Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde
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3.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“For a generation of women who grew up watching Sex and the City, Manhattan is the Promised Land—or as Rebecca Dana puts it in her hilarious, self-deprecating new memoir, it’s ‘my Jerusalem—the shining city off in the distance, the only place to go’…[An] insightful tale of two fish out of water.”—O Magazine
Rebecca Dana worshipped at the altar of Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, dreaming of moving to New York. After college, life in the city turned out just as she’d planned: glamorous parties; beautiful people; the perfect job, apartment and man. But when it all comes crashing down, she is catapulted into another world.
She moves into Brooklyn’s Lubavitch community, and lives with Cosmo, a young Russian rabbi and jujitsu enthusiast. While Cosmo faces his disenchantment with Orthodoxy, Rebecca finds that her religion—the books and films that made New York seem like salvation—has also failed her. Shuttling between the worlds of religious extremism and secular excess, faith and fashion, Rebecca goes on a search for meaning.
A mix of Shalom Auslander and The Odd Couple, Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde is a thought-provoking tale for the twenty-first century.
Includes a Readers Guide
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pittsburgh native Dana grew up dreaming of moving to New York City and living la Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Not long after graduating from Yale, she moved to Manhattan to work at the New York Observer and immediately began making decisions based on what Carrie would do, like taking a cab she couldn't afford ("the girl I wanted to be didn't walk with her luggage"). She acquired the requisite designer clothes, lawyer boyfriend, and pad in the West Village but when the boyfriend cheated on and cruelly dumped her, she moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to gain distance from her pain and doubt. She became roommates with Cosmo, a 30-year-old Lubavitch rabbi who was questioning his faith while learning jujitsu, which makes for plenty of entertaining odd-couple conversations and adventures as their friendship grows. Dana may have fallen prey to a clich , but writes well: she turns a nine-month stint in Brooklyn into a thoughtful, archly funny meditation on what it means to want a certain kind of life, achieve it, and then feel patently uncomfortable in it, noting, "I have lived my entire life according to established story lines, even when they aren't true." Explorations of her own Judaism are nicely placed against the backdrop of the Lubavitcher community.
