RedOvechkin1917

 This will be a short review, because this recent book was a real dud. I just finished "Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma" by Tirzah Firestone. I have become interested in learning about intergenerational Jewish trauma but the author just spends more or less the entire book waxing about liberal zionism, so it really ruined what was a promising premise for the book.  I want to learn about how descendants of Holocaust survivors might carry trauma in their bodies and lives, but this book spends most of its time talking about how the Israeli occupation is bad, but on the other hand, what are we supposed to do, surrender to terrorists? She literally says the separation wall is ugly, but in some places it is aesthetic. THANK YOU, NEXT. Anyway, Jews are clearly a pretty traumatized people, but it definitely does not justify the horrific crimes of Zionism. I do like to think about what Jewish life and Jewish communal life would be like in the present were it...

  "Curse the mind that mounts the clouds / in search of mythical things and only mystical things, / mystical things / cry for the soul that will not face / the body as an equal place / and I never learned to touch for real / down, down, down, where the iguanas feel." -- "Iguana Song," by Judy Mayham This is a poem used as an epigraph in the book I just finished, "Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma" by Peter A. Levine (1997). The book documents the way that trauma and traumatic events are stored in the body, and the way the emotions from trauma live in the body in long-lasting ways. I guess it's a bit like "The Body Keeps The Score" but less problematic because it's not all about U.S. soldiers (I haven't read the latter book, to be fair, and also the author does get quoted in this book a few times.) I picked up the book because Tommy Caldwell posted it on his instagram page, and it spoke to me because ... I liked the tigers on the front ...