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Adam Sobsey presents A JEWISH APPENDIX, with Rabbi Hannah Bender of Judea Reform Congregation
Adam Sobsey presents a powerful, passionate, deeply personal memoir of reckoning with his Jewish identity.
Flyleaf will offer seating for up to 70 in-person guests, with priority access given to folks who purchase the book. Please indicate in the comments if you’d like 1-2 seats held for you at the event! Signing line at 5:30pm, talk begins at 6:00pm.
In October of 2018, the day after a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven Jews, Adam Sobsey woke up with acute stomach pain. The next morning, he was in surgery to remove his appendix. A nonpracticing Jew, he made no connection between these two events. But six months later, when he arrives in Romania to visit the homeland of his great-grandparents, who had immigrated a century earlier - to Pittsburgh, where they helped found a synagogue-he is besieged by a mysterious illness that responds to no treatment and just as mysteriously vanishes the day he leaves the country, three weeks later.
Through the upheaval in his body and his encounters with the ravaged ruins of Jewish life in Romania-and flooded by memories of his own past-Sobsey is forced to confront his Jewish identity and roots.
Adam Sobsey is the author of Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography (University of Texas Press, 2017), and co-author of Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark (Daylight Books, 2014). He has written for The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Missouri Review, Cincinnati Review, Spin, The Journal of Experimental Ontology, Disruptive Quarterly, and many others. He is a former staff writer at PopMatters and Baseball Prospectus, the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship, and numerous journalism and playwriting awards. His work for the stage has appeared in New York, California, Minnesota, Texas, and North Carolina.
Rabbi Hannah Bender is a Midwesterner at heart with a degree in religious studies from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. They were ordained from the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. Rabbi Bender joined Judea Reform Congregation as their new assistant rabbi this summer and is already loving making the Triangle their new home.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2990232-0
