Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.

In late 1967 as part of the Tet offensive, U.S. commanders hoped to lure the North Vietnamese Army into exposing large numbers of soldiers to their overwhelming air power. But in January 1968, a U.S. Marine Corps force found themselves surrounded by the enemy in their hilltop base at Khe Sanh. The siege lasted for nearly three months and caught the attention of the world; for many it came to epitomize the conflict. Eric Hammel's classic account is a vivid oral history, using the words of American fighting men caught up in the gruelling, deadly seventy-seven-day ordeal creates a harrowing tapestry of tragedy and triumph. As two North Vietnamese Army divisions move to surround them, the vastly outnumbered U.S. Marines rush to strengthen their defenses at the isolated base and several nearby hilltop positions. The Communist forces repeatedly attack, are repeatedly repelled, and then dig in to take the American base by siege-the makings of a classic, modern "set-piece" strategy in which the defenders become bait to tie the attackers to fixed positions in which they can be pummelled and pulverized by American artillery and air support. The gripping - and moving - narrative flows from the masterfully woven threads provided by nearly a hundred men who gallantly endured the wrenching all-out struggle to hold the combat base and its vulnerable outlying positions. Re-issued in the fiftieth anniversary year of the siege, with an updated photo section and maps, this is a ground-breaking and influential history of this crucial landmark battle.

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.

Show business junkies, magic fans and lovers of the variety arts, put your hands on your wallets and read on. Cutting Up Touches is the first book ever written on the history of exhibition pickpocketing. This specialty act features dynamic performers who deftly steal watches and wallets - even neckties and belts from unsuspecting volunteers. F.D.R., J. Edgar Hoover, Pierce Brosnan and Michael Douglas are some of the many celebrities and political figures who've found their pockets emptied by these light-fingered showmen. David Avadon, one of the smoothest pickpockets in the country, unveils the rich history of this fascinating entertainment from its music hall beginnings to the largest showrooms in the world. He explores the powerful subliminal emotions touched by each act of theatrical theivery. This street crime turned performance art is unique among all entertainments. It is the human-to-human activity which most closely resembles bull fighting. Avadon puts the reader wise to the wires, dips and cannons of the street corner variety then, in elegant prose, limns the masters of stealing on stage: Dr. Giovanni, Borra, Dominique and many, many more. Illustrated with photos, playbills and posters, many published here for the first time.

Born in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, Walter Mehring inherited both his father's respect for the civilizing power of literature and his formidable library of thousands of books. Like his father, believed that books and reading were essential to progress, mutual understanding, and contentment. After having served in World War I, Mehring spent the years between the world wars as part of the exhilarating avant-garde coffeehouse culture of Europe's capitals; he himself was a poet, cabaret lyricist, and founder of the Dadaist movement in Berlin. But with the rise of fascism, Europe became a dangerous place for free-thinking artists. Mehring never envisioned that the culture of books celebrated in his father's library would be rejected by the sudden rise to prominence of the Nationalist Socialist Party. Soon, even his own books were burned by the Brownshirts and Mehring was forced to roam Europe as a literary fugitive. From a precarious exile in Vienna, he arranged for his father's books to be smuggled out of Germany, but their fate would be worse than his--while Mehring managed to slip out of Austria and avoid capture, his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. In The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture , translated by Richard and Clara Winston and presented in paperback for the first time, Mehring takes the reader with him as he unpacks the crates of books in his mind, and in the process recalls what each book meant to him and his father. Writing with wit and insight, Mehring successfully compares the humanism of his father's era with the chaos of Europe at war, using his father's library as a metaphor for how the optimism of nineteenth-century progress gave way to the disorder and book-burning of the twentieth. "It is with love and not a little bitterness that the author touches on the various tomes of his father's library [and through them] on the history of man's ideas, on the magnificence of our cultural progress, . . . and on the eventual destruction of the beauty and ideals that man had been able to create. . . . Beautifully conceived and beautifully executed."-- The Atlantic "Whoever cares for books will love this book about books."-- New York Times " The Lost Library cannot be read without profit."-- Times Literary Supplement

This volume collects the best of recent research and classic essays on the Primeval History, including several articles that have not appeared heretofore in English. The articles provide students and scholars with easy access to significant scholarship illuminating both the world outside the text and the world within the text.

Originally published in 1986, From Berlin to Berkeley is an intellectual portrait of one of America's leading 20th century social scientists, Reinhard Bendix, and his father, Ludwig Bendix. It discusses cultural identity and assimilation and provides a profound account of Ludwig Bendix's life as a lawyer and critic of the German judicial system, his identification with German culture and his emigration to Palestine during Hitler's regime. Bendix then examines the relationship with his father and details his youth in Germany, his emigration to America, and his early career as a scholar. Covering the period from 1877 to the 1980s, Bendix shows how the two lives were touched by the culture of Imperial Germany, the German legal profession, World War I, the revolution of November 1918 in Germany and subsequent inflation, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crisis of the Weimar Republic, the Hitler regime, emigration to Palestine and the United States, World War II, the division of Germany, and the world-political role of the United States. A moving exploration which melds sociological case study and family history, the book is a significant measure of a family and a civilization.

Here the late Raphael Patai (1910-1996) recreates the fascinating world of Jewish seafaring from Noah's voyage through the Diaspora of late antiquity. In a work of pioneering scholarship, Patai weaves together Biblical stories, Talmudic lore, and Midrash literature to bring alive the world of these ancient mariners. As he did in his highly acclaimed book The Jewish Alchemists, Patai explores a subject that has never before been investigated by scholars. Based on nearly sixty years of research, beginning with study he undertook for his doctoral dissertation, The Children of Noah is literally Patai's first book and his last. It is a work of unsurpassed scholarship, but it is accessible to general readers as well as scholars.An abundance of evidence demonstrates the importance of the sea in the lives of Jews throughout early recorded history. Jews built ships, sailed them, fought wars in them, battled storms in them, and lost their lives to the sea. Patai begins with the story of the deluge that is found in Genesis and profiles Noah, the father of all shipbuilders and seafarers. The sea, according to Patai's interpretation, can be seen as an image of the manifestation of God's power, and he reflects on its role in legends and tales of early times. The practical importance of the sea also led to the development of practical institutions, and Patai shows how Jewish seafaring had its own culture and how it influenced the cultures of Mediterranean life as well. Of course, Jewish sailors were subject to the same rabbinical laws as Jews who never set sail, and Patai describes how they went to extreme lengths to remain in adherence, even getting special emendations of laws to allow them to tie knots and adjust rigging on the Sabbath.The Children of Noah is a capstone to an extraordinary career. Patai was both a careful scholar and a gifted storyteller, and this work is at once a vivid history of a neglected aspect of Jewish culture and a treasure trove of sources for further study. It is a stimulating and delightful book.

This book presents important topics regarding the more mystical trend of Kabbalah - the ecstatic Kabbalah. It includes the mystical union, the world of imagination, and concentration as a spiritual technique. The emphasis in the text is on the interaction between the "original" Spanish stage of Kabbalah and Muslim mysticism in the East, mainly in the Galilee. The influence of the Kabbalistic-Sufic synthesis on the later developments of Jewish mysticism is traced, thereby providing a more precise understanding of the history of Kabbalah as an interplay between the theosophical and ecstatic mystical experiences.

"Moacyr Scliar was the preeminent literary voice of the Jewish immigrant experience in modern Brazil. Now his most ambitiously satirical and irreverent novel is at last translated into English, offering not just a significant contribution to Latin American and Jewish literature but to world literature as well. In a past-life therapy session, a mysterious woman makes a remarkable breakthrough when she discovers that in a previous life she was one of King Solomon's seven hundred wives. In language that hilariously mixes modern jargon and biblical diction, she sets out to tell the story of her earlier incarnation three thousand years in the past, revealing how she went from a provincial nobody to a queen. Yet being royalty isn't all it's cracked up to be. As the least desirable of King Solomon's wives and concubines, she is unceremoniously discarded and forgotten in his harem. But as luck would have it, she possesses a unique gift: she is a woman who knows how to read and write. Once her talent is discovered, King Solomon charges her with writing what will become one of the most important texts in human history. Along the way our nameless narrator leverages her newfound status as royal scribe to bring about her own secret agenda. A brilliant feminist critique skewering the absurdities of patriarchy, The Woman Who Wrote the Bible is a comic masterpiece of truly biblical proportions"-- Provided by publisher.

In this collection of essays and articles best selling author Mark Girouard writes of places he has visited in town and country. Mixing erudition with anecdote, he offers fascinating insights into both buildings and their inhabitants. He tells how he first became interested in architecture, describes the country houses which he visited as a boy, provides an authoritative interpretation of the origins of English rococo art, analyzes the formation of an English seaside resort, recreates the Georgian architecture and polite society of Jane Austen's world, and traces changing attitudes toward the landscape in architecture from eighteenth-century Britain to twentieth-century America. Old Slaughter's Coffee-House in the mid-eighteenth century; Holdenby, an Elizabethan great house built by a royal favourite who was called by one of his contemporaries "a mere vegetable of the court that sprung up at night and sank again at noon"; Belvedere, the eighteenth-century Irish country house that was witness to a tragic story of adultery and revenge: these are just a few of the buildings described by Girouard in these delightful essays on architecture and society in bygone eras in England and Ireland. Written with his customary wit and elegance, this collection of Girouard's finest essays illuminates not only architecture and social history but also the man who has explored both with such elan.

"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"--

For nearly a decade Marc Aronson ran an imprint dedicated to international and multicultural literature for teens. He was known in the industry for publishing "edgy" books, and for his commitment to bringing the experiences of non-dominant authors and illustrators to the world. Yet in the summer of 2001 he wrote an essay that argued against awards, such as the Pure Belpre and Coretta Scott King prizes, for which you must be a member of a given ethnic group to win. Not surprisingly, his article was very controversial; and the author and publisher Andrea Davis Pinkney who had created an imprint specifically designed to be of, by, and for African Americans, published a thoughtful reply. Here, in Beyond the Pale , Aronson explains the passionate convictions that led him to write his essay, and outlines objections made by others; then reprints the original alongside Pinkney's response. As Aronson prepared a formal response to his critics, the attacks of September 11th took place. This tragedy simultaneously made a squabble among authors seem petty, and the issues around art, society, and cultural diversity all the more important. Throughout 2001 and 2002, Aronson wrote essays in which he weighed out how art, history, and books for younger readers could respond to the altered world. As in his previous collection, Exploding the Myths, the Truth About Teenagers and Reading , he exposes the mythologies and false beliefs that distort our understanding of books and their readers. Provocative and informative, this collection of essays will challenge those who know children's literature well to think in new ways, while linking the debates within that industry to the wider intellectual currents of our time.

Journey to heaven invites readers to rediscover some of the basic tenets of Jewish belief concerning the hereafter: resurrection, immortality, judgment, messianism, and the World to Come. Starting with the Bible's references to Sheol and allusions to resurrection, this comprehensive survey explores immortality and bodily resurrection in Second Temple literature; the Mishnah's discussions of olam ha-ba, the World to Come, and how to merit entertering it; and the Talmud's depictions of Gan Eden (paradise), Gehinnom (hell), and the soul's journey through these metaphysical landscapes. Bronner also explores the views of medieval scholars such as Maimonides and Nahmanides, Jewish mystical teachings about reincarnation, and modern views of faith and belief. A separate chapter is devoted to views of the Messiah over the course of Jewish history. Bronner demonstrates that the afterlife is indeed a vital part of Judaism, as she reveals how generations of Jews, from biblical times to the present, have grappled with its core ideas and beliefs about the hereafter

Taxing America, first published in 1999, offers an interpretation of the American state between 1945 and 1975 by tracing the career of Wilbur D. Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974. Blending methodological insights from history, political science, and sociology, Julian Zelizer provides one of the first comparative histories of income taxation, Social Security, and Medicare in this study of the crucial role Mills played in negotiating between the tax policy community and Congress. Taxing America lays out four innovative arguments about the expansion of the state during the postwar period; Congress played a crucial role in the institutionalization of the state after World War II, policy communities helped encourage policymaking, taxation was central to postwar liberalism and its domestic agenda, and a fragile alliance between influential fiscal conservatives and the state was instrumental in expanding support of the policies of the tax community.

"The sociologist Daniel Bell was an uncommonly acute observer of the structural forces transforming the United States and other advanced societies in the twentieth century. The titles of Bell's major books-The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)-became hotly debated frameworks for understanding the era when they were published. In Defining the Age, Paul Starr and Julian Zelizer bring together a group of distinguished contributors to consider how well Bell's ideas captured their historical moment and continue to provide profound insights into today's world. Wide-ranging essays demonstrate how Bell's writing has informed thinking about subjects such as the history of socialism, the roots of the radical right, the emerging postindustrial society, and the role of the university. The book also examines Bell's intellectual trajectory and distinctive political stance. Calling himself "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture," he resisted being pigeon-holed, especially as a neoconservative. Defining the Age features essays from historians Jenny Andersson, David A. Bell, Michael Kazin, and Margaret O'Mara; sociologist Steven Brint; media scholar Fred Turner; and political theorists Jan-Werner Müller and Stefan Eich. While differing in their judgments, they agree on one premise: Bell's ideas deserve the kind of nuanced and serious attention that they finally receive in this book"--

I think that if persons concerned about the problems of Jews and Zionism could have but one book on the subject on their shelf, it should be this one.-- Socialism and Democracy The Zionist movement has had an unprecedented impact on global politics. The quest for a Jewish nation-state has caused turmoil and despair for the Palestinian people and has redefined what it means to be Jewish. Prominent American activist and intellectual Joel Kovel has written a critical exploration of the history of Zionism, arguing that a one-state solution is the only viable option for peace. Kovel recounts the extraordinary genesis of the Zionist movement and the explicit goals of its founders to create a Jewish-only state in Palestine. He examines how the pursuit of this path has changed the nature of Jewry, the fate of the Palestinian people, and the relationship between the Western and the Muslim world. Kovel's passionate concern for social justice makes him unable to accept the two-state solution for Palestine and Israel as a path to peace, and incapable of reconciling his Jewish identity with the goals of Zionism.

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.