Writer Stuart Green and MSJE Executive Director Kenneth Hoffman will be in conversation to discuss Stuart’s new book, The Rebbe of Baton Rouge, and Jewish life in Baton Rouge.

About the book: 

A disgraced professor. A lovesick rabbi. A meddlesome ghost.

Anna Zisk is a professor of Yiddish literature who, after being accused of an inappropriate relationship with a grad student, flees her settled life in Boston and seeks refuge at her childhood home in Baton Rouge. There, she’s forced to confront her long-ago first boyfriend, who claims he still loves her; a fraught relationship with her sister; and the uneasy feeling of never having quite belonged in the Deep South. To top it all off, she’s been relegated to teaching LSU football players basic composition—a skill they do not crave and will not master.

Meanwhile, Adam Kluger, the new rabbi in town, is struggling to keep his congregation afloat in a small southern city where there are barely enough Jews to fill a high school gymnasium. It doesn’t help that his ex-fiancée left him at the altar; the cross-town rival synagogue’s rabbi is poaching his shul’s members; and he’s being haunted by a spectral, Yiddish-speaking, elderly Hasid who pops up at the most inopportune moments. Not to mention that he’s falling in love with Anna.

The Rebbe of Baton Rouge is funny, absorbing, and twisty. A genre-bending, Yiddish-infused, Southern Lit rom-com that digs deep into the dynamics of this proud but vulnerable community—their rivalries and friendships; pettiness and generosity; faith and skepticism; insecurities and sense of solidarity.

About the Authors: 

Stuart P. Green is a Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University, currently a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, and the author of several leading books on the philosophy of criminal law. He co-authored The Rebbe of Baton Rouge with his wife, the writer and painter Jennifer Anne Moses, whose many books include her memoir, Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou. After raising their three children largely in Baton Rouge, Stuart and Jennifer moved to Montclair, New Jersey, where they now live with their two bad dogs.