This is a new presentation of the philosophy of the Talmud. The Talmud is not a work of formal philosophy, but much of what it says is relevant to philosophical enquiry, including issues explored in contemporary debates. In particular, the Talmud has original ideas about the relation between universal ethics and the ethics of a particular community. This leads into a discussion on the relation between morality and ritual, and also about the epistemological role of tradition. The book explains the paradoxes of Talmudic Judaism as arising from a philosophy of revolution, stemming from Jewish origins as a band of escaped slaves, determined not to reproduce the slave-society of Egypt. From this arises a daring humanism, and an emphasis on justice in this world rather than on other-worldly spirituality. A strong emphasis on education and the cultivation of rationality also stems from this. Governing the discussion is a theory of logic that differs significantly from Greek logic. Talmudic logic is one of analogy, not classification and is peculiarly suited to discussions of moral and legal human situations. This book will be of interest to those in the fields of philosophy, religion and the history of ideas, whether students, teachers and academics, or the interested general reader.

"The Transformational Decade shows the transformation that took place in American life from the attack on the World Trade Center to the emergence of the Obama presidency. It is not a strict history, but rather snapshots of a decade that has fundamentally altered perceptions of the United States. In some respects, this book is modeled after Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday, acclaimed books that sought to capture the spirit of the 1920s and '30s. London sees the period from 2001 to 2008 as "post yesterday," a period that broke with the past, challenged the essence of the free market, and contested America's role on the world stage. In an effort to limn these snapshots from recent history, London has written several "decade" books: The Overheated Decade, The Counterfeit Decade, and The Decade of Denial. This book, The Transformational Decade, differs in that it represents a separation from the past. London illuminates a decade that he considers to be a new and more frightful period than any in recent American history."--Publisher's website.

Eugene Myers is working on a novel about the end of the world. Meanwhile, he discovers his daughter doing porn online and his marriage is coming to an end. When he begins dreaming about people who turn out to be real, he wonders if his novel is real as well. Eugene Myers may just be the one to stop the apocalypse. This history of the future covers every conspiracy imaginable: UFOs, secret societies, and World War III, as well as theories on life after death and human evolution by a writer whose last novel was called by Dogmatika, A page-turner and an example of an effective piece of storytelling that should be envied. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson, The American Book of the Dead explores the nature of reality and the human race's potential to either disintegrate or evolve.

Italian poet Amelia Rosselli grew up in an environment jolted by -assaults of personal and social history. The daughter of one of the heroes of the Italian Resistance during World War II, she suffered her father's assassination when she was seven. After an adolescence characterized by movement between cities and continents, her mother died, triggering a mental breakdown in the daughter. War Variations encompasses these intense life experiences, terrifying psychological realities that ultimately led to Rosselli's suicide.

In these nine stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms and the gently mocking humor of despair. Wat inverts the conventions of religion, politics, and culture to fantastic effect, illuminating the anarchic conditions of existence in interwar Europe. The title story finds a superbly ironic Lucifer wandering the Europe of the late 1920s in search of a mission: what impact can a devil have in a godless time? What is his sorcery in a society far more diablical than the devil himself? Too idealistic for a world full of modern cruelties, the unemployable Lucifer finally finds the only means of guaranteed immortality. In "The Eternally Wandering Jew," steady Jewish conversion to Christianity results in Nathan the Talmudist reigning as Pope Urban IX. The hilarious satire on power, "Kings in Exile," unfolds with the dethroned monarchs of Europe meeting to found their own republic in an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean.

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.

Every work on Jewish thought and law since the twelfth century bears the imprint of Maimonides. A. N. Whitehead's famous dictum that the entire European philosophical tradition 'consists of a series of footnotes to Plato' could equally characterize Maimonides' place in the Jewish tradition. The critical studies in this volume explore how Orthodox rabbis of different orientations--Shlomo Aviner, Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin (Netziv), Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Joseph Kafih, Abraham Isaac Kook, Aaron Kotler, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Elhanan Wasserman--have read and provided footnotes to Maimonides in the long twentieth century. How well did they really understand Maimonides? And where do their arguments fit in the mainstream debates about him and his works? Each of the seven core chapters examines a particular approach. Some rabbis have tried to liberate themselves from the influence of his ideas. Others have sought to build on those ideas or expand them in ways which Maimonides himself did not pursue, and which he may well not have agreed with. Still others advance patently non-Maimonidean positions, while attributing them to none other than Maimonides. Above all, the essays published here demonstrate that his legacy remains vibrantly alive today.

The last 15 years have witnessed deep changes in Israeli society. The naive solidarity of the early years of statehood has given way to more sophisticated approaches, and the atmosphere of the 1990s was conducive towards critique and open discussion. It was the age of the Oslo Accords, of the large wave of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, economic growth and prosperity, and a concurrent feeling of security and well-being. Israel was fast becoming a postcapitalist society, a junior member of the global village. This newly acquired self-assurance led to openness towards unorthodox views on basic questions of Israeli identity. This book attempts to come to grips with these themes. The complex texture of Israeli society is drawn here by a number of hands, presenting up-to-date approaches, as viewed by experts.

Mention 1492 and most people conjure up images of three stout ships making their way west. But 1492 was the year in which the vibrant Jewish community of Spain came to an abrupt and tragic end. This book details the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal and their early immigration to the New World. European anti-Semitism followed the Jews but the newcomers persevered and made a home for themselves in the New World. Starred Review and Editor’s Choice, Booklist, NCCS/CBC Notable Children’s Trade Book and American Bookseller Pick of the Lists, 1990.

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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. 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. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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 aim of this book is to explain in simple language what we know about time and about the history of time. It is shown that the briefest (as well as the lengthiest) history of time can be described in one or two pages. The second purpose of the book is to show that neither entropy, nor the Second Law of Thermodynamics has anything to do with time. The third purpose is to educate the lay reader how to read popular sciences books, critically. Towards this goal, detailed reviews of four books on time are presented"--

Good condition. Shows signs of age, but minimal marginal notes or highlighting, and no harm to text or pages.

Book by Lichtenstein, Aharon

The rise and fall of the Jews is compressed into the enigmatic character of Ebenezer Schneerson, who has somehow become the final repository of all Jewish culture following the ravages of World War II.

"In the aftermath of the Cold War there has been a dramatic shift in thinking about the maintenance of peace and security on a global level. This shift is away from a preoccupation with how to prevent major wars between sovereign states to a preoccupation about non-state transnational warfare and violence and strife within states in a world order that continues to be juridically and politically delimited by spatial ideas of national sovereignty and national independence as signified by international boundaries. In this book, Richard Falk draws upon these changes to examine the ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention in the 21st Century. As well as analysing the theoretical and conceptual basis of the responsibility to protect, the book also contains a number of case studies looking at Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Syria. The final section explores when humanitarian intervention can succeed and the changing nature of international political legitimacy in countries such as India, Tibet, South Africa and Palestine.This book will be of interest to students of International Relations theory, Peace Studies and Global Politics. "--

Theodor Herzl, Architect of a Nation , is the compelling account of a complex individual who sacrificed his health and family in pursuit of an ideal: the establishment of a homeland where Jews throughout the world could go to escape anti-Semitism. "If you will it, it is no dream," he said. This book sheds valuable light on a man whose short, eventful life helped create and shape the modern State of Israel. Norman H. Finkelstein focuses on the ideas that Herzl gave to the Zionist movement and on the grand diplomacy and political maneuvering to which he devoted his life.

Summing up the work of libertarian economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) and noting its stunning range, philosopher David Gordon once wondered "if there are really three, four, or five geniuses writing under his name." These lively essays display one of those geniuses: Rothbard the journalist, cultural critic, political observer, and movement organizer. Even more remarkable, they represent just a fraction of what he wrote in his spare time, for just one publication, and in just the last few years of his life. His articles combined libertarian anti-government economics, decentralist local patriotism, anti-war isolation, and a reactionary cultural outlook that saw government as the key to the loss of the Old Republic. He defended land-rights groups against environmentalists, citizen militias against gun grabbers, isolationists against imperialists, paleoconservatives against neoconservatives, populists against party regulars, anti-New World Order conspiracy theorists against the establishment, nationalists against internationalists, states righters against libertarian centralists, the Christian right against its own leadership, and much more. These essays show forth not only Rothbard's intellectual vigor, but the complete joy with which he embraced life, and how his extreme optimism made even the most severe setbacks tolerable. He experienced great disappointments and great successes, but through it all he was heroic, undaunted, and irrepressible. In this, as in everything else, Murray Rothbard is the model for those who long for liberty, and work for it.

Abraham Abulafia, the founder of the ecstatic Kabbalah, exposed a mysticism that includes a deep interest in language as a universe in itself, to be studied as the philosophers study nature, in order to attain higher knowledge than natural science and speculative philosophy. The status of Hebrew as the natural, intellectual, and primordial language is discussed against the background of the medieval speculations regarding this topic.Abulafia proposed an elaborate hermeneutical system, unique in the whole Kabbalistic literature, for both its systematic exposition and the eccentric exegetical devices it describes. Various versions of this sevenfold system occur in several manuscripts that are collected and analyzed here in detail for the first time.Torah was regarded by Abulafia as the most important text, reflecting the constitution of the intellectual world and being identical with the Active intellect and even to God Himself. On the other hand, Torah was interpreted in Abulafia’s Kabbalah as an allegory to the psychological processes of the mystic, an approach different from the regular Kabbalistic interpretation of this text as a symbolic corpus reflecting the divine intrasefirotic life.

Discusses the economic, social, and political situations that enabled small groups of revolutionaries to bring about the collapse of the tsarist Russian empire and examines the effect of the revolution on Russia and the world.