“I would approach Jews who had never been placed in the Soviet show window by Soviet authorities,” wrote Wiesel. “They alone, in their anonymity, could describe the conditions under which they live; they alone could tell whether the reports I had heard were true or false—and whether their children and their grandchildren, despite everything, still wish to remain Jews. From them I would learn what we must do to help . . . or if they want our help at all.” What he discovered astonished him: Jewish men and women, young and old, in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Vilna, Minsk, and Tbilisi, completely cut off from the outside world, overcoming their fear of the ever-present KGB to ask Wiesel about the lives of Jews in America, in Western Europe, and, most of all, in Israel. They have scant knowledge of Jewish history or current events; they celebrate Jewish holidays at considerable risk and with only the vaguest ideas of what these days commemorate. “Most of them come [to synagogue] not to pray,” Wiesel writes, “but out of a desire to identify with the Jewish people—about whom they know next to nothing.” Wiesel promises to bring the stories of these people to the outside world. And in the home of one dissident, he is given a gift—a Russian-language translation of Night, published illegally by the underground. “‘My God,’ I thought, ‘this man risked arrest and prison just to make my writing available to people here!’ I embraced him with tears in my eyes.”From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Her cousin has grown up in the city feeling helpless due to a leg injury. She and her cousin swap sandals -- trade places -- in order to discover new perspectives.

    On Jewish Learning collects essays, speeches, and letters that express Rosenzweig’s desire to reconnect the profound truths of Judaism with the lives of ordinary people. An assimilated Jew and scholar of German philosophy, Rosenzweig was on the point of conversion to Christianity when the experience of a Yom Kippur service in 1913 brought him back to Judaism, and he began to study with philosopher Hermann Cohen. Seeking how to be an observant Jew in the modern world, Rosenzweig refused to characterize the traditions of Jewish law as mere rituals, customs, and folkways. His aim for himself and for others was to find Judaism by living it, and to live it by knowing it more deeply.The Wisconsin edition is not for sale in the British Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland, or South Africa.