Now in paperback! Taking Hold of Torah Jewish Commitment and Community in America Arnold M. Eisen A personal meditation on the meaning of Judaism today and a vision for revitalizing Jewish community and tradition in America. "Arnold M. Eisen offers a personal plea for—and a vision of—the revitalizing of American Judaism through a renewed relationship to Jewish tradition and the strengthening of Jewish communities." —Jewish Book News "...required reading for Jewish communal professionals, [Taking Hold of Torah] spells out the discontents and dreams of the baby boomers and their children who are reinventing Jewish communal life for the modern world." —Jewish Exponent "Melding autobiography with biblical exegesis, philosophical speculation and a program for Jewish educational reform, the book is an unbuttoned riff on what's ailing modern Jews." —Forward "...a personal story of a modern Jew trying to make sense of Judaism in a time when Jews can choose whether and how to be Jewish...." —The Jewish Advocate Jews, like other Americans, have both benefitted and suffered from the fraying of traditional loyalties that has come to characterize modern American culture. In each of the five chapters, Arnold M. Eisen examines a major issue or theme related to his vision for the renewal of Jewish communities—in terms of one of the five books of the Torah. What is the meaning and purpose of Jewish tradition? What is the significance of faith and covenant? What are the contemporary uses of ritual? What should a new agenda for politics in American Jewish life include? What legacy is to be left to future generations? This encouraging work is essential reading for anyone concerned with questions of Jewish faith and the future of Judaism in America. Arnold M. Eisen is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Stanford University, a frequent speaker on issues related to contemporary Jewish life before lay and scholarly audiences throughout North America, and an active participant in communal discussions concerning the future of American Judaism. His publications include The Chosen People in America (Indiana University Press) and Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community, winner of a Koret Jewish Book Award. The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies Contents: Introduction 1. Genesis: Taking on Tradition 2. Exodus: History, Faith, and Covenant 3. Leviticus: Ritual and Community 4. Numbers: Politics in the Wilderness 5. Deuteronomy: Legacies

Pauline Wengeroff, the only nineteenth-century Russian Jewish woman to publish a memoir, sets out to illuminate the "cultural history of the Jews of Russia" in the period of Jewish "enlightenment," when traditional culture began to disintegrate and Jews became modern. Wengeroff, a gifted writer and astute social observer, paints a rich portrait of both traditional and modernizing Jewish societies in an extraordinary way, focusing on women and the family and offering a gendered account (and indictment) of assimilation. In Volume 1 of Memoirs of a Grandmother, Wengeroff depicts traditional Jewish society, including the religious culture of women, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, who wished "his" Jews to be acculturated to modern Russian life.Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother offers a unique first-person window into traditionalism, modernity, and the tensions linking the two in nineteenth-century Russia. Wengeroff (1833–1916), a perceptive, highly literate social observer, tells a gripping tale of cultural transformation, situating her narrative in the experience of women and families. In Volume Two, Wengeroff claims that Jewish women were capable and desirous of adopting the best of European modernity but were also wedded to tradition, while Jewish men recklessly abandoned tradition and forced their wives to do the same. The result was not only marital and intergenerational conflict but also catastrophic cultural loss, with women's inability to transmit tradition in the home leading to larger cultural drift. Two of Wengeroff's children converted when faced with anti-Jewish educational and professional discrimination, unwilling to sacrifice secular ambitions and visions for the sake of a traditional culture they did not know. Memoirs is a tale of loss but also of significant hope, which Wengeroff situates not in her children but in a new generation of Jewish youth reclaiming Jewish memory. To them, she addresses her Memoirs, giving an "orphaned youth"―orphaned of their past and culture―a "grandmother."

"In his captivating new book, based on new evidence and a series of interviews, author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer offers a richly journalistic portrait of Russia's dwindling yet still vibrant and influential Jewish community. This is simultaneously an in-depth exploration of the texture of Jewish life in Putin's Russia and an emigre's moving elegy for Russia's Jews, which forty years ago constituted one of the world's largest Jewish populations and which presently numbers only about 180,000. Why do Jews continue to live in Russia after the antisemitism and persecution they had endured there? What are the prospects of Jewish life in Russia? What awaits the children born to Jews who have not left? "With or Without You" asks and seeks to answer some of the central questions of modern Jewish history and culture"--

Judaism has always taught that sons and daughters must honor their parents. First encountered in the Ten Commandments, this teaching has remained characteristic of the Jewish ethos through out the ages. Indeed, if the mores of the Jewish family merit special discussion, the responsibility of children toward parents must be isolated as a sensitive central value. This book describes and analyzes the teaching of filial responsibility and respect in Judaism. Inasmuch as the Jewish thrust has been to concretize and specify, to detail and debate, the honoring of parents was translated into the pattern and process of family life. How does one honor parents? What is expected of a son and a daughter? When is parental authority legitimate, and when is it not? What do halakhists and moralists say on the issue? And since we are dealing with a paradigm of Jewish thought and action, we must also confront the tensions between feeling and doing, loving and obeying, honoring and serving. Finally, what is the significance of this ethic? With full awareness of the historical setting and milieu, this book treats the dynamic of an idea that exists as a social reality. Honor Thy Father and Mother will be valuable for sociologists and historians, for students of ethics and law. Moreover, since the commandment to honor parents is part of Christian Scripture as well as Jewish, the significance of this book goes far beyond the Jewish community, and it should be of interest to readers of all faiths. Ultimately, in fact, the book should appeal to all men and women, for all of us are sons and daughters, and many of us are, or will be parents.

Anzia Yezierska's "Children of Loneliness" explores the complex experiences of Jewish immigrants in New York City. This literary work delves into the challenges of social alienation and the struggles inherent in cultural assimilation. Through compelling prose, Yezierska examines the conflicts that arise between generations as they navigate new identities in a rapidly changing world. A poignant portrayal of the immigrant experience, "Children of Loneliness" offers a powerful glimpse into the lives of those seeking a new home while grappling with the loss of their traditions. The novel masterfully portrays the universal themes of identity, belonging, and the search for connection in an unfamiliar land, ensuring its enduring relevance. This carefully prepared print republication makes this important historical fiction accessible to all. 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.

Myron Brinig's debut novel, Singermann, originally published in 1929, tells the story of a Jewish family, the Singermanns who immigrate to the mining city of (Silver Bow) Butte, Montana during the early heydays of the west. Follow Moses, his wife Rebecca, and their six children as they navigate the complexities of their rapidly changing world. From the eldest son's unexpected journey into Christian Science to the youngest's fascination with writing, each member of the Singermann clan embarks on a unique path that challenges the family's tightly held beliefs. Themes of the immigrant experience, religion, labor unrest, childhood, and homosexuality, are all told in an honest and captivating voice (the book is largely based on the author's own life). Singermann is groundbreaking and compelling and worthy of being available again!

Pp. 264-338 discuss the Holocaust period, beginning with anti-Jewish laws in Yugoslavia restricting Jewish economic activity, as well as a numerus clausus, in October 1940. Notes that these laws were passed under German pressure, that protests made by the Jewish leadership were to no avail, and that many Jews thereafter converted. With the German occupation and division of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Nazis took over control of Belgrade and instituted further anti-Jewish measures. During fall 1941 all Jewish men were arrested; they were sent to nearby labor camps, and many were killed. In December all of the remaining Jews, mostly women and children, were interned at Sajmište, and during spring 1942 they were killed in a gassing truck. Provides details concerning the Final Solution in Belgrade, which was carried out with the collaboration of local authorities and police. Estimates that 94% of the ca. 11,870 Jews living there in 1941 were killed. Only a few of the Nazi perpetrators were tried and sentenced in Yugoslavia after the war; the others either fled or returned to Germany, where some received light sentences.

"In 1944, at the height of World War II, 982 European refugees found a temporary haven at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. They were men, women, and children who had spent frightening years one step ahead of Nazi pursuers and death. They spoke nineteen different languages, and, while most of the refugees were Jewish, a number were Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. From the time they arrived at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter on August 5 they began re-creating their lives and embarked on the road to becoming American citizens. In the history of World War II and the Holocaust, this "token" save by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Refugee Board was too little and too late for millions. But for those few who reached Oswego it was life changing. The Shelter and the Fence tells their stories"--

Letters from Our Mother contains the letters that the author’s mother, Charlotte Lewy Gossels, had written to her two young sons in France after she had worked for a year to obtain visas from the French government to help them escape from Nazi Germany in 1939. Unable to obtain a visa for herself, she was deported to Auschwitz from Berlin early in 1942.The book describes the fate of the brothers’ family, how the children managed to survive the defeat of the French army by the German invaders, who occupied France, the care they received from Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants and their rescue by members of the American Friend Service Committee, who obtained visas for these Jewish brothers to come to the United States in 1941. The book tells the story of the education these young German refugees received, their marriages, the families they created and the contributions they made to their American communities and society.It is the story of the two young immigrants, who fled for their lives . . . and it is the story of America.

Presents an inventory of the images of the Jew, mainly in Romanian culture. Focuses on popular beliefs, while illustrating ties with more elite political imagery. Groups anti-Jewish stereotypes into various "portraits": physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magic, and religious. Some physical images of the Jew, like red hair and "Jewish" freckles were associated with the devil. Another negative feature, one not exclusive to Romanian folk culture, was a belief in the existence of an unplesant Jewish smell considered to be a punishment for deicide that could be, alleviated only by the blood of Christians. Occupational stereotypes often related to materialism and dishonesty, contrasting the Jewish tradesman with the nature connected Romanian peasant. Jewish tavern-keepers were also associated with the devil. Characteristics that could be viewed as positive, like intelligence, were often linked to negative Jewish stereotypes, like craftiness. Some anti-Jewish stereotypes derived from early Christian views, e.g. of the Jews as blind to the "truths" of Christianity. Other images, like that of the Jew as a rain-maker, reflect traditional East European peasant views. An apparently positive image may have negative connotations, e.g. the positive omen of meeting a Jew at the beginning of a trip is based on the idea of the Jew as a "lightning-rod" for attracting the devil away from Christians. The religious portrait combines traditional universal Christian images of the Jew as deicide with local legends of the Jews as responsible for martyring a Christian saint and defacing a revered local icon. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were accused of killing Christian children. Some of these negative stereotypes were also associated with the Gypsies or other minorities.

"I had to do something to escape Hitler's clutches," writes Esti Freud. Yet she waits with her then-16-year-old daughter, Sophie in Paris, until German canons can be heard in the distance, before deciding to escape by bicycle across France as Sophie keeps looking back to see whether German tanks will overtake them. Both women survive by sheer miracle and, in their own ways, come to feel a need to keep a personal record of those tumultuous times. In a memoir written at age 79, Esti Freud, daughter-in-law of Sigmund Freud and wife of his oldest son Martin, looks back on her life that began before the 20th century, was lived on three continents, and stretched through two world wars and the Holocaust. Twenty years after her mother's death, daughter Sophie turned to Esti's memoir as a scaffold for this book, expanding it through family letters and archival material. Out of these documents the author has created a fascinating, many-voiced mosaic--the story of a famous family and of a century seen through the eyes of many characters. Indomitable Esti was not an easy person to love. While she establishes herself professionally three times, in three different languages, her troubled family relationships leave her lonely, often deeply unhappy. Sophie confides that Esti died without son or daughter at her side. This work gives an insider's, in-law view of the family Freud, its foundations, and flaws. The relationship between Esti, daughter of a wealthy Vienna attorney and her husband Martin Freud is foreshadowed by the young lovers' fathers. At first meeting Esti, Sigmund told his son the glamorous woman was "too beautiful" for the clan, meaning her splendor belied a lifestyle not conducive to the frugal Freud ways. And Esti's father, on hearing of her love for Martin, expressed regret she was involved with a man who was "not a financially favorable linkage," and that his family was not respectable since patriarch Sigmund was "just another psychiatrist, and one who writes pornography books at that." Thus begins the ill-fated relationship that would rock two families and a generation of children to come. Sophie weaves into the text letters she inherited, including letters from Martin while he was a prisoner of war, and excerpts from her own diary, kept as an adolescent. The resulting mosaic will fascinate--and perhaps disturb--readers interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as those intrigued by relationships and family.

Shaping Losses explores how traumatic loss affects identity and how those who are shaped by loss give shape, in turn, to the empty place where something--relationships, family, culture--was and is no longer. Taking the example of the decimation of European Jewry during the Nazi era, Shaping Losses confronts the problem of transforming trauma into cultural memory. This eloquent volume examines how memoirs, films, photographs, art, and literature, as well as family conversations and personal remembrances, embody the impulse to preserve what is destroyed. The contributors -- all distinguished women scholars, most of them survivors or daughters of survivors--examine classic memorializations such as Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Roman Vishniac's photographs of prewar Jews as well as several less-well-known works. They also address ways in which children of survivors of the Holocaust--and of other catastrophic traumas--struggle with inherited or vicarious memory, striving to come to terms with losses that centrally define them although they experience them only indirectly. Shaping Losses considers the limitations of Holocaust representations and testimonies that capture shards of the experience but are necessarily selective and reductive. Contributors discuss artistic efforts to "preserve the rawness" of memory, to resist redemptive closure in Holocaust narratives and public memorials, and to prevent the Holocaust from being sealed in "the cold storage of history." The authors probe the nature of memory and of trauma, studying the use of language within and outside a traumatic context such as Auschwitz and pinpointing the qualities that make traumatic memory ineffable, untransmittable, and perhaps unreliable. Within the "haunted terrain of traumatized memory" that all Holocaust testimonies inhabit, the impulse to give form to emptiness--to shape loss--emerges as a necessary betrayal, a vital effort to bridge the gap between history and memory.

Ivan Jablonka's grandparents' lives ended long before his began: although Matès and Idesa Jablonka were his family, they were perfect strangers. When he set out to uncover their story, Jablonka had little to work with. Neither of them was the least bit famous, and they left little behind except their two orphaned children, a handful of letters, and a passport. Persecuted as communists in Poland, as refugees in France, and then as Jews under the Vichy regime, Matès and Idesa lived their short lives underground. They were overcome by the tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalinism, the mounting dangers in Europe during the 1930s, the Second World War, and the destruction of European Jews. Jablonka's challenge was, as a historian, to rigorously distance himself and yet, as family, to invest himself completely in their story. Imagined oppositions collapsed - between scholarly research and personal commitment, between established facts and the passion of the one recording them, between history and the art of storytelling. To write this book, Jablonka traveled to three continents; met the handful of survivors of his grandparents' era, their descendants, and some of his far-flung cousins; and investigated twenty different archives. And in the process, he reflected on his own family and his responsibilities to his father, the orphaned son, and to his own children and the family wounds they all inherited. A History of the Grandparents I Never Had cannot bring Matès and Idesa to life, but Jablonka succeeds in bringing them, as he soberly puts it, to light. The result is a gripping story, a profound reflection, and an absolutely extraordinary history.

A classic tale adopted to a modern setting. We all, children and adults alike, have different inner voices telling us what to do. In this episode, David, 8, is tasked with babysitting his baby sister while Mommy goes to the store. (Daddy is in the other room.) David hears his friends playing ball outdoors. David's Bad King tells him to join them. His Good King says no! He is torn even more when his friends call him out to join them! What will David do?! What would you do? Based on an ancient parable of "the wisest man who ever lived."

With the Gaavatanic sunk at the bottom of the sea, the shipwrecked passengers must learn to work together to survive on a desert island. Under Rebbe Lev Tov's wise guidance, the lessons of good interpersonal relationships are taught and the 'incredible voyage' continues with this exciting sequel. For children and adults alike, this book will open the reader's eyes to the beauty of good middos, and provides the key to acquiring them. 62 full-color, beautifully illustrated pages. Large format.

One long poem threaded with personal, evocative poetry constantly moving. A Zen journey. A journey of love. The Absence of Zen. Becoming Jewish. The Kaddish. Blessings. A very readable work of what was known before and what is known now. From "The world is a hard place": We look at our empty handsand feel shadows and shade,sky drying where water has bee,and are left with wind, know themonly by their absence. Water. Wind.-- Melissa Bell review in VISIONS-International 2001

Shock number one for Dinah is that she is actually dating Geoff, star quarterback and all-around great guy. Shock number two is that her usually supportive family objects and that Geoff does not understand why. Why must difficult choices always come with wanting to have fun?

A writer's lifelong battle with mental illness. Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin is a weaving of the Montreal writer's stories and selected diary excerpts and family photographs revealing a far-reaching creative personality who is haunted from the age of ten by the "moods taking over." This book poignantly illuminates the dramatic duality of a public and private literary and emotional life through published and unpublished stories of an idyllic Montreal Jewish childhood contrasted with deeply troubled and often shocking diary entries that document the author's lifelong battle with mental illness. Yelin's insightful yet light and humorous stories have been cherished by generations of children and adults for their universal appeal. The journal entries that she maintained for most of her 90 years document the abuse, paranoia, self-loathing, doubt, and devastating depression of Yelin's true emotional state. These concurrent lenses reveal the profound struggles and suffering of a fascinating and highly gifted woman who transcended her ongoing deep-seated emotional agony to create a significant literary legacy. The many threads of this multilayered book have been woven together though the collaboration of Yelin's daughter, Gilah Yelin Hirsch and Yelin's first stories' editor, Nancy Marrelli.

"Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with desperate hope. She's always biblical to me, not just because the Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to war, though she sees in that son another's son--a boy killed on a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much needed Psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first articulated by Fanny Howe: 'Where did the days go? Where to now?' And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all the poems in this painful and wise book: 'Are my children safe?' 'We will need a new language, ' Back warns. Good then that she's giving it to us."--Kazim Ali "'What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking, ' and the book itself is the answer: Poetry --this poetry--is necessary, irreplaceable, urgent. This is the best work of an important Israeli-American poet, translator, peace activist and scholar who reminds us, through the courageous beauty of her poems, that not to be political in these times is to collaborate with the forces of darkness. And what is political for Back couldn't be more intensely personal, as the mother of an air-force paramedic who suffers from PTSD. Narrating the endless cycle of violence of her region, Back's poems protest, grieve, and rescue language from its political and commercial appropriations. Throughout she adopts the irreverent tradition of textual allusion in Jewish poetry, allowing herself to radically rewrite the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Psalms, and feminize the Jewish liturgy. This is one of the best new books of poetry I have read in recent years!"--Chana Kronfeld "Poetry may make nothing happen, as Auden infamously wrote, but Rachel Tzvia Back's poetry makes something delicately yet fiercely come forth: the grief of mothers, the fear of soldiers, the tenderness of a younger brother's hand, the stones and sand against which cyclamens struggle to flower in Israel/Palestine. This is a poetry that honors the vast silence out of which and into which we go, and the silences before and after extreme violence. Drawing on ancient epic and myth, alert to the rhythms of land- and sea-scapes, Back's poems arise from a background of unending war, refugee crises, the 'sea of small feathered/things' and 'of mortar fire fired.' These are incantations offered in part to heal a son, to recognize injury, to sound out grief and guilt, but also to register difficult flashes of beauty and the presiding elemental forces of "eastern winds," sun, moon, season, and sea. Back's lyrics are as purposive, stealthy, and precise as the step of the tutelary cat in some of her poems. Her beautifully spare lines offer 'a narrow bridge and all the world'." --Maureen McLane