Third Thursday Book Group

Free monthly daytime book discussion group on Thursday mornings that meets in the Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Library at the Washington DCJCC. Read current and classic fiction and non-fiction.

Thursday, March 18, 10:30 am
Nathan Shaham, The Rosendorf Quartet

The Rosendorf Quartet is both a deft portrait of the complexities and contradictions that have gone to make up the state of Israel and a stunning tribute to the curative powers of music, in whose realm dissonance, politics, and personal anguish dissolve into art, transcending human conflict and national boundaries. Israeli novelist Shaham (The Other Side of the Wall, 1983) unfolds the deceptively quiet story of a string quartet formed by four German emigres to Palestine in 1936, set forth in five sections--one by each player and a fifth by the group's spiritual mentor, historian Egon Loewenthal.

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Thursday, April 15, 10:30 am
Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher's passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.

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Thursday, May 20, 10:30 am
Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World

"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” So begins Fareed Zakaria’s blockbusting bestseller on the United States in the twenty-first century. How can Americans understand this rapidly changing international climate, and how might the nation continue to thrive in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.

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Thursday, June 17, 10:30 am
Adam Gopnick, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. Gopnik shows us Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and social climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living husband, father, son, and student behind each myth. How do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the hardened commander who wittingly sent tens of thousands of young soldiers to certain death? Why did the relentlessly rational Darwin delay publishing his "Great Idea" for almost twenty years? How did inconsolable grief at the loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find--for himself or for a society now possessed of a sadder, if wiser, understanding of our existence?

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For more information or to be added to the e-mail list, contact margalitr@washingtondcjcc.org or call (202) 777-3250.