Thank You, Angelina Jolie

This piece was first published on The Sisterhood blog at the Forward.

The personal piece actress Angelina Jolie published today in the New York Times should put to rest any question as to her seriousness. Say what they will about her in the tabloids, it is clear from her sharing that she has recently undergone a preventative double mastectomy that she is a woman of conviction.

Convinced that she has a better chance of living a long life without her natural breasts (she has had a series of three surgeries, the last being reconstruction with implants), Jolie has gone where most, if not all, other Hollywood actresses would not. I guess it’s hardly surprising given that she, as UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, has already readily traveled to dangerous places.

Jolie carries the BRCA1 gene mutation, common among Ashkenazi women. Her mother also died of cancer at age 56. And so Jolie, only 37, decided to not wait to see if she would eventually develop breast cancer herself. She wrote that doctors originally told her she has an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 50% risk of ovarian cancer. “My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87% to under 5%. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”

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© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

A Jewish Harriet Potter

This article was first published in The Times of Israel.

Author Ari Goelman is a big fan of Jewish summer camp and fantasy fiction. (Courtesy. Photo credit: John Goldsmith Photography)

Move over, Harry Potter at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, and make way for Dahlia Sherman at Camp Arava.Scholastic, Inc., the publisher that brought us the biggest-ever phenomenon in children’s literature, has released a mystical fantasy novel for preteen readers set at a Jewish sleep-away summer camp in rural Pennsylvania.

Before long, terms like Kabbalah, golem and gematria will be rolling off kids’ tongues as easily as dementor, horcrux and arithmancy.

“The Path of Names,” by first-time novelist Ari Goelman, has 13-year-old aspiring magician Dahlia arriving at Arava reluctantly, her parents having insisted she attend a session at the camp — where her older brother Tom is a counselor and she’ll meet other Jewish kids — before going to magic camp later in the summer.

As she settles in to her bunk, the aloof and skeptical Dahlia sees two little girls appearing to walk through a wall. She assumes it must be some kind of trick, but soon things get weirder when she dreams about a Hasidic Yeshiva student named David Schank in 1940s New York who has discovered the 72^nd name of God. The intelligent and inquisitive Dahlia uses bits of information she picks up from the camp’s flaky Kabbalah club instructor and a mysterious old book to figure out she is being possessed by the spirit of this dead Yeshiva bocher with the same initials as hers.

Schank has enlisted Dahlia to save the ghostly little girls and prevent the leader of an evil organization called “The Illuminated Ones” from learning the mystical name and using it to gain eternal life and the power to uncover all of life’s secrets.

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© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

‘Go The F**k To Sleep’: The Movie

This post first appeared on The Arty Semite blog at the Forward.

First there was the viral leaked PDF. Then there was the book. Then there was the audio book narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. And now there’s the movie.

America can’t seem to get enough of Adam Mansbach’s “Go the F**k to Sleep,” the picture book for adults that took the country by storm when it was published in 2011.

Deadline.com reports that husband-wife writing team Ken Marino and Erica Oyama Marino have been hired by Fox 2000 to adapt the book, which was illustrated by Ricardo Cortes, for the screen.

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© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.