"Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was a prolific scholar, impassioned theologian, and prominent activist who participated in the black civil rights movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. He has been hailed as a hero, honored as a visionary, and endlessly quoted as a devotional writer. In this sympathetic, yet critical, examination, Shai Held elicits the overarching themes and unity of Heschel's incisive and insightful thought. Focusing on the idea of transcendence - or the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness - Held puts Heschel into dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, Christian theologians, devotional writers, and philosophers of religion"--From publisher's website

the Astonishing Elephant is an unabashed celebration of these mysterious creatures, whose closest living relatives are the dugong and the hyrax. "they have," Alexander writes, "essential nobility,grace, serenity, sagacity, loyalty and playfulness, a simple goodness, a alack of animosity - unless provoked." While she admits elephants can pose particular dangers to unwary humans (she recounts tales of circus trainers of her acquaintance, some of whom fell in action), they are too often the victims in any interaction with people. the elephant's fortunes have long been declining: where only a few thousand years ago several species roamed the earth, by 1980 the combined wild populations in Africa and Asia numbered fewer than 100,000 individuals.

"Sharona Muir's Heredity and Other Inventions radiate like elements discovered late at night after years of searching ... a rocket in a museum in another country is both public knowledge and family secret; a daughter's umbilical cord in her father's lab sparks questions about the uses of love; the body of an airplane holds the imagined gestures of humans in their fi nal moments of life ... Muir renders the physical world so unfl inchingly that the metaphysical blows back, in equal and opposite reaction ... these poems are an act of postmortem collaboration: daughter as witness to history, using language to weld and spark familial bonds and to summon up their mysteries." --Rebecca Klaver, author of Empire Wasted "... Muir has a gift for conjuring beauty in the least expected places, dazzling audiences with rich imagery ... While the speaker's narrative is particular to her unique experience, in many ways this chapbook's poems transcend place and time, and resonate with all who have looked to the past for a way of understanding the present." --Mary Biddinger, author of Small Enterprise

In From Metaphysics to Midrash, Shaul Magid explores the exegetical tradition of Isaac Luria and his followers within the historical context in 16th-century Safed, a unique community that brought practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into close contact with one another. Luria's scripture became a theater in which kabbalists redrew boundaries of difference in areas of ethnicity, gender, and the human relation to the divine. Magid investigates how cultural influences altered scriptural exegesis of Lurianic Kabbala in its philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical perspectives. He suggests that Luria and his followers were far from cloistered. They used their considerable skills to weigh in on important matters of the day, offering, at times, some surprising solutions to perennial theological problems.

"Piety and Rebellion examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventional religious practice. Many of the essays exhibit a comparative perspective deployed to better articulate the innovative spirit, and traditional challenges, Hasidism presents to the traditional Jewish world. Piety and Rebellion is an attempt to present Hasidism as one case whereby maximalist religion can yield a rebellious challenge to conventional conceptions of religious thought and practice" --

Book by Schwartz, Sheila

A Nobel Laureate who is committed to scientific literacy, Glashow brings his intelligence and vast understanding of the subject to a text geared to liberal arts students. Combining fascinating literary and historical references with a vigorous, whimsical, and often humorous writing style, Glashow traces the evolution of physics and chemistry from ancient to modern times and explains not only what we know about matter and the universe, but how we came to know it, and why it is important.

Most people believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand. Although it would often be meritorious, we are not, in fact, morally required to do all that we can to promote overall good. What's more, most people also believe that certain types of acts are simply forbidden, morally off limits, even when necessary for promoting the overall good. In this provocative analysis Kagan maintains that despite the intuitive appeal of these views, they cannot be adequately defended. In criticizing arguments for limited moral requirements as well as those for unconditionally prohibited acts, Kagan offers a sustained attack on two of the most basic features of ordinary common sense morality. --from publisher description.

In "Anthropology and social theory" the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings - specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu - requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world. Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner's theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner's characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.

"This early book by Turkle, released with a new preface, looks at how the late impact of Freud and psychoanalytic theory played out in France: in politics, feminism, and what would come to be known as "French Theory.""--

Shirley Povich was the Dean of American sportswriters. As a columnist for The Washington Post for more than seventyfive years, he was an eyewitness to the most thrilling moments in American sports, including: the legendary 1927 Dempsy-Tunney "long count"; the celebrated 1938 race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral; the 1946 signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers; Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series; the Ali-Frazier fight of 1971; and the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But Povich's columns were about more than sports; they reflected the dramatic changes in American society over the course of the 20th Century. Driven by a strong sense of social justice, Povich called for the integration of major league baseball in 1939, and twenty years later he was still at it, attacking Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall for having an all-white team. For the 100th anniversary of his birth, Povich's children— David, Maury, and Lynn — and his colleague at the Post, former sports editor George Solomon, have pulled together this panoramic collection of Povich's most beloved columns. The result is a front-row seat to the most awe-inspiring sports moments of our American Century.

Shirley Povich was the Dean of American sportswriters. As a columnist for The Washington Post for more than seventyfive years, he was an eyewitness to the most thrilling moments in American sports, including: the legendary 1927 Dempsy-Tunney "long count"; the celebrated 1938 race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral; the 1946 signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers; Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series; the Ali-Frazier fight of 1971; and the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. But Povich's columns were about more than sports; they reflected the dramatic changes in American society over the course of the 20th Century. Driven by a strong sense of social justice, Povich called for the integration of major league baseball in 1939, and twenty years later he was still at it, attacking Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall for having an all-white team. For the 100th anniversary of his birth, Povich's children— David, Maury, and Lynn — and his colleague at the Post, former sports editor George Solomon, have pulled together this panoramic collection of Povich's most beloved columns. The result is a front-row seat to the most awe-inspiring sports moments of our American Century.

Delineates a number of aspects of Zionist thought, as expressed through the writings of selected central nineteenth and twentieth century individuals. Avineri presents a history of Zionist thought through profiles of some of Zionism's major thinkers. Each chapter is devoted to a specific personality and focuses on a particular topic or approach. By examining the stories of these men, how their ideas developed, and some of their writings, the reader becomes familiar with different aspects of Zionist thought.

This book is about the pendulous movement of Arabs and Israelis between war and peace, in one of the most protracted conflicts of modern times. It is written from the perspective of a professional historian who was also a major participant at key junctures of the peace process. The narrative and analysis begins with the War of Independence and the creation of the state of Israel; the Sinai campaign of 1956, and the relative calm that followed; the Six Day War of 1967, where the Arabs were defeated but the Israelis were also defeated by the euphoria and complacency produced by their overwhelming victory; the Yom Kippur War and the recovery of Arab pride; the ascendancy of America 1973-77; Camp David; the first Intifada, the Gulf War and the Madrid peace conference; Rabin and Oslo; the Netanyahu impasse; the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The final chapters deals with the crisis of 9/11, the Iraq War, and the reactivation of the peace process.

"Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person's camp in Austria, to a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a "secular Jew." With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the "chosen people" myth and its "holocaust industry." Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what "Jewish" means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism"--

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, S. Y. Agnon is considered the towering genius of modern Hebrew literature for his hard-edged modernism and soft-hued imagery. With this new collection of stories, the English-speaking audience has, at long last, access to the rich and brilliantly multifaceted fictional world of one of the great writers of this century. These stories span the lifetime of a quintessential wandering Jew - born in Buczacz, Poland, living in Germany, and finally settling in Jerusalem - and they bring to life the full gamut of the modern Jewish experience in fiction. This broad selection of Agnon's fiction introduces the full sweep of the writer's panoramic vision as chronicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emerging society of modern Israel. Here are stories that portray the richly textured culture of traditional Jewish life in Poland, as well as changes in the life of the community over time. Several stories reflect on the Jewish infatuation with German and Western culture in the interwar period: "On the Road," for example, narrates an eerie encounter on the eve of a holy day between an itinerant Jew and a ghostly company of martyred Jews from the Crusades. The early years of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel are recalled in "Hill of Sand," which is also a revealing portrait of the artist as a young man; "A Book That Was Lost" is a powerful metaphor for the writer's own journey from Buczacz to Jerusalem.

As many as one in three long-term marriages in America are sexless, and most people accept this as the inevitable course of a romantic relationship. In this groundbreaking book, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach explains why the prioritizing of love and companionship in marriage is all wrong, and why we should not go quietly into that dark night of celibate marriage. It is not love, Rabbi Shmuley shows, but lust that is the glue of a marriage. In this book you will learn how to restore lust to its rightful place as the central pillar of marriage. You will learn about the three principles of lust, and how to tap into them to keep the flames burning in the family hearth. Finally, you will discover the incredible emotional and spiritual potential of the intimate marital bond. In a wide-ranging discussion that plumbs the depths of the erotic mind, Rabbi Shmuley delivers a revolutionary message with the power to completely transform your most important relationship.