In the second of two volumes of this magnificently illustrated cultural history--the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews--Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish people, spanning from their expulsion from Spain in the Inquisition across six hundred years to the present day. It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in the face of oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the centuries and the continents--from the Iberian Peninsula and the collapse of "the golden age" to the shtetls of Russia to the dusty streets of infant Hollywood. Its voices ring loud and clear, from the philosophical musings of Spinoza to the poetry written on slips of paper in concentraion camps. Within these pages, the Enlightenment unfolds, a great diaspora transforms a country, a Viennese psychaiatrist forever changes the conception of the human mind. And a great story unfolds. Not--as often imagined--of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians, from the Soviets to America. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

A New York Times “Books for Summer Reading” selection Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for History By the time he died in 1993 at the age of 73, Irving Howe was one of the twentieth century’s most important public thinkers. Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought. In the first comprehensive biography of Howe’s life, historian Gerald Sorin brings us close to this man who rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the 1930s to become one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years. Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity. To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.

A new collection of stories by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Gary Barwin that puts the fab in fabulist. Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 1984-2024 couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin's previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals , Big Red Baby , Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth , and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 . Barwin's prose kicks against short fiction's more traditional forms: these are pieces that flirt with poetry and playwriting. Whole stories--and worlds--are packed into single compact paragraphs. There are narrators and fleas and lists and imperatives and Hitler's moustache and radiant happiness. Known as a "whiz-bang storyteller" who can deliver magical, dream-like sequences and truisms about the human condition in the same paragraph, Barwin's trademark brilliance, wit, and originality are on display in this can't-miss collection of short fiction.

These poems search for compatibility between contemporary consciousness and a rich, ancient liturgical tradition. Specifically, they explore the deep feelings of joy and regret, shame and hope associated with the Days of Awe, the Jewish High Holidays, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and concluding with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Tekiah refers to the sound of the shofar, the ceremonial ram's horn that is blown to commemorate the beginning of creation. The sound also recalls the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the destruction of the Temple, and the binding of Isaac, and anticipates as well the reunification of the Jews of the Diaspora. Finally, and perhaps most important, it serves as an entreaty to the Jewish people to perform teshuvah, to return to God.

A collection of poetry pieces.

Carole Balin introduces us to dozens of Jewish women writers from late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Tsarist Russia, focusing on five who were among the most prolific. Their extant literary remains include not only fiction, poetry, drama, translations, and essays, but also memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters. Balin contextualizes the works of each within the culture in which she lived and wrote. Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920) toiled to advance the goals of the Russian Haskalah (Enlightenment), translated German works into Hebrew, tried her hand at poetry, and became a foreign correspondent for a Hebrew newspaper at the age of 48. Hava Shapiro (1879-1943) published short stories and newspaper articles in Hebrew, earned a doctorate at the University of Berne, and was an active participant in the writing circle convened at the Warsaw home of Y. L. Peretz. Rashel Mironovna Khin (1861-1928) wrote numerous short stories and plays in Russian, two of which were staged at Moscow's Malyi Theater. Feiga Israilevna Kogan (1891-1974) composed books of Symbolist poetry in Russian while harboring a love of Hebrew, which she nurtured at the Society for Lovers of the Hebrew Language. Sofia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986) was the daughter of historian Simon Dubnov, the wife of socialist Genrikh Erlikh, and an accomplished poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist in her own right. The life-like and touching portraits that emerge of these talented writers allow us a penetrating view of Jewish women within their Russian-Jewish milieu that is far more nuanced than the images of housewife and revolutionary currently held in collective Jewish memory. The lives and works of these women help to tell a larger story of Jewish cultural history in the Russian Empire.

Theology is, by definition, rational discourse about God and, by extension, the rational discourse about religious matters in general. Humans are rational--though not only rational--creatures and, as such, they are ever striving to verbalize, to rationalize, and to systematize. But, if theology is rational discourse about a primary experience rather than experience itself, we are faced with the problem of whether theology can really do full justice to the primary experience. Theologians have often list sight of the fact that theology is an interpretive discipline, that the primary source of religious knowledge is human experience, and that we have in our experience only hints and intimations of God. The images and nuances of poetry may be better suited than logical discourse for capturing these hints and intimations. Alongside its technical theological tractates, Judaism has always had its prayerbook, and the language of prayer is the language of poetry. Theological systems may come and go, but the theology that is translatable into liturgy remains. Liturgical poems expressing the unconventional and the idiosyncratic share the same prayerbook pages with conventional theology, just as conflicting ideas had always shared the same pages of Talmud and Midrash, where no uniformity of theological positions was ever enforced. Ibn Ezra's advice to "pray only in a literalist manner" was hardly the advice by which Jews let themselves be guided. The poetry of the synagogue proves it. The traditional Jewish liturgy contains not only the standard prayers ordained in the Talmud and the ritual codes, but also poetic embellishments of all kinds. Such poetic embellishments, or piyyutim, take the form of hymns to be sung in conjunction with the standard prayers, and of poetic inserts in the standard prayers themselves. Jakob Petuchowski presents ten such poems in pointed Hebrew, with translation, commentary, and introduction to the theological theme of each poem. The poems-ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and hailing Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy-introduce the reader to innovative poetic expressions of unconventional and daring theological ideas that have been incorporated into the standard liturgy. This reprint edition is an indispensible introduction to piyyut (medieval liturgical poetry) for all students of Jewish thought and culture.

Amy Levy(1861-89) was born in London to a relatively wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. At the age of 15 she was sent to Brighton High School and later attended Cambridge University where she was the first Jewish student at Newnham College. She left Cambridge without taking her degree but became a prolific writer of poetry, essays and articles and in 1888 published her first novel The Romance of a Shop. The central theme of Reuben Sachs, also published in 1888, is the relationship between Reuben and Judith Quixano, but some understanding of the history of the Jewish community in England is necessary for a full appreciation of this deeply moving novel. Much progress had been made and economic prosperity achieved since Jews returned to England in the 1650s, having been expelled by Edward 1 in 1290. A significant theme of the novel is the difference between the so-called Sephardi Jews (from Spain via Amsterdam) and Ashkenzi Jews (from Poland and Eastern Europe). Reuben Sachs is Ashkenazi while Judith Quixano is Sephardi. Amy Levy did not shrink from criticising some features of the Jewish community, which she consistently refers to in Reuben Sachs as ‘the tribe’. He frankness led to her being accused by some of anti-semitism. She in turn was openly critical of what she considered to be an inaccurate and over-romanticised view of British Jews as portrayed in the novel Daniel Deronda published by George Elliott in 1876. She was particularly critical of Elliot’s portrayal of Jews as orientals yearning for a return to Palestine

An album of art works by Valentin Lustig, focusing on allusions to the Holocaust in his works. Lustig was born in 1955 in Cluj, the son of Holocaust survivors. His family immigrated to Israel in 1974. After studying art in Firenze, Lustig settled in Zürich in 1983. Notes that his paintings are influenced by the poetry of Paul Celan, and that members of his extended family who were killed in the Holocaust appear in most of his paintings.