Part history, part memoir, The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers: A Family Memoir recounts a narrative of lives lived in dramatically changing times. In the background loom author Deborah Hellers distant forebears: a maternal great-great-grandmother, the first Jewish woman in her nineteenth-century German village to refuse to shave her head and wear a wig (sheitel) after marriage, who earned her passage to America by driving geese to market; and a s...

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies. To argue that the age “resisted secularism” is by no means to argue that resi...

_______________'Part memoir, part rant and part joke ... as elusive as it is beguiling' - Sunday Times'If Vonnegut isn't the enduring Good Humor man, who is?' - John Irving, The Times'One of the greatest writers of the past 50 years' - Daily Telegraph_______________Comic riffs and diatribes on the America of G.W. Bush from the author...

Three New York Times bestsellers chronicle the rise of America's most influential Jewish families as they transition from poor immigrants to household names.In his acclaimed trilogy, author Stephen Birmingham paints an engrossing portrait of Jewish American life from the colonial era through the twentieth century with fascinating narrative and meticulous research.The collection's best-known book, "Our Crowd" follows nineteenth-century Germa...

A never-before-published collection of letters - an intimate self-portrait as well as the portrait of a century. Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth-century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest letters are to Bellow's fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ral...

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.Wiss...

From the host of NPR affiliate’s Forum with Michael Krasny, a compendium of Jewish jokes that packs the punches with hilarious riff after riff and also offers a window into Jewish culture.Michael Krasny has been telling Jewish jokes since his bar mitzvah, and it’s been said that he knows more of them than anyone on the planet. He certainly states his case in this wise, enlightening, and hilarious book that not only collects the best of Jewish humor passed down from generat...

More than 1000 outrageously irreverent quotations, anecdotes, and interviews on a vast array of subjects, from an illustrious list of world-class curmudgeons

"An interesting and quirky and sometimes irreverent look at how the Yiddish language has survived all over the world." — Jerusalem PostYiddish—an oft-considered "gutter" language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an incredible journey, especially considering how often Jews have tried to kill it themselves. Underlying Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researche...

Alan King -- the beloved comic, actor, producer, author, philanthropist, and storyteller extraordinaire -- has compiled a wonderfully readable book about growing up Jewish, with totally original contributions by famous people. Combining warmhearted humor with a prideful nostalgia, these essays discuss life in the Jewish family and neighborhood, being a Jew in a non-Jewish world, Jewish holidays, and discovering the essence of being Jewish.

The New York Times–bestselling history of the Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland who altered the American landscape from New York to Hollywood.The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and per...

Originally a radical socialist, the current driving force behind the rise of the Hollywood right recounts how he moved from one set of political convictions to another over the course of thirty years, and challenges readers to consider how they came by their own convictions.