Like her celebrated short fiction, Paley's poems are street-smart yet vulnerable, full of earthy observations and a refreshing bemusement; they display a wonderful ear for the rhythm of the speech of her native New York, where "talk is cheap but comes in variety." She "tells the story of the stories" told by children and grandmothers, which resonate "in the mind's ear" as "talk talk talk/the tickling tongue/of strangers." These poems are rich with the fullness of everyday life: the doings of Paley's Greenwich Village neighborhood, summers in Vermont, fulltime political activism, memories of family and friends. Paley's wonderful economy with words recalls William Carlos Williams and the objectivist poets. ISBN 0-88448-098-4: $19.95.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan may be best known as a statesman. He served in the administrations of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford; was ambassador to India and the United Nations; and represented New York in the U.S. Senate for 4 terms. But he was also an intellectual of the first order, whose books and papers on topics ranging from welfare policy and ethnicity in American society to international law stirred debate and steered policy. Moynihan was, journalist Michael Barone remarked, the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson. He was, Greg Weiner argues, Americas answer to the 18th-century Anglo-Irish scholar-statesman Edmund Burke. In its incisive analysis of Moynihans political thought, American Burke lays out the terms for such a recovery. The book traces Moynihans development through the broad sweep of his writings and career. The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society, Moynihan once wrote. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. In his ability to embrace both of these truths, this American Burke makes it bracingly clear that a wise political thinker can also be an effective political actor, and that commitments to both liberal and conservative values can coexist peaceably and productively. Weiners work is not only a thorough and thoroughly engaging intellectual exploration of one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century; it is also a timely prescription for the healing of our broken system.

The first collection of writings by a noted artist and activist whose work has focused on the AIDS epidemic. The HIV epidemic animates this collection of essays by a noted artist, writer, and activist. "So total was the burden of illness—mine and others'—that the only viable response, other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by using the crisis as a lens," writes Gregg Bordowitz, a film- and video-maker whose best-known works, Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), address AIDS globally and personally. In The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous— the title essay is inspired by Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theater Company—Bordowitz follows in the tradition of artist-writers Robert Smithson and Yvonne Rainer by making writing an integral part of an artistic practice. Bordowitz has left his earliest writings for the most part unchanged—to preserve, he says, "both the youthful exuberance and the palpable sense of fear" created by the early days of the AIDS crisis. After these early essays, the writing becomes more experimental, sometimes mixing fiction and fact; included here is a selection of Bordowitz's columns from the journal Documents, "New York Was Yesterday." Finally, in his newest essays he reformulates early themes, and, in "My Postmodernism" (written for Artforum's fortieth anniversary issue) and "More Operative Assumptions" (written especially for this book), he reexamines the underlying ideas of his practice and sums up his theoretical concerns. In his mature work, Bordowitz seeks to join the subjective—the experience of having a disease—and the objective—the fact of the disease as a global problem. He believes that this conjunction is necessary for understanding and fighting the crisis. "If it can be written," he says, "then it can be realized."

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The life and times of Groucho Marx. He is photographed with family, friends and other stars.

Zusammenfassung: "Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders, in fact, relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis -- members of the killing squads, guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps, civilian employees of the SS, the drivers of gas trucks, and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions. Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources, including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia, the recollections of Jewish survivors, archival documents, and most importantly, the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly, extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators, their mindset, and the motivations for their actions. Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight, the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities, offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty, obedience to authority, thirst for career, and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology, among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor, Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life -- and of human history -- that cannot be forgotten. -- Provided by publisher

Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture. Hall concludes that recognition of the survival and persistence of African ethnic identities can fundamentally reshape how people think about the emergence of identities among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about the ways shared identity gave rise to resistance movements, and about the elements of common African ethnic traditions that influenced regional creole cultures throughout the Americas.

The lives of six strangers become intertwined when a road trip culminates at the site of the national Karaoke championships.

Jesus in the Jewish Wold represents some of the seminal aspects of the lifelong research of Geza Vermes focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish Bible interpretation and the historical study of Jesus and the New Testament. Taken together the fifteen essays, the oldest of which dates from 1970 and the most recent from 2010, constitute an evocative cross section of the contribution to scholarship by Vermes who is equally celebrated as a pioneering Jesus In The Jewish World represents a synopsis of the most significant and Scrolls expert and, according to the Sunday Telegraph, the greatest Jesus scholar of his generation. Readers of the present volume are offered lively and often humorous accounts of the impact of Jesus the Jew on Christian and Jewish readers; of the value of Josephus as a historical source regarding John the Baptist, James the brother of the Lord, and Jesus; the historical implications of ancient Jewish biblical exegesis; of the inside story of the monumental recasting by Vermes and his friends of Emil Schurer's History of the Jewish People; and of the sacrifice of Isaac and the story of the first-century Galilean rabbi, Hanina ben Dosa. The final two essays, written in 2007 and 2010, are particularly noteworthy, the first propounding a fresh and revolutionary approach to methodology in the study of the historical Jesus and the second restating and reinforcing Vermes's stance in the half -a-century long Son of Man debate. Geza Vermes is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford but continues to teach at the Oriental Institute in Oxford.

Who was Herod the Great? How did he come to govern one of the most politically tumultuous regions in the world? Was he the heartless baby-killer of Matthew's Gospel, or does this popular tale do Herod a great disservice? Geza Vermes, whose work on the Historical Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls has made him one of the most recognisable names in Biblical and Jewish studies, provides a new portrait of Herod. Vermes examines Herod's legacy as a political leader, and a potentate, a man of culture, and an all-round smooth operator. Vermes opens up the fascinating character of Herod, from his sizable and fragile ego to his devastation at the execution of his beloved wife, an execution that Herod ordered himself. Beginning with the key historical sources (notably Josephus) Vermes moves on to consider Herod's greatest legacy and testament - his extensive building works, which include the Temple in Jerusalem, Masada and Herodium. Colour images, combined with Vermes' lively prose make this new picture of Herod an enticing and informative guide to one of ancient history's most misunderstood figures.

Published for the first time in English, Panorama is a superb rediscovered novel of the Holocaust by a neglected modern master. One of a handful of death camp survivors to fictionalize his experiences in German, H. G. Adler is an essential author--referenced by W. G. Sebald in his classic novel Austerlitz , and a direct literary descendant of Kafka. When The Journey was discovered in a Harvard bookshop and translated by Peter Filkins, it began a major reassessment of the Prague-born H. G. Adler by literary critics and historians alike. Known for his monumental Theresienstadt 1941-1945 , a day-by-day account of his experiences in the Nazi slave-labor community before he was sent to Auschwitz, Adler also wrote six novels. The very depiction of the Holocaust in fiction caused furious debate and delays in their publication. Now Panorama , his first novel, written in 1948, is finally available to convey the kinds of truths that only fiction can. A brilliant epic, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of young Josef Kramer. Told in ten distinct scenes, it begins in pastoral Word War I-era Bohemia, where the boy passively witnesses the "wonders of the world" in a thrilling panorama display; follows him to a German boarding school full of creeping xenophobia and prejudice; and finds him in young adulthood sent to a labor camp and then to one of the infamous extermination camps, before he chooses exile abroad after the war. Josef's philosophical journey mirrors the author's own: from a stoic acceptance of events to a realization that "the viewer is also the participant" and that action must be taken in life, if only to make sure the dead are not forgotten. Achieving a stream-of-consciousness power reminiscent of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, H. G. Adler is a modern artist with unique historical importance. Panorama is lasting evidence of both the torment of his life and the triumph of his gifts.

"Hadassah Lieberman's memoirs, telling the story of her experience as the child of Holocaust survivors, of being an immigrant in America, making a career as a working woman, experiencing divorce, and re-marriage as the wife of a US senator"--

Haim Cohn, a Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, and a scholar of Jewish legal history , offers a profound and respectful engagement of the Gospel narrative of the trail and death of Jesus. Using information we possess from various scholarly sources concerning the law and procedures (both Jewish and Roman) pertaining at the time, Justice Cohn presents a searching forensic and historical analysis to create a legal, political and religious context of the events as they may really have happened.

When American-born Haim Watzman immigrated to Israel, he was drafted into the army and, after eighteen months of compulsory service, was assigned to Company C, the reserve infantry unit that would define the next twenty years of his life. From 1984 until 2002, for at least a month a year, Watzman, who had never aspired to military adventure, was a soldier. Watzman was a soldier as he adjusted to his new country, raised his children, and pursued a career as a writer and translator. At times he defended his adopted country’s borders; at other times he patrolled beyond them, or that gray area, the occupied territories. A religiously observant Jew who opposed Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he served in uniform in conflicts that he demonstrated against in civilian clothes. Throughout, he developed a deep and abiding bond with the diverse men of Company C--a fellowship that cemented his commitment to reserve service even as he questioned the occupation he was enforcing. In this engrossing account of the first Intifada, the period of the Oslo Accords, and Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank as lived by citizen-soldiers in the field, Watzman examines our obligations to country, friends, family, and God--and our duty to protect our institutions even as we fight to reform them.