Kosher Jesus is a project of more than six years research and writing. The book seeks to offer to Jews and Christians the real story of Jesus, a wholly observant, Pharisaic Rabbi who fought Roman paganism and oppression and was killed for it. While many Christians will be confused by its assertion that Jesus never claimed divinity and not only did not abrogate the Torah but observed every letter of the Law, they will find comfort in my tracing most of Jesus' principal teachings back to Jewish sources, this before he was stripped of his Jewishness by later writers who sought to portray him as an enemy of his people. This is especially true of Jesus' most famous oration, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a reformulation of the Torah he studied and to which he was committed. A small sampling: Jesus: (Matt 5:5) Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 37) The meek shall inherit the earth, and delight themselves in the abundance of peace. Jesus: (Matt 5:8) Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see G-d. Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 24) Who shall ascend the mount of the Lord - the pure-hearted. Jesus: (Matt 5:39) But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Hebrew Bible: (Lamentations 3:30) Let him offer his cheek to him who smites him.... Jesus: (Matt 6:33) But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 37:4) Delight yourself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Jesus: (Matt 7:7) Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. Hebrew Bible: (Jer 29:13) When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart. Jesus: (Matt 7:23) Then I will declare to them, "I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers." Hebrew Bible: (Psalms 6:9) Depart from me, all you workers of evil... The book is also for Jews who remain deeply uncomfortable with Jesus because of the Church's long history of anti-Semitism, the deification of Jesus, and the Jewish rejection of any Messiah who has not fulfilled the Messianic prophecies. We Jews will forever reject the divinity of any man, the single most emphatic prohibition of our Bible. And we can never accept the Messiahship of any personality, however noble or well-intended, who died without ushering in the age of physical redemption. But as Christians and Jews now come together to love and support the majestic and humane Jewish state, it's time that Christians rediscover the deep Jewishness and religious Jewish commitment of Jesus, while Jews reexamine a lost son who was murdered by a brutal Roman state who sought to impose Roman culture and rule upon a tiny yet stubborn nation who will never be severed from their eternal covenant with the G-d of Israel.

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.

"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."--

"Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In Neighboring Faiths, David Nirenberg examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other during the Middle Ages and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today. There have been countless scripture-based studies of the three "religions of the book," but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each other--all in the name of God--in periods and places both long ago and far away. Nirenberg argues that the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the others over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three "neighbors" define--and continue to define--themselves and their place in terms of one another. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage; to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination; to strategies for bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetry, Nirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to produce the future--together." -- Publisher's description.

Through personal essays and poetry, short fiction and painting, book reviews, interviews, performance pieces, and hybrid creations of text and image, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba opens a window onto the meaning of nationality, transnationalism, and homeland in our time. For more than thirty-five years U.S.-Cuban relations have been couched in terms of the Cold War, often pitting Cubans in the diaspora against Cubans who remain in their homeland. Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba celebrates the informal networks that Cubans in both countries have maintained through artistic, academic, family, and other ties. The book brings together for the first time in English Cuban voices of the second generation, both on the island and in the diaspora. The multivocal and multigenre collection includes both scholarly and creative writing and an impressive range of visual art. The participants are earnest, angry, witty, and hopeful. They are sometimes visionaries, but they are not deluded about Cuban or North American realities. Their voices offer testimony to the continuing efforts of Cubans and Cuban-Americans to look beyond the animosities and failings of their respective societies and find possibilities for personal and international reconciliation, dialogue, and renewal. "Ruth Behar, as editor of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, leaps across conventional intellectual boundaries in an effort to show the complexity of nationhood, exile, and revolution in the Cuban experience of the last thirty years. An important book about the possibility and impossibility of building cultural and political bridges."--Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Princeton University "Behar narrows the straits of Florida with a richly textured dialogue of voices in and out of Cuba. Bridges to Cuba is sure to make history."--Liz Balmaseda, Miami Herald "A vital and interesting anthology about contemporary Cuba."--Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love " Bridges to Cuba is the first U.S. anthology that looks at Cuban creativity from an integrated perspective, refusing to kneel before the painful and often arbitrary divisions that have split the voices of this passionate culture into forever separate bands. The results are magnificent. Read this book and get a long overdue understanding of contemporary Cuban literature and art."--Margaret Randall, author of Women in Cuba: Twenty Years Later "In order for memory to be recovered, there must be a community that remembers and tells the story. . . . Bridges to Cuba displays a wealth of insights that leave the reader with a sense of having experienced first hand the intricate web of thought and feeling that is Cuban life."--Latino Review of Books "Ruth Behar's anthology represents one of the most important and moving bridges yet published on contemporary Cuba and its condition as the island that is still absent from the Western world. Bridges to Cuba is an extraordinary example of the faith and ability of Latin American intellectuals to cross true bridges, bridges of solidarity."--Marjorie Agosín, Wellesley College Ruth Behar is author of Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story and coeditor, with Deborah Gordon, of Women Writing Culture. She has been the recipient of awards from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations.

"Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), was a 'prince' of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc's study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic--travel times and insurance premiums, rare manuscripts and objects from the Orient. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early seventeenth century that was dominated by the sea: the ceaseless activity of merchants, customs officials, and ships' captains at the center of Europe's sprawling maritime networks. Peiresc's Mediterranean World reconstructs the web of connections that linked the bustling port city of Marseille to destinations throughout the Western Mediterranean, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond. As Miller also makes clear, Peiresc's mastery of practical details and his collaboration with local traders and fixers as well as scholars, sheds new light on the structure of knowledge-making in the age of Bacon, Galileo, and Rubens. Miller shows that Peiresc's pursuit of Oriental studies, for example, depended crucially on his abilities as a man of action. Exploring the historian's craft today against the backdrop of Peiresc's diverse research activities, Peiresc's Mediterranean World suggests new possibilities for scholarship on the past, but also for the relationship between the writing of history and its readers"--Provided by publisher

A provocative and moving dialogue between two men of faith, two voices of conscience, about the most profound events and issues of our time, based upon, but expanded from, a WNBC-TV broadcast. A book that all who cherish the essential goodness in man will want to read and reread and give to friends and loved ones.

In Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve, Juliana Geran Pilon argues for a return to an egalitarian view of men and women, found in the original Genesis narrative, as reflected through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In each of these Abrahamic traditions, it was understood that man and woman were created to be soulmates in God's image—equal despite their different functions within society. Pilon writes that this original message has gradually been distorted, with disastrous effect. Any hope for an ennobling human community begins by resurrecting Eve as an equal partner to Adam. The work examines the Biblical creation narrative, comparing it to Greek and other ancient mythologies. Pilon explains how the disturbing association of woman with sin and death led to Eve's demise as Adam's equal. The final section of the work deals with the Goddess myth, love and marriage in early religious narratives, and modern man's search for his soul no less than for a soulmate. The book, at its core, is a meditation on the relationship between men and women but also among human beings. The resurrection of Eve is indispensable to attaining a true appreciation of love and faith. Pilon uses religious texts, expert commentary, and various works of fiction, poetry, and psychology to make her argument come alive. The work is strengthened by the writing style, alternately poetic and humorous, and a clear and illuminating progression of ideas. Its emphasis on reconciliation and understanding, and its post-feminist outlook will find a receptive audience.

Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert. By the middle of the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust compelled Christians, especially mainline Protestants and Catholics, to enter into a serious dialogue with Jews, one of the consequences of which was the removal of claims by Christians to have replaced Judaism, and revising text books that communicated that message to Christian believers. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many branches of Christianity, not least the Catholic Church, are engaged in a world-wide constructive dialogue with Muslims, made all the more necessary by the terrorist attacks of September 11. In these new conversations, Muslim religious leaders took an important initiative when they sent their document, “A Common Word Between Us,” to all Christians in the West. It is an extraordinary document, for it makes a theological argument (various Christians in the West, including officials at the Vatican, have claimed that a “theological conversation” with Muslims is not possible) based on texts drawn from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qurʾan, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers share the God-given obligation to love God and each other in peace and justice.