The Path of Names

A New Novel Brings Ghosts, Geeks, and Golems to Sleepover Camp

First-time novelist Ari Goelman faces tough questions from an 11-year-old fantasy fiction aficionado and summer-camp devotee
In his debut novel, The Path of Names, Vancouver-based writer Ari Goelman conjures Dahlia, an intrepid 13-year-old who we meet as she begrudgingly attends her first summer at Camp Arava, the Jewish overnight camp where her brother is a beloved counselor. Ever interested in figuring out sleights of hand, she’d rather spend her time learning magic. Then strange things start to happen. Dahlia spots two apparitions—little girls dressed for the 1940s who beckon to her in her bunk. Suddenly she has memories and dreams of yeshiva life and understands Hebrew words she has never before known. Unruffled by the increasingly intense fantastical phenomena around her, Dahlia forges on, keen to figure out what’s happening to her and to the sweet ghosts who keep reappearing.

Ari Goelman talks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the fantasy novels that accompanied his childhood, how he came up with the idea for Dahlia and her story, and why he set the action at a Jewish overnight camp. Joining the conversation is Josie Ingall, herself a lover of fantasy fiction, who, at 11 years old, fits right in to Goelman’s target demographic and has some questions of her own to put to the author. (Josie is also the daughter of Tablet Magazine columnist Marjorie Ingall.)

Though the school year is ending, there’s no reason for you or your child to stop reading! Enter our sweepstakes to be one of 10 lucky people selected at random to win a copy of The Path of Names.

Vox Tablet is Tablet Magazine's Weekly Podcast  

Shiva: The Video Game

If we had a shekel for every time we've paid a shiva call and wanted to make a game of it…we'd be broke. But that hasn't been Dave Gilbert's experience.

Gilbert's brainchild, "The Shivah," is a murder mystery game in which the user follows a rabbi as he uncovers the truth behind a recent and generous donation to his ailing synagogue. What starts as a shiva call to the widow of a murdered man turns into a full-blown investigation.

Reviews of this award-winning game have been mixed but generally positive. The Onion's A.V. Club, for example, noted that the game is short, but "sticks with its players—not for its touchy puzzles, nor for its 'retro' graphics, which hearken back to the earliest adventure games, but for its content."

If nothing else, traveling through Manhattan as a rabbi and uncovering multiple murders—at one point with the opportunity to engage in a sword fight—is a solid break from work. Not to mention from sitting shiva.

American teens' materialism makes sense

By Dale McFeatters


We are as willing as anybody to step on the fingers of younger generations trying to climb the ladder of success behind us and to believe that -- with their different tastes in dress, music and jargon -- they represent a pause in evolutionary progress.

But sometimes one feels called on to defend the unfairly maligned.

Two psychology professors -- Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Tim Kasser of Knox College in Illinois -- reviewed results from a national survey and write this month in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that today's young adults want nice things but are less willing than their predecessors to work hard for them.

And how does this make them different from most other Americans?

"Compared to previous generations," Twenge writes, "recent high school graduates are more likely to want lots of money and nice things, but less likely to say they're willing to work hard to earn them."

Twenge, author of the book "Generation Me," went on, "That type of 'fantasy gap' is consistent with other studies showing a generational increase in narcissism and entitlement."

This would seem more of an economic than a social problem. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of U.S. economic activity, largely driven by materialism. If our young people think a new car, bigger TV and the latest in handheld devices are not worth the extra effort, we're in economic trouble.
The sense of narcissism and entitlement sounds like standard adolescence. Real life will grinds it out of youths in a process called maturity.

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Survivors, Bronx Girls Connect At Senior Home

The first group gasp came when Marion Sacher told about her childhood in the Third Reich.

Sacher, a refugee from Nazi Germany, is a resident of the Kittay House independent living seniors apartment building in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. She and a Holocaust survivor who lives there were talking about their wartime experiences one morning last week in the building’s auditorium. In the seats around them were 20 fifth graders, all girls, from PS 75X public school in the South Bronx and a handful of school staff and Kittay House residents.

Naomi Chiel, Jewish program coordinator at Kittay House, asked Sacher how old she was when the Nazi restrictions first affected her life.

“I was 10 years old,” Sacher answered.

All the girls gasped. Sacher was their age when the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws kept her and her fellow German Jews from sitting on public benches, playing in public parks or doing the things that other Germans were able to do.

The girls from PS 75X, a 40-minute school bus ride away from Kittay House, are all 10, 11 or 12 years old. They already knew the outlines of Sacher’s former life in Europe, and of Czechoslovakia-born Pearl Brown’s — their stories were the subject of a Yom HaShoah story, “Terror and Tears,” in the Daily News a few weeks ago.

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Tomer Hen - Israel's 19-year-old Mobile Marketing Guru

‘My success is just having the courage to do things,’ says Tomer Hen, who employs 13 people (all older than himself) in his global consultancy.

 

“Do Israelis have cell phones?” Teens in Ohio asked this question of Tomer Hen, when he was visiting the United States as a junior ambassador during high school. They sure asked the right guy.

Tomer, now 19, is one of the world’s foremost experts in exploiting the marketing potential of mobile devices. His multimillion-dollar Tomer Hen Mobile Marketing Consulting grew out of playing around with his smartphone during 10th grade in Netanya.

He and his friends were using their phones to look up train schedules and find the nearest pizza shop — but unlike on the Internet, search results rarely came along with advertisements.

“I saw that more and more people were using their phones to access products and services, but there weren't many ads on smartphones,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “This was an untapped market and the prices were extremely cheap.”

Tomer, already an experienced eBay trader at 13, used NIS 12,000 of his bar mitzvah gift money to join an affiliate network (an intermediary between publishers and merchants) and place mobile ads for insurance companies, dating sites and hotel booking sites.

“I lost a lot of money, but I learned a lot. I learned about the market in Azerbaijan, in Germany — all over the world,” he says. “Once I realized the right way to do it, what the audience is looking for, I started making money.”

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What Is Love?

Many believe love is a sensation that magically generates when Mr. or Ms. Right appears. No wonder so many people are single.

A few years ago, I spoke to a group of high-schoolers about the Jewish idea of love.

"Someone define love," I said.

No response.

"Doesn't anyone want to try?" I asked.

Still no response.

"Tell you what: I'll define it, and you raise your hands if you agree. Okay?"

Nods.

"Okay. Love is that feeling you get when you meet the right person."

Every hand went up. And I thought, Oy.

This is how many people approach a relationship. Consciously or unconsciously, they believe love is a sensation (based on physical and emotional attraction) that magically, spontaneously generates when Mr. or Ms. Right appears. And just as easily, it can spontaneously degenerate when the magic "just isn't there" anymore. You fall in love, and you can fall out of it.

The key word is passivity. Erich Fromm, in his famous treatise "The Art of Loving," noted the sad consequence of this misconception: "There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love." (That was back in 1956 ― chances are he'd be even more pessimistic today.)

So what is love ― real, lasting love?

Love is the attachment that results from deeply appreciating another's goodness.

The word "goodness" may surprise you. After all, most love stories don't feature a couple enraptured with each other's ethics. ("I'm captivated by your values!" he told her passionately. "And I've never met a man with such morals!" she cooed.) But in her study of real-life successful marriages (The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts), Judith Wallerstein reports that "the value these couples placed on the partner's moral qualities was an unexpected finding."

To the Jewish mind, it isn't unexpected at all. What we value most in ourselves, we value most in others. God created us to see ourselves as good (hence our need to either rationalize or regret our wrongdoings). So, too, we seek goodness in others. Nice looks, an engaging personality, intelligence, and talent (all of which count for something) may attract you, but goodness is what moves you to love.

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The Coalition of Jewish Teens Forms to Take a Stand Against Bullying

The Coalition of Jewish Teens, or CJT, was created with the purpose of bringing together Jewish teens from all different youth movements, including BBYO, NCSY, NFTY, USY and Young Judaea. As representatives of the major Jewish youth movements, we are united in taking a stand against bullying everywhere. While each one of us may belong to a different Jewish youth movement, we are connected by our passion and desire to fulfill tikkun olam, our responsibility to repair the world. Together we must create a more inclusive and open Jewish community for today and tomorrow. We urge all Jewish teens, as well as all those who work with Jewish teens and the parents and families of Jewish teens, to take a stand against intolerance.

Watch the video below and continue reading to sign the Pledge.