Ohr Kodesh Book Club

The Ohr Kodesh Book Club meets monthly on the first Wednesday of each month at 12:00 noon at Ohr Kodesh (in the Salzberg Family Library).

Books selections are chosen by the club's members, alternating fiction and non-fiction every other month, and are generally limited to books no longer than 400 pages in length. New participants will be welcomed!

Feel free to bring a dairy or parve lunch to the meeting. Coffee will be provided.

For further information, contact Book Club Coordinator Barry Cantor at 301-933-3776 or barcando [at] gmail [dot] com.

Future dates & book selections:  

September 4, 2019 - 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

“Brilliant. . . . Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason.” —William Easterly, Wall Street Journal

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

NOTE: The book club will not meet in October

November 6, 2019 - 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. 
 
When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of newly discovered seventeenth-century Jewish documents, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents' scribe, the elusive "Aleph."
  
Electrifying and ambitious, The Weight of Ink is about women separated by centuries—and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind.

DECEMBER 4, 2019 - 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm

The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn

by Lucette Lagnado

We had previously read and enjoyed her book, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) and since she recently died in July 2019 the members who were at the August meeting felt this would be an appropriate tribute.

For January 8, 2020

we are considering a book by Natalia Ginsberg based on availability in Library and online. Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) is today recognized as one of the foremost woman writers to emerge from twentieth-century Italy.