UJA-JCC Class on Korach

This Thursday, June 29th, at noon, I will be teaching a class on Korach, the Torah portion of the week, at the UJA-JCC of Greenwich located at 1 Holly Hill Lane in Greenwich, Connecticut.  Whenever I teach at the UJA-JCC (I’ve been doing it for years) I always start the class with a book recommendation.  The books have to be Jewish themed and of high quality.  For example,  I’ve recommended Never Alone by Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, Witness: Lessons From Eli Wiesel’s Classroom by Ari Burger, and Days of Awe, edited by S.Y. Agnon.

This Thursday I will present Jim’s and my book, The Academy Of Smoke And Mirrors: A Boarding School On The Brink.  

I know, I know that it sounds like I’m comparing our work with writers like those.  But what I’m saying is that The Academy of Smoke And Mirrors meets the two criteria I have used to select those other books.

First, it is Jewish-themed.  How could a book about a Jewish boarding school in rural Georgia not be, especially when almost all of its characters are Jewish?  And its pages are full of allusions to Jewish books and ideas.

As for quality, The Academy Of Smoke And Mirrors will make you smile and laugh.  If it does, and I am confident it will, then it will have succeeded on its own terms. 

Another thought on quality: there are two masterpieces of comic fiction that served as ideals for Jim and I to strive towards while we wrote the novel.  One is Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, and the other is House Of God, by Samuel Shem. Both portray the zany interior worlds of seemingly high-functioning institutions (the US Army and Beth Israel Hospital, respectively.)   While the real life inspiration for our fictional Hampton Acres Hebrew Academy lacked the prominence of those two institutions, it yields nothing to them in terms of craziness.

You can see for yourself by buying and reading The Academy Of Smoke And Mirrors.  And you can get a sense of the novel’s engaging voice by listening to me read its opening page, which I plan to do at the Thursday class.

And while we are on the subject of books, the most influential of my life is, hands down, the Hebrew Bible.  The story of Korach is a sad but timeless tale about the struggle for power between demagoguery and rightful authority.  Doesn’t that sound familiar?

If you’d like to come to the class, please call the UJJ-JCC to arrange it.  I will post the recording as soon as it is available.