This is a life, in stories, of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760), the founder of Hasidism. The Baal Shem Tov, or the Besht, as he is commonly called, led a revival in Judaism that put love and joy at the center of religious life and championed the piety of the common folk against the rabbinic establishment. He has been recognized as one of the greatest teachers in Jewish history, and much of what is alive and vibrant in Judaism today, in all denominations, derives from his inspiration. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was descended from several illustrious Hasidic dynasties, wrote: "The Baal Shem Tov brought heaven to earth. He and his disciples, the Hasidim, banished melancholy from the soul and uncovered the ineffable delight of being a Jew.">

"A hilarious, poignant memoir from comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a gay man--and the reactions and support from his comedy pals, from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman. Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn't have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his "situation." There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to "cure" himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convince him that it was finally time to come out to the world. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone--young and old, gay and straight--breathe a little more freely. Peppered with anecdotes from his life among comedy's greatest headliners and tales of the occasionally insane lengths Todd went through to keep a secret that--let's face it--he probably didn't have to keep for as long as he did, The Todd Glass Situation is a front-row seat to the last thirty plus years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man's search for acceptance"--

Showing how history imprints itself on private lives, this memoir presents the author's sensuous, harrowing, and remarkable life. It moves from Berlin during the Great War to the artists' set on the Cote d'Azur, through lovers, mentors, seducers and friends, and from genteel yet shabby poverty to comfort in London's Chelsea.

The career of Stefanie Powers is one of so many stage, screen, and television credits that her name alone recalls memories as varied as her roles. Groomed for show business at an early age, she began her career at the tail end of the Studio System, a dynamic education in star quality and Hollywood history she happily admits was "one hell of a ride." She tells of the time she broke down in tears at a party over her divorce from actor Gary Lockwood, only to be comforted with hard-won, been-there advice from two guests she had never met: Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner. She is also an award-winning stage actress, fitness advocate, and an internationally recognized animal conservationist. But in a lifetime of dear friends, no other had such a significant effect on Stefanie as Oscar-winning actor William Holden. Here, she reveals for the first time the extraordinary nine-year relationship they shared.--From publisher description.

In this book, Rudolf A. Raff reaches out to the scientifically queasy, using his life story and his growth as a scientist to illustrate why science matters, especially at a time when many Americans are both suspicious of science and hostile to scientific ways of thinking. Noting that science has too often been the object of controversy in school curriculums and debates on public policy issues ranging from energy and conservation to stem-cell research and climate change, Raff argues that when the public is confused or ill-informed, these issues tend to be decided on religious, economic, and political grounds that disregard the realities of the natural world. Speaking up for science and scientific literacy, Raff tells how and why he became an evolutionary biologist and describes some of the vibrant and living science of evolution. Once We All Had Gills is also the story of evolution writ large: its history, how it is studied, what it means, and why it has become a useful target in a cultural war against rational thought and the idea of a secular, religiously tolerant nation.

""Scorpions" tells the story of four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself, exploring the constitutional battles of the Roosevelt era (1940s and 1950s) and their contemporary relevance."--

"THE PURPOSE OF POLITICS IS NOT TO DEFEAT YOUR OPPONENT AS MUCH AS IT IS TO PROVIDE SUPERIOR LEADERSHIP AND BETTER IDEAS THAN THE OPPOSITION." --JACK KEMP The late 1970s were miserable for America. It was the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, a time of high unemployment, ruinous inflation, gasoline lines, Communist advances, and bottomed-out U.S. morale. In the 1980s, it all turned around: "stagflation" ended and nearly two decades of prosperity ensued. The Soviet Union retreated, then collapsed. America again believed in itself. And around the world, democratic capitalism was deemed "the end of history." Ronald Reagan's policies sparked the American renaissance, but the Gipper's leadership is only part of the story. The economic theory that underpinned America's success was pioneered by a star professional quarterback turned self-taught intellectual and "bleeding-heart conservative": Jack Kemp. Kemp's role in a pivotal period in American history is at last illuminated in this first-ever biography, which also has lessons for the politics of today. Kemp was the congressional champion of supply-side economics--the idea that lowering taxes would foster growth. Even today, almost no one advocates a return to a top income tax rate of 70 percent. Kemp didn't just challenge the Democratic establishment. He also encouraged his fellow Republicans to be growth (not austerity) minded, open their tent to minorities and blue-collar workers, battle poverty and discrimination, and once again become "the party of Lincoln." Kemp approached politics the same way he played quarterback for the Buffalo Bills: with a refusal to accept defeat. Yet he also was incapable of personal attack, arguing always on the level of ideas. He regarded opponents as adversaries, not enemies, and often cooperated with them to get things done. Despite many ups and downs, including failed presidential and vice-presidential bids, he represented a positive, idealistic, compassionate Republicanism. Drawing on never-published papers and more than one hundred Kemp Oral History Project interviews, noted journalists Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes trace Kemp's life, from his childhood through his pro football career to his influential years as a congressman and cabinet secretary. As the American Dream seems to be waning and polarized politics stifles Washington, Kemp is a model for what politics ought to be. The Republican party and the nation are in desperate need of another Kemp.

A history of the Holocaust in Greece and of Jewish participation in Greek partisan warfare during World War II, based largely on personal accounts of survivors. Describes the development of events that ended with the deportations of Jews to death camps, from the German zone of occupation (which included Salonika), the Bulgarian zone, and the Italian zone (which included Athens). Although the Allies already knew about the death camps, nobody warned the Greek Jews. Many Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians, and others sympathized with Jews and attempted to help them, but very few survivors owe their lives to Christian rescuers. The best way to survive was to join the resistance. Pp. 127-326 contain excerpts from memoirs of Jewish survivors, including some who survived Auschwitz and other camps, and resistance fighters. Pp. 329-402 contain Matsas' memoirs. He was born in 1930 in Ioannina and survived the war hiding in a mountain village with his parents and sister.

"As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?"--

A thoroughly engrossing memoir that recounts Beckwith's halting steps toward scientific triumphs--among them, the discovery of the genetic element that turns on genes--as well as his emergence as a world-class political activist, "Making Genes, Making Waves" is a compelling history of the major controversies in genetics during the last 30 years.

On February 12, 1994, probably in her eighty-fourth year, the woman known as Anna Anderson died in Charlottesville, Virginia. Was she, as she claimed, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar, or was she a former Polish factory worker who, miraculously, had intimate knowledge of the royal family's activities? The fate of Anastasia and that of the entire Russian Imperial family is still shrouded in mystery, even after the confirmation in 1993 of the discovery of their remains in a pit near Ekaterinburg in the Urals. The many reports out of Russia concur that two of the royal children were missing from the grave, but do not agree on their identity. The cover-ups and contradictory statements by earlier Communist regimes have further clouded the Romanovs' untimely end. Even the house where the family was executed was destroyed on the orders of Boris Yeltsin. John Klier untangles the strands of the Romanov mysteries, separating unpalatable truths from tactical, political lies. Fluent in Russian and an expert in Russian history and archival materials, he has traveled to Russia, the United States, and Western Europe in search of the lost Romanovs.

A history of the influential labor Zionist youth movement Habonim. the movement's history is recounted in its members' words, including those of Golda Meir, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Fein. the afterword is provided by Chaim Herzog, a founder of habonim in ireland

"In Fireweed, Gerda Lerner, a pioneer and leading scholar in women's history, tells her story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist's skill and a historian's command of context. Lerner's memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made her an activist for social justice before her academic career began. The child of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she was still a teenager when a fascist regime came to power in 1934, and she became involved in the underground resistance movement. The Nazi takeover of Austria cast her into prison, then forced her and her family into exile; she alone was able to leave Europe. Once in the United States, she experienced the harshness of the Depression and despair over the fate of her family. Still, she persisted in adapting to the new culture and to becoming a writer. Here she met and married her life-long partner, Carl Lerner, a film editor and director. Together they become deeply involved in left-wing activities, from struggling to unionize the film industry and resisting the blacklist in Hollywood to community organizing for peace, for an interracial civil rights movement, and for better schools in New York City. Lerner insists that her decades of grassroots organizing largely account for the theoretical insights she was later able to bring to the development of women's history." -- Publisher's description.

Nearly a century and a half after his death, Abraham Lincoln remains an intrinsic part of the American consciousness, yet his intentions as president and his personal character continue to stir debate.Now, in The Lincoln Enigma, Gabor Boritt invites renowned Lincoln scholars, and rising new voices, to take a look at much-debated aspects of Lincoln's life, including his possible gay relationships, his plan to send blacks back to Africa, and his high-handed treatment of the Constitution. Boritt explores Lincoln's proposals that looked to a lily-white America. Jean Baker marvels at Lincoln's loves and marriage. David Herbert Donald highlights the similarities and differences of the Union and Confederate presidents' roles as commanders-in-chief. Douglas Wilson shows us the young Lincoln--not the strong leader of popular history, but a young man who questions his own identity and struggles to find his purpose. Gerald Prokopowicz searches for the military leader, William C. Harris for the peacemaker, and Robert Bruce meditates on Lincoln and death. In a final chapter Boritt and Harold Holzer offer a fascinating portfolio of Lincoln images in modern art.Acute and thought-provoking in their observations, this all-star cast of historians--including two Pulitzer and three Lincoln Prize winners--questions our assumptions of Lincoln, and provides a new vitality to our ongoing reflections on his life and legacy.

In 1955 a New York City court sentenced Puerto Rican immigrant and teenage gang member Frank Santana to twenty-five years to life for second-degree murder. Fredric Wertham (1895-1981), one of the most influential authorities on child psychology in the twentieth century, was outraged and felt compelled to write The Circle of Guilt . He had conducted multiple interviews with Santana and created an extensive psychological profile on him. Wertham saw unsettling patterns in the ways in which the case was reported, investigated, and deliberated. Media portrayed the victim, a white teenager named Bill Blankenship, as a "model boy" and reported the killing as "unprovoked." In the furor surrounding the case, Santana was often called a "hoodlum." Wertham suspected otherwise. In The Circle of Guilt , the psychiatrist uncovers a paradigm of fear, racism, distrust, and prejudice. He argues that the press's presentation of the case reflected extreme cultural bigotry. Wertham also reveals Blankenship's activity within teen gangs and asserts that Santana's actions were shaped in part by his unmediated exposure to mass media. This reprinted edition includes a new introduction by history professor William Bush that places both the crime and Wertham's work into cultural and historical context. Bush argues that much of what Wertham decries in mass media and its impact on justice and race applies equally today. Longtime chief of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, Fredric Wertham authored Seduction of the Innocent . William Bush is visiting assistant professor of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"Emma Lazarus's most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable life has remained a mystery until now. She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her-a feminist, a Zionist, and an internationally famous Jewish American writer before thse categories even existed. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity. Born into a wealthy Sephardic family in 1849, Lazarus published her first volume of verse at seventeen and gained entree into New York's elite literary circles. Although she once referred to her family as "outlaw" Jews, she felt a deep attachment to Jewish history and peoplehood. Her compassion for the downtrodden Jews of Eastern Europe-refugees whose lives had little in common with her own-helped redefine the meaning of America itself. In this groundbreaking biography, Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus's place in history as a poet, an activist, and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today-a world that she helped to invent."--Publisher's website. A portrait of the iconoclastic poet and activist whose words are are set on the Statue of Liberty follows the complex life and times of Emma Lazarus, from her early literary success, to her roles as a feminist, Zionist, and renowned Jewish-American writer.

What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something ). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic—and iconoclastic—group.

"According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), philosophy is a 'battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.' This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein's thought and his place in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cult-like following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna. Gottlieb's meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him."--from the inside front flap.

"Finally, the writing of one of the century's most notorious lesbians is available in English. Though best known for hosting the avant garde of Paris for thirty years--Colette, Renee Vivien, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein, to mention a few--she was also a writer who challenged the male-dominated literary establishment both in the content and the form of her work. Now we can discover her views on the people, places and events of that exciting and stimulating era for ourselves. Here is a spirited translation of Barney's thought-provoking work by one of Britain's most interesting writers"--Back cover.