A giant in the history of American entertainment, Eddie Cantor (1892-1964) won over the American public time and time again, first on stage, bowling audiences over in the Ziegfeld Follies, then in films, on the radio, and on television. His career ran from Vaudeville to video making all stops in between. A tireless person even when not on the stage, Cantor helped found the March of Dimes, and was the first national president of the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG), the American Federation of Radio Artists (later AFTRA), and the Jewish Theatrical Guild. Yet another medium in which Cantor succeeded was print. He authored and co-authored several books that upheld his standing as one of America's leading comedians. My Life Is In Your Hands & Take My Life combines for the first time in a single volume two memoirs written in 1928 and 1957, in which Eddie remembers his beginnings as an orphan on the Lower East Side and his hard-won climb from poverty to the bright lights of Broadway. The book also contains a lost chapter in which Eddie recalls his reactions to the stock market crash of 1929, along with a new complete index, discography, and filmography. In My Life Is In Your Hands & Take My Life, Cantor's humor is as sharp as ever and his sentiment is 100% genuine. While not at all modest about his decades of public adoration, Cantor shows a willingness to laugh at his blunders (such as his second film, "Special Delivery"), and to praise the many talented people with whom he collaborated. Along with telling the story of show business in the first half of the 20th century, Cantor also lets readers in on fond stories of his friends, from Jimmy Durante (who worked as a pianist in the Coney Island restaurant where Cantor was a singing waiter), to Ziegfeld alumni Will Rogers and W. C. Fields, to fellow entertainers Clara Bow and Fanny Brice.

This comical collection of of Jewish comedian portraiture is a sequel to 2006's wildly successful Old Jewish Comedians, which earned Friedman raves from Jerry Lewis, Howard Stern, The Believer,Entertainment Weekly and many more, and earned Friedman his own roast at New York's legendary Friar's Club. This all-new collection includes the famous (Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Joan Rivers, Mel Brooks, Soupy Sales, etc.), the not-so-famous (Jerry Stiller, Zeppo & Gummo Marx, Larry Storch, Zero Mostel, etc.) and the largely unknown (Molly Picon, Herbie Faye, Jan Milton, etc.). The Reuben Award-winning Friedman, one of the great caricaturists of his age, presents a thorough visual history of the 20th Century's greatest Borscht-Belt comedians.

Traces the history of the epidemic and examines its social, political, and psychological impact on society.

""What I wanted after college was a job and my own apartment, but what I needed was a good comeuppance, and that's what I got." " When Dave Itzkoff graduated from Princeton in 1998-the first member of his family to earn a college degree-he expected to be rewarded with a career, and a life, that mattered. Instead, he ended up convinced that he was selling the entire institution of manhood down the river. After a series of personal and professional experiences stripped him of any lingering sense of entitlement, Itzkoff found himself working as an editor at Maxim, the pugnacious frontrunner in a new breed of men's periodicals dubbed "lad magazines." There, he was initiated into a culture of heavily retouched girlie pictorials, dirty jokes, disingenuous sex advice, and shopping guides for expensive electronic gadgetry. And as Maxim continued its inexorable rise to become the most successful men's magazine in modern publishing history, Itzkoff was left wondering what his work-and his life-really meant. Lads is the hilarious, heartbreaking story of Dave Itzkoff's efforts to define himself as a man while working at a magazine that was purveying a vision of young manhood-a state of perpetual adolescence-that was seductive to all but viable for none. Lads takes us deep inside one young man's struggle with identity, responsibility, and sexuality, in an unsparingly candid account of how men really relate to one another, as fathers and sons, as employers and employees, as colleagues and friends. Lads is trenchant. Lads is perceptive. Lads is alarmingly funny. This is an unforgettable debut from a young writer of astounding talent. "From the Hardcover edition."

Real American Food draws from Burt Wolf's lifetime of experiences traveling the country producing programming for PBS. Packed with fascinating trivia and history, this book defines the distinctive contributions of key regions to American cuisine.

Anna Halprin is one of the most important innovators in the history of modern dance, performance art, and post-modern dance. Moving Toward Life brings together for the first time her essays, interviews, manifestos, and teaching materials, along with over 100 illustrations, providing a rich account of the work that radicalized an entire generation of performers. Since the late 1950s, Halprin has been at the forefront of experiments in dance, from improvisation and street theatre to dances in the environment and healing dances. A brief overview of Halprin's career shows how her work has prefigured -- and transfigured -- crucial developments in postmodern dance. In the 1960s, Halprin invented the "workshop," and in the wake of the Watts riots, her multiracial company broke boundaries in their confrontational political performances. In the 1970s, she organized "community rituals" to explore how individual creativity feeds positively into group dynamics. These healing social events led to her current work with cancer survivors and people challenging AIDS and their caregivers. Depicting Halprin's deep commitment to social change, Moving Toward Life presents an engaging, critical document of the life of one of the most influential and least known luminaries of American dance. Sally Banes and Janice Ross join Rachel Kaplan in providing introductory essays to sections of the book.

"A feast for the eyes...bringing alive a long vanished world that's still eerily present."--Daniel Czitrom, New York Post The premiere national Jewish newspaper has opened its never-before-seen archives, revealing a photographic landscape of Jews in the twentieth century and beyond. This extraordinary volume features classic photographs of the history one has learned to associate with the Jewish Daily Forward --Lower East Side pushcarts, Yiddish theater, labor rallies--along with gems no one would expect. The book also features essays by Leon Wieseltier, Roger Kahn, and Deborah Lipstadt, and a rousing introduction by Pete Hamill.

Indispensable history on the cutting edge issue in the battle over gun rights The right to carry a firearm for self-defense.

Assesses the 2008 presidential election as one of history's most significant, covering such topics as Bush's second term, the rise of Obama, and the key issues affecting the election.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

The 2000 presidential left the world standing still, but it was no fluke. America is divided right down the middle - the product of a half-century, unique in our country's history, of inconclusive, increasingly heated partisan battle. Tantalizingly close to victory, each party inflames and mobilizes its most loyal supporters and battles to gain even a small edge with some contested groups. Politics has become culture war - a fight about values, faith, the family, how people should live their lives. The result: partisans are more partisan, politics more polarized, America more divided. The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It tells the history of each party's failed efforts to dominate the era's politics and ideas, radically changing the political landscape. The book provides an in-depth guide to the new groups at the center of our politics. Internationally renowned political strategist and pollster Stanley Greenberg puts the reader in the room with the strategists and politicians and shows how each party can win, even shatter the impasse. The Two Americas is a political primer and strategic playbook for this unique era - essential reading for any armchair political strategist or engaged citizen eager to understand our future politics.

"The 2000 presidential left the world standing still, but it was no fluke. America is divided right down the middle - the product of a half-century, unique in our country's history, of inconclusive, increasingly heated partisan battle. Tantalizingly close to victory, each party inflames and mobilizes its most loyal supporters and battles to gain even a small edge with some contested groups. Politics has become culture war - a fight about values, faith, the family, how people should live their lives. The result: partisans are more partisan, politics more polarized, America more divided. This book tells the history of each party's failed efforts to dominate the era's politics and ideas, radically changing the political landscape and provides an in-depth guide to the new groups at the center of our politics"--

AT&T's divestiture was the largest corporate reorganization in history and has had international repercussions. It was a major development in American economic policy, and a prominent part of the deregulation movement of the late 1970s. This study reveals the internal decision-making process at AT&T and explains how private and public interests combined to shape corporate and public policy in late 20th-century America. Temin weaves the strands of politics, economics, business, and law into an accessible narrative history that will be of interest to the general reader who wants to know about government business interaction and how it affects American citizens. Temin portrays divestiture as a great experiment in public policy, competition, openness, and international policy. He concludes that the experiment has been a mix of deliberate design and uncontrollable forces whose outcome was not foreseen.

"The virtue of prudence suffuses the writings of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln, yet the demands of statecraft compelled both to take daring positions against long odds: Burke against the seemingly inexorable march of the French Revolution, Lincoln against disunion at a moment when the Northern situation appeared untenable. Placing their statesmanship and writings in relief helps to illuminate prudence in its full dimensions: inflected with caution but not confined to it, bound to circumstance, and finding expression in the particular but grounded in the absolute. This comparative study of two thinkers and statesmen who described themselves as "Old Whigs" argues for a recovery of prudence as the political virtue par excellence by viewing it through the eyes, words and deeds of two of its foremost exemplars. Both statesmen deeply informed by the life of the mind, Burke and Lincoln illustrate prudence in its universal but also contrasting dimensions. Burke emphasized the primacy of feeling, Lincoln the axioms of logic. Burke saw British prudence emanating from the mists of ancient history; for Lincoln, America's soul lay in a discrete moment of founding in 1776. Yet both were moved by a respect for the mysterious and customary. Each maintained the virtue of compromise while adhering to immovable commitments. At a time when American politics, and American conservatism in particular, teems with a desire for boldness but also an innate resistance to schemes of social or political transformation, this book answers with a fuller and richer account of prudence as it emerges in the thought and action of two of the great statesmen and thinkers of modern times"--

Many Americans feel that presidentials have become inordinately expensive, shallow, and vulgar. The seemingly endless contest even appears to discourage the most suitable candidates from seeking the highest office in the land. Frustrated, we long for the good old days of dignified campaigns and worthy candidates. As Troy's fascinating history demonstrates, however, they never existed. This definitive volume examines every presidential campaign from 1840 to the present to explore why candidates campaign as they do, and why Americans complain about it. Troy reveals what our presidential campaigns tell us about American democracy itself.

The Civil War and the World War II stand as the two great cataclysms of American history. They were our two costliest wars, with well over a million casualties suffered in each. And they were transforming moments in our history as well, times when the life of the nation and the great experiment in democracy--government of the people, by the people, for the people--seemed to hang in the balance. Now, in War Comes Again, eleven eminent historians--including three Pulitzer Prize winners, all veterans of the Second World War--offer an illuminating comparison of these two epic events in our national life. The range of essays here is remarkable, the level of insight consistently high, and the quality of the writing is superb. For instance, Stephen Ambrose, the bestselling author of D-Day, June 6th, 1944, offers an intriguing comparison of the two great military leaders of each war--Grant and Eisenhower. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Robert V. Bruce takes a revealing look at the events that foreshadowed the two wars. Gerald Linderman, author of Embattled Courage, examines the two wars from the point of view of the combat soldier. And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., describes how both Lincoln and FDR went around strict observance of the Constitution in order to preserve the Constitution. There is, in addition, a fascinating discussion of the crucial role played by spying during the two wars, by Peter Maslowski; a look at the diplomacy of Lincoln and Roosevelt, by Howard Jones; and essays on the impact of the wars on women and on African Americans, by D'Ann Campbell, Richard Jensen, and Ira Berlin. In perhaps the most gripping piece in the book, Michael C.C. Adams offers an unflinching look at war's destructiveness, as he argues that the evils we associate with "bad wars" (such as Vietnam) are equally true of "good wars." And finally, in perhaps the most provocative essay in the book, Russell Weigley, one of America's most eminent military historians, maps the evolution of American attitudes toward war to our present belief that the only acceptable war is one that is short, inexpensive, and certain of victory. Would any great commander, Weigley asks, would a Lee or a Grant or a Marshall, refuse to fight unless he knew he couldn't lose? "Is not a willingness to run risks for the sake of cherished values and interests close to the heart of what defines greatness in a human being or in a nation?" Another Pulitzer winner and World War II veteran, Don E. Fehrenbacher, concludes War Comes Again with a very personal look at two common soldiers who have no monuments, who have not been mentioned in previous histories, but who point at the essence of these two wars and are "embedded in the very structure of the enduring nation and the world we live in."

This book reaches deep into the past of the city of Los Angeles and carries through to the dramatic events that have recently received global attention--the Rodney King beating and the uprising in South Central L.A. Tracing the evolution of an extraordinary biracial coalition in Los Angeles behind Mayor Tom Bradley, Raphael Sonenshein shows how "crossover" politics and racial violence coexist in urban America. While challenging the prevailing pessimism about biracial coalitions in general, he also compares their relative successes in Los Angeles to their disheartening failures in New York City. What emerges is a probing look at a crucial issue of politics in the United States: can whites and minorities find common ground?

No detailed description available for "The United States and Israel".

Looks at the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, describes how human rights are protected here and abroad, and discusses recent developments in the concept of human rights.