"In his final book before his death, Primo Levi returns once more to his time at Auschwitz in a moving meditation on memory, resiliency, and the struggle to comprehend unimaginable tragedy. Drawing on history, philosophy, and his own personal experiences, Levi asks if we have already begun to forget about the Holocaust. His last book before his death, Levi returns to the subject that would define his reputation as a writer and a witness. Levi breaks his book into eight essays, ranging from topics like the unreliability of memory to how violence twists both the victim and the victimizer. He shares how difficult it is for him to tell his experiences with his children and friends. He also debunks the myth that most of the Germans were in the dark about the Final Solution or that Jews never attempted to escape the camps. As the Holocaust recedes into the past and fewer and fewer survivors are left to tell their stories, The Drowned and the Saved is a vital first-person testament. Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II. This is an essential book both for students and literary readers. Reading Primo Levi is a lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit."--Publisher description.

Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his father’s grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner’s kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier’s National Jewish Book Award–winning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man’s urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner’s unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death’s wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier’s Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son’s embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar’s savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer’s revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.

Europe was in the long slumber of the Dark Ages, the Roman Empire was in tatters, and the Greek language was all but forgotten, until a group of Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars rediscovered and translated the works of Aristotle. His ideas spread across Europe like wildfire, offering the scientific point of view that the natural world, including the soul of man, was a proper subject of study. The Catholic Church convulsed, and riots took place at the universities of Paris and Oxford.

Excerpt from Jewish Folk-Lore in the Middle Ages We look with other eyes on the heaped up treasures of Jewish aggadah, on the diamonds which oriental fancy made brilliant by a fiery inspiration. Brought under this new light cast on them they glitter and gleam in a thousand colours like the dew in the flower when lighted by the sun. We value as a poetical story, or picturesque image, legends like the following: In the time when the Lord remembers His children, and sees them dwelling in sorrow and grief amongst We look with other eyes on the heaped up treasures of Jewish aggadah, on the diamonds which oriental fancy made brilliant by a fiery inspiration. Brought under this new light cast on them they glitter and glean in a thousand colours like the dew in the flower when lighted by the sun. We value as a poetical story, or picturesque image, legends like the following: "In the time when the Lord remembers His Children, and sees them dwelling in sorrow and grief amongst the nations, He sheds two tears, and they drop into the great ocean, and their noise is heard from one end of the world to the other. Hence the earthquake." What a wonderful picture to express, the sympathy of heaven and earth with the heartstricken grief of the people! Or take another: "In the same day when King Solomon married the daughter of Necho, the Egyptian king, the angel Michael descended from heaven and planted a reed in the great ocean; and there came up loam, and upon that Rome was afterwards built." And further: "On the day when Jeroboam first established the two golden calves to be worshipped by Israel, Romulus and Remus erected their tents." Only ill-will, or prejudiced misunderstandings could not see the historical truth in the symbolical explanation of the relation which exist between the fall of Judah and the rise of Rome. Under the form of an allegory, they said that the power of the Jewish nation is intimately connected with the true and unchanged religious belief, and a change in such belief necessarily brings about an avoidable decline. In the curious tales of Rabbah bar-bar Channah, we recognize further, now-a-days, Indian sailor and travellers' tales, and in some of them Buddhistic legends, as for instance, the story of the gigantic fish, which destroys sixty towns, and out of whose bones to his pupils one of his former existence. Innumerable are the examples on which our feet stumble as we tread through the forest thousands of years old, called Jewish literature, where palms and hyssop, trees and bushes, flowers and thorns are often inextricably intertwined. On the other hand, we have learned to-day to recognize only as legends, the absurd accusations hurled against the Jews during the middle ages: such as the use of blood in their ceremonials, the poisoning of wells, the piercing of the host, so that it bled, even the accusations that the Jews have been usurers to so great an extent as it was presumed. All these, and similar accusations, are the outcome of prejudice, they are cobwebs spun by poisonous spiders, which hide the true light, and render the approach to the Ghetto disgusting and obnoxious. But we sweep them away, we know that they are only floating material to be found everywhere in the air, waiting only for the right time and the right men to appropriate and make use of them. They are for us nothing more than one of the those numerous legends, devoid of every internal truth, and interesting only for the student of folk-psychology and folk-lore. One more legend refers to the seclusion of the Jews within the walls of their houses, who are said to care nothing for the movement of the times, and who let the waves of the rolling sea pass over their shelter. But be the walls as high as towers and the prejudice as powerful as ever, they never form a real barrier against the spirit, which pours in through a thousand invisible channels. "The sun shines for the righteous as well as...

A classic tale adopted to a modern setting. We all, children and adults alike, have different inner voices telling us what to do. In this episode, David, 8, is tasked with babysitting his baby sister while Mommy goes to the store. (Daddy is in the other room.) David hears his friends playing ball outdoors. David's Bad King tells him to join them. His Good King says no! He is torn even more when his friends call him out to join them! What will David do?! What would you do? Based on an ancient parable of "the wisest man who ever lived."

This collection of commentaries, written during the recent Gaza war as it unfolded, represents an attempt of one Jew on behalf of Jews of Conscience everywhere, to come to grips with the state of Israel as it is rather than what it purports to be. Though written from a geographic distance, one feels the pain Palestinians experienced as a challenge to Jewish history. Have Jews survived the Holocaust only to recreate scenes of horror Israel now visits upon the Palestinian people? Or is there a way forward for Jews and Palestinians beyond mutual recrimination, displacement and war? Using the burning children of the Holocaust as the core of Jewish ethical post-Holocaust life, these commentaries ask Jews, the state of Israel and all those in solidarity with Jews and Jewish history to hold Israel accountable for its assault on Gaza and provide a vehicle for a future where Jews and Palestinians live together in justice and peace.

"Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is Shabbos..." (Exodus 20;9-10) The sages explain that each and every day's labor has a special connection to the upcoming Shabbos. My Jewish Days of the Week is a fun-filled journey toward the best day of all. It begins with a family Sunday spent in the garden, a busy Monday spent at school, and ends with Thursday grocery shopping and Friday cooking and cleaning. All week long, the characters prepare for the experience of ushering in and observing Shabbos. The catchy rhymes and old-world illustrations portray everyday life as a joyous adventure for toddlers. Naturally, Shabbos itself is given top billing as: a go-to-shul and walking day a story-telling, talking day a friend and neighbor meeting day a yummy challah-eating day! The text is set in a large clear font, and a glossary explains any words that may be unfamiliar to some of the readers. As an added bonus, a beautiful chart at the end of the book reviews all the days of the week in both English and Hebrew.