Toward a Meaningful Life is a spiritual road map for living based on the teachings of one of the foremost religious leaders of our time: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Head of the Lubavitcher movement for forty-four years and recognized throughout the world simply as "the Rebbe," Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in June 1994, was a sage and a visionary of the highest order. Toward a Meaningful Life gives people of all backgrounds fresh perspectives on every aspect of their lives--from birth to death, youth to old a≥ marriage, love, intimacy, and family; the persistent issues of career, health, pain, and suffering; and education, faith, science, and government. We learn to bridge the divisions between accelerated technology and decelerated morality, between unprecedented worldwide unity and unparalleled personal disunity. Although the Rebbe's teachings are firmly anchored in more than three thousand years of scholarship, the urgent relevance of these old-age truths to contemporary life has never been more manifest. At the threshold of a new world where matter and spirit converge, the Rebbe proposes spiritual principles that unite people as opposed to the materialism that divides them. In doing so, he continues to lead us toward personal and universal redemption, toward a meaningful life, and toward God.

Explores the psychology of victims and oppressors. Discusses the victimization of Jews, especially Jewish women. Ch. 2 (pp. 16-34), "Jew-Hate/Woman-Hate", discusses hatred of Jews in general, and that of women, including Jewish women specifically; Jewish self-hatred is included. Ch. 3 (pp. 35-58), "Pogrom/Rape", discusses some of the main pogroms in modern history, elucidating psychological aspects of both victim and perpetrator, and how rape was often a feature of anti-Jewish pogroms. Ch. 7 (pp. 133-170), "Hate Literature/Pornography", discusses antisemitic writings throughout history, but mainly in the 19th-20th centuries, and the dehumanization of Jews, including by the Nazis, who abused Jewish and non-Jewish women sexually, both bodily and via language and images. Argues, also, that Israeli men oppress Palestinians as a reaction to the history of oppression of Jews.

Zionism is driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it has infamously clashed with the rights of the Arabs in Palestine and become so controversial that deep understanding and reasoned public debate is increasingly difficult. Prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose uses her political and analytical skills to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Rose argues that Zionism colours Israel's most profound self-image. In the most provocative part of her book, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state--so often used to justify Israel's policies--needs to be rethought.

In the 1993 Oslo accords, Israel embraced Yasser Arafat as its "peace partner." It then installed him in Gaza and the West Bank as head of a nascent Palestinian government, allowed him to bring with him some 7,000 of his loyalist gunmen, and provided the gunmen with weapons, even as Arafat continued to support terrorist attacks on Israelis and to assure Palestinians and other Arabs his goal remained Israel's destruction.Why did Israel pursue the path of Oslo? Why did it persist on that path when, in the wake of the initial Oslo agreements, the Palestinians unleashed an unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terror? Palestinian leaders also routinely called for holy war against Israel and compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaibiya, which Mohammed had signed in 628 and abandoned when his forces became strong enough to overwhelm his adversaries. Arafat and his subordinates told Arab audiences that Oslo was a step in the PLO's 1974 "plan of phases," a strategy of acquiring whatever land could be won by negotiations and using that territory as a base for pursuing Israel's annihilation. Yet Israel responded with additional concessions. What psychological, historical and communal forces spawned policies that undermined Israel's security and even threatened its survival? Dr. Levin's original and powerfully persuasive analysis relates Israeli diplomacy of the nineteen-nineties to psychological responses common among chronically besieged populations, whether minorities subjected to defamation, discrimination and assault or small nations under chronic attack by their neighbors. More particularly, he demonstrates links between the evolution of Oslo and the long history of Diaspora Jews being subjected to persistent abuse. The reaction of many enduring such abuse was to seek to improve their predicament by endorsing elements of the surrounding societies' bigoted indictments and embracing delusions of salvation through self-effacement and concessions. This case study in the psychology of a community under chronic attack takes on broader significance at a time when even traditionally safe and secure societies such as the United States are confronting the psychological challenges posed by terrorist assaults.