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Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. 2010
Our culture is showing the cracks of a growing fracture. Soaring divorce rates; a crippled economy that rewards the few…
and punishes the many; religious-fueled hatred; record rates of depression--the headlines paint a grim picture. We inhabit a society that desperately needs fixing. But as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach reveals in his new book, Renewal, our society can made whole again when we as individuals make the choice to live a life based on values. For too long, conversations about values have been derailed by political movements trying to score points over hot-button issues like gay marriage or abortion. Boteach, one of our wisest and most respected counselors and spiritual experts, reaches deep into our history and into our shared religious legacy to revive the key universal values of Judaism for our struggling world. He presents these age-old ideas as guideposts for the challenges of modern times. These values, whose roots are in the Bible and thousands of years of Jewish spiritual living, can be applied to anyone in the modern world--from Christians and Muslims to atheists and agnostics--who want to renew their existence and recommit themselves to the most precious things in life. Renewal shows everyone how to use the timeless values of the Hebrew Bible and Judaism to live a more fulfilling, modern life. Destiny Unlike the Greeks, who believed that life was scripted from birth, the Jews believe in destiny. In short, they reject the idea of tragic fates and instead champion the individuals' capacity to create their own destiny through individual choice. Redemption Christians and Muslims emphasize salvation, or the need for man to become spiritual--to refine his character and earn a place in heaven. But Jews believe in world redemption, the capacity for the individuals to make heaven here on earth for,the betterment of the community. Action What you do is more important than what you believe. Good deeds always supersede good dogma. Enlightenment Jews are an infinitely curious people and believe that the great bane of existence--boredom--can only be cured by knowledge. Marriage Marriage refers not just to the institution, but rather the softening of the masculine by exposure to the feminine. A culture that does not know how to respect women is bound to collapse. Struggle It is wrestling with our nature, rather than attaining perfection, that constitutes true righteousness. Everyone is somehow flawed, but righteousness is found in the struggle to do right amid a predilection to act selfishly. Sacred Time Whereas other religions sanctify space, Jewish values privilege special moments. The Sabbath day, the holiest day of the week, provides a time for connecting with family and friends.Holocaust: An American Understanding
By Deborah E. Lipstadt. 2016
Immediately after World War II, there was little discussion of the Holocaust, but today the word has grown into a…
potent political and moral symbol, recognized by all. In Holocaust: An American Understanding, renowned historian Deborah E. Lipstadt explores this striking evolution in Holocaust consciousness, revealing how a broad array of Americans--from students in middle schools to presidents of the United States--tried to make sense of this inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history. Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that touches on events as varied as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the women's movement, as well as controversies over Bitburg, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of Kosovo. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and various strains of Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt traces how the Holocaust became integral to the fabric of American life. Even popular culture, including such films as Dr. Strangelove and such books as John Hershey's The Wall, was influenced by and in turn influenced thinking about the Holocaust. Equally important, the book shows how Americans used the Holocaust to make sense of what was happening in the United States. Many Americans saw the civil rights movement in light of Nazi oppression, for example, while others feared that American soldiers in Vietnam were destroying a people identified by the government as the enemy. Lipstadt demonstrates that the Holocaust became not just a tragedy to be understood but also a tool for interpreting America and its place in the world. Ultimately Holocaust: An American Understanding tells us as much about America in the years since the end of World War II as it does about the Holocaust itself.Jew
By Cynthia M. Baker. 2017
Jew. The word possesses an uncanny power to provoke and unsettle. For millennia, Jew has signified the consummate Other, a…
persistent fly in the ointment of Western civilization’s grand narratives and cultural projects. Only very recently, however, has Jew been reclaimed as a term of self-identification and pride. With these insights as a point of departure, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but indeed at the core of Western civilization. Examining scholarly debates about the origins and early meanings of Jew, Cynthia M. Baker interrogates categories like “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion” that inevitably feature in attempts to define the word. Tracing the term’s evolution, she also illuminates its many contradictions, revealing how Jew has served as a marker of materialism and intellectualism, socialism and capitalism, worldly cosmopolitanism and clannish parochialism, chosen status, and accursed stigma. Baker proceeds to explore the complex challenges that attend the modern appropriation of Jew as a term of self-identification, with forays into Yiddish language and culture, as well as meditations on Jew-as-identity by contemporary public intellectuals. Finally, by tracing the phrase new Jews through a range of contexts—including the early Zionist movement, current debates about Muslim immigration to Europe, and recent sociological studies in the United States—the book provides a glimpse of what the word Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, precarious nationalisms, and proliferating identities.The Wisdom of the Talmud
By Madison C. Peters. 1912
"The house that does not open to the poor shall open to the physician." "To have no faithful friends is…
worse than death." "Too many captains sink the ship." "Good deeds are better than creeds." "The sensible man drinks only when he is thirsty." "The noblest of all charities is in enabling the poor to earn a livelihood." "He who wishes to be forgiven must forgive." These and over 500 other proverbs and adages come together in this delightful collection, arranged under 22 headings such as adversity, ambition, ancestry, anger, business, charity, death, friendship, home life, honesty, immortality, labor, love, money, and truth.Yearnings
By Linda Loewenthal, Irwin Kula. 2006
"Irwin Kula shows us how to to live our humanness -- the pleasures and the challenges, the messiness and the…
triumphs -- with a profound acceptance of our desires and foibles and a joy that can only come from understanding." --Deepak Chopra "Yearning. After twenty-three years as a rabbi, I can think of no more defining human experience."Life can be messy and imperfect. We're all looking for answers. And yet, as renowned rabbi Irwin Kula points out, the yearning for answers is no different now than it was in the times that gave rise to Moses, Buddha, and Jesus. Far from being a burden, however, these yearnings can themselves become a path to blessing, prompting questions and insights, resulting in new ways of being and believing. In this, his first book, Rabbi Kula takes us on an excursion into the depths of our desires, applying ancient Jewish tradition to seven of our most wonderful yearnings. Merging ancient wisdom with contemporary insights, Rabbi Kula shows how traditional practices can inform and enrich our own search for meaning. More importantly, he invites us to embrace the messiness and complexities of the human experience in order to fully embrace the endless and glorious project of life.Yearnings
By Linda Loewenthal, Irwin Kula. 2006
"Irwin Kula shows us how to to live our humanness -- the pleasures and the challenges, the messiness and the…
triumphs -- with a profound acceptance of our desires and foibles and a joy that can only come from understanding." --Deepak Chopra "Yearning. After twenty-three years as a rabbi, I can think of no more defining human experience."Life can be messy and imperfect. We're all looking for answers. And yet, as renowned rabbi Irwin Kula points out, the yearning for answers is no different now than it was in the times that gave rise to Moses, Buddha, and Jesus. Far from being a burden, however, these yearnings can themselves become a path to blessing, prompting questions and insights, resulting in new ways of being and believing. In this, his first book, Rabbi Kula takes us on an excursion into the depths of our desires, applying ancient Jewish tradition to seven of our most wonderful yearnings. Merging ancient wisdom with contemporary insights, Rabbi Kula shows how traditional practices can inform and enrich our own search for meaning. More importantly, he invites us to embrace the messiness and complexities of the human experience in order to fully embrace the endless and glorious project of life.What Was the Holocaust? (What Was?)
By Gail Herman, Jerry Hoare, Who Hq. 2017
A thoughtful and age-appropriate introduction to an unimaginable event—the Holocaust.The Holocaust was a genocide on a scale never before seen,…
with as many as twelve million people killed in Nazi death camps—six million of them Jews. Gail Herman traces the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, whose rabid anti-Semitism led first to humiliating anti-Jewish laws, then to ghettos all over Eastern Europe, and ultimately to the Final Solution. She presents just enough information for an elementary-school audience in a readable, well-researched book that covers one of the most horrible times in history.This entry in the New York Times best-selling series contains eighty carefully chosen illustrations and sixteen pages of black and white photographs suitable for young readers.From the Trade Paperback edition.Have a Little Faith: A True Story
By Mitch Albom. 2009
What if our beliefs were not what divided us, but what pulled us together In Have a Little Faith, Mitch…
Albom offers a beautifully written story of a remarkable eight-year journey between two worlds--two men, two faiths, two communities--that will inspire readers everywhere. Albom's first nonfiction book since Tuesdays with Morrie, Have a Little Faith begins with an unusual request: an eighty-two-year-old rabbi from Albom's old hometown asks him to deliver his eulogy. Feeling unworthy, Albom insists on understanding the man better, which throws him back into a world of faith he'd left years ago. Meanwhile, closer to his current home, Albom becomes involved with a Detroit pastor--a reformed drug dealer and convict--who preaches to the poor and homeless in a decaying church with a hole in its roof. Moving between their worlds, Christian and Jewish, African-American and white, impoverished and well-to-do, Albom observes how these very different men employ faith similarly in fighting for survival: the older, suburban rabbi embracing it as death approaches; the younger, inner-city pastor relying on it to keep himself and his church afloat. As America struggles with hard times and people turn more to their beliefs, Albom and the two men of God explore issues that perplex modern man: how to endure when difficult things happen; what heaven is; intermarriage; forgiveness; doubting God; and the importance of faith in trying times. Although the texts, prayers, and histories are different, Albom begins to recognize a striking unity between the two worlds--and indeed, between beliefs everywhere. In the end, as the rabbi nears death and a harsh winter threatens the pastor's wobbly church, Albom sadly fulfills the rabbi's last request and writes the eulogy. And he finally understands what both men had been teaching all along: the profound comfort of believing in something bigger than yourself. Have a Little Faith is a book about a life's purpose; about losing belief and finding it again; about the divine spark inside us all. It is one man's journey, but it is everyone's story. Ten percent of the profits from this book will go to charity, including The Hole In The Roof Foundation, which helps refurbish places of worship that aid the homeless.It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi's Witness of the Shoah and Survival
By Leon Thorne. 2019
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once described Dr. Leon Thorne’s memoir as a work of “bitter truth” that he compared…
favorably to the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Out of print for over forty years, this lost classic of Holocaust literature now reappears in a revised, annotated edition, including both Thorne’s original 1961 memoir Out of the Ashes: The Story of a Survivor and his previously unpublished accounts of his arduous postwar experiences in Germany and Poland. Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (Key Words in Jewish Studies #35)
By Daniel Boyarin. 2019
Judaism makes the bold argument that the very concept of a religion of ‘Judaism’ is an invention of the Christian…
church. The intellectual journey of world-renowned Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin, this book will change the study of “Judaism”—an essential key word in Jewish Studies—as we understand it today. Boyarin argues that although the world treats the word “Judaism” as appropriate for naming an alleged religion of the Jews, it is in fact a Christian theological concept only adopted by Jews with the coming of modernity and the adoption of Christian languages.Hiding Edith: A true story
By Kathy Kacer. 2006
Hiding Edith tells the true story of Edith Schwalb, a young Jewish Girl sent to live in a safe house…
after the Nazi invasion of France. Edith's story is remarkable not only for her own bravery, but for the bravery of those that helped her: an entire village, including its mayor and citizenry, heroically conspired to conceal the presence of hundreds of Jewish children who lived in the safe house.This young readers’ edition tells the remarkable story, largely forgotten until now, of the young Jewish women who became resistance…
fighters against the Nazis during World War II. It has already been optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture.As their communities were being destroyed, groups of Jewish women and teenage girls across Poland began transforming Jewish youth groups into resistance factions. These “ghetto girls” helped build systems of underground bunkers, paid off the Gestapo, and bombed German train lines.At the center of the book is eighteen-year-old Renia Kukielka, who traveled across her war-torn country as a weapons smuggler and messenger. Other women who joined the cause served as armed fighters, spies, and saboteurs, all risking their lives for their missions. Never before chronicled in full, this is the incredible account of the strong Jewish women who fought back against the seemingly unstoppable Nazi regime. It follows the women through arrests, internment, and for a lucky few, into the late 20th century and beyond.It also includes a section of black-and-white photos, so that readers can see firsthand the extraordinary women who bravely fought for their freedom in the face of overwhelming odds.Anne Frank
By Kem Knapp Sawyer. 2004
Tells the incredible story of this courageous young writer. In this groundbreaking new series, DK brings together fresh voices and…
DK design values to give readers the most information-packed, visually exciting biographies on the market today. Full-color photographs of people, places, and artifacts, definitions of key words, and sidebars on related subjects add dimension and relevance to stories of famous lives that students will love to read.Kindertransport
By Olga Levy Drucker. 1992
The author describes the circumstances in Germany after Hitler came to power that led to the evacuation of many Jewish…
children to England and her experiences as a young girl in England during World War II.Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life
By Linda Loewenthal, Irwin Kula. 2006
"Irwin Kula shows us how to to live our humanness -- the pleasures and the challenges, the messiness and the…
triumphs -- with a profound acceptance of our desires and foibles and a joy that can only come from understanding." --Deepak Chopra "Yearning. After twenty-three years as a rabbi, I can think of no more defining human experience."Life can be messy and imperfect. We're all looking for answers. And yet, as renowned rabbi Irwin Kula points out, the yearning for answers is no different now than it was in the times that gave rise to Moses, Buddha, and Jesus. Far from being a burden, however, these yearnings can themselves become a path to blessing, prompting questions and insights, resulting in new ways of being and believing. In this, his first book, Rabbi Kula takes us on an excursion into the depths of our desires, applying ancient Jewish tradition to seven of our most wonderful yearnings. Merging ancient wisdom with contemporary insights, Rabbi Kula shows how traditional practices can inform and enrich our own search for meaning. More importantly, he invites us to embrace the messiness and complexities of the human experience in order to fully embrace the endless and glorious project of life.We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust
By Jacob Boas. 1995
David Rubinowicz, Yitzhak Rudashevski, Moshe Flinker, Eva Heyman, and Anne Frank were all teenagers during World War II. They lived…
in different parts of Europe. They had different lives. But they all had something in common: They were Jewish, and therefore, under Hitler's twisted rule, they were five of the six million men, women, and children sentenced to death.The Wonder of Becoming You: How a Jewish Girl Grows Up
By Miriam Grossman. 1988
The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye
By Barry Trachtenberg. 2022
In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to…
transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966. The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish untangles the complicated saga of the Algemeyne entsiklopedye and its editors. The editors continued to publish volumes and revise the encyclopedia’s mission while their primary audience, Eastern European Jews, faced persecution and genocide under Nazi rule, and the challenge of reestablishing themselves in the first decades after World War II. Historian Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, over the course of the middle decades of the twentieth century, the project sparked tremendous controversy in Jewish cultural and political circles, which debated what the purpose of a Yiddish encyclopedia should be, as well as what knowledge and perspectives it should contain. Nevertheless, this is not only a story about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.Somewhere There Is Still a Sun: A Memoir of the Holocaust
By Todd Hasak-Lowy, Michael Gruenbaum. 2002
Resilience shines throughout a boy's firsthand, present-tense account of life in the Terezin concentration camp during the Holocaust, an ideal…
companion to the bestselling Boy on the Wooden Box.Michael "Misha" Gruenbaum enjoyed a carefree childhood playing games and taking walks through Prague with his beloved father. All of that changed forever when the Nazis invaded Prague. The Gruenbaum family was forced to move into the Jewish Ghetto in Prague. Then, after a devastating loss, Michael, his mother and sister were deported to the Terezin concentration camp. At Terezin, Misha roomed with forty other boys who became like brothers to him. Life in Terezin was a bizarre, surreal balance--some days were filled with friendship and soccer matches, while others brought mortal terror as the boys waited to hear the names on each new list of who was being sent "to the East." Those trains were going to Auschwitz. When the day came that his family's name appeared on a transport list, their survival called for a miracle--one that tied Michael's fate to a carefully sewn teddy bear, and to his mother's unshakeable determination to keep her children safe. Collaborating with acclaimed author Todd Hasak-Lowy, Michael Gruenbaum shares his inspiring story of hope in an unforgettable memoir that recreates his experiences with stunning immediacy. Michael's story, and the many original documents and photos included alongside it, offer an essential contribution to Holocaust literature.Anne Frank Remembered
By Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold. 2009
She found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope. It seems as if we are…
never far from Miep's thoughts....Yours, Anne For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity. Each page rings with courage and heartbreaking beauty.