12/1/08

Five Star Review: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption by Yori Yanover

Yori Yanover has crafted the Jewish answer to the blockbuster TV action series "24."

The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption by Yori Yanover is the most clever action-packed Jewish novel ever written.

This book is informed by Yanover's deep knowledge of Jewish religion and beliefs and his wide learning of kabbalah and Jewish messianism. Yori maintains a pace of action in this book that can rival that of any of the best screenwriters in Hollywood today.

I will be astonished if a savvy TV producer does not grab up the rights to this book. Yanover's story cries out to be adapted to a major creative TV release.

Who is this outstanding author? Yori is a well-regarded journalist and writer who also pioneered the Jewish Internet and virtually invented the Jewish blog.

I must issue this disclaimer. I worked as a colleague in awe of Yori at the Jewish Communications Network in 1996 and 1997. I am forever indebted to this man who showed me how to persevere in the face of great business challenges and maintain a focus on the tasks at hand - in this case inventing the Jewish Internet in a company that was run by the proverbial management team of well-intentioned amateurs.

Yori is at once a pious Jew, a heretical Israeli and a voracious consumer of modern pop culture. Nobody I know could craft a more clever assemblage of the latest news of the Jews as Yori did at JCN - every day of the year - with absolutely astonishingly brilliant photoshopped images, clever headlines and acutely on the money judgment of what was and was not newsworthy.

Now Yanover tells a story in this new book of a master cabalist in Brooklyn -- father of the messiah. With allusions to the Hasidic mystical dynasty and to ancestral legend, Yanover keeps one eye on Judaism's core beliefs and the other on the Kojak-like tensions that make up the Lower East Side of New York City.

Does this description of this book seem like it marks a totally fresh and novel writer's formula? You bet it does.

Is the world ready for Yori's outlandish messiah story replete with "firefights, helicopter battles and strange visions"? In an era that has witnessed one bestselling Christian apocalypse series of books after another it is high time that we, the founding dramatic Israelites, came back to the center of the stage and offered up our answer, as Yanover does indeed in this great new book.

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