. With characteristic modesty and clarity, Ellison lets us into his own development, the struggles he faced as a child and teenager, and his conversion to Islam, which completely shocked his Christian family. He takes us into his campaigns, showing us where he stumbled and how he recovered. He also offers a window into the inside maneuvering that occurs in Congress. As he describes how he has dealt with the anti-Muslim hysteria he has encountered, he manages to teach us a great deal about American politics. He talks of his visits to Mecca, Medina, the West Bank, and Gaza, and he explains his opposition to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Though he doesn’t label himself a spiritual progressive, his perspective is certainly that, as he has made clear when addressing the Network of Spiritual Progressives conferences in Washington.

Reading this book will give you new faith in the possibility of honest, decent, and principled spiritual progressives actually finding a way into American politics despite all the huge obstacles.

The Man Who Loved Dogs
Leonardo Padura
Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2014

After Auschwitz: A Love Story
Brenda Webster
Wings Press, 2014

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
Francine Prose
Harper, 2014

Suddenly, Love
Aharon Appelfeld
Schocken Books,
2014

The Ninth Day
Ruth Tenzer Feldman
Ooligan Press, 2013

All five of these novels tell stories rooted in major historical events of the twentieth century, and each gives us a new perspective on the possibility of healing from the resulting traumas. Leonardo Padura brings us into the tragic murder of the Jewish revolutionary Leon Trotsky and helps us understand how a complex human being could have carried out the homicidal orders of Trotsky’s archenemy Joseph Stalin. Brenda Webster provides what Robert Alter calls “a haunting love story” about a Holocaust survivor and a filmmaker suffering from the onset of dementia. Francine Prose, a former literary editor for Tikkun, takes us into the intensity of a counterculture that turns perversely pro-fascist in the France of the 1920s and 1930s, providing a variety of new perspectives on a history we thought we knew. Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel’s most respected novelists, tells the tale of a seventy-year-old Red Army veteran from Ukraine. Many years after the Nazis murdered his first wife and baby, and following his divorce from his second wife, the veteran falls in love with the thirty-six-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors who miraculously falls in love with him.

And talking about fantasies, Ruth Tenzer’s The Ninth Day brings us a Berkeley teenage heroine who first gets involved with Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and then is transported to eleventh-century Paris, where she plays a role in saving the life of an innocent child. If you are looking for fiction that is at once engaging and instructive, try these five!

The Idea of Israel
Ilan Pappe
Verso, 2014

Genesis
John B. Judis
Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2014

Menachem Begin
Daniel Gordis
Nextbook/Schocken,
2014

Oy, Israel. One can’t address its existence without immersing in controversies and facing denunciations. Serious authors are likely to be dismissed as propagandists or even as anti-Semites, no matter how pro-Israel they are, should they have even slight criticisms of Israeli policy. Ilan Pappe’s book, subtitled A History of Power and Knowledge, continues Pappe’s courageous attempt to force Israelis to confront the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 and Israel’s intransigence in refusing to deal with the consequences of that Palestinian catastrophe. Pappe describes the way experts at hasbara (Israeli propaganda) have dealt with this history, highlighting the powerful pushback that gets directed against anyone who raises...