Join Ruth Light to celebrate the joys of being Jewish on those Fridays when there is no official “program.” Ruth will be lighting candles at her home online in a Zoom room at 7 PM on those Fridays. “This is a new thing for me: even my grandmothers didn’t light candles for Shabbos”, says Ruth.  We will take just a few minutes to schmooze, light candles if you like, perhaps share a little music or poetry or a short video, and touch base with our CHJ family.

A Zoom link will be sent closer to the date. Contact Ruth with questions.

Celebrate the Earth’s abundance with a family-friendly service accompanied by our exuberant and talented song leader, Adam Feder who will be LIVE FROM NYC

This is a virtual event. 

Event is free and open to the public
Like the trees, we too need strong and deep roots for nourishment. Attend for uplifting spiritual and social warmth in the cold winter

To register, email events@HumanisticJews.org with the name of the event in the subject line: “TuBshvat Seder,” and your first and last name, town of residence and your favorite season. We need each season represented!

Zoom link will be provided to registrants the week of the event.

Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of the Greatest Generation. In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who
piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one–a
president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war)
and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each
other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children. Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.  (490 pp) Nonfiction

Viewing + Discussion
Selected Scenes From Avalon

Based on Director Barry Levinson’s family history, Avalon follows the immigrant Krichinsky clan during the early 20th century. While Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) establishes roots in the city and finds a wife (Joan Plowright), his ambitious son, Jules (Aidan Quinn), changes his last name and tries to live the American Dream.

Open to all CHJ and Community Members

Join Women’s Rap vis Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death,
she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred.
But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their
brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?
The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences (276 pp) Fiction

Join Women’s Rap vis Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a
president, and in a small New England town an aging Classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to
retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk
would astonish even his most virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his
colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk’s secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk’s astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “magnificently” interwoven with “the larger public history of modern America”. (361 pp)
Fiction

Join Women’s Rap vis Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out
that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the
lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind.
True chemistry results.
But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six.
Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.
Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting
characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist. (400 pp) Fiction

Join Women’s Rap vis Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

A poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown–and the love,
loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.
With her trademark spare, crystalline prose, Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner
workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through
the early days of the pandemic.
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and
bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For
the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled
against the moody, swirling sea.
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart–the pain of a beloved
daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love. (304 pp) Fiction

Join Women’s Rap vis Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn’s very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic
impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in the most startling and original ways.
Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster
Frank Minna’s limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel’s colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim’s widow skips town. Lionel’s world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has
trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel
by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. (311 pp) Fiction