Tradition has it that King Solomon knew everything there was to know -- the mysteries of nature, of love, of God himself -- but what do we know of him? Esteemed biblical scholar Steven Weitzman reintroduces readers to Solomon's story and its surprising influence in shaping Western culture, and he also examines what Solomon's life, wisdom, and writings have come to mean for Jews, Christians, and Muslims over the past two thousand years. Weitzman's Solomon is populated by a colorful cast of ambitious characters -- Byzantine emperors, explorers, rabbis, saints, scientists, poets, archaeologists, trial judges, reggae singers, and moviemakers among them -- whose common goal is to unearth the truth about Solomon's life and wisdom. Filled with the Solomonic texts of the Bible, along with lesser known magical texts and other writings, this book challenges both religious and secular assumptions. Even as it seeks to tell the story of ancient Israel's greatest ruler, this insightful book is also a meditation on the Solomonic desire to know all of life's secrets, and on the role of this desire in world history--From publisher description

In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv were mindful of the plight of European Jews in the face of the Nazi threat during the 1930s. Drawing on a wide variety of memoirs, letters, and institutional reports by people from all walks of life, this volume sheds new light on a troubled period in Jewish history. Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit trace Jewish responses to developments in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as reactions to British policy on the question of a Jewish homeland, to show that Zionists in the Yishuv worked tirelessly on the international stage on behalf of their coreligionists in Europe. Nevertheless, their efforts were all too often shattered by the realities of their powerlessness and lack of resources. Piercing to the heart of conversations about how or whether to save Jews in an increasingly hostile Europe, this volume provides a nuanced assessment of what could and could not be achieved in the years just prior to World War II and Holocaust.

This book illustrates the rise of modern Judaism through the social and intellectual history of the Jews in Germany. It covers three centuries, up until the violent suppression of the last spark of visible Jewish spiritual-intellectual life in Germany during the Second World War. As a background understanding of this intellectual development, the political, economic, and social events of this three-century-long development are repeatedly drawn upon. This book shows the significance of German Jewry in Jewish history.

The first comprehensive history of how Jews became citizens in the modern world For all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. In this book, David Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, Jewish Emancipation tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Israel. Emancipation, Sorkin shows, was not a one-time or linear event that began with the Enlightenment or French Revolution and culminated with Jews' acquisition of rights in Central Europe in 1867–71 or Russia in 1917. Rather, emancipation was and is a complex, multidirectional, and ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. For example, American Jews mobilized twice for emancipation: in the nineteenth century for political rights, and in the twentieth for lost civil rights. Similarly, Israel itself has struggled from the start to institute equality among its heterogeneous citizens. By telling the story of this foundational but neglected event, Jewish Emancipation reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.

Everywhere you turn, people are wondering about the future and the end of the world as we know it. While conversations of doom and gloom are pervasive, what Christians have to offer is a message of a future and a hope. Future Hope by David Brickner, executive director of Jews for Jesus, is written in an easy to understand format and offers insights into the Bible prophecies. The book also includes helpful charts and appendices. Great for both Christians interested in a Jewish perspective on end time prophecy and Jewish people that are curious about what Christians have to say about the end of history.

"German, Jew, Muslim, Gay offers an astonishing perspective on the history of modern Germany through the vantage point of a man with multiple identities who devoted his life to religious utopias, fought for homosexual rights, wrote gay fiction, converted from Judaism to Islam (one of the few of any faith to do so), and considered himself part of a spiritual elite that held the key to Germany's salvation. Born in Posen in 1880, the son of a Jewish industrialist, Hugo Marcus converted to Islam and chose the name Hamid; he became the most important convert in Germany while retaining his membership in the Jewish community. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, where he was in the unique position of Muslim witness to the Holocaust. The imam of his mosque gained his release and he escaped to Switzerland, where he wrote gay fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus. He died in Basel in 1966. The book challenges deeply ingrained perceptions of Muslim-Jewish relations during World War II and illuminates their interconnected histories in modern Europe. It also tells the unknown story of Marcus' orientalized Islam that, in echoing Goethe's, revitalized an essential strand of Germany's spiritual heritage"--

Jacob Neusner has published more than 1000 books and articles, scholarly and academic, popular and journalistic, and is one of the most published humanities scholars in the world. Over a period of fifty years he has made significant, insightful and challenging contributions to the study of Rabbinic Judaism, particularly in the disciplines covered in the three volumes which make up Neusner on Judaism: the study of history (volume 1), literature (volume 2), and religion and theology (volume 3). These unique volumes of selective writings by Jacob Neusner, with new introductions by the author, offer scholars an invaluable resource in the field of Judaic Studies.

Before the Inquisition, Spain was a tolerant and peaceful society. How, precisely, does a culture that prizes autonomy and harmony within the population descend so quickly into one of the most oppressive nations to have ever existed? Focusing on the humanity of the major historical players, Erna Paris traces the obscure origins of what was to become a brutal and enduring campaign of religious and ethnic conformity through terror and segregation. The conclusions she draws from the annals of Spanish history are enduring lessons on basic human nature, as applicable to the modern world as they are to the medieval.

Set in Miami Beach in 1972, this novel follows the Posner family--two Holocaust survivors, Sophie and Jacob, and their son, Adam--doing everything they can to avoid one another in a city with an infinite supply of colorful diversions. In '72 Miami hosted both the Republican and Democratic political conventions and experienced the rise of the counterculture, the Cold War, and the desegregation of the old South. Miami Beach was to be the Posner's salvation. Instead they discover their lives quickly turning into a Disney World of funhouse mirrors and chaotic rides that give them front row seats through a transformational year in American culture, politics, and history.

Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern—from his birth on the Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real estate, to his building of a refuge for the Jewish remnant of World War II. "A majestic work of fiction that should stand world literature's test of time, to be read and reread. A masterpiece."— Commonweal "This book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years. For one thing, it is that risky devising, dreamed of only by the Thomas Manns of the world, a serious and vastly conceived fiction bled out of the theological imagination. For another, it is clearly an 'American' novel—altogether American, despite its Jewish particularity: it is not so much about the history of the Jews as it is about the idea of the New World as haven. . . . In its teeming particularity every vein of this book runs with a brilliance of Jewish insight and erudition to be found in no other novelist. Arthur Cohen is the first writer of any American generation to compose a profoundly Jewish fiction on a profoundly Western theme."—Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review "This stately, ambitious amalgam of Jewish myth, history, theology, and speculations on the Jewish soul is like an enormous Judaic archeological ruin—often hard for the uninitiated to interpret, but impressive. . . . Intelligent, inventive, fascinating."— New Yorker

Since its original publication in 1958, The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia has been acknowledged as the authoritative sourcebook of information about all aspects of Jewish life. Its entries cover not only Jewish history and religion, but also current political events, personalities, traditions, archaeological findings and culture. This is the most comprehensive, one-volume Jewish reference book available, spanning all things Jewish from Biblical times to the present era. In the three decades that have passed since the first publication of The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, major world events, such as the Six Day War, the Camp David Accords and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, have wrought changes that affect Jewish life everywhere. This edition has been continually and thoroughly updated to incorporate this new information. Its timeliness is best illustrated by the inclusion of articles on the mass exodus of Ethiopian and Soviet Jews to Israel, and the latest statistics available about Jewish populations in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Here also is a wealth of information about Jews who have affected our cultural lives: Woody Allen, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Einstein, Chaim Potok, to name but a few of the more than 8,000 entries that comprise this massive endeavor. The revisions of existing entries and the inclusion of new articles make The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia not only one of the most comprehensive reference works available but also the most current. This edition also contains a complete list of Jewish Nobel Prize winners. Prepared in Jerusalem by a team of 200 scholars and the staff of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, this edition was completed by an editorial board headed by the highly regarded Geoffrey Wigoder, also general editor of the universally acclaimed Encylopaedia Judaica, working in concert with the American Advisory Board headed by I.J. Carmin Karpman, chief editor of Who's Who in World Jewry. Authoritative, comprehensive and up-to-date, this work belongs on the shelves of everyone who is interested in all things Jewish.

In the current situation of polarization in the Middle East, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that a long tradition of dialogue and openness toward the "Other" exists in many strands of Jewish thought. Himself or herself the quintessential Other in a world in which she or he has existed dispersed, in exile, as a minority, the Jew has consistently envisioned the self in relation to surrounding societies. Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias show that alterity is a useful and morally compelling notion with which to structure Judaism's historically specific and politically charged encounters with deity, femininity, the Christian West, and the Muslim East. In Benbassa and Attias's view, the Other may be rejected, but it is also a mirror, both reminding the Jew of ethical duties and constituting a source of temptation and danger. Sometimes, the authors find, the Other is the enemy. They note that it is with the enemy that peace is made, peace with the Other and peace with the self. The Jew and the Other , which is an extended commentary on a dozen Biblical verses and which follows the five books of the Pentateuch, offers the history of that encounter as an inextricable part of the Jewish condition and is itself a meditation on this encounter.

The cause celebre of the 19th century, the Dreyfus Affair destabilized French society (1894-1906) and reverberated across the world. Its repercussions continue to this day. A deliberate miscarriage of justice, the public degradation of an innocent Jewish officer and his incarceration on Devil's Island, espionage, intrigue, media pressure, vehement antisemitism and political skulduggery--all these elements, based on historical records, are contained in George R. Whyte's trilogy of plays which also focuses on Emile Zola's letter to the President of France, J'Accuse, arguably history's most famous plea for human rights.

During the opening years of the 21st century, anti-­Semitic venom and incidents of violent assault on Jews have begun spreading. They are not a historical aberration. They are fueled by today's capitalist crises and fracturing of the post-World War II imperialist "order," described in recent decades as "globalization." At every turning point in history-from antiquity through feudalism, to capitalism's rise and the imperialist death throes of the past century-Jews have been targets of persecution. Including the genocide cold-bloodedly touted by Hitler as the "Final Solution." Why is Jew-hatred still raising its ugly head? What are its class roots? Why is there "no solution to the Jewish question under capitalism, just as there is no solution to other problems before humanity," without revolutionary struggles that transform us as we fight to transform our world? Abram Leon was killed in October 1944, at age 26, in the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz. He left us this book to help answer those questions.

After World War II a flow of literature written by both Orthodox and left-wing Jewish writers, as well as academic works, appeared, defaming the attitude of Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency Executive toward the rescue of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. The most slandering works were those by Rabbi M.D. Weissmandel and "The Seventh Million" by Tom Segev. Shows that Ben-Gurion, as early as 1932, foresaw the genocide of the Jews. He never favored the Zionist cause over the rescue of diaspora Jews, and did all he could for their rescue. However, he understood that little could be done by the Jewish Agency because it had no governmental authority. Ben-Gurion believed that the only way to save European Jews was to encourage immigration to Eretz Israel; therefore, most of his energy was directed to this cause. Examines Segev's book, as well as some other works, criticizing them for twisting the facts. Maintains that Weissmandel's rescue plan and other plans proposed by Zionist and non-Zionist leaders in Europe were not viable; therefore, their activities should not be juxtaposed with the alleged inactivity of the Yishuv and the JAE leadership.

"This book tells the largely unknown story behind the rescue activities of several remarkable young Jewish women in Vichy France during World War II and their role in the resistance against Nazi and Vichy France deportation policies. Few studies of Vichy France and the Holocaust have looked at the rescue of Jews by those prepared to risk everything to escort them to safety in the border regions, and even fewer have considered Jewish rescue of Jews, specifically of Jewish children by women. This work will be arguably the first book in which the experiences and efforts of a number of female rescuers—all of whom knew or knew of each other—have been brought together in a single volume, with the object of honoring their memory and showing how the value of human life was sustained through the Holocaust. Focusing on a number of young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, this narrative highlights their courage and sacrifice in their efforts to rescue Jews in France during World War II. Additionally, it shows how these French women responded to Nazi and Vichy France policies of deportation through resistance activities. This is a story that will captivate anyone with an interest in the innate goodness of human beings that can shine even when confronted with the darkest expressions of depravity that occurred during the Holocaust." -- From publisher's website.

Foreword / William J. vanden Heuvel, Robin Vrba. - Introduction / Randolph L. Braham, William J. vanden Heuvel. - Hungary and the Jewish question / Istvań Deák. - Hungary : the controversial chapter of the Holocaust / Randolph L. Braham. - America and the Holocaust in Hungary / Richard Breitman. - The Auschwitz Reports : who got them and when? / Zoltán Tibori Szabó. - When the veil was rent in Twain : Auschwitz, the Auschwitz Protocols, and the Shoah testimony of Rudolf Vrba / Robert Jan Van Pelt. - Rudolph Vrba and the Auschwitz Reports : conflicting historical interpretations / Ruth Linn. - The Kasztner affair : a reappraisal / Eli Reichenthal. - Confronting the Holocaust : an eyewitness account / George Klein. - Hungarian Holocaust : after 50 years / Donald Blinken.

A biography of Gertrude van Tijn (1891-1974), born as Gertrud Franzisca Cohn in Braunschweig, Germany. From 1911-15 she lived in London, but was forced to immigrate because of her status as an enemy alien. She then went to Holland, where she became a fervent Zionist. In 1920 she married Jacques van Tijn, a Dutch Jew, and gave birth to two children. As he was a mining engineer, they lived in different countries until 1932 when they returned to Holland; in 1937 they were divorced. Focuses on her life and activities during 1933-45, when she worked for organizations dealing with the resettlement of Jewish refugees from Germany who fled to Holland, as well as with emigration of Dutch Jews, in particular for the Committee for Jewish Refugees. In April-May 1941 van Tijn, with Nazi approval, traveled to Portugal to coordinate, together with Portuguese authorities and the Joint Distribution Committee, the transit of Jewish refugees through Portugal and across the Atlantic. Her task proved to be very difficult, but some Jews got through, including her daughter. Her son served in the Allied army in France and Belgium. Van Tijn became head of the emigration department of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam; however, her achievements in this capacity were modest. In September 1943 she was deported to Westerbork, and in March 1944 to Bergen-Belsen. In the summer of 1944 she was freed with a group of prisoners in exchange for Germans arrested in Palestine. She stayed in Palestine for a few months, traveled back to Europe in 1945, and eventually settled in the USA, living close to her daughter. While in Palestine she wrote a report of what she had witnessed, which is found in the Leo Baeck Archives in New York, but was never published. Soon after the war van Tijn was criticized and censured as a dupe of the Nazis, guilty at the least of false credulity and at the most of collaboration, but she was later exonerated.

Jacob Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and Theology at Bard College and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard. He has published more than 900 books and unnumbered articles, both scholarly and academic and popular and journalistic, and is the most published humanities scholar in the world. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees, including seven US and European honorary doctorates. He received his AB from Harvard College in 1953, his PhD from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in 1961, and rabbinical ordination and the degree of Master of Hebrew Letters from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1960. Neusner is editor of the 'Encyclopedia of Judaism' (Brill, 1999. I-III) and its Supplements; Chair of the Editorial Board of 'The Review of Rabbinic Judaism, ' and Editor in Chief of 'The Brill Reference Library of Judaism', both published by E. J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands. He is editor of 'Studies in Judaism', University Press of America. Neusner resides with his wife in Rhinebeck, New York. They have a daughter, three sons and three daughters-in-law, six granddaughters and two grandsons.

The authors utilize social science findings for the first time to analyze practical issues that face both Jew and non-Jew. Eighteen widely-published experts in sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, economics, history, and philosophy have contributed objective examinations of the problems of anti-Semitism in these collected essays.