Exploring a contemporary Judaism rich with the textures of family, memory, and fellowship, Jodi Eichler-Levine takes readers inside a flourishing American Jewish crafting movement. As she traveled across the country to homes, craft conventions, synagogue knitting circles, and craftivist actions, she joined in the making, asked questions, and contemplated her own family stories. Jewish Americans, many of them women, are creating ritual challah covers and prayer shawls, ink, clay, or wood pieces, and other articles for family, friends, or Jewish charities. But they are doing much more: armed with perhaps only a needle and thread, they are reckoning with Jewish identity in a fragile and dangerous world. The work of these crafters embodies a vital Judaism that may lie outside traditional notions of Jewishness, but, Eichler-Levine argues, these crafters are as much engaged as any Jews in honoring and nurturing the fortitude, memory, and community of the Jewish people. Craftmaking is nothing less than an act of generative resilience that fosters survival. Whether taking place in such groups as the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework or the Jewish Hearts for Pittsburgh, or in a home studio, these everyday acts of creativity—yielding a needlepoint rabbi, say, or a handkerchief embroidered with the Hebrew words tikkun olam—are a crucial part what makes a religious life.

For more than twenty years, Roy Underhill has taught the techniques of traditional woodcraft with muscle-powered tools. With his four previous books and his popular PBS series, The Woodwright's Shop, now in its sixteenth season, Roy has inspired millions to take up chisel and plane. The master woodwright returns here with instructions for handcrafting an appealing selection of projects from the American woodworking tradition. The Woodwright's Apprentice begins with directions for building a workbench. Each successive project builds new skills for the apprentice woodworker--from frame construction to dovetailing, turning, steam-bending, and carving. Among the twenty items featured are an African chair, a telescoping music stand, a walking-stick chair, a fireplace bellows, and a revolving Windsor chair. Designed both for woodworking novices and for more seasoned woodworkers looking for enjoyable projects, the book includes step-by-step directions, complete with easy-to-follow photographs and measured drawings, and an illustrated glossary of tools and terms. All of the pieces presented here are based on projects featured in past and upcoming seasons of The Woodwright's Shop television show.

Examines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children’s literature Through close readings of selected titles published since 1945, Jodi Eichler-Levine analyzes what is at stake in portraying religious history for young people, particularly when the histories in question are traumatic ones. In the wake of the Holocaust and lynchings, of the Middle Passage and flight from Eastern Europe's pogroms, children’s literature provides diverse and complicated responses to the challenge of representing difficult collective pasts. In reading the work of various prominent authors, including Maurice Sendak, Julius Lester, Jane Yolen, Sydney Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, Eichler-Levine changes our understanding of North American religions. She illuminates how narratives of both suffering and nostalgia graft future citizens into ideals of American liberal democracy, and into religious communities that can be understood according to recognizable notions of reading, domestic respectability, and national sacrifice. If children are the idealized recipients of the past, what does it mean to tell tales of suffering to children, and can we imagine modes of memory that move past utopian notions of children as our future? Suffer the Little Children asks readers to alter their worldviews about children’s literature as an “innocent” enterprise, revisiting the genre in a darker and more unsettled light.

Roy Underhill brings to woodworking the intimate relationship with wood that craftsmen enjoyed in the days before power tools. Combining historical background, folklore, alternative technololgy, and humor, he provides both a source of general information and a detailed introduction to traditional woodworking. Beginning with a guide to trees and tools, The Woodwright's Shop includes chapters on gluts and mauls, shaving horses, rakes, chairs, weaving wood, hay forks, dough bowls, lathes, blacksmithing, dovetails, panel-frame construction, log houses, and timber-frame construction. More than 330 photographs illustrate the text.

Roy Underhill is America's best-known master of traditional woodcraft. Creator of the popular PBS series The Woodwright's Shop, Roy has inspired millions--from professional craftsman to armchair woodworker--with his talent, knowledge, and enthusiasm. Roy returns here with his third book. The Woodwright's Workbook features step-by-step instructions for a selection of projects from his television series. All projects are illustrated with photographs and measured drawings. Included here are plans for tool chests, workbenches, lathes, and historical reproductions of items for the home: a six-board chest, rustic chairs with cattail seats, a churn for the kitchen, and the Rittenhouse hygrometer. Roy also explores building barns, forges, boats, and even colonial fortresses. A wonderful feature of this book is Roy's own translation of the humorous fifteenth-century poem The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools. He also provides a fascinating and useful 'field guide' to American tool marks that shows how to identify the specific tool used by the marks it left. Whether Roy is an old friend or a new acquaintance, let him be your guide to the world of traditional woodworking.

Contemporary Jewish art is a growing field that includes traditional as well as new creative practices, yet criticism of it is almost exclusively reliant on the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven images. Arguing that this disregards the corpus of Jewish thought and a century of criticism and interpretation, Ben Schachter advocates instead a new approach focused on action and process. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the Second Commandment, Schachter addresses abstraction, conceptual art, performance art, and other styles that do not rely on imagery for meaning. He examines Jewish art through the concept of melachot—work-like “creative activities” as defined by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Showing the similarity between art and melachot in the active processes of contemporary Jewish artists such as Ruth Weisberg, Allan Wexler, Archie Rand, and Nechama Golan, he explores the relationship between these artists’ methods and Judaism’s demanding attention to procedure. A compellingly written challenge to traditionalism, Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art makes a well-argued case for artistic production, interpretation, and criticism that revels in the dual foundation of Judaism and art history.

For more than ten years, Roy Underhill has taught the techniques of traditional woodcraft, or 'how to start with a tree and an axe and make one thing after another until you have a house and everything in it.' Through his popular PBS series, The Woodwright's Shop,' and his previous books, Roy has inspired millions--from professional craftspeople to armchair woodworkers--with his talent, knowledge, and enthusiasm. Roy returns now with his fourth book, The Woodwright's Eclectic Workshop. It features step-by-step instructions for many projects featured on the television series in recent years, including such popular projects as the Adirondack chair, tavern table, folding ladder, rocking horse, lathe, and kayak. All projects are illustrated with photographs and measured drawings. The book also includes colorful descriptions of what it was like to be a tradesperson who made a living by hand, working with the tools and methods Roy describes on television and in his books: carpenters, joiners, wheelwright, millwrights, chairmakers, and blacksmiths. As Roy puts it, he wants to examine 'the old paths in the way that they were originally taken: not as adventuresome recreations but a profession that put food on the table and clothes on the kids.'