Jewish-American Heritage Month

It's Jewish-American Heritage Month and we are celebrating with some great books on display and available to check out at the Whole Earth Library at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability. Topping the list we have Susan Chevlowe's "The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography. Susan Chevlowe is an Assistant Curator at The Jewish Museum in New York. Her project focuses visually on what it means to be Jewish in the United States in the early 21st Century. In addition, we have selected works by noted Jewish-American writers including Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Studs Terkel, Howard Zinn, Jonathan Rosen, Bruce Stutz and Victor Navasky. From science to politics to history to birding to environmentalism and journalism, these writers have added indelibly to quilt of the American landscape.

Carl Sagan, the noted astrophysicist from Cornell University now sadly departed to be one with the cosmos, wrote a number of books that be termed more philosophical than scientific. The selection we have chosen for this month is one such work. Entitled "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are," this work, co-written with his wife Ann Druyan, explores what it means to be human and our place in the universe.

Our second selection speaks to the very important role that Jewish-American progressive thinkers have played in the development of American liberalism though the work we have highlighted is also more of a reflective philosophical nature. Louis "Studs" Terkel, who died in 2008, was a prolific writer and a life-long social activist. He won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for for General Non-Fiction for "The Good War." His "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" was published in 2001 and was the last book he wrote. It is more auto-biographical and grapples with question of death, faith and identity.

Howard Zinn requires no introduction. He is simply the People's Historian. The Whole Earth Library boasts most of his works and the one we have chosen is "Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian, "an anthology and the seventh volume of his Radical Sixties series. The series of essays cover an array of topics that remain relevant to this today. For example, there is an essay How Free is Higher Education and another on Just and Unjust Wars.

Jonathan Rosen and Bruce Stutz are both Jewish-American naturalists and important contributors to the environmental movement. Rosen's book. "The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature," looks at the world from the perspective of a birder, one whose hobby is watching birds. The reality is that we are all birders. Birds are for the most part the only wildlife we see day in and day out. A mix of memoir, natural history and philosophy make this book a joy to read. "Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season" by Bruce Stutz is journal of an unfolding Spring. Stutz followed the blossoming of nature writing about  its retreat from the cold icy death of winter to its annual rebirth. It's the perfect book for Springtime reading in the Sun. A caveat, the calendar say Spring, a step outside might disprove such a notion.

"A Matter of Opinion" by Victor Navasky is the last book celebrating the contributions of Jewish-Americans to our literary landscape. An editor,  educator and journalist, Navasky won the National Book Prize in 1982 but is perhaps best known for his tenure at The New York Times Sunday Magazine and then at The Nation. In "A Matter of Opinion," Navasky offers a full-throated argument on the necessity of a vibrant and diverse press for a healthy democracy. It is the variety of opinion and tolerance for the views of others that embolden Americans to undertake an expansion of democratic life. As media consolidation has taken hold, we have lost that diversity of opinion undercutting an important part of civic discourse and threatening our democratic traditions.