As religiously grounded moral arguments have become ever more influential factors in the national debate-particularly reinforced by recent presidential elections and the creation of the faith-based initiative office in the White House-journalists' ignorance about theological convictions has often worked to distort the public discourse on important policy issues. Pope John Paul II's pronouncements on stem-cell research, the constitutional controversies regarding faith-based initiatives, the...

Jane Eisner traces the professional accomplishments and personal challenges of pop icon Carole King, exploring her unique contribution to American music“An eagle-eyed telling of how King (born Carol Joan Klein) emerged from the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn to achieve decades of songwriting success.†?—Karen Iris Tucker, Washington PostCarole King’s extraordinary career has defined American popular music for more...

Who is a Jew in 21st century America? Is membership in “the tribe” defined by shared religious beliefs? Common ethnic backgrounds? Familiar holiday practices? Similar tastes in culture and cuisine? And what do the widely varying answers to those questions mean for the future of the American Jewish community? In 2013, at the suggestion of Jewish Daily Forward editor Jane Eisner, the Pew Research Center completed the most comprehensive and credible survey eve...

Roaming from America to Europe to Australia, Lights Out is a trenchant examination of the tensions between a resurgent Islam and a fainthearted west - and of the implications for liberty in the years ahead. In 2007, the Canadian Islamic Congress brought three suits against Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling newsweekly, for running an excerpt from Steyn's bestselling book America Alone, plus other flagrantly Islamophobic columns by the author. A y...

What can we believe about, and how can we believe in, Jesus in the twenty first century, in light of the Holocaust and other atrocities, and the drift from religion that followed? The key lies in Jesus’ Jewishness.What New York Times bestselling author James Carroll has discovered through decades of writing and lecturing, is that he is far from alone in clinging to a received memory of Jesus that separates him from his crucial identity as a Jew, and therefore as a human. Yet if Jes...

THE BOOK OF GENESIS is the key to the Bible. In the New Testament it is quoted twenty-seven times literally and thirty-eight times substantially. It tells in a very few words how God first imaged man and the universe and then turned the development over to Jehovah, who has been in a process of manifestation for ages and aeons. The "Five Books of Moses," of which Genesis is the first, have always been credited to Moses, but that he was the author seems doubtful in the face of the many stori...

They have no graves, no markers of ever having existed.The millions of people murdered by the Nazis live on only in the memories of the survivors. In his seventy-ninth year, Andor Schwartz was driven to record the lives of his family and friends who perished.Writing with the instincts of a born storyteller, Andor takes us back to the world of his childhood in rural Hungary in the years leading up to World War II. His love of nature and country life, his fri...

Accounts of everyday Spanish life and very recent history with a touch of humour, seen through the eyes of a British writer after 20 years living in the country. Feel the culture shock as a Northern European comes to grips with Spanish queues, driving, red tape, Spanish fiestas and siestas, regional nationalisms and much more. Views on modern Spain in the grip of economic recession, shared by Spaniards and expats alike. For expats, tourists and travellers who are enamoured, fas...

Emmanuel Levinas is now widely recognised alongside Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as one of the most important Continental philosophers of the twentieth century. His abiding concern was the primacy of the ethical relation to the other person and his central thesis was that ethics is first philosophy. His work has also had a profound impact on a number of fields outside philosophy such as theology, Jewish studies, literature and cultural theory, psychotherapy, sociology, political the...

Come learn about what it’s like to see a synagogue in ruin, meet the warm people of Hungary and to see a makeshift Holocaust memorial, put up in front of a statue referred to as “a monument to the government’s arrogance”.   Guide book author Rachelle Kaufman talks about Hungary from a Jewish perspective, learning about the past and present.   Also includes photography!  

This debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculin...

The interaction of Judaism and economics encompasses many different dimensions. Much of this interaction can be explored through the way in which Jewish law accommodates and even enhances commercial practice today and in past societies. From this context, The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics explores how Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people relate to the economic sphere of life in modern society as well as in the past. Bringing together an astonishingly strong group ...