Category: Book Talk

In partnership with Nu Reads and Hummingbird Books, join Tamid of Hebrew College on Tuesday, May 19, 2026 for our next in-person book club discussion of Fran Fabriczki’s debut novel, Porcupine, moderated by Tova Mirvis.

About Porcupine

A fresh and witty debut about a young immigrant mother and her increasingly inquisitive daughter, who wakes up one day and decides to find out who her father is.

Sonia is a Hungarian immigrant who is raising her daughter, Mila—her beloved Milosh—on her own in sunny Los Angeles. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, dodging PTA moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum—minor mistakes that nevertheless continually remind her of everything she doesn’t understand about America and parenthood. Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school with the help of a less-than-helpful guidebook on how to be cool in the sixth grade—all the while trying to get her secretive mother to share something, anything, about her past.

Sonia is sure that their bond, stitched from drive-through dinners, extracurricular activities, and a lot of exasperated affection for each other—will be enough to satisfy her daughter. But her guarded lifestyle has left Mila lonely, isolated, and ready to write herself into a bigger story. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and a man she’s never met, Mila decides to take matters into her own hands and forms a plan that will implode their carefully constructed lives.

Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall; Washington, DC, in the tense years of the Cold War; and the bright sunshine of early aughts Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, secrecy and loneliness, belonging and reinvention—and what happens when the truth can’t be held back any longer.

Moderator: Tova Mirvis

Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation as well as four novels, We Would Never, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine and Real Simple, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, MA with her family.

The year 2026 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of Francis of Assisi. Popular Franciscan interpreter, Jon M. Sweeney, will be at Hebrew College on Thursday, March 12 at 7 PM to discuss his new book, Experiencing God: Thirty-six Ways according to Saint Francis of Assisi, which looks at how the world’s most popular Catholic saint claimed to experience the divine.

Sweeney will begin by explaining who Francis was, what he did that was so unusual, and how he was ahead of his time. He will also explain why he thinks Francis remains ahead of his own faith tradition even today.

The thirty-six ways of experiencing God that Sweeney has identified from early sources include “Freeing captive creatures,” “Praying alone at night,” “Allowing yourself to weep,” “Standing between those who fight,” “Making a cross with your arms,” and “Praying ‘Who are you, God? And who am I?’” Sweeney discusses these, and others, through personal anecdote, medieval text, explanation, discussion, and embodied practice. And he offers parallels from other spiritual teachers of other religious traditions, including Thich Nhat Hanh, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Nicholas Black Elk, the Baal Shem Tov, and Mary Oliver.

Rabbi Or Rose of Hebrew College’s Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership, and Karen Kiefer from The Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College, will join Sweeney to discuss these themes.

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About the speaker & Panelists

Jon M. Sweeney is a Roman Catholic author, independent scholar, and book publisher who’s married to a Reconstructionist rabbi. Sweeny’s wife, Rabbi Michal Woll, currently serves at the Rutland Jewish Center in Rutland, VT. His books on Franciscan spirituality have sold a quarter of a million copies. He has been interviewed by the Dallas Morning News and The Irish Catholic, on radio with NPR and the BBC, and on television for “CBS Saturday Morning,” as well as NBC’s “Morning Blend” and “CBS Sunday Morning” — both in Milwaukee. He currently serves as the religion editor at Monkfish Book Publishing, editor of Living City magazine, and book review editor at SpiritualityandPractice.com

Rabbi Or Rose is the founding director of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership of Hebrew College. Before assuming this position in 2016, he worked in various administrative and teaching capacities at Hebrew College for over a decade, including serving as a founding faculty member and associate dean for Informal Education of the Rabbinical School. Rabbi Rose was also one of the creators of CIRCLE, The Center for Interreligious & Community Leadership Education, cosponsored by Hebrew College and Andover Newton Theological School (2007-2017) and has taught for Hebrew College’s Me’ah Classic program.

Karen Kiefer serves as the director of the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College, which is a catalyst and resource for the renewal of the Catholic Church. Before joining the C21 Center in 2008, she held positions in University Advancement and as an adjunct faculty member in the Communication Department. Karen is the founder of Spread the Bread, an award-winning, nonprofit organization, and taught religious education in local parishes for 25 years. She is the author of the children’s book, “The Misfit Sock,” and recently authored the children’s book, “Drawing God”, sparking a worldwide drawing movement, and the sequel, “Growing God.” The mother of four daughters, Karen, resides in Wayland with her husband, Sam.

Join us on Sunday, February 22, 2026 at Hebrew College’s collaborative campus when campus partner Temple Reyim hosts a book talk with author Eric Lichtblau about his new book, American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate. Lichtblau is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was a reporter for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

The book presents the decade-long surge in violent bigotry and hate crimes by white supremacists in America, especially against Jewish, Black, LGBTQ and immigrant communities. The book has been featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and many other media outlets; the New York Times review called it “ambitious (and) deeply reported” and “an admirably vivid job” of dissecting the white supremacy movement, and Publishers Weekly described it as “kaleidoscopic … a troubling window into the rage that animates America’s shadowy far-right networks.”

Questions?

Please contact Becca Wolter-Gustafson at [email protected] or 617-275-8804.

This event is co-sponsored by Hebrew College.

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More about the book

One night in early 2018, while he was home from college, an Ivy League student named Blaze Bernstein snuck out of his parents’ house in Orange County. Waiting for him in a car outside was an old high-school classmate: Sam Woodward, someone who Blaze mostly remembered as a brooding, bigoted loner. But that night, after months of flirtatious messaging, Sam had succeeded in coaxing Blaze—a gay, Jewish sophomore at UPenn—out for a rendezvous. No one would ever see him alive again.

In American Reich, veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau uses the story of Blaze’s life and death to shine a light on the epidemic of hate in Southern California and, increasingly, the nation as a whole. Orange County has long been a bastion of the ultra-right: carved out of farmland as a haven for wealthy whites fleeing the diversifying metropolis to the north, it was the birthplace of the far-right John Birch Society, a hub for neo-Nazi recruitment, and a powerful springboard for race-baiting Republican politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But in the years leading up to Blaze’s disappearance, Orange County was changing: like the country as a whole, it was rapidly diversifying, to the outrage of many of its white residents. No one was more opposed to the changes than America’s resurgent neo-Nazi groups, one of which had recently gained a new member: Sam Woodward.

Revealing how Orange County has exported racial hatred to the rest of the country and the world, American Reich weaves this tragic tale together with stories from across the nation, showing what this haunted place and the colliding paths of two of its residents reveal about America’s fractured soul and our hope for healing.

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About the author

Eric Lichtblau is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the best-selling author of The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, and Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau was a Washington reporter for the New York Times for 15 years and for  the Los Angeles Times for 15 years before that. He has also written during his career for the New Yorker, TIME, and other publications, reporting extensively on national security, terrorism, law enforcement, civil rights, political corruption, war crimes, and other issues.

He earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for stories revealing the existence of a secret NSA wiretapping program approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, and a second Pulitzer in 2017 as part of a team investigating links between the Trump administration and Russia in the 2016 campaign.He has been a frequent guest on NPR, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and other networks, as well as a speaker at many and institutions.