Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

December 3, 2012
Pittsburgh native Dana grew up dreaming of moving to New York City and living à la Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Not long after graduating from Yale, she moved to Manhattan to work at the New York Observer and immediately began making decisions based on what Carrie would do, like taking a cab she couldn’t afford (“the girl I wanted to be didn’t walk with her luggage”). She acquired the requisite designer clothes, lawyer boyfriend, and pad in the West Village—but when the boyfriend cheated on and cruelly dumped her, she moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to gain distance from her pain and doubt. She became roommates with Cosmo, a 30-year-old Lubavitch rabbi who was questioning his faith while learning jujitsu, which makes for plenty of entertaining odd-couple conversations and adventures as their friendship grows. Dana may have fallen prey to a cliché, but writes well: she turns a nine-month stint in Brooklyn into a thoughtful, archly funny meditation on what it means to want a certain kind of life, achieve it, and then feel patently uncomfortable in it, noting, “I have lived my entire life according to established story lines, even when they aren’t true.” Explorations of her own Judaism are nicely placed against the backdrop of the Lubavitcher community. Agents: Jason Anthony, Rachel Vogel, Sylvie Rabineau.

November 1, 2012
Coming-of-age memoir from Newsweek and Daily Beast senior correspondent Dana. The author, a leggy transplant from Pittsburgh, had snagged a great apartment and a great boyfriend in New York City. She had great hair, great clothes and a great job reporting for Daily Beast. Tina Brown, no less, was her mentor. Her way was lit by Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and, of course, Carrie Bradshaw. Brainy, hip and looking good, all was going according to plan until a spoiled romance ended in a classic breakup. And so our clever princess left the joint Manhattan apartment to share a place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, land of the orthodox Jewish community of Lubavitch. There was Cosmo, her roommate, a bright rabbi, given to acting not at all like a Jewish, or even a jujitsu, rabbi. What was Rabbi Cosmo doing, after all, chewing on raw bacon or wrestling with a girl? No wonder Dana, deracinated in Brooklyn, became a tad confused. She loved cake and clothes and was in thrall to the gods of glamor. Her Good Book was Vogue. Her High Holy Days took place during Fashion Week; its rituals were celebrated. And yet, with the warm family life and the heartfelt spirit she encountered, there was undeniably something wonderful going on in Crown Heights. Readers will find Dana's depiction of Lubavitch life quite accessible, despite her frequent use of sparsely translated terms like shidduch, treyf, nudzhing or tznius. Finding nourishment, kosher-style, clever chick lit expands its usual boundaries.

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December 15, 2012
In her first book, Dana, a senior correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast whose weekly column is titled Social Diaries, admits that Carrie Bradshaw of Sex in the City was her role model. Although she was also enthralled by the literary critic Harold Bloom while at Yale. So the countervailing winds blow in this canny, buzz-inducing memoir. Fleeing the scene of her discombobulating breakup with her seemingly central-casting-perfect boyfriend, this secular Jew from Pittsburgh turned Manhattan fashion maven ends up living like a shipwrecked anthropologist deep in Lubavitcher territory in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood. Her roommate, Cosmo, is a Russian rabbi without a green card who works in a copy shop and studies jujitsu. Suddenly unsure that her making-the-scene life is all that fabulous, and irrepressibly curious and intrepid, Dana accompanies Cosmo to Shabbas dinners and even attends yeshivacation to learn more about the Hasidic tradition. Funny, wily, audacious, and captivating, Dana asserts her passion for glitz and high heels; vividly recounts her crazy adventures, profane and sacred; and saucily ponders life's big questions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)