Howard Jacobson Wins a Pig

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

Howard Jacobson and Zoo Time

Author Howard Jacobson tried to be discreet about what he had eaten for breakfast while being interviewed about winning the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. He’d had bacon and eggs, and the prize was a 10-year-old kunekune sow named Zoo Time, after Jacobson’s winning novel about a writer distracted from writing.

This was not the first time that the Man Booker-winning British writer has been awarded a Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse pig. He received his first one in 2000, and it was named Mighty Walzer, after his winning book that year. Jacobson admitted to having never gone back to visit Mighty Walzer, but promised to develop a closer relationship with Zoo Time.

The Wodehouse prize, which “captures the comic spirit of the Jeeves creator,” was presented to Jacobson at the Telegraph Hay Festival, a six-day arts and literature festival, considered to be Britain’s foremost event of its kind.

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© 2013 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Saving the Canadian Jewish News

This article was first published as “Tech-savvy duo use social media in bid to save Canada’s Jewish weekly”  in The Times of Israel.

Alana Kayfetz and Rachel Singer used their social-media savvy to unearth community support to ‘Save the CJN.’ (photo credit: Courtesy of Rachel Singer)

If you think tech-savvy young people don’t read or care about printed Jewish newspapers, then you haven’t met Alana Kayfetz and Rachel Singer. These two young Toronto women are spearheading a grassroots effort to save the Canadian Jewish News, which is set to cease publication on June 20.

Kayfetz and Singer, both 29 and both CJN subscribers, were devastated to read an April 22 letter to readers from CJN President Donald Carr announcing Canada’s flagship national Jewish newspaper had succumbed to the two biggest challenges plaguing printed media: diminished advertising revenue and the widespread expectation that news and commentary be made available for free. Carr mentioned the hope that the CJN could continue in a digital format, but he was not specific about such plans.

“We made substantial operating changes, which we thought would assist. After careful analysis, we have concluded that they do not,” Carr explained. The decision was made to cease publishing the weekly and to use whatever assets were left to wrap things up properly and pay severance to the approximately 50 employees who had been putting out the paper’s Toronto and Montreal editions.

With the disappearance of the CJN from newsstands and mailboxes, the Canadian Jewish community would be left with only one non-regional paper, B’nai Brith Canada’s The Jewish Tribune, and several local Jewish publications.

Kayfetz and Singer immediately sprung into action, using modern social media tools to try to save the 53-year-old weekly tabloid, which is more often seen in the hands of older people than in those of the women’s mobile device-toting peers. Within hours of launching their “Save the CJN” website, they discovered hundreds of other Millennials felt the same way.

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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.