The Writings of Daniel M. Jaffe

THE GENEALOGY OF UNDERSTANDING is a novel-in-stories in which the narrator explores different ways of adapting Jewish tradition to the modern world.
Matt Klein, a contemporary Jewish Scheherazade, questions whether ancient Torah is relevant to the social issues of today. Can Torah illuminate and guide responses to such issues as intermarriage, infidelity, and prejudice that threaten to splinter families in the suburban New Jersey community of his upbringing?
He first examines the private lives of his congregation’s unfaithful rabbi, of a friend contemplating intermarriage, of a neighbor family that lost wife and mother to AIDS, of other friends raising a brain-damaged child who murders a toddler. Matt then confronts his own family’s tensions, particularly his parents’ dramatically conflicting approaches to religious observance, his father’s struggle with his mother’s Alzheimer’s decline, and his own coming out as a gay Jewish man despite family and community resistance. Each of the 53 stories in this novel responds to a particular weekly Torah reading, resulting in a work of fiction that explores Jewish spirituality, ethics, and community values, as well as the nature of human heart, mind, and soul.

"Jaffe is a marvelous storyteller.... The characters are sensitively drawn and come to life in his hands. This is a lovely piece of fiction suggesting that the challenges, conflicts and conundrums of our lives are expressed in the universal themes of Torah, and our search for solutions begins there, as well."
Amy Scheinerman for Congregational Libraries Today

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"Jewish Gentle" and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living

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"[T]he most powerful collection of short stories about gay Jews ...[in] more than 20 years." Wayne Hoffman, Jewish Book Council's Jewish Book World.
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The acclaimed novel of a gay Jewish man's lusty and spiritual adventures in Amsterdam

— now back in print!

THE LIMITS OF PLEASURE

A novel by Daniel M. Jaffe

On Chanukah Eve, December 1, 2010, Bear Bones Books, an imprint of Lethe Press, published its first novel, a reprint of author Daniel M. Jaffe’s acclaimed book, The Limits of Pleasure, a Finalist for one of ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards upon initial publication in 2001.

With great humor and sensitivity, The Limits of Pleasure follows Dave Miller, a sexy forty-year-old bearish man living in Boston, as he survives an escalating inner skirmish to reconcile his Jewish and gay identities.

A year after the death of his Holocaust-surviving grandmother, Dave leaves Boston for Amsterdam, the home of Anne Frank, whom his Grandma revered. Dave, feeling undeserving to confront the suffering that Grandma endured in the concentration camps, cannot bring himself to visit Anne Frank’s house.

Angry with himself and the world, Dave repeatedly seeks out risky erotic trysts that mix sacred ritual with profane hedonism. When he meets Alexander, a sexually reserved Dutchman of Indonesian heritage who has identity conflicts of his own, the relationship shakes both men’s lives to their core.

“I can only testify to the riveting effect this book has had on me . . . truly groundbreaking . . . a brilliant author. . .The canon itself quakes, shudders, and then invites the likes of The Limits of Pleasure in, as it so emphatically must. Daniel Jaffe has done a great thing: made a fresh pilgrimage to the age-old human well, where sex and death, good-hearted secularism and the promptings of an ambiguous Higher Power, revolutionism and blood fealty all roil the pond from surface to sediment.”

— Sydney Lea, Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Pursuit of a Wound; Founding Editor of New England Review