North of Eden

Find Out More About Rodger Kamenetz Online

Go to Rodger's Blog www.rodgerkamenetz.com

Praise for the Book

What would you say if someone told you that all the masterful dream interpreters in history, from the biblical Joseph to the heretical Freud were - well, wrong? That is the jolt delivered by Rodger Kamenetz in this powerful and beautifully written book. Kamenetz is a soul-searcher, quite literally, and we are all better off because of it.

-- STEPHEN J. DUBNER, author of Turbulent Souls, co-author of Freakonomics

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Rodger Kamenetz's The History of Last Night's Dream is an enchanting and provocative book exploring a subject with profound implications about our very humanity. As always, Kamenetz writes with intellectual keenness, spiritual longing, and the verbal elegance of a poet. This is a book that has the cumulative effect of our most complex and revealing dreams.

-- ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Pulitzer Prize Winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

For those of us who cherish THE JEW IN THE LOTUS, a new book by Rodger Kamenetz is something to celebrate. He takes us on a wholly beguiling and illuminating night journey through the history of dreams, from Joseph to Freud and far beyond, and he shows us the extraordinary richness of meaning that can be extracted from the common human experience of dreaming. A profound, affecting and deeply rewarding book from a charismatic teacher.

--JONATHAN KIRSCH author of A History of the End of the World

THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM reads like a well-paced thriller. I took nourishment from this book. The care and feeding of the soul is hard going these days of spiritual fast food of every kind. In the strip mall of New Age snake oils and cardboard palliatives Kamenetz's book is a square meal. Steeped in erudition, rooted in his own search, Kamenetz has written a manual for living the dream of life through the real dreams of an individual.

--ANDREI CODRESCU, National Public Radio

Readers of THE JEW IN THE LOTUS and STALKING ELIJAH met Rodger Kamenetz as a sympathetic journalist covering the Jewish Renewal beat and the concomitant encounter between Judaism and Buddhism. In THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul, Kamenetz covers his own renewal as a deeply spiritual Jew. In direct and generous language, he invites the reader into his personal quest for the experience of revelation and the immediacy of God's love.

A poignant memoir, THE HISTORY OF LAST NIGHT'S DREAM, is a poet's chronicle of how he learned to defer interpretive closure and instead to abide with the image. Beginning with Genesis and moving through the Talmud to Kaballah and Maimonides to Hasidism and finally to Freud and Jung, Kamenetz also explores the ways Jews have tended to pit the intellect against imagination, to use language as a way of occluding vision. He demonstrates that prophecy and intensely individual religious experience are as Jewish as Biblical Jacob and that the suppression of these capacities is also Jewish, as Jewish as Joseph, son of Jacob, who, having begun as dreamer, ended up interpreter, one who privileges word over image.

The renewal of Judaism requires the rediscovery of Jewish imagination. Rodger Kamenetz has emerged as a teacher who can use words to lead individuals back to the fount of fantasy, the founding images which haunt, exalt, warn and waken us and from which we seek always to flee. He does so as seeker, poet and Jew. His book is the gift of soul.

--RABBI JAMES E. PONET, Howard M. Holtzmann Jewish Chaplain, Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish life at Yale

About the Author

Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet, author and teacher. Of his ten books, his best known is The Jew in the Lotus, the story of rabbis making a holy pilgrimage through India to meet with the Dalai Lama. His account of their historic dialogue became an international bestseller, prompting a reevaluation of Judaism in the light of Buddhist thought. Now in its 35th printing overall, The Jew in the Lotus is a staple of college religion courses. The New York Times called it a "revered text." A PBS documentary followed, and a sequel, Stalking Elijah, won him the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought.

Kamenetz's five books of poetry include The Lowercase Jew. He has been called "the most formidable of the Jewish-American poets." His memoir, Terra Infirma was described as "one of the most beautiful books ever written about a mother and a son."

When The History of Last Night's Dream appeared in 2007, Oprah Winfrey interviewed him on her "Soul Series" program, saying, "What's so exciting about this book is that it talks about how there's a whole other life that we are living when we sleep and that our dreams are there as offerings and gifts to us if we only recognize what the dreams are there to teach us."

Kamenetz's latest work Burnt Books, in Schocken/Nextbook's Jewish Encounters series, once again crosses boundaries, between literature and religion. It begins as a dual biography of Franz Kafka and Rebbe Nachman, who each asked his best friend to burn his books. It ends with Kamenetz on his own pilgrimage to Kafka's Prague and to the rebbe's grave in Ukraine.

Born in Baltimore, Rodger Kamenetz has degrees from Yale, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. At Louisiana State University, he held a dual appointment as a Professor of English and Professor of Religious Studies and founded the MFA program in creative writing and the Jewish Studies minor. He retired as LSU Distinguished Professor and Sternberg Honors Chair Professor. He lives in New Orleans where he devotes himself now to his work with clients who seek spiritual direction through dreams.