These vibrant short stories are about the lives of Jewish families in New York in the mid-twentieth century. But, in Kaplan's vision, everyday life, with its complexity, disorder, and comic subtleties can never obscure a deeper reality. Her sharp-eyed, quirky children and adults are haunted by history, both individual and collective. About this book, Cynthia Ozick said, "Johanna Kaplan's first book of stories blissfully renews character as fiction's chief adventure. Other People's Lives is the source of every intelligent joy, and restores to reading its old flavor of visits busy with crisis, comedy, wisdom, dreaming, irony, redemption." Other People's Lives won the Jewish Book Award, and the Ernest Hemingway-PEN Prize in 1976.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Blasphemy is holy--and exciting, outrageous literature in TREYF PESACH (Unkosher Passover). Novelist Paul Auster declares that this book "strikes with all the force of an exploding bomb--because it speaks the truth." This collection of poems presents radical departures from traditional rituals, formats and conventions: alternative Passover Seders, Yom Kippur liturgy, Thanksgiving prayers, psalms and other poems in the form of proclamations, resolutions, jazz improvisations, incantations, rants, orations, comic monologues, oil spills, life spills, songs, visions, undocumented documents, borders, suns, farewells, minutes of meetings, talk-stories, and all accompanied by provocative drawings of Treyf Passover Seder plates by artist Charles Steckler. In this book the symbolic plate is arrayed with treyf (un-kosher food) and the story of the Exodus with untypical meanings, whiskey instead of wine, recounting the continual slavery of wars and military occupations. The poems in TREYF PESACH have taken place over the course of years and various occasions, from vicious aggressions, to absurd walls, to smallpox blankets, to oil spouting across the Gulf, and more, all framed by the first months of the Trump regime. Some have been read out loud at Seders, Yom Kippur services, Thanksgiving Day benedictions, Sunday fellowships, and other ceremonies. But those are the exceptions. For the most part TREYF PESACH has been placed under arrest and shoved across the borders of respectability. Hilton Obenzinger writes poetry, fiction, history, and criticism, and is the recipient of the American Book Award. According to poet Diane di Prima, "he is the American Jonathan Swift."

Review 47th Street Abc Of Culture Adoration Of The Moon Autobiography Battle Report Beyond The Demonic Element Blue Eyes The Bridge Brooklyn Heights: 1 Brooklyn Heights: 2 City City Portrait Cityscape Combat Comment Cry Of The Small Rabbits Cummings Curtains Cynthia Days And Nights Death Of A Grandmother Ditty Domestic Matters The End Feast Of The Ram's Horn For Delmore Schwartz For The Yiddish Singers In The Lakewood Hotels My Childhood For Wcw From A Chinese Master From An Autobiography From Martin Buber The Gift Of Remembering: 1 The Gift Of Remembering: 2 The Gift Of Remembering: 3 The Heart History In The Room The Intensity Interlude Italy, 1944 A Jerusalem Notebook: 1 A Jerusalem Notebook: 10 A Jerusalem Notebook: 11 A Jerusalem Notebook: 12 A Jerusalem Notebook: 13 A Jerusalem Notebook: 14 A Jerusalem Notebook: 15 A Jerusalem Notebook: 2. Postcard A Jerusalem Notebook: 3 A Jerusalem Notebook: 4. Tourists A Jerusalem Notebook: 5 A Jerusalem Notebook: 6 A Jerusalem Notebook: 7 A Jerusalem Notebook: 8. For C. R. A Jerusalem Notebook: 9. The Old Jewish Poet Floats ... July The Kingdom Last Things May 14, 1978 A Message From Rabbi Nachman Middle Class Monday Mountain Fire, Thornbush Muse Poem Musical Shuttle National Cold Storage Company News Of The World The Night Nightsounds A Notebook Notes At 46 Observations The Old Nostalgia Past Time Power In America The Prophet Announces The Realization Riding Westward Riverside Drive Saul's Progress Sister The Six Hundred Thousand Letters Spirit Of Rabbi Nachman Summer Sunday Morning The Synagogue On Kane Street The Talker Through The Boroughs Tides Tight Like That To The Teacher Two Cornell Deaths Vacation Poetry The Way Where I Am Now -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® Product description Book by Shapiro, Harvey From Publishers Weekly This collection, which consists of new verse as well as selections from Shapiro's previous books, spans over 30 years, and reveals his evolution as artist and observer. An American urban poet with an informal style that is direct and often colloquial, he captures the essence of life in anxiety-ridden, overstimulating New York: "If you walk by the river, Manhattan / is like a book, the pages turn, / the words march down those pages. / Look back to the lights along the river. / Wait for the dark, wait for the city to come on, / windows and bridges blazing, / Whatever you needed was there, wasn't it?" With haunting insistence Shapiro, former editor of the New York Times Book Review , explores his ambivalence, pain and fascination regarding his Jewish lineage, childhood, women and marriage, fatherhood, and mortality: "I was conceived on the night / of my sister's funeral. / . . . This is family history. / What is unclear is my father's role. / Was the night of my sister's funeral / a suitable time for making love? / Did they both think that? / Or was my father excited by my mother's grief? / Though I honor my mother and father, / I want to ask a few more questions." He describes domestic life candidly and with considerable humor and humility, but his words are serious and linger. The length of the poems varies; many are spontaneous snippets of thought, others are longer, carefully crafted and, richer in texture and content, offer more of Shapiro's seasoned insight and tenacity of spirit. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Meticulous and deceptively simple, Shapiro's poems embody craft and concept. Had William Carlos Williams been Jewish, fought in World War II, and later lived in New York City, he might well have written poems like these. Though Shapiro offers a unique exploration of the American Jewish identity, what stands out in this collection are the love poems: "I believe we came together/ Out of ignorance not love." Shapiro's career in publishing (including editorship of The New York Times Book Review from 1975 to 1983) has overshadowed his poetry, but one comes away from this collection wishing it had inclu

Adolf Loos--A Private Portrait is an unusual, literary biography featuring lively, often humorous, "snapshots" of Viennese-Czechoslovak architect Adolf Loos. "A valuable fine-grained portrait... The English translation of her book is fluent and accurate, conveying well the tone of Claire Loos' original (which, in turn, to some extent mimics Loos' own writing style). Richly informative." --Christopher Long, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture "Claire Beck Loos, a gifted photographer and writer, ... reveals much about her ex-husband's mercurial persona in a series of conversationally-toned vignettes .... Claire died tragically at 38, at the Riga concentration camp; her memoir thus becomes a haunting tribute not only to Loos's talents, but to her own.." --Judy Pollan, Modernism Magazine An intimate collection of vignettes reveals Loos' personality, temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1929-1933) and the ways in which he helped shape Modern architecture. This translation, by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, is the first English edition, the book having enjoyed several reprints in German. The author, Claire Beck Loos, was a photographer and Adolf Loos' last wife. She was born in 1904 in Czechoslovakia; her family were Jewish industrialists and important early clients of Loos, commissioning several apartments in Pilsen and works by the architect's friend Oskar Kokoschka. In addition to being a biography of her husband, Adolf Loos--A Private Portrait also serves as a self-portrait of Claire, a vibrant young artist who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book includes supplemental texts by Claire's niece Janet Beck Wilson, biographical materials and previously unpublished artistic photographs by the author.

What are the origin and meaning of the words "greed is idolatry" found in Ephesians 5:5 and Colossians 3:5? In what sense are the greedy guilty of idolatry? Many different answers have been given to this question throughout the history of interpretation. In fact, a consensus exists on only one score - that the expression serves to vilify greed. Brian Rosner takes on the challenge of interpretation by tackling the phrase as a metaphor, structuring his argument around an intriguing comparison to mountain climbing. From this vantage point, he offers a history of interpretation of the phrase, including a study of the origin of the concept of idolatrous greed in biblical and Jewish sources. Rosner concludes that the comparison of greed with idolatry teaches that to desire to acquire and keep for oneself more money and material things is an attack on God's exclusive right to human love, trust, and obedience. With this work comes an understanding of familiar terms - "greed," "idolatry," and even "God"--Challenging both the church as a whole and individual believers to consider the far-ranging implications of our materialistic world. --From publisher's description.

Algorithmic Shapeshifting is the first poetry collection of Bogi Takács, winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. The collection includes poems from the past decade and previously unpublished work. The scope of pieces extends from the present and past of Jewish life in Hungary and the United States to the far-future, outer-space reaches of the speculative—always with a sense of curiosity and wonder. “Bogi Takács is a poet of visceral exuberance and Talmudic invention. Moving as dazzlingly between genres as languages, e makes the reader eir kaleidoscope where ancient traditions, unenvisioned technologies, and children's toys tumble with ordinary, transcendent precision, imagining new ways of being and observing others signally extant. These poems draw blood and spark synapses, make dauntingly familiar and tenderly strange. You should let them change you.” Sonya Taaffe, author of Forget the Sleepless Shores “Bogi Takács's poetry is gleefully and unabashedly itself, pulling the reader through surreal worlds of visceral magic, body modification, political wit, and interpersonal devotion. Whether looking back into Talmudic history, forward into a science fictional psychic war, or sinking into the earth and growing flowers from its own eye sockets, "Algorithmic Shapeshifting" presents a voice that is consistently fresh, startling, and sincere.” Ada Hoffmann, author of The Outside

Whereas the whole concept of Jewish theology is often considered alien to Judaism, this book should contribute to the understanding of the meaning of a truly Jewish theology through these examples.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JUDAISM?A NATIONAL RELIGION By The Very Rev. Dr. M. Gaster. Many attempts have been made in the past to find a proper definition for Jews and Judaism, but all attempts seem to have failed. The reason is not far to seek. Those who have undertaken this task have been guided by modern conceptions, and have endeavoured to apply notions which fit the existing political and ethnical conditions to Jews and Judaism. But Jews and Judaism are not a modern growth, and do not conform to the conditions which prevail among the nations of Europe. The attempt has been made from different quarters and with different objects; but only on rare occasions have men of science also drawn within the sphere of their investigations the problem of the Jews. As a rule their various theories had to serve a definite purpose. They had to favour the view that the Jews are a nation, or that they are not a nation. Jews have also been studied from the point of view of the relation in which they stand to the other nations in whose midst they live. A conscious and sometimes an unconscious bias has crept into the investigation and coloured the results obtained. Side by side with it went the new conception of nationality, which has become so prominent a feature in modern times. Yet it would be very difficult to define adequately what a nation is or what a race is. Whatever answer might be given to these questions from the study of modern problems, it could not be made to fit the question as it applies to Jews and Judaism, Among the modern criteria of a nation, unity of language is given the first place. The racial differencehas been more and more neglected; nay, modern nations have gone so far as to attempt the obliteration of the racial origin by a policy of forcible unification on the basis of the same langu...

Theology is, by definition, rational discourse about God and, by extension, the rational discourse about religious matters in general. Humans are rational--though not only rational--creatures and, as such, they are ever striving to verbalize, to rationalize, and to systematize. But, if theology is rational discourse about a primary experience rather than experience itself, we are faced with the problem of whether theology can really do full justice to the primary experience. Theologians have often list sight of the fact that theology is an interpretive discipline, that the primary source of religious knowledge is human experience, and that we have in our experience only hints and intimations of God. The images and nuances of poetry may be better suited than logical discourse for capturing these hints and intimations. Alongside its technical theological tractates, Judaism has always had its prayerbook, and the language of prayer is the language of poetry. Theological systems may come and go, but the theology that is translatable into liturgy remains. Liturgical poems expressing the unconventional and the idiosyncratic share the same prayerbook pages with conventional theology, just as conflicting ideas had always shared the same pages of Talmud and Midrash, where no uniformity of theological positions was ever enforced. Ibn Ezra's advice to "pray only in a literalist manner" was hardly the advice by which Jews let themselves be guided. The poetry of the synagogue proves it. The traditional Jewish liturgy contains not only the standard prayers ordained in the Talmud and the ritual codes, but also poetic embellishments of all kinds. Such poetic embellishments, or piyyutim, take the form of hymns to be sung in conjunction with the standard prayers, and of poetic inserts in the standard prayers themselves. Jakob Petuchowski presents ten such poems in pointed Hebrew, with translation, commentary, and introduction to the theological theme of each poem. The poems-ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and hailing Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy-introduce the reader to innovative poetic expressions of unconventional and daring theological ideas that have been incorporated into the standard liturgy. This reprint edition is an indispensible introduction to piyyut (medieval liturgical poetry) for all students of Jewish thought and culture.

"Singer's travel narrative of the Soviet Union offers a picture of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement (urban and rural) under the young Communist regime"--

The first few decades of the eighteenth century witnessed an important moment in Jewish-Christian relations, as influential Christian scholars increasingly looked to Jewish texts to reveal the truths of their own faith. To what extent could postbiblical writings help them better understand the New Testament? And who would best be able to explicate these connections?Connecting the Covenants focuses on two separate but entwined stories, the first centering around the colorful character of Moses Marcus. The English-born son of wealthy parents and the grandson of the famous autobiographical author Glikl of Hameln, Marcus was a prominent Jew educated in the Ashkenazic yeshivah at Hamburg. On New Year's Day, 1723, Marcus was baptized as a Christian, later publishing a justification of his conversion and a vindication of his newly discovered faith in a small book in London. A trophy convert, he was promoted by figures at the highest levels of the Anglican Church as a cultural mediator between Judaism and Christianity. His modest successes in the world of the elite clerical establishment were followed, however, by conspicuous failures, both intellectual and material.The second story that David Ruderman tells emerges against the background of Marcus's professional decline. In the end, the prize convert proved to be a theologian of limited ability, far outstripped in sophistication and openness to rabbinic learning by a circle of Enlightenment Protestant scholars. It was not the Jew who had abjured Judaism who was willing or able to apply the Mishnah and Talmud to Christian exegesis, but figures such as William Whiston, Anthony Collins, William Wotton, and the Dutch scholar William Surenhusius who seized upon the ways to connect the covenants.

""Seeking the Hiding God" by Arnold Eisen examines the elusive nature of God and the significance of divine encounters through the lens of Jewish rituals and traditions. The book explores the responsibilities of humans as God's partners and the personal and communal implications of faith and doubt"--

Text: English, Hebrew (translation)

According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance between the honor due the priest and the actual behavior of some who filled the role? What can the people do to make itself truly a kingdom of priests? Himmelfarb argues that these questions become central in Second Temple Judaism. She considers a range of texts from this period, including the Book of Watchers , the Book of Jubilees , legal documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and goes on to explore rabbinic Judaism's emphasis on descent as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel—a position, she contends, that took on new force in reaction to early Christian disparagement of the idea that mere descent from Abraham was sufficient for salvation.

"An indispensible companion text, Texts and Traditions includes the essential documents of the various religious trends of the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods as well as Josephus, Greek and Aramaic inscriptions, classical historians and talmudic sources." --Book Jacket.

Hardcover, no dust jacket. Ex-library, stained cover.

This sweeping, eighty-year memoir is the last work of veteran journalist Israel Epstein (1915-2005), one of the very few Western writers to experience the Chinese Communist Revolution firsthand. Born in Poland and raised in China, Epstein served as a war correspondent from the front lines of the Chinese War of Resistance against Japan, as well as during the Communist-Nationalist struggle. Inspired by the immense social revolution taking place, Epstein took Chinese citizenship, only to be imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. During this dark period, Epstein found his ideals challenged in ways he never imagined, yet his lifelong struggle for social equality has never wavered. This powerful memoir resonates with some of the twentieth century's most turbulent years and is a fascinating read for anyone interested in Chinese history.