In the second of two volumes of this magnificently illustrated cultural history--the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews--Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish people, spanning from their expulsion from Spain in the Inquisition across six hundred years to the present day. It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in the face of oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the centuries and the continents--from the Iberian Peninsula and the collapse of "the golden age" to the shtetls of Russia to the dusty streets of infant Hollywood. Its voices ring loud and clear, from the philosophical musings of Spinoza to the poetry written on slips of paper in concentraion camps. Within these pages, the Enlightenment unfolds, a great diaspora transforms a country, a Viennese psychaiatrist forever changes the conception of the human mind. And a great story unfolds. Not--as often imagined--of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians, from the Soviets to America. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question examines the image of "the Jew" in Sartre's work to rethink not only his oeuvre but also the role of the intellectual in France and the politics and ethics of existentialism. It explores more broadly how French identity is defined through the abstraction and allegorization of "the Jew" and examines the role anti-antisemitic intellectuals play in this process. Jonathan Judaken reconsiders the origins of the intellectual in France in the context of the Dreyfus affair and Sartre's interventions in the parallel Franco-French conflicts in the 1930s and during the Vichy regime. He considers what it was possible to say on behalf of Jews and Judaism during the German occupation, Sartre's contribution after the war to the Vichy syndrome, his positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the ways Sartre's reflections on the Jewish Question served as a template for his shift toward Marxism, his resistance to colonialism, and for the defining of debates about Jews and Judaism in postwar France by both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. Judaken analyzes the texts that Sartre devoted to these issues and argues that "the Jew" constituted a foil Sartre consistently referenced in reflecting on politics in general and on the role of the intellectual in particular.

"As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage. Drawing on Wiesel's prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question."--

Comedy is full of famously funny Jews, from Groucho Marx to Larry David to Sarah Silverman. This smart and funny book includes tales from many of these much-loved comics, and will appeal to their broad audience, while revealing the history, context, and wider culture of Jewish joking.The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham, and like the Jews themselves it has wandered over the world, learned countless new languages, worked with a range of different materials, been performed in front of some pretty hostile crowds, and yet still retained its own distinctive identity. So what is it that animates the Jewish joke? Why are Jews so often thought of as "funny"? And how old can a joke get?With jokes from Lena Dunham to Woody Allen, as well as Freud and Marx (Groucho, mostly), Baum balances serious research with light-hearted humor and provides fascinating insight into this wellknown and much loved cultural phenomenon.

Excerpt from The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 4: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People From the Earliest Times; Chazars-Dreyfus Case Cyrus adler, Pan. (departments of post-biblical Antiquities; the Jews of America.) President of the American Jewish Historical Society Librarian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A New York Times Bestseller A leading public intellectual’s timely reckoning with how Jews can and should make sense of their tradition and each other. What does it mean to be a Jew? At a time of worldwide crisis, venerable answers to this question have become unsettled. In To Be a Jew Today , the legal scholar and columnist Noah Feldman draws on a lifelong engagement with his religion to offer a wide-ranging interpretation of Judaism in its current varieties. How do Jews today understand their relationship to God, to Israel, and to each other—and live their lives accordingly? Writing sympathetically but incisively about diverse outlooks, Feldman clarifies what’s at stake in the choice of how to be a Jew, and discusses the shared “theology of struggle” that Jews engage in as they wrestle with who God is, what God wants, or whether God exists. He shows how the founding of Israel has transformed Judaism itself over the last century—and explores the ongoing consequences of that transformation for all Jews, who find the meaning of their Jewishness and their views about Israel intertwined, no matter what those views are. And he examines the analogies between being Jewish and belonging to a large, messy family—a family that often makes its members crazy, but a family all the same. Written with learning, empathy and clarity, To Be a Jew Today is a critical resource for readers of all faiths.

"Krasny delves deeply into the themes, topics and forms of Jewish humor: chauvinism undercut by irony and self-mockery; the fear of losing cultural identity through assimilation; the importance of vocal inflection in joke-telling; and calls to communal memory, including the use of Yiddish."--Book jacket.

"You can't let people be treated in an inhuman way around you....Otherwise you start to become inhuman." So declares rescuer Hetty Voûte in this updated edition of THE HEART HAS REASONS, an acclaimed historical account that offers an in-depth look into the hearts and minds of the Holocaust rescuers and explores the meaning that their lives and deeds have for us today. Individually or in small "humanitarian cells," the ten Dutch people Klempner profiles saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Holland. How did they do what they did--and why did they risk everything to do it? Although their tales of rescue vary greatly, the integrity of the rescuers does not. Thus these narratives provide a glimpse into their personalities and character while shedding light on their extraordinary acts of courage and kindness. Framed by Klempner's quest for meaning, the rescuers' words resonate across generations, providing timeless insight into how people of conscience can navigate morally and resist tyranny in a world where the old specters of prejudice and fascism are again ascendant.

""'A painstakingly researched, meticulously documented, cogently reasoned and eminently readable book. It represents an important step forward in New Testament study which henceforward scholars, even if they do not agree with it will not be able to ignore.' Times Literary Supplement 'For those who are concerned to penetrate to the historical realities within the gospel records this is an extremely important book.' Expository Times 'Can only be described as epoch-making.' Jewish Chronicle"" In this, Geza Vermes' best known book, there emerges perhaps the closest portrayal that we have of a genuinely historical Jesus. Freed from the weight and onus of Christian doctrine or Jewish animus, Jesus here appears as a vividly human, yet profoundly misunderstood, figure, thoroughly grounded and contextualised within the extraordinary intellectual and cultural cross currents of his day. Jesus the Jew is a remarkable portrait by a brilliant scholar writing at the height of his powers, informed by insights from the New Testament, Jewish literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls alike.

On August 2, 1940, as on every other morning for weeks before, a long line of Jewish refugees waited outside the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. Many had already witnessed Nazi atrocities in Poland and other Axis-occupied lands, and they were desperate to escape. To leave Europe they needed foreign transit visas. And at the window, the smiling Japanese consul was issuing them. Before his government closed down the consulate and reassigned him to Berlin, he would issue thousands of such visas.This is the story of Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat and spy who saved as many as 10,000 Jews from deportation to concentration camps and almost certain death, Because of his extreme modesty, Sugihara's tremendous act of moral courage is only now beginning to become widely known.Unlike Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat whose government sent him to Hungary with the express purpose of saving Jews, and Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who at least initially had a vested economic interest in protecting the lives of his Jews, Sugihara had no apparent reason to perform his acts of rescue. Indeed, he acted in direct violation of official Japanese policy, which directed all government and military personnel to cooperate with the murderous policies of their Nazi allies. Examining Sugihara's education and background -- a background shared with the colonial administrators and military men who committed the rape of Nanjing -- author Hillel Levine finds nothing that explains his extraordinary behavior.Levine's search has taken him from the old Japanese consul building in Kaunas (now Kovno), Lithuania, to the Australian outback; across Japan from the rice fields of Sugihara's native town to the boardrooms of conglomerates where his younger schoolmates still hold power. But the more Levine sought answers to Sugihara's puzzling behavior, the more he encountered questions. Remarkably, Chiune Sugihara was not the only Japanese official to save Jews. Yet none was ever punished for insubordination. Was there a secret Japanese plan to save Jews from Nazi genocide?Much Holocaust scholarship focuses on the perpetrators of evil, trying to illuminate what drove ordinary men and women to commit horrifying and murderous acts. But perhaps as difficult to understand is the phenomenon of rescue: what inspired courageous individuals to swim against the tide of cruelty and indifference. This sensitive and nuanced biography concludes that there is no link between a person's background and his moral inclinations. Mercy remains a divine mystery despite our human craving to reduce it to behavioristic formulas.This book does not attempt to explain man's humanity to man. Instead Levine has woven a fascinating narrative of one man's heroic efforts to save lives, in the midst of so many seeking to destroy them.

"'A covenantal vision of life, with mitzvah (divine commandment) as the central organizing principle in the relationship between Jews and God, liberates the intellect and the moral will. I seek to show that a tradition mediated by the Sinai covenant can encourage the development of a human being who is not afraid to assume responsibility for the ongoing drama of Jewish history. Passive resignation is seen not to be an essential trait of one whose relationship to God is mediated by the hearing of mitzvot ." --from the Introduction This interpretation of Jewish teaching will appeal to all people seeking to understand the relationship between the idea of divine demand and the human response, between religious tradition and modernity. Hartman shows that a life lived in Jewish tradition need not be passive, insulated, or self-effacing, but can be lived in the modern pluralistic world with passion, tolerance, and spontaneity. The Judaic tradition is often seen as being more concerned with uncritical obedience to law than with individual freedom and responsibility. In A Living Covenant, Hartman challenges this approach by revealing a Judaism grounded in a covenant--a relational framework--informed by the metaphor of marital love rather than that of parent-child dependency. This view of life places the individual firmly within community. Hartman shows that the Judaic tradition need not be understood in terms of human passivity and resignation, but rather as a vehicle by which human individuality and freedom can be expressed within a relational matrix.

In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. In Communities of Violence, David Nirenberg argues that violence in the Middle Ages functioned differently. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon. He argues that these attacks were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society. -- from back cover.

Explore the angry world of early Christianity through the eyes of one of the earliest followers of Jesus, a member of the Jewish group headed by James. Enter into the controversy with Paul, a person who never knew Jesus and who radically changed the religion of Jesus to one about him.

In this concluding volume of James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II: The Damascus Code, the Tent of David, the New Covenant, and the Blood of Christ, renowned biblical scholar Robert Eisenman compresses in a more reader-friendly format the results of previous work, creating a more comprehensive picture of Jesus' brother James as "the pivotal Opposition Leader" of the time leading up to the War against Rome (66-70 CE). Is there an interconnecting code between the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls? Eisenman - who broke the Scrolls monopoly and was the first to identify the so-called "James Ossuary" as fraudulent - shows that there is. Moreover, in this newly-revised volume, he 'decodes' many beloved and famous sayings of the Gospels, such as "Every plant which My Heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted," "A man shall not be known by what goes into his mouth but by what comes out of it," "Do not throw Holy Things to dogs," etc. including chapters like "The Dogs who Licked Poor Lazarus' Sores" or "Rabbi Eliezer's Bad Breath and Lazarus' Stinking Body." In identifying the Scrolls as the literature of "the Messianic Movement in Palestine"; he not only connects "James the Brother of Jesus" to the Leadership of 'Early Christianity' in Palestine, but also to "the Righteous Teacher" in the Scrolls. Offering a point-by-point analysis of James' relationship to the Habakkuk Commentary, The Damascus Document, The War Scroll, etc., he also illumines the subjects "the Pella Flight and raising the Fallen Tent of David," "Paul as an Herodian," "the Wilderness Camps," and "Peter"'s role as "a prototypical Essene" but in Acts as a mouthpiece for anti-Semitism. In doing so he, not only clarifies the true history of Palestine in the First Century, but deciphers the way 'the picture' of "Jesus" was put together in the Gospels and, as a consequence, what can be known about the real "Jesus." He also covers subjects like "the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus" and Paul's attack on James on the Temple steps, extending it to the competition between Paul and "the Party of James" over "Circumcision" in Antioch and the conversion of Queen Helen Adiabene and her sons in Northern Syria, who led the "famine relief" effort ascribed to Paul in Acts. Moreover, he will show the figure of James to have been so influential and highly-regarded in the Jerusalem of his day that his death was the capstone event leading up to the Jewish Revolt against Rome. In making these arguments and exposing actual 'overwrites', a crucial new point that emerges is his identification of the Qumran document called by scholars "MMT" as a 'Jamesian' Letter to "the Great King of the Peoples beyond the Euphrates." At the same time, he unravels the real "code" behind the pivotal New Testament allusion: "This is the Cup of the New Covenant in My Blood," connecting it to "the New Covenant in the Land of Damascus" and "giving the Cup of the Right Hand of the Lord ( "the Cup of Divine Wrath") to drink" in both the Damascus Document and Habakkuk Pesher in the Scrolls. Did Paul know the meaning of the famous Damascus Document (discovered in Cairo in the Nineteenth Century) "to set the Holy Things up according to their precise specifications" - or the reverse of it, as Peter is presented as being made to understand by "a Voice out of Heaven" and "a Tablecloth" descending out of it - "to make no distinctions between Holy and profane" - on a rooftop in Gaza? In this series, Eisenman's revelations will extend far beyond these examples. James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, both I and II, will complete the task of rescuing James from the oblivion into which he was cast, either intentionally or via benign neglect. His conclusion will, therefore, definitively bear on the problem of "the Historical Jesus" "Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus." Eisenman's many readers will not be disappointed.

In this sparkling debut, a young critic offers an original, passionate, and erudite account of what it means to feel Jewish--even when you're not. Self-hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. Overbearing Mother-Love. In this witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated with modern Jews. Reflecting on why Jews have so often been depicted, both by others and by themselves, as prone to "negative" feelings, she queries how negative these feelings really are. And as the pace of globalization leaves countless people feeling more marginalized, uprooted, and existentially threatened, she argues that such "Jewish" feelings are becoming increasingly common to us all. Ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Sarah Bernhardt to Woody Allen, Anne Frank to Nathan Englander, Feeling Jewish bridges the usual fault lines between left and right, insider and outsider, Jew and Gentile, and even Semite and anti-Semite, to offer an indispensable guide for our divisive times.

A chilling, fascinating, and nearly forgotten historical figure is resurrected in this riveting work that links the fascism of the last century with the terrorism of our own. Written with vigor and extraordinary access to primary sources in several languages, Icon of Evil is the definitive account of the man who, during World War II, was called "the fuhrer of the Arab world" and whose ugly legacy lives on today. With new and disturbing details, David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann show how al -Husseini ingratiated himself with his hero, Adolf Hitler, becoming, with his blond hair and blue eyes, an "honorary Aryan" while dreaming of being installed as Nazi leader of the Middle East. Al-Husseini would later recruit more than 100,000 Muslims in Europe to fight in divisions of the Waffen- SS, and obstruct negotiations with the Allies that might have allowed four thousand Jewish children to escape to Palestine. Some believe that al-Husseini even inspired Hitler to implement the Final Solution. At war's end, al-Husseini escaped indictment at Nuremberg and was harbored in France. Icon of Evil chronicles al-Husseini's postwar relationships with such influential Islamic figures as the radical theoretician Sayyid Qutb and Saddam Hussein's powerful uncle General Khairallah Talfah and his crucial mentoring of the young Yasser Ararat. Finally, it provides compelling evidence that al-Husseini's actions and writings serve as inspirations today to the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations pledged to destroy Israel and the United States.

Why did the Jews reject Jesus? Was he really the son of God? Were the Jews culpable in his death? These ancient questions have been debated for almost two thousand years, most recently with the release of Mel Gibson’s explosive The Passion of the Christ . The controversy was never merely academic. The legal status and security of Jews—often their very lives—depended on the answer. In WHY THE JEWS REJECTED JESUS, David Klinghoffer reveals that the Jews since ancient times accepted not only the historical existence of Jesus but the role of certain Jews in bringing about his crucifixion and death. But he also argues that they had every reason to be skeptical of claims for his divinity. For one thing, Palestine under Roman occupation had numerous charismatic would-be messiahs, so Jesus would not have been unique, nor was his following the largest of its kind. For another, the biblical prophecies about the coming of the Messiah were never fulfilled by Jesus, including an ingathering of exiles, the rise of a Davidic king who would defeat Israel’s enemies, the building of a new Temple, and recognition of God by the gentiles. Above all, the Jews understood their biblically commanded way of life, from which Jesus’s followers sought to “free” them, as precious, immutable, and eternal. Jews have long been blamed for Jesus’s death and stigmatized for rejecting him. But Jesus lived and died a relatively obscure figure at the margins of Jewish society. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that “the Jews” of his day rejected Jesus at all, since most Jews had never heard of him. The figure they really rejected, often violently, was Paul, who convinced the Jerusalem church led by Jesus’s brother to jettison the observance of Jewish law. Paul thus founded a new religion. If not for him, Christianity would likely have remained a Jewish movement, and the course of history itself would have been changed. Had the Jews accepted Jesus, Klinghoffer speculates, Christianity would not have conquered Europe, and there would be no Western civilization as we know it. WHY THE JEWS REJECTED JESUS tells the story of this long, acrimonious, and occasionally deadly debate between Christians and Jews. It is thoroughly engaging, lucidly written, and in many ways highly original. Though written from a Jewish point of view, it is also profoundly respectful of Christian sensibilities. Coming at a time when Christians and Jews are in some ways moving closer than ever before, this thoughtful and provocative book represents a genuine effort to heal the ancient rift between these two great faith traditions.

Discusses Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" (1939), published just after the Nazis took over Austria and Freud fled Vienna for England. Despite what many have interpreted as a putdown of Jews and/or Judaism, notes that the work, written at a time when the very survival of the Jewish people was more seriously threatened than at any other time in its history by the Nazis, presents an explanation for Jewish survival. One section focuses on disagreements with the reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his "Freud's Moses" (1991). Ch. 3 (pp. 75-89), "Anti-Semitism, Christianity, and Judaism", deals with Freud's view of antisemitism, especially his psychoanalytic view of the deicide charge. Argues for a sophisticated reading of Freud's "Moses", one that does not focus either on the "Egyptianness" of Moses or his actual murder by the ancient Hebrews. Ch. 4 (pp. 90-116) focuses on disagreements with the reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his "Freud's Moses" (1991).

Seventy years after it took place, the Holocaust committed against the Jews of Europe during World War II continues to cast a giant shadow over humankind. Man's inhumanity to man is not a thing of the past. Genocidal action is still commonplace around the globe. Has humankind learned the lessons of the past? Is the human race doomed to live in a perpetual state of war and self-destruction? Explaining the Holocaust shows how, given the right circumstances, human beings can lose their humanity. Does that mean that the ethical teachings of the major religions are wishful thinking? This book tackles two questions that continue to be asked by people everywhere: Why did a highly civilized nation like Germany, in the middle of the twentieth century, commit the most heinous crime in all of human history? And if indeed there is a loving God who made a covenant with the people of Israel, why were millions of innocent, peaceful Jews dehumanized, starved, tortured, and systematically murdered? Explaining the Holocaust spares no one in discussing the enormity of the evil. But it also shows how the divine spark in human beings did not die during those years of darkness, and why we still have a glimmer of hope. ""Explaining the Holocaust is balanced, graceful, and probing. Including both Jewish and Christian theological responses to the Holocaust, as well as voices from around the world, Rabbi Schreiber presents an historical overview of the Holocaust and Holocaust studies. His style is personal, engaging, and conversational, yet also reveals his extensive knowledge and erudition. An excellent book for small-group discussion."" --Alice Ogden Bellis, Professor of Old Testament, Howard University School of Divinity Mordecai Schreiber is the author of several books on the Bible and on the Holocaust. His latest book is Hearing the Voice of God (2013). He is the founder of Schreiber Translations and Schreiber Publishing. Now retired from both, he devotes his time to research and writing.