Jewish Community News

News: May 2008

Jewish literature series addresses sex and love

Beginning this July, the Sunnyvale Public Library will host the next regional Let’s Talk About It:  Jewish Literature Series, sponsored by  a grant  from Nextbook and the American Library Association. The series focus will be “Your Heart’s Desire: Sex and Love in Jewish Literature.” Coordinator of SJSU’s Jewish Studies Program Vicki Harrison will co-lead, along with several other scholars eager to stimulate your minds.
    The series, which meets from 7 to 8:30 PM once a month on Wednesdays, opens July 30 with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. SJSU Professor David Mesher will explore the equal-opportunity offensiveness of Alexander Portnoy, Roth’s most over-sexed character.
    The series will return August 13 to discuss Grace Paley’s The Litte Disturbances of Man with Rabbi Melanie Aron. Paley’s collection of short stories about strong women and the men they shouldn’t fall for captures the humor, pathos, and surprise of love.
  On September 10 Vicki Harrison will lead a discussion of Nobel laureate S.Y.Agnon’s A Simple Story, a 1935 novel set at the turn of the 20th century. The disarming prose style leads us oh, so gradually down the darkening path of its hapless hero.
    Susan Ellenberg will take on A. B. Yehoshua’s The Lover, on October 29. Set during the Yom Kippur war, this tale of a love affair gone awry is powerful for its multiple and clashing viewpoints.
    The series will close with Rabbi Joshua Berkenwald’s discussion on November 19 of Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem. The book’s  heroine is caught somewhere between her witty philosophical queries and the complexities of physical desire.