Entertainment Weekly gave Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde by Rebecca Dana an A- saying, “When Dana lands at Penn Station with $20 and the promise of a journalism job, she feels the weight of “everyone else’s stories falling like fresh soot from the skyscrapers above.” She knows there’s no new New York tale to tell — though Manhattan does give her all the glitter and heartbreak that a suburban Pittsburgh girl who dreamed of Truman Capote and Carrie Bradshaw could ask for. But like the martial-arts-obsessed Hasid of the title, her take on being young and smart and emotionally adrift in the city is odd and charming enough to be that elusive thing: a true original.”
Oprah Magazine calls it an “insightful tale of two fish out of water, an odd couple who together confront their very different God issues.”
Summary:
The ultimate fish-out-of-water tale . . .
A child who never quite fit in, Rebecca Dana worshipped at the altar of Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, dreaming of one day ditching Pittsburgh and moving to New York, her Jerusalem. After graduating from college, she made her way to the city to begin her destiny. For a time, life turned out exactly as she’d planned: glamorous parties; beautiful people; the perfect job, apartment, and man. But when it all came crashing down, she found herself catapulted into another world. She moves into Brooklyn’s enormous Lubavitch community, and lives with Cosmo, a thirty-year-old Russian rabbi who practices jujitsu on the side.
While Cosmo, disenchanted with Orthodoxy, flirts with leaving the community, Rebecca faces the fact that her religion—the books, magazines, TV shows, and movies that made New York seem like salvation—has also failed her. As she shuttles between the world of religious extremism and the world of secular excess, Rebecca goes on a search for meaning.
Trenchantly observant, entertaining as hell, a mix of Shalom Auslander and The Odd Couple, Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde is a thought-provoking coming-of-age story for the twenty-first century.
