The History of Last Night's Dream
Discovering the Hidden Life of the Soul
(HarperSanFrancisco, October 2007)

Are dreams fantastic nonsense—or ultimate reality?

In his search for the spiritual  truth of dreams, Rodger Kamenetz studies with an 87 year old female kabbalist  in Jerusalem, a suave Tibetan tulku in Copenhagen, and a crusty intuitive dream master  in northern Vermont.

With their guidance, Kamenetz plunges into the world of dreams, and shows how the constant struggle between dream and interpretation has shaped Western thought from Genesis to Freud.         This intellectual discovery only marks the threshold of an entire new world of the soul.

By entering fully into his dreams and taking on their reality, Kamenetz follows a path of increasing depth that leads to three ancient gifts of the dream.

INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Why did you write this book?

After my mother’s death, I began to see her in my dreams and the way she spoke seemed very convincing, not at all what I thought I could have imagined on my own.  Could dreams be giving us glimpses of another world—the world of the soul?

        I found a teacher who could show me a path in dreams that was amazingly direct and extremely powerful. I felt like I’d discovered a long lost gift, a gift each of us receives most every night without realizing it.  I had to tell people about this gift and how to use it, and that’s why I wrote this book.           

What were some of the challenges in writing this book?

The first challenge was to accept what my dreams were telling me about my life. The second was to change my life enough that I could glimpse the huge treasure dreams offer us. The third and biggest challenge was to communicate to those who hadn’t had these remarkable experiences what they were about. The biggest difficulty is our general attitude towards dreams. We simultaneously believe that dreams are hugely significant and total nonsense.

BOOK CLUBS

During the fall of 2007 and spring of 2008 Rodger will be available via telephone or video conference to groups of 25 or more who have purchased The History of Last Night’s Dream and wish to discuss it with him.

There are only a limited number of times available. If your book club or reading group is interested, please write books@kamenetz.com

The Lowercase Jew
(Northwestern University Press, August 2003)

"The celebrations and angels and vaudeville and holocaustal suffering, the Torah-learning and hora-dancing and blessings and bar-mitzvah noshing and mourning and high meshuges. . .are all here, with a fresh wit and the winds of a timeless poignancy crafted into them. These are soulful poems. . .and some, a bissel kickass." -- Albert Goldbarth

These exuberant, rich, vastly funny and vastly serious poems  cover the whole ground of Jewish life, low and high-- from rye bread and borscht to the Holocaust, from the anti-Semitism of the modernists to the robbery of a pharmacist. Kamenetz frames in subtle terms the questions that haunt our time-about the identity of poet and poetry and the capacity of art to harm and to heal. Drawing on personal history, Torah and mysticism to explore the tangled relations of Jewish identity and modern life, Kamenetz's poems attest to the inexorable power of language-and of joy.

Read the title poem, "The Lowercase Jew" at Exquisite Corpse.

Also don't miss "Allen Ginsberg Forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews", in The Forward.

Terra Infirma
A MEMOIR OF MY MOTHER'S LIFE IN MINE
(Schocken, January 1999)

Ter'ra in'fir'ma, n. 1. Shaky ground. 2. The uneasy shared territory of love and painful separation that defines mother and son. 3. The border between life and death. 4. The precariously emotional place in  which we are left after the death of a parent. 5. The mythic terrain a boy passes through on the way to becoming a man. 6. The material from which a writer must craft his story.

"Inside a mother, each of us begins a dream," writes Rodger Kamenetz. Actually, two: a mother's dream for her child, and the dream that will become a person. For Kamenetz, crossing the terra infirma--the place where the two collide--was not easy: his mother was a difficult woman who had loved her family with a tyrannical passion. Only as she was losing her battle with cancer at age fifty-four could her son begin to take the essential first step toward becoming a man, thereby fulfilling both of their dreams.

Rich with humor and insight, Terra Infirma is a deeply moving account of one man's spiritual passage to the firmer ground of maturity and self- understanding.

Stuck: Poems Midlife
(Time Being Books, December 1997)

Table of Poems:
At Table, What's At Stake
The Birthright
Dear Me
Do Not Say
The Dog Search
The Family War
Fathom
Homemade Voodoo
Howard And Rebecca: The Deal
In Limbo
Josie And Joshua
Lover By Lover
Meg And Joe (1)
Meg And Joe (ii): Joe Steps Out
Moving Distances
Night Voice
Office Politics: Rob, Helena And Jennifer
The Placebo: Jack And Rebecca At Howard's Funeral
The Poker Player
A Property Of Blood
A Son Conceives His Father
Stuck
A Synagogue In Tz'fat
An Uncertain Hour: A Birth
An Uncertain Hour: An Uncertain Hour
An Uncertain Hour: Ethics Committee
An Uncertain Hour: Vigil
An Uncertain Hour: Yet
What Turns But Never Moves

Stalking Elijah
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1997)

Rodger Kamenetz continues the dazzling spiritual adventure he began in The Jew in the Lotus, his best-selling account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. In Stalking Elijah, he takes his wild mind on the road, seeking counsel of spiritual teachers across the country as he searches for his own Jewish truth.

In an astonishing series of dialogues, encounters, quick takes, and meditations, Kamenetz unfolds a journey to the depths of human spiritual yearning. Profound and often raucously funny, Kamenetz's quirky tale carries him from a conversation with the Dalai Lama (in which he valiantly "contravened forty-six years of my own noisy cultural conditioning" to keep from stepping on the silence) to breaking matzah with him a year later at a Passover seder for Tibetan freedom. Along the way he learns kabbalah poolside at the Beverly Hilton, meditates in a T-shirt shop with Baton Rouge's three resident Tibetan Buddhists, observes the Sabbath in a plastic tent with Jewish addicts and cons in an inner-city slum, and "calls out" to God with neo-Hasidic abandon while racing down the San Bernardino freeway.

Entertaining, illuminating, and deeply moving, Stalking Elijah, teaches at every step of the path how to celebrate the Jewish tradition in the context of feminism, contemporary science, and interfaith dialogue. In Kamenetz's magical journey through the new landscape of Jewish practice, he finds the blessing of the holy in everyday life and the face of a prophet in every face he meets.

*    *     *

From the book:
We are now entering a new stage of Judaism, a time of crisis but also a time of renewal. The old foundations, whether of reform Judaism on the one end or of Orthodoxy at the other, have been shaken. We are building a new mishkan (tabernacle) and we have so many fine materials to draw on. We are looking for the light in the old kabbalah, but also in the new language of our experience. My teachers are women and men, my teachers are not all Jews, for I cannot assume any more triumphalism, whether the triumphalism of an Orthodoxy that cannot acknowledge what is holy in the present, or the modernist triumphalism of a Reform Judaism that a hundred years ago discarded large parts of an ancient wisdom without due consideration. If I were to define myself denominationally, I'd say I'm an under-constructionist--and I wear a yellow hard hat yarmulke.

The Jew in the Lotus
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1995)

Kamenetz, a poet and a Jew, was invited to attend and write about a historical meeting between a delegation of American Jews and a group of Tibetan Buddhists that included the Dalai Lama. This interfaith get-together was inspired, in part, by the increasing number of Jews who have become Buddhists as well as the Dalai Lama's perception of Jews as "survival experts." The Dalai Lama felt that the Jews, experts in exile and the preservation of faith and practice, would offer advice and comfort; participating rabbis were intrigued by the surprising similarities between the two religions, including esoteric traditions and a profound awareness of suffering. Kamenetz not only chronicles the resultant discussions, which proved to be enlightening and emotional, but also profiles a number of Jewish Buddhists, including Allen Ginsberg and Ram Dass. As his investigation throws his own beliefs and assumptions into high relief, Kamenetz is amazed and humbled by the intensity and altruism of Buddhism. Kamenetz defines and comments upon these complex matters with skill, personableness, and a welcome dash of levity. Donna Seaman
Copyright © 1994, Booklist, American Library Association, May 15, 1994. All rights reserved.

The Missing Jew
(Time Being Books, January 1992)

Rodger Kamenetz has been described as "the strongest of contemporary Jewish voices" in American poetry, and The Missing Jew is his signal collection, now in the second printing of its second edition, representing work written from 1975-1990. Several reviewers have commented on the grace of Kamenetz's language, of which Andrei Codrescu wrote in the San Francisco Review of Books, "his ear is as good as William Carlos Williams in the early poetry" and Yehudah Amichai that "his poems are a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew." Louise Erdrich adds that "Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page." Another strong appeal has been his evocation of Jewish diaspora life, and Jewish religion. Writing in the Forward, Joel Lewis declared Kamenetz a "modern day Rashi" and The Missing Jew, "The ideal Baedeker for the American Jewish Diaspora."