ZPP: Press Round-Up

Politickerny.com covers ZPP story on Inez Dickens.

A blogger tries fixing Inez Dickens’ email problem.

Vicki Boykis, the self-proclaimed snark, reviews Surviving.

Excerpt:

Ohiso tells his story of being born to mixed Japanese-American Irish heritage. When he goes back to college, he starts hanging around Jewish kids, and this begins to rub off on him. When he digs deeper into his heritage, he finds that he had one Jewish great-grandfather, Jules Sottnek (shortened from Sotnikov, obvs. ) born in Riga, who hid his identity to get away from the stigma of being Jewish. Sottnek immigrated to New York and started a life there, choosing to forget about his identity. Ohiso completed the circle when he decided to fully convert to Judaism in order to be able to marry Jewish.

The journey he completes to do so is fascinating for someone like me, who has no clue why someone would want to convert to a people who are parodied as monkeys. Maybe for the jokes? Ohiso does so admirably and tracks his journey in a book that is as visually appealing as it is succinct (layed out by his wife, Ellie). Seeing at to how I have no attention span anymore due to Twitter, this book was the perfect size and scope for me. It made me feel like I wasn’t experiencing information overload, but at the same time learning meaningful ideas in the span of 70 pages. Spoiler: There is a cute baby picture at the end.

Ms. Boykis felt the book did feel unbalanced with the stories of Holocaust survivors juxtaposed against a convert’s story, but, otherwise, a fair review. Not snarky at all.