Ben-Gurion's Spy is a riveting exploration of the scandalous Lavon affair in Israel, which in 1963 toppled the government and ended the political life of David Ben-Gurion, the nation's founding father. In the early 1950s, a team of Israeli agents was ordered - without prior knowledge of either the cabinet or the military high command - to stage a series of bombings of American and British institutions in Egypt, in an attempt to forestall Great Britain's planned withdrawal from the Suez. Betrayed by their commander, the agents were captured and put on trial in Cairo. Who gave the orders for the sabotage attempts? Was it defense minister Pinhas Lavon, Ben-Gurion's hand-picked successor? Or was it Director of Military Intelligence Benyamin Givly, a cunning and ruthlessly ambitious officer? Both denied responsibility, and their dispute turned into a charade of character assassination, forgery, cover-up, and vendetta that forced Lavon's resignation in 1955. Ben-Gurion's Spy explores the political implications of the Lavon affair, demonstrating how the episode helped to usher in Menahem Begin's Likud - whose doctrine claims the whole of Palestine - and to initiate a radical shift in defense policy from restraint to violent, sometimes reckless, retribution. Unlike similar incidents like Iran-Contra or the Dreyfus affair, the Israeli analogue saw no judicial inquiry or public hearings, nor any published documents. Teveth fills in the vital information, employing classified documents including minutes of secret cabinet and military tribunal investigations, as well as interviews with key actors and the private correspondence of Givly and his doting secretary, Dalia Carmel.

Pioneering anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner is renowned for her work on the Sherpas of Nepal. Now she turns her attention homeward to examine how social class is lived in the United States and, specifically, within her own peer group. In New Jersey Dreaming , Ortner returns to her Newark roots to present an in-depth look at Weequahic High School's Class of 1958, of which she was a member. She explores her classmates’ recollected experiences of the neighborhood and the high school, also written about in the novels of Philip Roth, Weequahic High School’s most famous alum. Ortner provides a chronicle of the journey of her classmates from the 1950s into the 1990s, following the movement of a striking number of them from modest working- and middle-class backgrounds into the wealthy upper-middle or professional/managerial class. Ortner tracked down nearly all 304 of her classmates. She interviewedabout 100 in person and spoke with most of the rest by phone, recording her classmates’ vivid memories of time, place, and identity. Ortner shows how social class affected people’s livesin many hidden and unexamined ways. She also demonstrates that the Class of ‘58’s extreme upward mobility must be understood in relation to the major identity movements of the twentieth century—the campaign against anti-Semitism, the Civil Rights movement, and feminism. A multisited study combining field research with an interdisciplinary analytical framework, New Jersey Dreaming is a masterly integration of developments at the vanguard of contemporary anthropology. Engaging excerpts from Ortner's field notes are interspersed throughout the book. Whether recording the difficulties and pleasures of studying one's own peer group, the cultures of driving in different parts of the country, or the contrasting experiences of appointment-making in Los Angeles and New York, they provide a rare glimpse into the actual doing of ethnographic research.

"How can someone who condemns hunting, animal farming, and animal experimentation also favor legal abortion, which is the deliberate destruction of a human fetus? The authors of Beating Hearts aim to reconcile this apparent conflict and examine the surprisingly similar strategic and tactical questions faced by activists in the pro-life and animal rights movements. Beating Hearts maintains that sentience, or the ability to have subjective experiences, grounds a being's entitlement to moral concern. The authors argue that nearly all human exploitation of animals is unjustified. Early abortions do not contradict the sentience principle because they precede fetal sentience, and Beating Hearts explains why the mere potential for sentience does not create moral entitlements. Late abortions do raise serious moral questions, but forcing a woman to carry a child to term is problematic as a form of gender-based exploitation. These ethical explorations lead to a wider discussion of the strategies deployed by the pro-life and animal rights movements. Should legal reforms precede or follow attitudinal change? Do gory images win over or alienate supporters? Is violence ever principled? By probing the connections between debates about abortion and animal rights, Bating Hearts uses each highly contested set of questions to shed light on the other"--Unedited summary from book jacket.

The author provides ten steps which answer such fundamental questions as "What is happiness?" "What does it mean to be ethical in a world that is less than ethical?" and "How can I find the strength I need to cope with the problems of my life?"

The stories here recounted were drawn from the first sixteen of twenty-eight notebooks filled by Jacob Marateck and never in his lifetime prepared for publication. They were written in Yiddish in nickel notebooks and composed on a kitchen table in the Bronx during the Great Depression of the 1930's, wherein the author, a Polish-born immigrant to the United States, recalls the experiences and adventures of his younger years.After his release from the Czar's army, Jacob Marateck became, in turn, a "terrorist" in Warsaw, a junk peddler, a flour and grain merchant, a fish seller and beer-truck driver in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania and in New York City.

Revealing an often unknown, scholarly side of the beloved and renowned late composer and musician Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, this fascinating commentary on the book of Genesis provides a glimpse of the unique way in which he received and transmitted Torah. Readers will learn about figures such as Abraham, Sara, Isaac, Rebekah, and Jacob in a wholly new, more intimate way. Rabbi Carlebach’s teachings on the first six sections of the book of Genesis presented in this book are intended as a practical lesson in living a holy life.

A Guest for the Night (first published in 1939 as Germany invaded Poland) is Agnon's depiction of how all modern movements aside from Zionism secularism, Haskalah, socialism, communism failed to provide a viable alternative to traditional life. But, he is clear, even traditional life was untenable, because it all fell apart from within before the first furnaces were ignited in Auschwitz. Even the Guest's well-intentioned attempt to revivify and to re-engage the lost world of piety is also doomed. The Alte Heim, the old home, can no longer exist it is a place where we can only be passing guests for the night. Therefore you can't go home again, but not for the reasons that Thomas Wolfe suggests; rather, because home no longer exists. It has to be rebuilt, but it can only be rebuilt in the Bayit Hadash, in the new home in the Land of Israel. This is Agnon's greatest theme in the novel and, in differing ways, throughout his body of writing: The idea that modern man, modern Jews, are alienated from their spiritual home. While we can't go home again, that doesn't mean we can't move forward through conceiving of a new home although doing so comes with the great danger of being caught in the disconnect between the old and the new, between what was and what might be. Translated by Misha Louvish, with a new Foreword by Jeffrey Saks.

A creator of stories and satires, novels and plays, monologues and children's tales, fantasies and sketches, Sholom Aleichem endeared himself to the public with his shrewd, loving, and accurate portrayals of the speech, manners, and foibles of the Eastern European Jew.

Take a voyeuristic peep through the curtains of kosher love. From the naïve sexual fantasies of a seminary girl, to a key-hole view of private marital moments, you'll get a taste of it all in these four short tales of Jewish sex, lust and yearning. Set inside the Orthodox Jewish world, these tales are so intimate and real that you'll feel like you've been spying on your neighbors!

Most research on intermarriage between Jews and non- Jews focuses on the United States. Th is volume takes a path-breaking approach, examining countries with smaller Jewish populations so as to better understand countries with larger Jewish populations. It focuses on intermarriage in Great Britain, France, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and Curacao, then applies the fi ndings to the United States. In earlier centuries such a volume might have yielded much diff erent conclusions. Th en Jews lived in more countries, intermarriage was not as prevalent, and social science had little to contribute. Before World War II, the Jewish population was dispersed much diff erently, and it continues to shift around the world because of both push and pull factors. Like demography, intermarriage is a dynamic process. What is true today was probably not true in the past, nor will it be true tomorrow. The contributors to this volume locate new forms of Jewish family life--single parents, gay/lesbian parents, adults without children, and couples with multiple backgrounds. Th ese multiple family forms raise a new question--what is a Jewish family--as well as a variety of related issues. Do women and men have diff erent roles in intermarriage? Does a family need two people to raise children? Should there be patrilineal descent? Where do adoption, single parenting, lesbian and gay identities, and more, fit into the picture? Broadly, what role does the family play in transmitting a group's culture from generation to generation? This volume presents a portrait of Jewish demography in the twenty-fi rst century, brilliantly interweaving global processes with signifi cant local variations.

Hivai, a prophet from the ancient village of Gibeon, is exiled from his home when his prophesy of an attack on the village proves to be false, and joins a small band of traveling Hebrews, enemies of the Gibeonites

Book by Lens, Sidney