This month, the Book Circle will read and discuss The Hebrew Teacher by Maya Arad, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation. The group will meet on Thursday, June 19, at 3 p.m., in the community room of the shul. Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States seek to overcome crises in their lives. In three novellas, the celebrated Israeli writer Maya Arad probes the [...]

The Book Circle will meet on Thursday, May 15, at 3 p.m., in the community room at the shul, where the group will talk about Goyhood, a debut novel by Reuven Fenton. Here, a devoutly Orthodox man discovers in middle age that he is not, in fact, Jewish. He is, however, a Talmud scholar, married into one of the greatest rabbinical families in the world. Now what? Meyer Belkin grapples with a God he [...]

The Book Circle will meet on Wednesday, April 30, at 3 p.m., in the community room at the shul, where the group will talk about The Safekeep, by Yael Van Der Wouden, in whose debut novel it is learned that a house and its people are not what they seem. It is a dark tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the [...]

The Book Circle will meet on Thursday, March. 20, at 3 p.m., in the community room at the shul, to talk about Paper Bullets by Jeffrey H. Jackson, a Nazi resistance story by an unlikely pair of heroines. Paper Bullets tells the story of two French women who drew on their skills as artists to write and distribute “paper bullets” —  wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive dialogues to demoralize Nazi [...]

The Book Circle will meet on Thursday, Feb. 20, at 3 p.m. to talk about The World and All That It Contains by Aleksandar Hemon. Opening in Sarajevo as WWI is triggered, this globe-trotting century-spanning novel mingles fact with fiction, taking readers on a journey through years and lives that span continents. Find here falling empires, storied cities, wars galore, loves, losses, dreams, delusions, allusions, and the occasional rude joke. According to book reviewer [...]

The Book Circle will meet on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, at 3:30 p.m., on Zoom to discuss Jean Strouse’s A Family Romance.           The story captures the drama, mystery and intrigue surrounding John Singer Sargent’s 12 portraits of the Wertheimer family. Asher Wertheimer, an eminent London art dealer bequeathed the portraits to the National Gallery in London, a controversial gift that would see a family of Jews appearing alongside the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats painted by [...]

The Book Circle will meet on Wednesday, Dec. 18, at 3 p.m., in the shul’s community room to discuss Joshua Cohen’s novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.           In this story, Ruben Blum is co-opted onto a college’s hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar. Benzion Netanyahu shows up. The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive [...]