"His books have not just been good for the Jews; they have been great." – Joel Yanofsky, Literary Review of Canada
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!This is the fifth of five guest blog posts I wrote for Powell's Books.
Michael Wex at Markham St. shul in Toronto
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight, and for me — possibly the only person in the world who looks at the High Holidays this way — it's time for window wars, pitched verbal battles over whether... 
In case you missed it in this Saturday's Globe and Mail, here's Wex's piece he wrote as part of the Globe's My Books, My Place series.
As someone who can only read in bed if he's under the covers with a flashlight, a posture too apt to be translated as, “Darling, the honeymoon's over,” I've never been much for hopping into the sack with a volume in my hand. I spent 23 of the last 25 years in a cute... 
Along with the shone toyves that I’ve been sending out to friends and family this year, I’ve been receiving New Year’s cards of another kind from politicians and Jewish communal figures whom I’ve been peppering with what are best described as instructional letters and e-mails. These cards implore me to be sure to go to shul this year, in order to be sure to have a chance to gey shray khay ve-kayem,... 
We’re into the month of Elul now, when we’re supposed to begin examining our deeds and telling the truth to God and ourselves. Contempt for the kind of b.s. that we use to justify our dodgier actions has given rise to one of the most remarkable, not to mention useful, of Yiddish phrases: veys ikh voos (literally, “I know what”; more literally, “know I what”). Uriel Weinreich, in his Modern... 
A little more on weddings.
If someone complains about tantsn af tsvey khasenes (mit eyn por fis), “dancing at two weddings (with one pair of legs),” they’re saying that they can’t do two things or be in two places at once. You can talk about tantsn af fremde khasenes, “dancing at other people’s weddings.” This has less to do with party-crashing than with devoting yourself to someone who... 