"When her marriage suddenly ends, and a diary documenting her beloved grandfather's escape from Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Naomi K. Lewis decides to retrace his journey to learn about her family history. Despite suffering from extreme disorientation and a lifetime of anxiety, she travels alone for the first time. Moving from Amsterdam to Lyon--relying on the marvels of GPS--she discovers family secrets and her own narrative as a second-generation Jewish Canadian. With vulnerability, humour, and wisdom, Lewis's memoir asks tough questions about her identity as a secular Jew, the accuracy of family stories, and the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations. How do immigrants weave their sense of identity into their chosen countries? Must we be able to locate ourselves within family and cultural geography to belong?"--

"Part memoir, part history, part political commentary - and all Richler - This Year in Jerusalem is a personal, passionate, and quirkily comic examination of the idea of Israel-as-homeland: for Jews, for Palestinians, and, not least, for the author himself. Richler re-creates the Montreal of his adolescence - the local Zionist youth organization functioning as an escape from the zealous Hasidism of his grandfathers; the idea of emigration to Israel growing into a shimmering dream for himself and his friends. And, going to Israel to look up his old pals from St. Urbain Street, he shows us what happened to those who actually did "make aliyah"--Who settled in the cities and on the kibbutzim, survived the turmoils of war, and are faced today with the opportunities and dangers of peace with the Palestinians. He shows us, as well, the course of his own migration - away from Zionism and through the maze of his own sense of Judaism until he rediscovers his true homeland: "I owe as much to the thin gruel of my Canadian experience as I do to my Jewish provenance." Woven through his story are his fond (and not so fond) recollections of his family, his encounters in today's Israel with the kids he grew up with in Montreal a million years ago, and his most mordant observations on the state of the state of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Witty, intelligent, well reasoned, and across-the-board provocative, here is Mordecai Richler at his inimitable - and controversial - best." -- dust jacket

The novel centres on a colourful group of refugee Tibetans. One of the group's members, the charismatic (and slightly dubious) Rabbi Chod, recognises himself as the reincarnation of Moses, and various friends as reincarnations of key Biblical figures. Despite condemnation from both the mainstream Jewish and Tibetan communities, he declares his followers the true 'lost tribe of Israel', and defiantly opens up a synagogue in a pet shop. a family where suppression and dysfunction are common currency. Both of his parents are Tibetan Jews, followers of Rabbi Chod. His father owns a cafe called 'Hush Hush', so called because within the cafe, all forms of noise are forbidden. Any customer who speaks is instantly banned and a Polaroid photo of them is pinned to a cork board in case they should dare to return. way not into the future, but the past. He falls asleep each night only to wake up the day before. In this way, as he grows up his parents get younger. By the end of the book his parents are children - too young to manage by themselves - and the adult Monlam has to look after them. In this way he witnesses his own family history, quite literally living backwards into their lives.

"Voltaire's Coconuts is a wonderfully engaging and witty combination of history and biography which looks at how Europeans have been fascinated by all that it means to be English. Dutch by birth, Buruma came to live in England in 1990 for the third time in his life and noticed a new mood of introspection. Englishness was a subject of endless discussion. Fox hunting was debated, loyalty to English cricket a hot issue, and the future of the monarchy rarely out of the news. This worrying over Englishness resulted, in Buruma's words, 'in great balls of intellectual wool', obscuring the more practical reasons why Europeans have admired (or hated) Britain in the past: its liberal institutions, its civil liberties, its delicate balance between social order and the free pursuit of self-interest. In this brilliant and elegantly written book Buruma examines these ideas about Englishness and what Europeans admired or loathed about Britain. Voltaire wondered why British laws could not be planted in France, or even Serbia, like the precious seeds of coconut trees. Karl Marx thought the English were too stupid to start a revolution; Goethe worshipped Shakespeare; Baron de Coubertin's idea of the modern Olympic Games was inspired by Tom Brown's Schooldays; Theodor Herzl's dream of the Jewish state was fuelled by his love of British aristocracy; and the German Kaiser was convinced that Britain was run by Jews. Combining biographical stories of these European Anglophiles and Anglophobes with memories of his own Anglo-Dutch-German-Jewish family, Ian Buruma has found a wholly original way of describing the relationship between Britain and Europe. This is a dazzlingly clever book which through its exploration of anglomania shows how much Englishness and people's view of it has shaped modern Europe." --Descripción del editor.

Twenty-four stories of Israeli and Jewish life, chosen from the more than one hundred Haim Watzman has written over the last nine years in his "Necessary Stories" column in the The Jerusalem Report. Bookended by a flashback to his first weekend in Israel forty years ago and a storytelling encounter on a recent flight back home from the US, these stories--funny, meditative, and sad, set in immigrant camps, the army, and the author's own neighborhood in south Jerusalem--uniquely capture what it is like, in our age, to be an Israeli and a Jew. Praise for Haim Watzman: "His stories detail the lives of ordinary Israelis, often touching on current events ... The dialogue, though written in English, has the distinct feeling of Hebrew speech -- that unmistakable combination of impatience and warmth." --Naomi Zeveloff, Forward "Watzman knows that every encounter, no matter how fleeting--a conversation in a cemetery with a long-dead Talmudic sage; Felix Mendelssohn's great aunt scolding the young prodigy; four Jews on a plane discussing the Bible, the Zohar and Wuthering Heights--is a matter of life and death. Necessary Stories is a quietly beautiful work, haunting in places, gently funny in others, written by a graceful, thoughtful, eloquent man who understands that life itself is not enough. One must live to tell the tale." --From the Introduction by Joseph Skibell "Author Haim Watzman is a master of the tiny moment, the exact point in time that leaves an impression on the future ... If you enjoy short stories, 'Necessary Stories' is a fine collection, filled with hints and hidden meanings. It's a perfect choice for a Jewish book club whose members can discuss these stories for hours." --Rivkah Lambert Adler, Jerusalem Post, June 14, 2017 "Watzman writes with immediacy, attentiveness and empathy, whether he's describing a pregnant feral cat he names Hagar, who makes her home in the dumpster of his Jerusalem building, or the best friend of the bride at a wedding, or his late son, who was killed in a tragic accident while serving in the IDF. Watzman ... has a good ear for dialogue. The stories, layered with meaning, speak to his wide-ranging interests." --Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week/Times of Israel "All but one of these stories are relatively short ... Yet anyone who sits down with this collection will come away with a sense of something much larger--a multifaceted impression of what it's like to make a life in a place where the prosaic mixes with the fantastic; history, politics, and philosophy are around every corner, and each encounter with a stranger holds the potential to show you the world from a fresh angle." --Janice Weizman, The Jerusalem Report

This book explores the intersection of Islamophobia and Israel-and the ways that the U.S. "war on terror" impacts both. The authors challenge the Jewish community's use of a "pro-Israel" litmus test of who is a "good" Muslim;" trace the funding connections and other links between Islamophobia and right-wing pro-Israel supporters; document the ADL's history of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab actions; and analyze two high-profile post-9/11 anti-Muslim campaigns.

Children have been recruited for fighting throughout history - as soldiers in regular and guerilla armies, in armed revolts, and for political terrorism. However, these children cannot always be viewed as victims of remorseless and criminal leaders. In some situations, joining the fighting is the best or the only alternative for the young. Ch. 2 (pp. 19-56), "Fighting for Their Lives: Jewish Child Soldiers of World War II", discusses children's participation in the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Using mainly material from resistance and partisan groups in Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus, shows that joining the fighters was sometimes the Jewish children's only hope for survival. The children were motivated by necessity and a sense of honor and duty. Zionist and leftist movements, in particular Hashomer Hatzair, which headed the resistance in many ghettos, cultivated independence and militancy of the young and were especially inclined to draw children into their ranks.

David Daube (1909-1999) was an eminent authority on Talmudic, Roman and ancient law, who taught legal history and jurisprudence at Cambridge, Aberdeen, Oxford and Berkeley. He was also in the vanguard of scholars who established the importance of Jewish and Talmudic perspectives to the understanding of the New Testament. This book, first published in 1947 and now reissued, contains five ground-breaking essays on the legal issues present in a number of Old Testament narratives including the story of Joseph and his brothers. Among the topics discussed are theft, deception, evidence, liability and punishment. These are set in the wider context of the growth of codes in the Pentateuch, Rabbinic interpretations of the Torah, and Roman sources including Macrobius and Gaius. Daube's book will resonate afresh in the scholarly climate of the twenty-first century, where the relationships between law and religion and between Judaism and Christianity are again the subject of lively debate.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of one of the four New Testament gospels and brings a unique approach to the genre of Bible commentary. Featuring distinct Jewish and Christian voices in respectful conversation, Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington methodologically break new ground in exploring why scholars disagree on questions of history (what actually happened, what is authorial invention, how do we address different versions of the same account), literature (what does this story tell us about Jesus and Peter, Mary Magdalene and Judas, among other characters), and theology (what can we say about resurrection and divine justice, or about Jesus as the Messiah)

This powerful memoir chronicles the life of one of America’s most celebrated rabbis—Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, or “Reb Zalman” as he is fondly known to friends and followers. The book traces his life from a youth in the shadow of the Nazis through the tumultuous 1960s in America to his position as a renowned religious leader today. Often controversial for his attraction to cultural mavericks and religious rebels, Reb Zalman’s colorful lifetime includes a striking cast of characters across faith traditions, including Timothy Leary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, and more. The book traces Reb Zalman’s work creating the vibrant Jewish Renewal movement that emphasizes spiritual experience and continues to touch Jews around the world today. Reb Zalman often illustrates his talks with anecdotes from his life, and My Life in Jewish Renewal brings together the life story of this beloved leader for the first time.

"This ethnography explores the religious beliefs and rituals of a group of elderly Jewish women, originally from Kurdistan and Yemen, who now live in Jerusalem. Sered visited the women in their homes and accompanied them on trips to holy tombs, local ethnic synagogues, and Judaica classes. She finds that, though mainly illiterate and excluded from formal religious practices, the women are experts in rituals aimed at safeguarding the well-being of their extended families. By analyzing their rituals, daily experiences, life-stories, and non-verbal gestures, Sered uncovers the strategies these women have used to circumvent the patriarchal institutions of Judaism, and how they have developed their own "little tradition" within and parallel to the "great tradition" of Torah Judaism".--

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem Based on an unparalleled and exhaustive collection of original Jewish accounts and sources not available until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1980s, Jean Ancel provides a detailed analysis of the path of antisemitism that led to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Romania. The Romanians, and other nations inside and outside the Balkans, related differently to ?their Jews? and ?other Jews,? that is, those living in districts annexed to Romania after the First World War and in areas occupied and annexed to the Romanian military administration after the Soviet invasion in June 1941. The Jews of the Regat, the core Romanian principality, suffered pogroms, decrees, and degradation, but on the whole they survived the Holocaust. Contradicting long-held assumptions, Ancel shows that Romanians were largely responsible for murdering their Jewish community?one of the largest in Europe before the war?and although its survival rate was the highest in Europe, the survival rate in areas where Jews were liquidated was one of the lowest.

The Jews of northern France, Germany, and England, known collectively as Ashkenazic Jewry, have commanded the attention of scholars since the beginnings of modern Jewish historiography. Kanarfogel examines the educational process in Ashkenaz, exploring whether there was a developed system of education, whether compensation for Torah study was permitted and what the social status of those who taught Torah was; in the first comprehensive study of the relationship between the educational institutions, leadership, and the communities in medieval Ashkenaz.

In ancient Jewish culture the ideas of purity and impurity defined the socio-cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. Hayes argues that different views of the possibility of conversion, based on varying ideas about Gentile impurity, were the key factor in the formation of Jewish sects in the second temple period, and in the separation of the early Christian Church from what later became rabbinic Judaism.

The wide-ranging portrayal of modern Jewishness in artistic terms invites scrutiny into the relationship between creativity and the formation of Jewish identity and into the complex issue of what makes a work of art uniquely Jewish. Whether it is the provenance of the artist, as in the case of popular Israeli singer Zehava Ben, the intention of the iconography, as in Ben Shahn's antifascist paintings, or the utopian ideals of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, clearly no single formula for defining Jewish art in the diaspora will suffice. The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times is the first work to analyze modern Jewry's engagement with the arts as a whole, including music, theater, dance, film, museums, architecture, painting, sculpture, and more. Working with a broad conception of what counts as art, the book asks the following questions: What roles have commerce and politics played in shaping Jewish artistic agendas? Who determines the Jewishness of art and for what purposes? What role has aesthetics played in reshaping religious traditions and rituals? This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the various challenges of modernity, including cultural adaptation and self-preservation, economic diversification, and ritual transformation. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world--or, alternatively, an art to being modern in the Jewish world--and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.

"Here is the extraordinary Diary of Rywka Lipszyc, finally published 70 years after it was created. Handwritten in a school notebook between October 1943 and April 1944, this remarkable diary depicts the nightmare of life under the Nazis in Poland's infamous Lodz ghetto--through the eyes of brilliant, 14-year-old Jewish girl"--Dust jacket flap.