With the simple power and astonishing candor that made his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman's Son, a number one international bestseller, Kirk Douglas now shares his quest for spirituality and Jewish identity -- and his heroic fight to overcome crippling injuries and a devastating stroke. On February 13, 1991, at the age of seventy-four, Kirk Douglas, star of such major motion-picture classics as Champion, Spartacus, and Paths of Glory, was in a helicopter crash, in which two people died and he himself sustained severe back injuries. As he lay in the hospital recovering, he kept wondering: Why had two younger men died while he, who had already lived his life fully, survived? The question drove this son of a Russian-Jewish ragman to a search for his roots and on a long journey of self-discovery -- a quest not only for the meaning of life and his own relationship with God, but for his own identity as a Jew. Through the study of the Bible, Kirk Douglas found a new spirituality and purpose. His newfound faith deeply enriched his relationship with his own children and taught him -- a man who had always been famously demanding and impatient -- to listen to others and, above all, to hear his own inner voice. Told with warmth, wit, much humor, and deep passion, Climbing the Mountain is inspirational in the very best sense of the word.

How the story of NYC's schools contain lessons for other cities. City Schools brings together a distinguished group of researchers and educators for an in-depth look at the nation's largest school system. Topics covered include the changing demographics of city schools, the impending teacher shortage, reading instruction, special education, bilingual education, school governance, charter schools, choice, school finance reform, and the role of teacher unions. City Schools also provides fresh and fascinating perspectives on Catholic schools, Jewish day schools, and historically black independent schools. Diane Ravitch, Joseph P. Viteritti, and their coauthors explore pedagogical, institutional, and policy issues in an urban school system whose challenges are those of American urban education writ large. The authors conclude that we know a lot more about how to provide effective educational services for a diverse population of urban school children than performance data would suggest. Contributors: Dale Ballou, University of Massachusetts, Amherst • Stephan F. Brumberg, Brooklyn College • Mary Beth Celio, University of Washington • Gail Foster, Toussaint Institute • Michael Heise, Case Western University • Clara Hemphill, Public Education Association • Paul T. Hill, University of Washington • William G. Howell, Harvard University • Pearl Rock Kane, Columbia University • Frank J. Macchiarola, Saint Francis College • Melissa Marschall, University of South Carolina • Thomas Nechyba, Duke University • Paul E. Peterson, Harvard University • Christine Roch, Georgia State University • Christine H. Rossell, Boston University • Marvin Schick, Avi Chai Foundation • Mark Schneider, SUNY, Stony Brook • Lee Stuart, South Bronx Churches • Paul Teske, SUNY, Stony Brook • Emanuel Tobier, New York University • Joanna P. Williams, Columbia University

On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters and situations that tell you this could only be New York. The parents who are determined to get their children literally to fly at the school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier at the local deli who is more Jewish than Gopnik s grandfather - his gloriously peculiar analyst who argues that a name can be damaging to the human psyche, saying Adam s name is very ugly - the birder who takes Adam to see the huge flock of feral parrots that have taken over Flatbush. No one knows how they got there or how they survive the brutal winters, but they do. And flourish on it. These birds are so bold. They are real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude . Through the Children s Gate is written with Gopnik s signature mix of mind and heart, elegantly and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life.

On every page of this delicious book you will meet characters and situations that tell you this could only be New York. The parents who are determined to get their children literally to fly at the school production of Peter Pan - the Cambodian cashier at the local deli who is more Jewish than Gopnik's grandfather - his gloriously peculiar analyst who argues that a name can be damaging to the human psyche, saying Adam's name is very ugly - the birder who takes Adam to see the huge flock of feral parrots that have taken over Flatbush. No one knows how they got there or how they survive the brutal winters, but they do. And flourish on it. 'These birds are so bold. They are real New Yorkers. They have so much attitude'. Through the Children's Gate is written with Gopnik's signature mix of mind and heart, elegantly and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life.

The seminal work of Ruth Rubin, a pioneering collector, singer, folklorist, writer, and crusader for the vanishing legacy of the Yiddish world, "Voices of a People" remains the only general introduction to Yiddish folksong. A priceless collection of song texts in Yiddish and English, as well as a selection of tunes Rubin transcribed, this volume brings the Jews' ancient, itinerant culture alive through children's songs, dancing songs, and songs about love and courtship, poverty and work, crime and corruption, immigration, and the dream of a homeland. Rubin's notes and annotations weave each text into the larger story of the Jewish experience. Noted scholar Mark Slobin provides a new foreword that includes a biographical sketch of Rubin and an assessment of her contributions over a lifetime of collecting, absorbing, and disseminating Yiddish folksong.

Nicole Nieman has never really thought about being Jewish. Now, with the Nazis occupying France, it is the only thing on her mind. An almost endless stream of refugees comes to stay at their house, and her parents wonder if they too ought to escape over the border to switzerland or take the chance and wait it out. Then one awful day Nicole comes home from school to find her parents and her sister gone. The Nazis who have taken them are still looking for her. Where can Nicole hide? And will she ever see her family again? "A significant addition to the growing collection of children's books dealing with World War II." - The Boston Globe

"What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, tales of individual survival in hiding? Is it the same everywhere: in the West as in the East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and sui generis, or can it be studied in the light of other literatures? What of the perpetrators and bystanders, the hidden children, the children of Holocaust survivors: Do they speak with the same authority? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now--and why? Here, for the first time and told from beginning to end, is an historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast and varied literature produced in the Nazi-occupied ghettos, the bunkers and places of hiding, the transit and concentrations camps. Within weeks of the liberation, in displaced persons camps, a new memorial and testamentary literature begins to take shape. Moving from Europe to Israel, the U.S., and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: a period of "communal memory," still internal and internecine; a period of "provisional memory" in the '60s and '70s that witnesses the birth of a self-conscious Holocaust genre; to the period of "authorized memory" in which we live today, following the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989-91), and the opening of the US Holocaust Museum (1993). Twenty book covers - first editions in their original languages - and an eminently readable guide to the "first hundred books" together show the multilingual scope, historical depth, the moral and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing."--Publisher's website.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING LENA DUNHAM AND STEPHEN FRY.A "haunting, riotously funny, and deeply touching" (Publishers Weekly) novel about a woman and her father's journey to Poland to revisit her family historyRuth Rothwax finds order and meaning in the words she writes for other people, but she can't find words to underst[Bokinfo]

Jewish Bible stories retold as never before.

A timely and profound anthology from the national bestselling author of Black, White and Jewish, Representing a stunning range of essayists and novelists, both men and women, this groundbreaking anthology boldly confronts the complications, possibilities, uncertainties, and joys of being a man in the 21st century.

Rabbi Benjamin's congregation presents him with a special holiday vest--and cooks him so much food that soon its buttons pop off. Includes glossary, notes on Jewish holidays, and recipes for special foods associated with them.

“As far as the education of children is concerned,” states Natalia Ginzburg in this collection of her finest and best-known short essays, “I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one’s neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.” Whether she writes of the loss of a friend, Cesare Pavese; or what is inexpugnable of World War II; or the Abruzzi, where she and her first husband lived in forced residence under Fascist rule; or the importance of silence in our society; or her vocation as a writer; or even a pair of worn-out shoes, Ginzburg brings to her reflections the wisdom of a survivor and the spare, wry, and poetically resonant style her readers have come to recognize. “A glowing light of modern Italian literature . . . Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning streak of a plain phrase. . . . As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.” — The New York Times Book Review

Distinguished psychotherapist and survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum is losing his memory to an incurable disease. Never having spoken of the war years before, he resolves to tell his son about his past—the heroic parts as well as the parts that fill him with shame—before it is too late. Elhanan's story compels his son to go to the Romanian village where the crime that continues to haunt his father was committed. There he encounters the improbable wisdom of a gravedigger who leads him to the grave of his grandfather and to the truths that bind one generation to another.

Written from a liberal Jewish perspective, this thought-provoking book presents a wealth of down-to-earth, general advice on helping children to grow morally and spiritually.

Lost for sixty years in a Prague attic, the secret diary of a fourteen-year-old prodigy who later died at Auschwitz describes with keen insight into Jewish life the increasing horror of his situation but also reveals a brilliant, droll teenager with a hunger for life.

Recounts how a twelve-year-old Jewish girl and her brothers were sent from the Netherlands to the Children's House at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1943, and how she became the "little mother" for all the younger ones.

The author relates the remarkable story of his pianist mother and her sister, child prodigies who escaped certain death when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, adopted new identities, and came under the protection of a Nazi commander who heard them play.

Hiding Edith is the true story of Edith Schwalb, a young Jewish girl sent to live in a safe house after the Nazi invasion of France. Edith's story is remarkable not only for her own bravery, but for the bravery of those that helped her: an entire village, including its mayor and citizenry, that heroically conspired to conceal the presence of hundreds of Jewish children who lived in the safe house. Intensively researched and sensitively written, this book both comforts and challenges a young reader's spirit, skillfully addressing both the horrors and the hope that children experienced during the Holocaust.

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.

In You Never Call, You Never Write, Joyce Antler provides an illuminating and often amusing history of one of the best-known figures in popular culture--the Jewish Mother. Whether drawn as self-sacrificing or manipulative, in countless films, novels, radio and television programs, stand-up comedy, and psychological and historical studies, she appears as a colossal figure, intensely involved in the lives of her children. Antler traces the odyssey of this compelling personality through decades of American culture. She reminds us of a time when Jewish mothers were admired for their tenacity and nurturance, as in the early twentieth-century image of the "Yiddishe Mama," a sentimental figure popularized by entertainers such as George Jessel, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker, and especially by Gertrude Berg, whose amazingly successful "Molly Goldberg" ruled American radio and television for over 25 years. Antler explains the transformation of this Jewish Mother into a "brassy-voiced, smothering, and shrewish" scourge (in Irving Howe's words), detailing many variations on this negative theme, from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks to television shows such as "The Nanny," "Seinfeld," and "Will and Grace." But she also uncovers a new counter-narrative, leading feminist scholars and stand-up comediennes to see the Jewish Mother in positive terms. Continually revised and reinvented, the Jewish Mother becomes in Antler's expert hands a unique lens with which to examine vital concerns of American Jews and the culture at large. A joy to read, You Never Call, You Never Write will delight anyone who has ever known or been nurtured by a "Jewish Mother," and it will be a special source of insight for modern parents. As Antler suggests, in many ways "we are all Jewish Mothers" today.