"Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos -- the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing and others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge. In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall -- hailed for his "severe allergy to conventional wisdom" (Time) -- offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth." --

Mark Penn argues that the biggest trends in America are the Microtrends, the smaller trends that go unnoticed or ignored. One million people can create new market for a business, spark a social movement, or effect political change. In 1996, a microtrend identified by Penn ("soccer moms") was crucial in re-electing President Clinton. With years of experience as one of world's most highly regarded pollsters, Penn identifies the new microtrends sweeping the world: SINGLE WOMEN BY CHOICE: Women aren't waiting for Mr. Right. They are raising children by themselves and buying their own homes. SPLITTERS: A growing number of middle-class residents are shuttling between two homes, creating new communities and dynamics in the real estate market. SUN HATERS: Environmentalists, skin cancer survivors, and parents concerned about the sun's impact on our health. PHILO-SEMITES: A growing number of people want to date Jewish men and women. CLASSICAL MUSIC DADS: Older men who are fathers in their 40's and 50's and taking on a larger role in the nurturing of their children and becoming an important factor in consumer culture for kids. MICROTRENDS highlights everything from religion to politics, from leisure pursuits to relationships and will take the listener into the worlds of polling, targeting, and psychographic analysis, reaching tantalizing conclusions through engaging analysis.

The 2000 Year Old Man was actually born in 1950, when Carl Reiner bought a $138 Revere tape recorder, plugged in the microphone, and instead of saying, "Testing, testing," turned to Mel Brooks and asked, "Is it true that you were at the scene of the Crucifixion some 2000 years ago?" As Brooks' imagination took flight, the old man uttered his first remembrance of things past with a moan of "Oooooooohboy." And then: "I knew Christ, Christ was a thin lad, always wore sandals. Hung around with 12 other guys. They came in the store, no one ever bought anything. Once they asked for water." Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks ad-libbed their first interviews between the miraculous ancient sage and the reporter covering his history-making arrival in the United States. The 2000 Year Old Man knew everyone from Jesus to Shakespeare, Cleopatra to Paul Revere. He was there when men discovered women, and he dated Joan of Arc. The feisty raconteur had been married several hundred times. He had 42,000 children -- "and not one comes to visit me." The Jewish Methuselah had something to say about everyone and everything -- from religion to soul kissing, from taxes to nectarines: "Half a peach, half a plum. It's a hell of a fruit!" Brooks never knew what Reiner was going to ask, and Reiner only knew that he would never get the same answer twice. Reiner calls it "writing with the mouth." Most of the targets Reiner and Brooks skewered between 1961 and 1974 on record albums are still with us, including food, cigarettes, the power of advertising, selling America to Japan, neglected children, fear of homosexuals in the military, inadequate health care, fad diets, violent films and pretentious filmmakers. In this millenial update of the cult comedy classic, the 2000 Year Old Man offers his unique wit and wisdom on everything from the Mars landing to shopping malls; homeopathy to the invention of the infomercial; his own dietary secrets, from eating a swirl to his time-tested Seven-Day Diet; and pet peeves, from rap music to "If you know the extension, press one..." The humor of The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 is a hilarious antidote to the millenial literature of the '90s.

Visually and emotionally rich, MetaMaus is as groundbreaking as the masterpiece whose creation it reveals. In the pages of MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize-winning Maus, the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago. He probes the questions that Maus most often evokes -- Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics? -- and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process. MetaMaus includes a bonus DVD-R that provides a digitized reference copy of The Complete Maus linked to a deep archive of audio interviews with his survivor father, historical documents, and a wealth of Spiegelman's private notebooks and sketches. Compelling and intimate, MetaMaus is poised to become a classic in its own right. - Publisher.

"The unforgettable story of a Jewish teenager who survives World War II and embarks on a long and dangerous journey to a new land ... and new life. A poignant, inspirational novel about the inner strength of children, and how other children find their place in the world" Cf. Our choice, 1997-1998

Friends from different backgrounds come together in a heartwarming picture book that is perfect for Passover, from beloved children's book author Patricia Polacco. Larnel doesn't know his neighbor, Mrs. Katz, very well, until he asks her to adopt an abandoned kitten. Mrs. Katz agrees on one condition: that Larnel helps her take care of the kitten she names Tush. When Larnel starts spending more and more time with Mrs. Katz to help with Tush, Mrs. Katz tells him stories about coming to America from Poland and about the good times she spent with her late husband. As Larnel grows to love Mrs. Katz, he also learns about the common themes of hardship and triumph in each of their cultures.

Janina Bauman was a year older than Anne Frank when the Second World War began but, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank, this is a story of survival. When Hitler's decree forced her family into the Warsaw Ghetto, Janina, an intelligent, lively girl, suddenly found herself in a cramped flat, hiding with other Jewish families. At first even curfews and the casual cruelty meted out by the German occupiers could not dim her passion for books, boys and romance. Then came the raids, and Janina, with her sister and mother, had to keep on the move, hiding in the ruins of the ghetto to avoid being one of thousands rounded up every day and deported to the camps. Their escape to the 'Aryan' side was followed by two years in hiding, taking shelter with those willing to help them and living in constant fear of betrayal. Told through her teenage diaries, giving her story a rare immediacy, this is the extraordinary tale of a passionate young woman's courage and survival.

This volume offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda. Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust. Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery

No immortal in the history of baseball retired so young, so well, or so completely as Sandy Koufax. After compiling a remarkable record from 1962 to 1966 that saw him lead the National League in ERA all five years, win three Cy Young awards, and pitch four no-hitters including a perfect game, Koufax essentially disappeared. Save for his induction into the Hall of Fame and occasional appearances at the Dodgers training camp, Koufax has remained unavailable, unassailable, and unsullied, in the process becoming much more than just the best pitcher of his generation. He is the Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series on Yom Kippur, defining himself as a man who placed faith over fame. This act made him the standard to which Jewish parents still hold their children. Except for his autobiography (published in 1966), Koufax has resolutely avoided talking about himself. But through sheer doggedness that even Koufax came to marvel at, Jane Leavy was able to gain his trust to the point where they talked regularly over the three years Leavy reported her book. With Koufax′s blessing, Leavy interviewed nearly every one of his former teammates, opponents, and friends, and emerged with a portrait of the artist that is as thorough and stylish as was his command on the pitching mound.

One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into a reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne's Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations. After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne's surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it. Most arresting is the sinking realization that Jedwabne's Jews were clubbed, drowned, gutted, and burned not by faceless Nazis, but by people whose features and names they knew well: their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street. As much as such a question can ever be answered, Neighbors tells us why.

A brief biography of the Polish doctor, author, founder of orphanages, and promoter of children's rights, who lost his life trying to protect his orphans from the Nazis.

A Holocaust survivor recounts her liberation from a Nazi concentration camp, search for surviving family members, and long and difficult ordeal of trying to immigrate with her husband and two children to America.

In A Ceiling Made of Eggshells, Newbery Honor-winning author Gail Carson Levine tells a moving and ambitious story set during the expulsion of Jews from Spain, about a young Jewish girl full of heart who must play her own role in her people's epic history--no matter the sacrifice. Surrounded by her large family, Loma is happy living in the judería of Alcalá de Henares, Spain, and wants nothing more than to someday have a family of her own. Still, when her intimidating grandfather, her Belo, decides to bring her along on his travels, she's excited to join him. Belo has the ear of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and Loma relishes her adventures with him, adventures that are beyond the scope of most girls of the time. She soon learns just how dangerous the world is for the Jews of Spain, and how her grandfather's influence keeps their people safe. But the older Loma gets, the more she longs to realize her own dreams--if Belo will ever allow her to leave his side.

Eight stories based on traditional Jewish themes from Eastern Europe include: Shrewd Todie & Lyzer the Miser; Tsirtsur & Peziza; Rabbi Leib & the Witch Cunegunde; The Elders of Chelm & Genendel's Key; Shlemiel, the Businessman; Utzel & His Daughter Poverty; Menaseh's Dream; When Shlemiel went to Warsaw.

Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac explored the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, capturing life in the Jewish shtetlekh of Poland, Romania, Russia, and Hungary, communities that even then seemed threatened--not by destruction and extermination, which no one foresaw, but by change. Using a hidden camera and under difficult circumstances, Vishniac was able to take over sixteen thousand photographs; most were left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. With the publication of Children of a Vanished World , seventy of those photographs are available, thirty-six for the first time. The book is devoted to a subject Vishniac especially loved, and one whose mystery and spontaneity he captured with particular poignancy: children. Selected and edited by the photographer's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, and translator and coeditor Miriam Hartman Flacks, these images show children playing, children studying, children in the midst of a world that was about to disappear. They capture the daily life of their subjects, at once ordinary and extraordinary. The photographs are accompanied by a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games in both Yiddish and English translation. Thanks to Vishniac's visual artistry and the editors' choice of traditional Yiddish verses, a part of this wonderful culture can be preserved for future generations. Earlier books of Roman Vishniac's photographs include To Give Them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac (1995), A Vanished World (1983), and Polish Jews (1947). A major exhibition titled "Children of a Vanished World: Photographs byRoman Vishniac" is scheduled at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The show will open to the public on March 7 and run through June 4, 2000.

"Eva Mozes Kor was just ten years old when she arrived in Auschwitz. While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele. Subjected to sadistic medical experiments, she was forced to fight daily for her and her twin's survival. In this incredible true story written for young adults, readers learn of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil and Eva's recovery and her controversial but often misunderstood decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Readers will learn of how she triumphed over unfathomable pain and suffering into a life-long work for peace, human rights, and Holocaust education. The new edition provides interesting details and important context to the events related in the original story. A new Afterword by publisher Peggy Porter Tierney offers a richer portrayal of Eva as a person, the truth behind the controversies, and the eventful last ten years of her life"--

The national radio host and bestselling author of The American Miracle reveals the happy accidents, bizarre coincidences, and flat-out miracles that continue to shape America’s destiny. “ A hopeful message for our troubled times . . . Michael Medved has an eye for a story, and a preternatural gift for telling it in beguiling ways.”—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of Founding Brothers Has God withdrawn his special blessing from the United States? Americans ponder that painful question in troubled times, as we did during the devastation of the Civil War and after the assassinations of the ’60s, and as we do in our present polarization. Yet somehow—on battlefields, across western wilderness, and in raucous convention halls—astounding events have reliably advanced America, restoring faith in the Republic’s providential protection. In this provocative historical narrative, Michael Medved brings to life ten haunting tales that reveal this purposeful pattern, including: • A near-fatal carriage accident forces Lincoln’s secretary of state into a canvas-and-steel neck brace that protects him from a would-be assassin’s knife thrusts, allowing him two years later to acquire Alaska for the United States. • A sudden tidal wave of Russian Jewish immigration, be­ginning in 1881, coincides with America’s rise to world leadership, fulfilling a biblical promise that those bless­ing Abraham’s children will themselves be blessed. • Campaigning for president, Theodore Roosevelt takes a bullet in the chest, but a folded speech in his jacket pocket slows its progress and saves his life. • At the Battle of Midway, U.S. planes get lost over empty ocean and then miraculously reconnect for five minutes of dive-bombing that wrecks Japan’s fleet, convincing even enemy commanders that higher powers intervened against them. • A behind-the-scenes “conspiracy of the pure of heart” by Democratic leaders forces a gravely ill FDR to replace his sitting vice president—an unstable Stalinist—with future White House great Harry Truman. These and other little-known stories build on themes of The American Miracle, Medved’s bestseller about America’s remarkable rise. The confident heroes and stubborn misfits in these pages shared a common faith in a master plan, which continues to unfold in our time. God’s Hand on America con­firms that the founders were right about America’s destiny to lead and enlighten the world.

O, The Oprah Magazine, Time Magazine, Financial Times, Esquire, Bustle, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Library Journal, Brooklyn Based, Avenue BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR New York Times Editors' Choice "Superb. . . . Krauss's depictions of the nuances of sex and love, intimacy and dependence, call to mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their psychological profundity, their intellectual rigor. . . . Krauss's stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they're hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers." --Molly Antopol, New York Times Book Review "From a contemporary master, an astounding collection of ten globetrotting stories, each one a powerful dissection of the thorny connections between men and women. . . . Each story is masterfully crafted and deeply contemplative, barreling toward a shimmering, inevitable conclusion, proving once again that Krauss is one of our most formidable talents in fiction." --Esquire In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all. The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women's coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss's stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.

On the first night of Hanukkah, Rabbi Judah has too much to do and too little time to do it. Before the rabbi leaves to visit the emperor, he tells his housemaid Basha that she can ask the golem to help. While the golem makes latkes, Basha decides to visit a friend. Basha is having so much fun with her friend, she doesn't realize that latkes are pouring out of the rabbi's house, sending people running! Will Rabbi Judah come up with a solution to control the golem before it's too late? Illustrated with lively acrylic on wood, the book includes an Author's Note about the tale's origins.

Intended for children, relates the Holocaust experiences of Froim Baum, born in Warsaw in April 1926. After his father died in 1932, his mother was left with seven children. Froim, the youngest, was placed in Janusz Korczak's orphanage. While in the ghetto, he was active in crossing to the Aryan side and smuggling food into the ghetto for his family and friends. When the orphanage was liquidated, Baum happened to be visiting his mother and was not taken away with the other children. The Baum family then escaped from the ghetto to Plonsk, but were arrested there and deported to Auschwitz and other camps. Froim was liberated in Dachau; only two of his brothers survived.