Book selection due at the beginning of class on Thursday, September 10

Book Review of about 1800 words must be submitted to turnitin.com

prior to the beginning of class on Thursday, November 5

A book review tells not only what a book is about, but also how successful it is at what it tries to do. A book review brings together accurate, analytical reading and strong, personal response when the reviewer indicates what the book is about and what it might mean to a reader (by explaining what it means to him or her). Your book review should describe what is on the page, analyze how the book tries to achieve its purpose, and express your own reactions.

Points for writing an effective book review

Choose a book that you have not already read, and read the whole book (as obvious as this sounds).

You cannot make a judgment on what an author has written until you know all of it.

As you're reading or preparing to write the review, ask yourself these questions:

What are the author's viewpoint and purpose? These elements may be implied rather than stated (perhaps in the introduction or preface).
What are the author's main points? Again, these may be stated in the introduction.
What kind of evidence does the author use to prove his or her points? Is the evidence convincing? Why or why not? Does the author support his or her points adequately?
How does this book relate to other books on the same topic? Is the book unique? Does it add new information? What group of readers, if any, would find this book most useful?
Does the author have the necessary expertise to write the book? What are the most appropriate criteria by which to judge the book? How successful do you think the author was in carrying out the overall purposes of the book? Depending on your book's purpose, you should select appropriate criteria by which to judge its success. If an author’s purpose is to argue for a particular solution to a public problem, then the review should judge whether the author has defined the problem, identified causes, planned points of attack, provided necessary background information and offered specific solutions. If an author argues for a theory about a particular phenomenon, the review should evaluate what kind of theory the book is arguing for, how much and what kind of evidence the author uses for support, how valid the evidence seems, how expert the author is, and how much the book contributes to knowledge in the field.

Please include Bibliographic information in a standard, academically accepted format (this can appear separate from the body of the review).

I strongly recommend that you read some of the longer book reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section (www.nytimes.com or in the library) to gain an understanding of the creative and literary possibilities of a book review. I am more interested in what you have to say about the book (your thoughts and insights) than in what the book says itself.

Suggested Books

Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, 2001. IBM and the Holocaust is the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.

Cohen, Rich, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams, 1999. Tough Jews is not only a cultural history of the Jewish gangsters who thrived in New York in the first few decades of the twentieth-century (like Red Levine, the Orthodox hit man who refused to kill on the Sabbath), but also the story of the gangsters' effect on the imaginations of young Jewish kids living in New York City at the time.

Alan Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew, 1997. Because American Jews have become all too comfortable in their American skins, and they move freely through even the most rarefied precincts of American society, their Jewishness is in jeopardy. Dershowitz sets himself the task of fashioning a Jewish identity that can survive the siren song of assimilation.

Hasia Diner, Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present, 2002. New York University historian Diner presents the first social history of American Jewish women. From the moment they arrived in New Amsterdam (to the displeasure of Peter Stuyvesant, who referred to them as "enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ"), Jewish women have paved their way in American.

Samuel Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, 2000. In the last forty years, American Jews have increasingly found themselves torn apart by their diversity. Samuel G. Freedman examines the forces that have undermined the traditional peaceful coexistence among the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist branches, and secular and unaffiliated Jews. Examining recent headline-making stories as well as less publicized controversies, Freedman discusses the battles that have arisen over intermarriage, standards of conversion, the role of women, the Middle East peace process, and the secular influence on religious life.

Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?, 2002. Friedman presents an investigation and analysis that reads like a good detective story. Focusing on the central books of the Old Testament, he draws upon biblical and archaeological evidence to make a convincing argument for the identities of their authors. In the process he paints a vivid picture of the world of the Bible. The result is a marvel of scholarship that sheds a new and enriching light on our understanding of the Bible as literature, history, and sacred text.

Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, 2004. For millennia, two biblical verses have been understood to condemn sex between men as an act so abhorrent that it is punishable by death. Traditionally Orthodox Jews, believing the scripture to be the word of God, have rejected homosexuality in accordance with this interpretation. In 1999, Rabbi Steven Greenberg challenged this tradition when he became the first Orthodox rabbi ever to openly declare his homosexuality. Wrestling with God and Men is the product of Rabbi Greenberg's ten-year struggle to reconcile his two warring identities.

Samuel C. Heilman, Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy. This book offers a snapshot of Orthodoxy Jewry in the United States, asking how the community has evolved in the years since World War II and where it is headed in the future. Heilman delineates the varieties of Jewish Orthodox groups, focusing in particular on the contest between the proudly parochial, contra-acculturative haredi Orthodoxy and the accomodationist modern Orthodoxy over the future of this religious community. What emerges overall is a picture of an Orthodox Jewry that has gained both in numbers and intensity and that has moved farther to the religious right as it struggles to define itself and to maintain age-old traditions in the midst of modernity, secularization, technological advances, and the pervasiveness of contemporary American culture.

Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, 1969. This classic work presents all of the fundamental laws and traditions pertaining to Jewish death and mourning in modern psychological terms. The book explains the rites and rituals from the moment of death to interment, and discusses all of the first-year mourning observances. A closing chapter deals with the afterlife.

Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, 1998. Meyer traces the origins of the Reform movement to changes in temple services in Hamburg and Berlin in the early 1800s. In the United States, the Reform movement found fertile soil, spreading rapidly after a dozen men in 1825 launched the Reformed Society of Israelites in Charleston, S.C. This dry, scholarly history follows the rabbinical rivalries, ideological polemics and innovations that have marked Reform Judaism.

Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, 2003. On April 27, 1913, the body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was discovered in the basement of Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory. The girl’s murder would be the catalyst for an epic saga that to this day holds a singular place in America’s collective imagination - a saga that ended in 1915 with the lynching of Leo Frank, the Cornell-educated Jew who was convicted of the murder.

Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, 2007. Oren finds continuity in U.S. relations with the Middle East from the early 19th-century war against the Barbary pirates to the Iraq war. As America's power grew, strategic considerations became complicated by the region's religious significance, especially to the Protestant missionaries whose interests drove U.S. policy in the 19th century and who championed a Jewish state in Palestine long before the Zionist movement took up that cause. Americans' romantic fantasies about the Muslim world (as expressed in Mideast-themed movies) have repeatedly run aground on stubborn, squalid realities, most recently in Iraq. Oren's treatment views this history almost entirely through American eyes; the U.S. comes off as usually well intentioned and idealistic, if often confused and confounded by regional complexities.

Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East, 2004. The Yom Kippur War opened the way for what has come to be called "The Middle East Peace Process." In it Israel lost three times as many dead proportionally in 20 days than did the American army in a decade of fighting in Vietnam. As a result it triggered apocalyptic visions in Israel, both hopes and fears in the Arab world, and heated internal conflicts on both sides about the conduct of the war.

Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism, 2004. Sarna’s book chronicles the 350-year history of the Jewish religion in America. Tracing American Judaism from its origins in the colonial era through the present day, Sarna explores the ways in which Judaism adapted in this new context, and discusses how American culture - predominantly Protestant and overwhelmingly capitalist – affected Jewish religion and culture.

Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan, 1993. Based on Kaplan's voluminous private diaries and interviews with Kaplan and those who knew him, as well as unpublished correspondence, manuscript sermons, and published works, Scult not only provides the context and degree of understanding of Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, but also, of an entire century of American Jewish life.

Milton Steinberg, As a Driven Leaf, 1939. This masterpiece of modern fiction tells the gripping tale of renegade Talmudic sage Elisha ben Abuyah's struggle to reconcile his faith with the allure of Hellenistic culture. Set in Roman Palestine, As a Driven Leaf draws readers into the dramatic era of Rabbinic Judaism. Watch the great Talmudic sages at work in the Sanhedrin, eavesdrop on their arguments about theology and Torah, and agonize with them as they contemplate rebellion against an oppressive Roman rule, all while confronting the inevitable conflict between the call of tradition and the glamour of the surrounding culture

David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, 1984. It has long been alleged that officials in the Roosevelt administration knew, in surprising detail, about Adolf Hitler's plans to exterminate all the Jews in Nazi Europe--and that these officials did little to prevent the massacre, refusing asylum to shiploads of Jewish refugees and failing to order the bombing of railway lines leading to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other concentration camps. David S. Wyman examines the evidence, concluding that senior American officials could indeed have saved many thousands, if not millions, of European Jews by intervening earlier. In this controversial work, he suggests, with good cause, that a combination of anti-Semitism and indifference to anything not perceived as being of direct strategic importance to the United States indirectly led to countless deaths.