"Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632-1677) was a radical free thinker who led a life guided by strong moral principles despite his disbelief in an all-seeing God. Seen by many--Christians as well as Jews--as Satan's disciple during his lifetime, Spinoza has been regarded as a secular saint since his death. Many contradictory beliefs have been attached to his name: rationalism or metaphysics, atheism or pantheism, liberalism or despotism, Jewishness or anti-Semitism. However, there is no question that he viewed freedom of thought and speech as essential to an open and free society. In this insightful account, the award-winning author Ian Buruma stresses the importance of the time and place that shaped Spinoza, beginning with the Sephardim of Amsterdam and followed by the politics of the Dutch Republic. Though Spinoza rejected the basic assumptions of his family's faith, and was consequently expelled from his Sephardic community, Buruma argues that Spinoza did indeed lead a Jewish life: a modern Jewish life. To Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others today, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without believing in Judaism. His defense of universal freedom is as important for our own time as it was in his." --

In So Close , the internationally renowned writer Hélène Cixous recounts a return to her native Algeria after a more than thirty-year absence. Before she can decide to go, she must sift through large parts of her past in a land where she never felt at home and, from a young age, knew she must leave. Above all, she must confront the depths of her mother’s rejection of the country that had rejected her despite years of devotion to the poor women of Algiers. As she is struggling with this decision, she receives a message from Zohra Drif, with whom she has had no contact since their school days, which was just before Zohra joined the Algerian FLN and become a heroine in the uprising against French rule in her homeland. They meet in Paris for the first time in more than fifty years and soon afterward the narrator departs for Algiers. The latter part of the narrative brings a rush of sensations, impressions, memories, and new encounters as the narrator revisits sites from her past in Algiers and especially in Oran, the city of her birth, the city of the family’s happiness before her father’s death when she was a young girl. The quest to find his grave again in the overgrown Jewish cemetery of Algiers leads to a startlingly moving scene that closes the voyage and the book.

From orthodoxy to chaos, a major artist wrestles with her influences.

Not Without a Fight is the long-awaited autobiography of Helen Zille, one of South Africa's most important political figures. Zille takes the reader back to her humble family origins, her early career as a journalist at the Rand Daily Mail, where she wrote the story exposing Steve Biko's murder, and her involvement with the End Conscription Campaign and the Black Sash. She documents her journey through the ranks of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Alliance, and recalls her experiences as leader of the DA, mayor of Cape Town and premier of the Western Cape. In the process she speaks frankly about colleagues and opponents, and reveals fascinating insights about what happened behind the political scenes. Readers will also meet a Helen Zille they did not know: a warm person, a devoted mother, and someone with an earthy sense of humour. This book is as frank, honest and uncompromising as Helen Zille herself, and will appeal to anyone interested in the story of South Africa politics over the part fifty years.

Biographies of Rabbi Aharon Kotler, Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahanemann and Sarah Schneirer.

A "memoir by a journalist about his father's attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden"--Jacket.

Geza Vermes is known world-wide as an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls and for his pioneering work, Jesus the Jew . But in addition to that he is the living embodiment of Jewish-Christian relations in the context of an honest quest for the truth. Few scholars have had such a colorful and eventful life, the course of which he describes here. Born into a Hungarian Jewish family which later converted to Christianity, he received a Catholic education and was later ordained priest after the turmoil of the War. The quest for membership in a religious order led him to the Sion Fathers, in Louvain and then in Paris, where among other things he was introduced to biblical studies and became fascinated with the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. Subsequent emotional turmoil from conflicting pressures made him ill , but a series of "Providential Accidents" which gave this book its title brought him to England, marriage, and a new fulfilled life, first in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and then in Oxford, and to a public reassertian of his Jewishness. As well as telling a fascinating personal story, this book provides a vivid insider's account of developments in Scrolls research and of the lengthy battle with procrastinating editors over the "academic scandal of the century." These memoirs shed much light on the deep personal friendships and antagonisms and the complex, non-scholarly factors which accompany even committed study of the Bible, Qumran, and the Gospels.

Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast?s attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in 20th-century America.

Mixing observations about friends and family with short sketches and literary gossip, this third installment of the author's notebooks updates an intriguing personal and cultural record. Starting where Rough Copy: Personal Terms II left off, the story of one contemporary writer's life is resumed in anecdotes, aphorisms, journal entries, reviews, and vignettes of people and places.

An account of Newton's life and work.

Dorothy Ray Healey joined the Communist party at age fourteen, in 1928, and was leader of the Los Angeles district--the second largest in the country--for over twenty years. As a strike leader, opponent of McCarthyism, Vietnam war protestor, candidate for public office, and mentor to Angela Davis, she won fame as "a tough lady red," one of the few women to rise to Communist party leadership.

Why Did You Do That? is an autobiography of David Matas, an international human rights advocate. The book sets out his human rights activities and then attempts to explain why he did them. People are focused on their immediate environment, their family, their friends, their work or their neighbourhood. Why should they go to the bother of trying to address a seemingly intractable situation in order to try help those with whom superficially they have nothing in common, who may be living in a country far away to which they have never been, speaking in a language they do not understand and part of a culture which is both foreign and strange? The reason for the autobiography is an attempt to answer that question. By trying to explain why he did what he did, the author hopes to mobilize others, not to do what he did or is now doing, but rather just to do something, to shed feelings of indifference and impotence, to join the international human rights cause.

Part social history and part exposé, this revealing, entertaining, and provocative book spans nearly seventy years as it explores the lives and careers of some of the silver screen's foremost gays and lesbians and the effect of their high-profile lifestyles on the general public. From Charles Laughton and Greta Garbo to Nathan Lane and Ellen DeGeneres, David Ehrenstein traces the gradual transformation of Hollywood from a time when it was box-office poison to be publicly gay to the modern era when many top entertainment figures are celebrating their gay sexuality--and are in turn celebrated for it. Updated, Open Secret reveals what has happened to the key players in gay Hollywood since the original hardcover publication.

David Amram has played and rambled and galloped and staggered through a remarkably broad sweep of American life, experience, and creative struggle. The Boston Globe has described him as "the Renaissance man of American Music." Amram and Jack Kerouac collaborated on the first-ever jazz poetry reading in New York City in 1957 as well as the subsequent legendary film Pull My Daisy in 1959, combining Amram's music with Kerouac's narration. Amram, honored as the first Composer-in-Residence of the New York Philharmonic, has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber works, written two operas, and has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Dustin Hoffman, Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Nancy Griffith, Johnny Depp, and more. Vibrations is the story of one boy's adventures growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, working odd jobs, misfitting in the U.S. Army, barnstorming through Europe with the famous Seventh Army Symphony, exiling in Paris, scuffling on the Lower East Side, day-laboring-often down but never out-finally emerging as a major musical force. With its stage-setting foreword by Douglas Brinkley and a new afterword by Kerouac biographer Audrey Sprenger, this new edition is not to be missed.

David Amram-composer, jazz artist, conductor, and world music pioneer-has been described by the Boston Globe as "the Renaissance man of American music." From early collaborations with Kerouac and Sinatra, chosen by Leonard Bernstein as the New York Philharmonic's first composer in residence, Amram's artistry has taken him from concerts with Willie Nelson to jamming with the Massai tribe of Kenya. In Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat, Amram recounts his extraordinary adventures in the many worlds of music he calls home, all told in a rollicking anecdotal style that makes you feel that you are at home around the world. He writes, "Everywhere I have been in the world, music transcends politics. As musicians, we were able to go beyond all that and just be fellow human beings." Threading through Amram's tale of music, hard work, respect, and friendship are unforgettable stories of fellow great artists-Dizzie Gillespie, Hunter S. Thompson, Janet Gaynor, George Plimpton, Lyle Lovett, Zoe Caldwell, Willie Nelson, and many more.

"In a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? In his grandly entertaining debut memoir, playwright David Adjmi explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art.."--Publisher's description.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.