Dear Reader,

If Judaism teaches us anything, it teaches us how to mourn. As individuals, we experience the traditional rituals of burial and mourning (Shiva and Kaddish, among others), which are complex and remarkably effective means for dealing with grief. As a community, history has unfortunately given us too many opportunities to practice and refine our mourning rituals. 

August 7^th is Tisha B'Av, the annual holiday memorializing the destruction of our temples in Jerusalem as well as a series of tragedies said to have fallen on that day throughout our history. While the nature of Biblical tragedies cannot necessarily be compared to modern Jewish suffering, Tisha B'Av and the nine days leading up to it offer us an opportunity to reflect on dimensions of Jewish life we might otherwise hope to avoid: the tragic, the difficult, and the lost. 

The Mourner's Kaddish has inspired a broad range of Jewish literature, including Allen Ginsburg's poem, Leon Wieseltier's brilliant and affecting memoir, and Zadie Smith's recent comic novel, The Autograph Man.  In his new book, Living a Year of Kaddish, Ari Goldman, former religion reporter for the New York Times and author of The Search for God at Harvard, touchingly describes the experience of mourning for his father. 

Living after the Holocaust, we cannot forget that anti-Semitism is ultimately the cause of so much of the destruction that we mourn as a community. Some prominent Jews are arguing the anti-Semitism is currently on the rise and deserves more attention than we are giving it.  Phyllis Chesler, a radical feminist, for example, encountered so much anti-Semitism in academic circles that she felt compelled to document it in a new book; read our interview with her.  On the other hand, super-sensitivity to anti-Semitism can be troublesome, too: as, perhaps, in the case of trying to understand the always fascinating and usually infuriating H. L. Mencken. 

Of course, explaining hatred and tragedy to children presents its own challenges. If you're a parent, you'll want to know about several recently released children's books that introduce the topic of the Holocaust to young readers. 

And, to end on a more positive note, Tisha B'Av—like other Jewish rituals of mourning—is ultimately a powerfully affirming holiday because it connects us with our history and with the hundreds of generations of Jews that have come before us. In an excerpt from a recent book of "Stories of Discovery, Connection, and Joy," one Jew describes the overwhelming emotion of standing at the Western Wall—the last physical remnant of the temple—on Tisha B'Av. 

I hope these features will enrich your experience of Tisha B'Av this year. Please be in touch if you have any suggestions for the site or if there's anything you'd like to see.

Thanks for reading,

Josh Lambert

Editor, JBooks.com