The Newsletter of Fig Tree Books LLC
May, 2020: Issue #6
Fredric D. Price, Founder & Publisher
OUR MISSION: Fig Tree Lit is the Newsletter of Fig Tree Books LLC. Like our books, we aim to cover the dynamic American Jewish experience.

Tell us what you think; we're eager to hear what you have to say at  Info@FigTreeBooks.net .
FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE

OLDIES BUT GOODIES: Meyer Levin's Compulsion

JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES: In ‘ Broken Bird ,’ novice filmmaker Rachel Harrison Gordon returns to her family synagogue to capture liminal time as a rare black Jewish bat mitzvah

MY JEWISH YEAR: Lag B'Omer by Abigail Pogrebin

Essay: The Hypocrisy of the BDS Movement

COMMENTARY: 2020 ' midrash ' on last month's Q&A by Bill Robbins

OUT NOW: Thane Rosenbaum's SAVING FREE SPEECH ... with a Foreword by Bret Stephens, award-winning columnist for The New York Times
Listen to and Watch interviews and discussions with Thane Rosenbaum along with Rabbi Sam Cohon, Scott Jones, Leonard Lopate, Floyd Abrams, Nadine Strossen, and Bret Stephens. The don't always agree, but the conversations are stimulating, provocative, and respectful.
OLDIES BUT GOODIES! A re-issuance of the best-selling crime novel of the last century with a Foreword by famous attorney and author Marcia Clark.
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Order Compulsion Now!
Review of Compulsion by Jerome Chanes :

“ Why are we interested in a novel that was written sixty years ago?  More—why are we interested in a crime that was committed 90 years ago?  When I was growing up in New York in the 1950s, there was no one who did not know “Leopold and Loeb”—and there was none who did not know “Compulsion,” Meyer Levin’s  roman à clef  of the case. Levin’s 1956 novel, now reissued with an introduction by the author’s son Gabriel Levin, is a fictional account of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb’s horrible and horrifying murder of a fourteen-year-old boy. Levin’s perpetrators are named Judd Steiner and Artie Straus, but the story sticks closely to the actual facts of the 1924 crime."  
"Nothing ever ends, and if we retrace every link in causation, it seems there is nowhere a beginning. But there was a day on which this story began to be known to the world. On that day Judd Steiner, slipping into class late, took a back seat for McKinnon’s lecture in the development of law. Judd sat alone in the rear row, raised a step above the others, and this elevation fitted his inward sense of being beyond all of them.
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JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES: We're Not All The Same
" Birdie is a biracial girl raised by her white Jewish mother. In ' Broken Bird ,' ... the Torah portion Birdie chants in Rachel Harrison Gordon’s novice short film deals with keeping commitments – a fraught issue triggered by a distant relationship with her black father.

'Broken Bird,' which had its world premiere on February 23 at the recently finished Berlin International Film Festival, is a personal film about a lonely biracial girl. In a time of rising anti-Semitism and racism in Germany, the film’s embrace of racial differences carries an important political message. "

Essay: The Hypocrisy of the BDS Movement
Enemies of Jewish state briefly suspend anti-Semitism if Israel can save their lives.
COMMENTARY: 2020 ' midrash ' on last month's Q&A by Bill Robbins
As I read the April edition of Fig Tree Lit, my immediate attention was drawn to Robert Friedman’s Q & A (probably because, as I sat eating matzah rather than my usual Sunday bagel, it was only natural to think about Passover). Starting with his premise that the text we read is the Haggadah, which means telling, and his reference to relating a story and a two-way street, I would like to offer commentary on his Q & A to relate it specifically to this time of coronavirus.
MY JEWISH YEAR:
Lag B'Omer, by Abigail Pogrebin

" This is the holiday that could finally stump me. I’ve barely heard
of the Omer, other than the phrase “Counting the Omer,” though
I never knew what we were counting. Now I see the Omer is the forty-nine days from the second day of Passover to the eve of Shavuot (which is the holiday that marks the giving of the Torah) .”