Best Contemporary Jewish Writing Book

	Introduction: Jewish Writing and Healing the World
	To Jewishness	3
	The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity	8
	Poems: Reversion and What Kind of Times Are These	15
	Justify My Love	17
	Ten Ways to Recognize a Sephardic 'Jew-ess'	29
	Redemption on East Tremont: The kindness of Christians and a seder's matzah helps the daughter of Mendel Beilis fix the old fears	36
	News About Jews	40
	Gay and Orthodox	42
	Slipping the Punch	55
	The Night Game	70
	From The Roots of a Public Life	73
	From And What Is My Lifespan?	79
	Stories: Grandmother Eve, Consecrating the Ordinary, Blessing, and The Reward	80
	The Legacy: A Parable About History and Bobe-mayses, Barszcz, and Borscht and the Future of the Jewish Past	86
	Nishmat	95
	Starting on My Spiritual Path	97
	On Renewing God	103
	Eternity Utters a Day	113
	A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age	115
	Is God in Trees?	127
	The Emergence of Eco-Judaism	134
	A Theology of Illness and Healing	145
	Death and What's Next	150
	Eros and the Ninth of Av	152
	From the Book of Jewish Values	155
	Poems: Yom Kippur Sonnet and Science Psalm	162
	From And Peace and Justice Shall Kiss	169
	From Imagining the Birth of a Nation	186
	From the Red Tent	193
	From The Bible and You, the Bible and You and Other Midrashim	199
	Aaron's God - and Ours: A Yom Kippur Reflection	200
	Our (Meaning Women's ) Book-of-Esther Problem	205
	Cattle Car Complex	213
	Force Fields	221
	The Sanctuary	228
	The Trivialization of Tragedy	230
	Hereditary Victimhood: The Holocaust's Life a Ghost	241
	The Meaning of the Holocaust: Social Alienation and the Infliction of Human Suffering	252
	The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past	265
	Land for What?	281
	Occupation and Antisemitism	284
	A Novelist's Optimism: Reclaiming the Jewish Tradition	297
	From Booking Passage	300
	Poems: From In My Life, On My Life; Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?; and The Jewish Time Bomb	323
	Hovering at a Low Altitude	326
	Making Judaism Cool	331
	Old Man	339
	Poems: When You Come to Sleep with Me, Come Like My Father and Hebrew	342
	Esther and Yochanan	346
	The Twenty-seventh Man	352
	Against Logic	367
	The Healing Power of Jewish Stories	371
	The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer	375
	Bellow at 85, Roth at 67	392
	Jewish Writing and the Spiritual Journey: A Speculative Journey	409
	The One Hundred Best Contemporary Jewish Books	417
	The Editor	423
	The Contributors	425
	Credits	431