The State Department and the Red Cross have set up a truly remarkable system for the Mobile Age: Text “HAITI” to “90999″ to donate $10 to the Red Cross.

There is also Wyclef Jean’s Yéle Haiti charity where you can text “YELE” to 501501 to give $5 to help with earthquake relief efforts.

Oxfam has set up a cause on Facebook.

If you’re interested in donated to Jewish charities in this regard, MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger is working with local partners in Haiti to help, and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is raising funds for Emergency Relief.

And there is always Paul Farmer’s Partners In Health, which has a long track record of life-saving work in the country.

In thrilling news, Far From Zion was named a finalist for the 2009 National Jewish Book Awards in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice (and I think I’m the only progressive among the winner and the other finalist in my category…). Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of this book!

It truly is an honor, especially when I look at the amazing caliber of the other nominees (I especially loved Daniel Gordis’s 1997 book God Was Not In The Fire).

http://jewishbooks.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/2009-national-jewish-book-awards-announced/

Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice

Winner:

Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End
Daniel Gordis
John Wiley & Sons

Finalists:

Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community
Charles London
William Morrow

Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything
Adam Garfinkle
John Wiley & Sons

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The Jewish Daily Forward has posted a podcast I recorded with them about my travels in writing Far From Zion.

Listen to it here.

Also, if you’ve read the book and like it, why not go write a review on Amazon.com (even if you didn’t buy it there)? I’d be grateful!

05:00 PM DETROIT JEWISH BOOK FAIR
6600 W. Maple Rd West Bloomfield, MI 48322

SAN DIEGO JEWISH BOOK FAIR/Lawrence Family Jewish
4126 Executive Drive La Jolla, CA 92037-1338

06:30 PM JCC OF GREATER WASHINGTON/40th Annual Book Festiva
6125 Montrose Road Rockville, MD 20852

07:30 PM JEWISH COMMUNITY ALLIANCE/presents Charles London
8505 San Jose Blvd Jacksonville, FL 32217

07:00 PM Jewish Community Center of Greater Monmouth County
100 Grant Avenue Deal Park, NJ 07723

Am I dangerously naive, as Adam Kirsch argues in Tablet Magazine?

Do I offer a “rich and personalized narrative immensely different from the hollow polemical crossfire we’re accustomed to,” as Yoav Fromer writes in Newsweek?

Find out for yourself! Buy the book today!!

“Think Jack Kerouac meets Jackie Mason, resulting in a picaresque travel journal, with impressive intellectual ambitions…” -Newsweek

“An elegantly composed work about Jewish identity that yields enormous insight from direct, simple questions.” -Kirkus

“London’s book…makes for timely reading at this introspective moment of the Jewish year”-The Jewish Journal

Think Jack Kerouac meets Jackie Mason, resulting in a picaresque travel journal, with impressive intellectual ambitions…

Over at Newsweek.com, Yoav Fromer has a thoughtful and generous review of Far From Zion, in which he asserts that the book’s argument

overlooks the fact that political Zionism (that is, Israel) arose because of the catastrophic failure of the Diaspora to preserve itself. And then London fails to consider the possibility that these communities continue to survive not in spite of the Jewish state, but because of it.

I actually agree with him there to an extent, and though I mention it only glancingly in the book, many of the communities I profiled  have relied on Israel as a place to send their young in times of crisis, or to find freedoms lacking at home. In the journey, I certainly did not pay great attention to those well-documented and catastrophic failures of Diaspora assimilation that made Israel urgently necessary, as I was focused on telling a different kind of Jewish story.

I am grateful for the fact that Fromer, in spite of disagreeing with the conclusions I reached, could see the point of my journey and my writing about it, and I’ll leave the last words here to him.

Despite some questionable conclusions, London’s book remains a genuine attempt to examine Zionism through an all-too-overlooked alternate scope. With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict subject to “professional” punditry on cable networks, London’s method of inquiry is refreshing. His ability to go out into the field—and confidently to switch between the storyteller’s, the anthropologist’s, and the historian’s hat—produces a rich and personalized narrative immensely different from the hollow polemical crossfire we’re accustomed to. And even if he occasionally seems naive, London’s moral critique of Israel emanates not from animosity but from deep admiration—a quality that clearly differentiates him from the anti-Israel left.

It’s worth reading the whole review.

Just to clarify, this fine looking photography book about Jews and the Diaspora is not mine.

This one is.

In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of
Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C.
Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison
for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He
served 6.5 years in federal prison.

Is this the far-far-right reacting to Obama’s election, as a commentator on MSNBC asserted, or is this simply the innevitable result of the hateful ideology of anti-Semitism, which the Holocaust Museum attempts to memorialize?

In the discussion that will inevitable occur for days and days on the cable news networks, we cannot lose the fact that this attack had Jewish targets; that just a few weeks ago, synagogues in NY were targeted. We cannot deny the specifically anti-Jewish nature of these attacks by ascribing them to the general decay of the economy or the right reacting to our first black president. There is a specific history at work here and we cannot ignore it. In spite of our small numbers, there are a lot of people in this world who do not wish the Jews well.