JEWels

Know about the book -

JEWels is written by Steve Zeitlin and published by U of Nebraska Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0827619006 (ISBN 10) and 9780827619005 (ISBN 13).

JEWels is the first of its kind: the living tradition of Jewish stories and jokes transformed into poems, recording and reflecting Jewish experience from ancient times through the present day. In this novel hybrid--jokes and stories boiled down to their essence in short poems--Jewish witticism is preserved side by side with evocative storytelling and deepened with running commentary and questions for discussion. Illuminated here are jewels from journeys, from the Old Country, from Torah, shaped by the Holocaust, in glimpses of Jewish American lives, in Jewish foods, in conversations with God, and on the meaning of life. Jewish comedians (Lenny Bruce, Jackie Mason) appear alongside writers and musicians (Elie Wiesel, Sholem Aleichem, Itzhak Perlman) and Hasidic rabbis (the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov), yet most of the tellers are ordinary Jews. In this cacophony of ongoing dialogue, storytellers, rabbis, poets, and scholars chime in with interpretations, quips, and related stories and life experiences. In JEWels each of us can see our own reflection.