Samantha Brett … tips on snaring a man. Photo: AJN file

CHANTAL ABITBOL

MEN may have long ago ditched wearing shaggy fur loincloths and arming themselves with rocks and cattle-bone clubs, but they’re still cavemen at heart. Or at least, that’s what dating columnist Samantha Brett believes.

And the quicker women accept this and indulge men’s cavemanish ways by submitting to the chase, she says, the better we’ll all be for it.

Sound old-fashioned? Perhaps. But in an age where there’s a “singles epidemic” going on, where single women outnumber men and are becoming increasingly desperate to snare a man, it’s one of the only tried and tested methods that gets the job done, Brett argues.

“It’s timeless. Men will always be the chasers,” the petite blonde, who has become known as something of a real-life Sex in the City Carrie Bradshaw Down Under, states unequivocally.

“The longer women can make them chase, and think that they’re the ‘catch’ and the ‘prize’,” she continues, “the happier they’ll be”.
Read the full story

Rabbi Raymond Apple. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

RABBI Raymond Apple says he is “not a great believer in people writing autobiographies unless they’ve had a very exciting and dramatic life, which I really haven’t”.

So, in shaping his memoir, he resisted the idea of writing a standard autobiography.

“But to amuse myself, I started writing a series of reflective chapters about the involvements and commitments that have been part of my life. And it ended being around 100 such chapters,” said the emeritus rabbi of Sydney’s The Great Synagogue.

Sorted alphabetically, these essays, from Aborigines to Zionism, give a thematic view of the issues that have mattered to him — among them, social justice, Jewish history, the arts, his rabbinic colleagues and sport — rather than a chronology of events.

“If you want to know what I did in a particular year, you won’t find it, but if you want to know the sort of person I am, you’ll get the impression by looking at the book,” the Australian rabbinic doyen, who now makes his home in Israel, told The AJN.
Read the full story

Michael Gawenda. Photo: AJN file

BOOK REVIEW: PETER KOHN
Rocky And Gawenda: The Story Of A Man And His Mutt
By Michael Gawenda, Victory Books, Melbourne University Publishing, $24.99

WITH his trusty canine Rocky as his muse, esteemed Australian journalist Michael Gawenda has kept Crikey readers entertained from February to November this year through his blog, Rocky and Gawenda.

It has been a baby-boomer’s project -– even the title seems an allusion to that classic 1960s TV cartoon, Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The veteran former Age and Time editor now lectures in journalism and finally has enough hours on his hands for the introspective writing many journos yearn to create.

Gawenda’s blogs usually begin with his daily pre-dawn ritual of walking with Rocky along the St Kilda foreshore to watch the sunrise.
Read the full story

Holocaust survivor and author George Sternfeld at the Sydney Holocaust Museum, where he volunteers as a guide.

CHANTAL ABITBOL

IT took child Holocaust survivor George Sternfeld more than five decades to experience what had been denied to him -– his bar mitzvah.

“This opportunity sort of spontaneously came up, and after contemplating for about a minute or so, I said, ‘Why not?’” recalls the 70-year-old retired researcher from Randwick, who grew up in Communist Poland and chronicles the event in the first chapter of his newly-released memoir, Chocolate to Anzac Biscuits, published by the Sydney Jewish Museum.

His decision to have his bar mitzvah came after an emotional return to Poland and the home where he grew up -– the first time back since leaving more than 45 years ago -– during the 2005 March of the Living program.

“When I walked into the dining area, I could almost visualise my mother,” he recalls. “It was an amazing feeling to realise that I had left and moved on, and nothing had changed. I discovered that Poland is not my country anymore.”
Read the full story

Author Mark Dapin in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Photo: Ingrid Shakenovsky

BOOK REVIEW: RAPH BROUS
King Of The Cross
By Mark Dapin, Pan Macmillan, $32.99 (rrp)

THE Jewish gangster has long featured in the American cultural landscape, with real-life mobsters Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman and Meyer Lansky inspiring fiction by celebrated Jewish authors from E L Doctorow to Philip Roth.

Genre crime writing works best when portraying a city’s seedy underbelly: think James Elroy’s Los Angeles, James Lee Burke’s New Orleans or Carl Hiassen’s Miami. To these literary locales, we can now add Mark Dapin’s Sydney.

King of the Cross, Dapin’s debut novel, tells the life story of Jacob Mendoza, the Jewish underworld supremo of Kings Cross.

Unmistakably modelled upon the late “Boss of the Cross” Abe Saffron, Mendoza is a colourful, unhinged narrator whose lewdness is matched by the brutality of his exploits.
Read the full story

Rabbi Dr John Levi at his book launch in Melbourne. Photo: Joe Lewit

PETER KOHN

AN elegant Bauhaus chanukiah, salvaged from Nazi Germany along with some of his extensive library, reflects the style of Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger, said his biographer.

Held aloft by Rabbi Dr John Levi, the artefact was a surprise guest at the launch of his book about the life and times of the 20th-century rabbinical giant.

The event drew a near-capacity audience to Temple Beth Israel (TBI), including former governor-general Sir Zelman Cowen and Lady Anna Cowen, whose wedding was conducted by Rabbi Sanger.

The book launch on December 6 was a celebration of both Rabbi Sanger and his biographer, whose combined innings account for much of TBI’s 80-year history.

Rabbi Levi said his book, My Dear Friends: The Life of Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger, which echoes his trademark opening line for sermons, has been published on the 100th anniversary of Rabbi Sanger’s birth in Breslau, Germany.
Read the full story

BOOK REVIEW: BERNARD RECHTER
My Dear Friends: The Life Of Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger, By Rabbi Dr John Levi

WHEN, in 1936, Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger arrived in Melbourne, he found himself conducting services for a small group of non-Orthodox worshippers in the hired Parish Hall of Christ Church, St Kilda.

It was an inauspicious beginning to a significant phenomenon in Australian Judaism.

In writing the biography of a man who became a much-admired public figure, Rabbi Dr John Levi has undertaken a challenging task, not least because he became the subject’s rabbinic successor.

He has produced an absorbing and frank insider’s account of a rabbi who proved to be a catalyst in fashioning a miniscule congregation of breakaways from Orthodox Judaism, into a major element of Australia’s Jewish religious and communal life.

The new arrival possessed the personal, intellectual, moral and oratorical skills much needed by the community in times of Nazism, war and the Holocaust.
Read the full story

A farm near Tallarook in central Victoria taken by Joseph Feil

PHOTOGRAPHER Joseph Feil joined 37 leading documentary photographers, who travelled around Australia to capture the impact of drought, for a new book titled Beyond Reasonable Drought.

Feil’s photo was taken on a farm near Tallarook in central Victoria in November 2007 at sunset.

The book, published by Five Mile Press, features more than 200 photos by MAP Group photographers, a foreword by Don Watson and essays by Martin Flanagan, David Jones and Tim Lee.

As the photographers travelled over Australia, they witnessed the effects of profound changes in a wide range of communities, as well as resilience, ingenuity, despair and hope.

Beyond Reasonable Drought was launched earlier this month in Melbourne. It is available at bookshops for $39.95 (rrp) or direct from MAP Group on www.mapgroup.org.au

Author Mia Freedman

LEXI LANDSMAN

MIA Freedman has a quality about her that makes you feel like you have known her for years. Maybe it’s a result of being in the public eye since becoming the youngest editor of Cosmopolitan at 24, or maybe it’s because her latest offering, a memoir, speaks so candidly of her life in all its lights -– both good and bad.

It could even stem from having followed her weekly column in Fairfax’s Sunday Life magazine and her blog mamamia.com.au, both of which are open accounts on her thoughts from fashion, breastfeeding in public, to body image.

So when she arrives for the interview, resplendent in a hot pink kaftan, I resist the urge to fall into “catch-up with a friend”-type conversation, seeking an update on her life from where her memoir Mama Mia left off.

Instead, we settle for chocolate brownies, almond horse-shoe biscuits and soy lattes.
Read the full story

Author Mark Dapin. Photo: Ingrid Shakenovsky

LORIN BLUMENTHAL

FROM Australia to America, Jews are known to have had a hand in organised crime. In the United States, from the 1920s to the 1940s, the likes of Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Lepke Buchalter were part of a syndicate dubbed Murder Inc, which allegedly performed hundreds of contract killings on behalf of the American mafia.

In London there was Jack “Spot” Comer, who reportedly ran the East End protection rackets until the early 1950s and profited from illegal bookmaking.

Australia has its own collection of Jewish “gangsters”, one of whom Chopper Read claims as his best friend.

Jewish gangsters also feature in popular culture, including the 1980s epic crime film Once Upon a Time in America, the Coen Brother’s Miller’s Crossing, and El Doctorow’s gangster novel Billy Bathgate, later made into a movie of the same name.
Read the full story