Women's Rap
2026-05-31 10:30 - 12:30 (America/New_York) | Member’s residence
Come join other CHJ women to talk about a topic to be chosen at the meeting. It’s a great way to get to know one another.
Venue to be advised. Please watch the listserv .
RSVP:womensrap@humanisticjews.org

Men's Rap
2026-05-24 09:30
9:30 kibbutzing
10 Meeting
RSVP danapreis@gmail.com
Watch the listserv for the venue.

Men's Rap
2026-04-19 09:30
9:30 kibbutzing
10 Meeting
RSVP mensrap@humansticjews.org
Watch the listserv for the venue.

Book Club - Daughters of the Bamboo Grove - by Barbara Demick
2026-03-15 10:30
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick is a non-fiction book about twin sisters separated by China’s one-child policy, one of whom was abducted and adopted by an American family, while the other remained in China. The book investigates the impact of the one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and the story of the twins’ separate lives and eventual reunion, highlighting the human cost of these policies and the role of human trafficking.

Men's Rap
2026-03-15 09:30, 2026-02-01 09:30, 2026-01-18 09:30, 2025-11-16 09:30
9:30 kibbutzing
10 Meeting
RSVP lbwtz35@gmail.com
Watch the listserv for the venue.

Women's Rap
2026-02-22 10:30 - 12:30, 2026-01-11 10:30 - 12:30
Come join other CHJ women to talk about a topic to be chosen at the meeting. It’s a great way to get to know one another.
Venue to be advised. Please watch the listserv .
RSVP: rcfnpl2@gmail.com

Book Group - An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler
2026-02-14 10:30 - 12:00
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, this “wonderful history of the golden age of the movie moguls” (Chicago Tribune ) is a provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America’s motion picture industry.
Let bookgroup@humanisticjews.org know if you are planning to attend, or if you want to be put onto the CHJ Book Club mailing list.

Book Group - The Yid by Paul Goldberg
2026-01-10 10:30 - 12:30
CHJ BOOK GROUP

The Yid by Paul Goldberg

Saturday, January 10th at 10:30 AM

debut novel of daring originality, The Yid guarantees that you will never think of Stalinist Russia, Shakespeare, theater, Yiddish, or history in the same way again Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin’s death, his final pogrom, “one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin,” is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant.
While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country’s remaining Jews. Levinson’s cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson’s Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow’s premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall. As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent, Paul Goldberg’s The Yid is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction.
New CHJ participants are always very welcome; All CHJ members are invited.
Let bookgroup@humanisticjews.org know if you are planning to attend, or if you want to be put onto the CHJ Book Club mailing list.

New Members' Brunch
2025-11-23 12:00 - 14:00
CHJ Pot Luck Brunch to welcome New Members

Attendance is limited to 35, so please respond to debbietechct@gmail.com to secure your spot

Forum on Israel and Anti-Semitism
2025-11-09 13:30 - 15:00, 2025-09-07 13:30 - 15:00
These groups are organized by Loretta Jay, Michelle Tomarkin and Jessica Wolf for CHJ members to have a safe place to talk about Israel, anti-Semitism and other related topics and how we are affected. George Rockmore
has volunteered to serve as a back-up facilitator.

See listserv for venue.

RSVP forum@humanistcjews.org.

Book Club - The Woman They Could Not Silence - by Kate Moore
2025-11-08 10:30
1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened – by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum. The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband. But most disturbing is that Elizabeth is not the only sane woman confined to the institution. There are many rational women on her ward who tell the same story: they’ve been committed not because they need medical treatment, but to keep them in line – conveniently labeled “crazy” so their voices are ignored. No one is willing to fight for their freedom and, disenfranchised both by gender and the stigma of their supposed madness, they cannot possibly fight for themselves. But Elizabeth is about to discover that the merit of losing everything is that you then have nothing to lose…
Let rhonarobbin@yahoo.com know if you are planning to attend, or if you want to be put onto the CHJ Book Club mailing list.

Book Club - Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean by Edward Kritzler
2025-09-13 10:30
Member’s residence in Trumbull

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition forced many Jews to flee the country. The most adventurous among them took to the high seas as freewheeling outlaws. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, they attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding.
JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN is the entertaining saga of a hidden chapter in Jewish history and of the cruelty, terror, and greed that flourished during the Age of Discovery. Readers will meet such daring figures as “the Great Jewish Pirate” Sinan, Barbarossa’s second-in-command; the pirate rabbi Samuel Palache, who founded Holland’s Jewish community; Abraham Cohen Henriques, an arms dealer who used his cunning and economic muscle to find safe havens for other Jews; and his pirate brother Moses, who is credited with the capture of the Spanish silver fleet in 1628–the largest heist in pirate history. Filled with high-sea adventures—including encounters with Captain Morgan and other legendary pirates—and detailed portraits of cities stacked high with plunder, such as Port Royal, Jamaica, JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN captures a gritty and glorious era of history from an unusual and eye-opening perspective.

Women's Rap***New Date*** Sept. 6
2025-09-06 10:30 - 12:30
Come join other CHJ women to talk about a topic to be chosen at the meeting. It’s a great way to get to know one another.
RSVP: rcfnpl2@gmail.com

Men's Rap
2025-08-24 09:30
Come and join us for kibbitzing and noshing.
Noshing starts at 9:30am.
Meeting at 10am.
RSVP –manny67258@gmail.com
Watch the liserserv for venue.

Men's Rap
2025-08-24 09:30
Come and join us for kibbitzing and noshing.
Noshing starts at 9:30am.
Meeting at 10am.
RSVP – george.unser@gmail.com
Watch the liserserv for venue.

Book Club - My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
2025-08-09 10:30
A cross-cultural tale of two women brought together by the intersections of television and industrial agriculture, fertility and motherhood, life and love. Ruth Ozeki’s mesmerizing debut novel has captivated readers and reviewers worldwide. When documentarian Jane Takagi-Little finally lands a job producing a Japanese television show that just happens to be sponsored by an American meat-exporting business, she uncovers some unsavory truths about love, fertility, and a dangerous hormone called DES. Soon she will also cross paths with Akiko Ueno, a beleaguered Japanese housewife struggling to escape her overbearing husband. Hailed by USA Today as “rare and provocative” and awarded the Kirayama Prize for Literature of the Pacific Rim, My Year of Meats is a modern-day take on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for fans of Michael Pollan, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Kingsolver.

Book Club - Table for Two by Amor Towles
2025-07-12 10:30
Join a discussion of Table for Two by Amor Towles
Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.
The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how one of Towles’s most beloved characters, the indomitable Evelyn Ross from Rules of Civility, crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of 1930s Los Angeles.

Book Club - Trust by Hernan Diaz
2025-06-15 10:30
All CHJ members are invited to discuss Trust by Hernan Diaz at a member’s residence. See listserv for address
There are four sections to “Trust,” a novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Hernan Diaz. The first is a novel itself, a fictionalized life of a legendary and enormously successful 1920’s financier in New York City and his wife. The second is an unfinished memoir by the financier presumed by everyone to be featured in the novel. The third is the memories of the unknown young woman hired to help the financier write his memoir. The last is a short story about a woman who could be the wife. Each of them explores the human cost of wealth, especially in the reality-bending world of capitalism.

Men's Rap
2025-06-08 09:30
Come and join us for kibbitzing and noshing.
Noshing starts at 9:30am.
Meeting at 10am.
RSVP – danapreis@gmail.com
Watch the liserserv for venue.
