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:  

March 6, 2019 - 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm - "PUMPKIN FLOWERS: An Israeli Soldier's Story" by Matti Friedman; Length: 267 pages

From an award-winning Canadian-Israeli writer comes the true story of a band of young soldiers, the author among them, charged with holding one remote outpost in Lebanon, a task that changed them forever and foreshadowed today's unwinnable conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
It was small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that continue to emanate worldwide today. The hill was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for "casualties." Friedman's visceral narrative recreates harrowing wartime experiences in a work that is part front lines memoir, part journalistic reporting, part military history. The years in question were pivotal ones, and not just for Israel. They saw the perfection of a type of warfare that would eventually be exported to Afghanistan and Iraq. The new twenty-first century war is one in which there is never any clear victor, and not enough lives are lost to rally the public against it. Eventually Israel would come to realize that theirs was a losing proposition and pull out. But, of course, by then these soldiers--those who had survived--and the country had been wounded in ways large and small. Raw, powerful, beautifully rendered, the book will take its place among classic war stories such as those by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Vasily Grossman. Pumpkinflowers is an unflinching look, like the works of Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger, at the way we conduct war today.

April 3, 2019 - 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm

May 1, 2019 - 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm

June 5, 2019 - 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm