BOOK REVIEW
The Novels of Geraldine Brooks
Reviewed by Miriyam Glazer, Rabbi, Ph.D, Professor of Literature and Chair of the Literature, Communication & Media Department at American Jewish University.
 Every once in a while you fall in love with a writer. Depending upon your generation, gender and sensibility, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Ernest Hemingway or even F. Scott Fitzgerald might have captured your imagination and heart. Or a Yiddish writer like Chaim Grade, a fascinating one like Rhoda Lerman, a brilliant young one like Dara Horn, a Romantic like Israeli Dorit Rabinyan or the witty, thickly nuanced S.Y. Agnon. I've fallen in love any number of times - how could I not, after all, given that my professional field is literature!
But in recent years I've become a bit crustier, a little less ready to trust, a little more reluctant to allow a writer to so preoccupy me, so overwhelm me, so sweep me off my feet that I would be willing to throw to the winds an episode of Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias - or most of all - an episode of my very own daughter's program Off Limits - if it meant I could turn even one more page of the novel!
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 AT THE LIBRARY
5th Annual Celebration of Books
The Celebration of Jewish Books has become a highly anticipated and successful annual event throughout Los Angeles. This, the fifth year, will include some of the most controversial and fascinating authors yet.
November 4: Shabbat dinner and interview with Gilad Sharon, youngest son of Ariel Sharon, who wrote his father's definitive biography, Sharon: The Life of a Leader. Mr. Sharon will be interviewed by Rob Eshman, Jewish Journal Editor-in-Chief.
November 7: Senior political analyst, Mark Halperin, co-author of Game Change, which provides unprecedented information about the candidates and their spouses during the heated presidential race of 2008. Mr. Halperin will be interviewed by Dr. Gady Levy, Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education.
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interview
One Author's Perspective
 Dr. Gail Labovitz is Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature for the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at American Jewish University and the author of Marriage and Metaphor: Construction of Gender in Rabbinic Literature.
Q. The name of your book is Marriage and Metaphor. What does one have to do with the other?
A. The core of my argument is that, in rabbinic literature, marriage is metaphorically modeled after an ownership transaction in which the wife is seen as an acquisition owned by and subject to the husband.
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