Unscrolled : 54 Writers and Artists Wrestle With the Torah (9780761178743)

by Bennett, Roger (EDT)

  Damon Lindelof is a writer and producer of silly television shows and films that feature magic islands, space aliens, and lots and lots of time travel. He is also a husband and a father, which is much harder but a thousand times more rewarding. Lindelof is on a continuum of asking questions that can never be definitively resolved, but he has just enough hubris to occasionally try answering them himself. The results have been mixed thus far. He also wrote this bio.

  Sam Lipsyte is the author of five books of fiction. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

  Charles Alexander London writes books for children, teens, and adults. He is the author of the Accidental Adventures and Dog Tags series for children, Proxy for young adults, and for less young adults, One Day the Soldiers Came and Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and on the Web at calexanderlondon.com.

  Adam Mansbach is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the F**k to Sleep, as well as the novels Rage Is Back, The End of the Jews, and Angry Black White Boy. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and the Believer, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

  Ross Martin has won Emmy and Peabody awards as executive vice president at Viacom Media Networks and runs Scratch, a creative SWAT team working across the company. He is the author of a book of poems, The Cop Who Rides Alone, and has taught creative writing at the Rhode Island School of Design, The New School, and Washington University. Ross is a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Viacom Marketing Council, and the advisory board of St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. In 2012, he was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business and a “Media Maven” by Advertising Age.

  Rick Meyerowitz began contributing illustrated articles to the National Lampoon in the first issue published in April 1970. He painted the poster for Animal House, and the magazine’s trademark visual, the Mona Gorilla, which has been called “one of the enduring icons of American humor.” Shortly after 9/11, Rick and Maira Kalman created the most talked-about New Yorker cover of this century, NewYorkistan, about which the New York Times wrote: “When their cover came out, a dark cloud seemed to lift.” Rick would like to point out that the lifting of one lousy cloud hardly puts a dent in the pall hovering over us these days, but he doesn’t want to be a bummer. His most recent book is Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great, published by Abrams in 2010.

  Christopher Noxon is a writer, doodler, and flaming shaygutz who weirdly but strenuously identifies as a cultural Jew, active in Reboot, the Silver Lake Jewish Community, and the East Side Jews. He’s the author of the nonfiction Rejuvenile and a forthcoming novel. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Salon, and the New York Times Magazine.

  Rebecca Odes has coauthored and illustrated four books. She lives in New York.

  Eddy Portnoy is a short, bespectacled Jew with curly hair and a big nose. He teaches Yiddish at Rutgers University and has a Ph.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

  Michelle Quint is an editor at TED Books. Her young adult novel, The Defiant, will be published by McSweeney’s in 2014.

  Josh Radnor is best known for playing Ted Mosby on the Emmy-nominated CBS comedy How I Met Your Mother. He has written and directed two feature films, happythankyoumoreplease and Liberal Arts, both of which premiered to great acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival (the former winning the festival’s 2010 Audience Award). He has many film and TV credits and has appeared on and off Broadway, and his writing has been published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Huffington Post, MovieMaker, Indiewire, and Guilt & Pleasure.

  Caitlin Roper is a senior editor at Wired magazine in San Francisco.

  Todd Rosenberg (also known as “Odd Todd”) produces short-form animated segments for television, Internet, and corporate clients. His cartoons focus on taking economic, scientific, or logistical concepts and making them quick, simple, and fun. His clients include ABC World News, PBS, National Geographic, HP, and American Express. He is currently fighting a ticket for having his dog off-leash in a public park.

  Davy Rothbart is the creator of Found Magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and the author of a book of personal essays, My Heart Is an Idiot, and a collection of stories, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. He writes regularly for GQ and Grantland, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Believer. His documentary film, Medora, about a resilient high-school basketball team in a dwindling town in rural Indiana, premiered in March 2013 at the SXSW Film Festival. Rothbart is also the founder of Washington II Washington, an annual hiking adventure for inner-city kids. He divides his time between Los Angeles and his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Tim Samuels is a documentary maker and broadcaster based in London. For his films for the BBC, he has won three Royal Television Society awards as well as an award for best documentary at the World Television Festival. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and the Guardian.

  David Sax is a writer and journalist from Toronto. He is the author of Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen, a James Beard Award–winning book that was dubbed “an epic journey, akin to The Odyssey but with Rolaids” by one observer, and the upcoming book The Tastemakers, which looks into the business of food trends and the bacon-cupcake–food truck industrial complex. Sax’s writing has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, the New York Times Magazine, Saveur, and other august publications.

  Dana Adam Shapiro was nominated for an Academy Award for his first film, Murderball. His second film, Monogamy, was nominated for a 2010 Independent Spirit Award. He is a former senior editor at Spin magazine, and his debut novel, The Every Boy, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Book Sense notable book. His latest work, a nonfiction book about divorce called You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married), was published by Scribner in 2012.

  Samantha Shapiro is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in a number of other publications, including Wired, Slate, Mother Jones, Glamour, and the Stranger.

  Mireille Silcoff is a columnist with the National Post and a frequent contributor to magazines, including the New York Times Magazine. She is the founding editor of Guilt & Pleasure quarterly and the author of several books on drug and youth culture. She is finishing her first work of fiction. Mireille lives in Montreal.

  Justin Rocket Silverman has covered nightlife, tasers, meditation, politics, and other salacious topics for the New York Post, Wired, Fast Company, and many more publications. He lives in Brooklyn, but in a part far more hip than where the really famous writers are.

  Larry Smith is the founder of SMITH Magazine (smithmag.net), home of the Six-Word Memoir project and book series, including Oy! Only Six? Why Not More? Six-Word Memoirs on Jewish Life. He’s the editor of an anthology, The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure, and a frequent speaker on storytelling at companies, nonprofits, and schools around the world.

  Jill Soloway is a writer and director. She won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award for her first feature, Afternoon Delight, at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Jill is a three-time Emmy nominee for her work writing and producing Six Feet Under. She authored Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, a humorous post-feminist manifesto/memoir. She is a cofounder of the community organization East Side Jews and lives with her husband and two sons in Silver Lake, Los Angeles.

  Joel Stein grew up in Edison, New Jersey, went to Stanford, and in 1997, became a staff writer for Time. In 1998, he began writing his sophomoric humor column that now appears in the magazine every week. He’s also written fourteen cover stories for Time, and has contributed to
the New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, Details, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, Real Simple, Sunset, Playboy, Elle, the Los Angeles Times, and many more magazines, most of which have gone out of business. He has appeared as a talking head on any TV show that has asked him, taught a class in humor writing at Princeton, and wrote a weekly column for the back page of Entertainment Weekly and the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. His first book, Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, was published in 2012. This is the most he’s ever written in third person.

  Michaela Watkins is an actress who has appeared in movies such as Wanderlust, Thanks for Sharing, the upcoming In a World, and Afternoon Delight, and TV shows such as New Girl, Enlightened, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Modern Family, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Children’s Hospital, Parenthood, Grey’s Anatomy, and Californication. She hails from the Los Angeles main stage company the Groundlings, and appeared on SNL in the 2008–2009 season.

  Anonymous is a film critic for one of the last big newspapers in the U.S. that still employs film critics.

  About Reboot

  Reboot was founded eleven years ago as a strange experiment. We wanted to see what would happen if you engaged a creative cast of characters in a no-holds-barred conversation about how identity, community, and meaning are changing in America today.

  The project was launched in the spirit of innovation and adventure. While it had no premeditated outcomes, we had a hunch that if an eclectic, intelligent, inventive network was let loose and given the freedom to discuss the personal questions they harbored about their own identities, they would quickly forge new concepts that would encourage a wider audience to do the same.

  We arrived at that hunch after spending a year interviewing 800 creative types in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles about their own identities and experiences. These frank and honest conversations uncovered a large, young Jewish audience who expressed an eagerness to explore questions about history, theology, ritual, culture, and philosophy, yet professed slightly less interest in the universe of traditional Jewish organizations then in existence, most of which had been established before the 1940s when issues of survival and fighting anti-Semitism predominated.

  Where others had suggested this widespread lack of interest was just an anxiety-inducing symptom of assimilation, we sensed it could be a springboard for reclamation. The United States had changed radically in the postwar period, and while America’s Jews had been transformed along with it—a large segment moving en masse from the city to the suburbs, from tradition to modernity—the organizations had not always kept pace. Reboot was formed to experiment with closing that gap by catalyzing forms of Jewish life that would encourage participants to define identity, community, and meaning self-confidently, on their own terms.

  In the course of the last decade, Reboot has spawned over 100 projects, including digital projects like 10Q (doyou10q.com), enabling thousands to reflect on their year, prior to Yom Kippur; Sabbath Manifesto (nationaldayofunplugging.com), promoting the notion of a technology-free Shabbat; the Idelsohn Society (idelsohnsociety.com), exploring postwar history by taking re-releases of lost Jewish vinyl onto the Billboard chart; and Sukkah City (sukkahcity.com), a global architectural design contest building a dozen avant-garde sukkot (the temporary huts built for the festival of Sukkot) in the heart of Union Square, New York City.

  For more on this Unscrolled project go to unscrolled.org and @unscrolled.

  REBOOT WOULD LIKE TO THANK . . .

  Every project that Reboot has birthed is a testament to the passion, energy, and collective curiosity of the Reboot network, an always remarkable, occasionally unexpected cast of characters willing to run through walls in order to bring a production line of ideas into life. The network is too sprawling to mention name by name, but we are especially indebted to Reboot’s board: Scott Belsky, Roger Bennett, Greg Clayman, Ben Elowitz, Kate Frucher, Jeremy Goldberg, Julie Hermelin, Courtney Holt, David Katznelson, Samantha Kurtzman-Counter, Rachel Levin, Steven Rubenstein, Jill Soloway, and Anne Wojcicki. We are especially grateful to those who have served as Reboot’s chair over the years: the mighty Erin Potts, the strategic Scott Belsky, and the dynamic, inimitable David Katznelson. Special thanks also to those who have given their time to work as Reboot’s staff over the years, especially Amelia Klein, Shane Hankins, Robin Kramer, Maria Arsenieva, Melissa Buscemi, Lisa Grissom, Dina Mann, and Tanya Schevitz.

  Reboot is also proud and honored to have partnered with more than 500 community organizations around the world. Yet none of our projects would have come to life without the encouragement and support of the many foundations, individual donors, friends, colleagues, and partners that have supported Reboot financially over the years. As a 501(c)3 non-profit, we know that investing in an experiment demands real courage, and we are grateful to each and every one of you for believing in us. We are ever indebted to the late Andrea Bronfman, whose vision Reboot made manifest.

  We are also grateful to Rabbi Barry Schwartz and the Jewish Publication Society for their support with this project. We used their brilliant Torah, The Jewish Bible: Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures—The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text, as our core text, and encourage all those who intend to follow the portions week to week to do the same. JPS is currently raising money to create a digital version of their translation. Please support them.

  ROGER BENNETT WOULD LIKE TO THANK . . .

  The concept that became Unscrolled came from the mind of Damon Lindelof. It was his idea that led to the creation of this book, and we are grateful to the fifty-four writers who agreed to jump into the project with such abandon. Working with you all over the past two years has been a delight, though it has also made me realize that Moses simply had the commandments handed to him for a reason. We are also indebted to Adam Walden who came up with the name for this tome.

  It has taken a collective as large as a biblical tribe to bring this book to life. Thanks to my agent, Elyse Cheney, and her team. I am grateful to Kate Lee for introducing me to Suzie Bolotin, who has edited this book. Suzie, I cannot tell you how much I adore being in your company. When I am with you I am overcome by a sadly ephemeral belief that every global problem can be solved and overcome. Thanks also to the creative and patient design duo of Raquel Jaramillo and Jean-Marc Troadec, as well as Selina Meere, Jessica Wiener, Courtney Greenhalgh, Beth Levy, Samantha O’Brien, Barbara Peragine, Jarrod Dyer, the entire sales and marketing team, and everyone at Workman.

  On the Reboot front, I am grateful to Harrison Owen, whose Open Space methodology is at the core of the Reboot project. I am also indebted to the magical Amichai Lau-Lavie for his textual and educational brilliance. A gent who possesses the most eclectic mix of attributes I have ever encountered in one human being, he patiently worked with many of the writers as they thought through their contributions. (For more on Amichai and his work go to www.amichai.me.)

  Rachel Levin has long been the most insightful, patient, and determined professional partner I could have had. She has been blessed with every skill set that I lack, including style, grace, wisdom, and an ability to bring the best out of everyone she encounters.

  I am also utterly indebted to Dana Ferine, who has long demonstrated an unparalleled ability to work with boundless passion on some of the most arcane projects in America.

  Finally, love to my family—the Bennetts and the Krolls. As someone who was expelled from Hebrew school when my father was president, I know nothing will ever erase the shame I brought to the family name. I hope this project goes some way to repairing the damage. Massive love to the kids I have “begat:” Samson, Ber, Zion, and Oz; and most of all, to my wife, Vanessa. You are all the proof I need to know that behind every biblical patriarch, there is a biblical matriarch acting as the puppet master.

  twitter: @rogbennett

  Copyright © 2013 by Roger Bennett

  All rights reserved. No portion
of this book may be reproduced—mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying—without written permission of the publisher. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  eISBN 978-0-7611-7874-3

  Cover design by Raquel Jaramillo and Jean-Marc Troadec

  Translation of Hebrew courtesy of the JPS Hebrew–English Tanakh (1999)

  Photo credits: p. 124 (from left to right), iStockphoto: Antagain, Digoarpi, lauriek; pp. 209 and 210, photos courtesy of Jamie Glassman; p. 217, photo courtesy of Amichai Lau-Lavie; p. 281, photos courtesy of Larry Smith; pp. 350 and 351, photos courtesy of Bonni Benrubi Gallery; and p. 358, Missed Connections (2011) © Sophie Blackall. Commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design.

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