Traces Armand Hammer's extraordinary life and career as a statesmen, envoy, industrialist, entrepreneur, physician, and philantropist, and reveals historic private meetings with such men as Lenin, Khrushchev, FDR, and JFK.

In a blend of personal memoir and biographical portaits of European Anglophiles and Anglophobes, Ian Buruma examines what it is that continues to divide Britain from the European Continent, and Europe from the United States. Half Dutch, half British, and from a family of Anglo-German Jews, Buruma is the perfect loving, critical, satirical observer of Europe's often comical and sometimes deadly prejudices. The results is a clever portrait of Europeans, of England, and of the author himself.

Rabbi Alan Lew is known as the Zen Rabbi, a man who has been a leader in the Jewish meditation movement and who has worked to bring two ancient religious traditions into everyday life. One God Clapping is the story of his roundabout yet continuously provoking spiritual odyssey. It is also the story of the meeting between East and West in America and the ways in which that encounter has transformed how we understand our God and ourselves. Born in Brooklyn, where his grandfathers introduce him to the rituals of Jewish life, Lew is uprooted when his family moves to the suburbs. From there, his quest for spiritual solace begins, seeing him through the flowering of the sixties in California where, in the company of poets, hipsters, and beats, he settles on Zen Buddhism as a spiritual path. The enhanced self-awareness he chronicles leads to a completely unexpected revelation - the depth of his attachment to being a Jew. His interest in Buddhism begins to wane, culminating in his decision to become a rabbi. Yet even upon settling in as rabbi of the largest conservative synagogue in San Francisco, he is not at the end of his search for a spiritual home. Forced to answer questions about his Buddhist past, he is obliged to examine more closely the nature of spiritual practice and determine exactly what Buddhism and Judaism have to offer each other. Like a Zen parable or a Jewish folk tale, One God Clapping unfolds as a series of stories, each containing a moment of revelation or instruction that, while often unexpected, is never simple of contrived. Like the life of Alan Lew himself, this book is a bold experiment in the integration of Eastern and Western ways of looking at and living in the world.

"The story of the friendship between a Jewish-American conductor and Pope John Paul II This book offers the inspirational story of an unlikely friendship and the two men who collaborated in an extraordinary way to begin to help heal centuries-old wounds. For two decades Sir Gilbert Levine and Pope John Paul II collaborated on symbolic acts of reconciliation: a series of internationally broadcast concerts designed to bring together people from all religious backgrounds under the auspices of the Vatican. These concerts broke new ground and demonstrated the Vatican's desire for rapprochement and even atonement in its relationships with Jews around the world. And it resulted in Sir Gilbert recovering his own Jewish faith in a deeper and more meaningful way. Details the extraordinary collaboration between a world-renowned musical maestro and an innovative Pope. Shows how music can act as a bridge between people of different faiths. A moving, inspirational, and personal story that appeals to music lovers and to people of all faith traditions. This is a compelling tale of faith, friendship, and the healing power of music to bring people together."--

Mordecai M. Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, was the most influential and controversial radical Jewish thinker in the twentieth century. This book follows Kaplan from his earliest days as a member the New York Orthodox community, through his period of private estrangement, into his public divorce from Orthodoxy and ultimately through his many decades as reconstructionism's leader. The book is also a social history of American Orthodoxy and American Judaism over the last century.

When Armand Hammer died at the age of 92, he was chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Company, lauded for his financial support of cancer research and for his art collection. But behind the facade of respectability lay a lifetime of fraud, both personal and professional. Now, the bestselling author of The Assassination Chronicles reveals the true story of this manipulative and corrupt man. of photos.

The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.

A festschrift comprising ten contributions by British, American, and Israeli scholars assessing some of the most famous Jewish travelers, writers, and scholars and their contributions to understanding of the Islamic world. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The first few decades of the eighteenth century witnessed an important moment in Jewish-Christian relations, as influential Christian scholars increasingly looked to Jewish texts to reveal the truths of their own faith. To what extent could postbiblical writings help them better understand the New Testament? And who would best be able to explicate these connections?Connecting the Covenants focuses on two separate but entwined stories, the first centering around the colorful character of Moses Marcus. The English-born son of wealthy parents and the grandson of the famous autobiographical author Glikl of Hameln, Marcus was a prominent Jew educated in the Ashkenazic yeshivah at Hamburg. On New Year's Day, 1723, Marcus was baptized as a Christian, later publishing a justification of his conversion and a vindication of his newly discovered faith in a small book in London. A trophy convert, he was promoted by figures at the highest levels of the Anglican Church as a cultural mediator between Judaism and Christianity. His modest successes in the world of the elite clerical establishment were followed, however, by conspicuous failures, both intellectual and material.The second story that David Ruderman tells emerges against the background of Marcus's professional decline. In the end, the prize convert proved to be a theologian of limited ability, far outstripped in sophistication and openness to rabbinic learning by a circle of Enlightenment Protestant scholars. It was not the Jew who had abjured Judaism who was willing or able to apply the Mishnah and Talmud to Christian exegesis, but figures such as William Whiston, Anthony Collins, William Wotton, and the Dutch scholar William Surenhusius who seized upon the ways to connect the covenants.