Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction


Jack DannAvram Davidson - 1973
    A showpiece of Jewish wit, culture, and lore, blending humor and sadness, cynicism and faith.ContentsStories:On Venus, have we got a rabbi by William TennThe golem by Avram DavidsonUnto the fourth generation by Isaac AsimovLook, you think you've got troubles by Carol CarrGoslin Day by Avram DavidsonThe dybbuk of mazel tov IV by Robert SilverbergTrouble with water by Horace L. GoldGather blue roses by Pamela SargentThe jewbird by Bernard MalamudParadise last by Geo. Alec EffingerStreet of dreams, feet of clay by Robert SheckleyJachid and Jechidah by Isaac Bashevis SingerI'm looking for Kadak by Harlan EllisonEssays:Why Me? by Isaac AsimovEllison's Grammatical Guide and Glossary for Goyim by Harlan Ellison. Interior artwork by Tim Kirk.

Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege


Amira Hass - 1999
    From her friends, Hass learns the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and stealing through night streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early euphoria over the peace process and its subsequent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Palestinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized but eloquent, spiritually resilient, bleakly funny, and morally courageous.Full of testimonies and stories, facts and impressions, Drinking the Sea at Gaza makes an urgent claim on our humanity. Beautiful, haunting, and profound, it will stand with the great works of wartime reportage.

Jews, God, and History


Max I. Dimont - 1962
    Dimont shows how the saga of the Jews is interwoven with the story of virtually every nation on earth. This is a tale of a people escaping annihilation, fighting, falling back, advancing - a lively and fascinating look at how the Jews have contributed to humankind's spiritual and intellectual heritage in remarkable ways, and across a remarkable span of history.

Wherever You Go


Joan Leegant - 2010
    Yona Stern longs to make amends with her estranged sister who lives in a radical Jewish settlement. Mark Greenglass, a Talmud teacher, has inexplicably lost his once fierce devotion to Orthodox Judaism and now wonders if he’s done with God. Enter Aaron Blinder, an unstable college dropout whose famous father endlessly—some say obsessively—mines the Holocaust for his best-selling, melodramatic novels. In a sweeping, beautifully written story of the lengths to which we will go in search of spiritual fulfillment, Joan Leegant weaves together the stories of three lives in the grip of a volatile, demanding faith, and ultimately bound together by a tragic act of violence. Haunting and wise, Wherever You Go is a gripping and prescient debut novel.

Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict


John B. Judis - 2014
    In Genesis, John B. Judis argues that, while Israelis and Palestinians must shoulder much of the blame, the United States has been the principal power outside the region since the end of World War II and as such must account for its repeated failed diplomacy efforts to resolve this enduring strife.The fatal flaw in American policy, Judis shows, can be traced back to the Truman years. What happened between 1945 and 1949 sealed the fate of the Middle East for the remainder of the century. As a result, understanding that period holds the key to explaining almost everything that follows—right down to George W. Bush's unsuccessful and ill-conceived effort to win peace through holding elections among the Palestinians, and Barack Obama's failed attempt to bring both parties to the negotiating table. A provocative narrative history animated by a strong analytical and moral perspective, and peopled by colorful and outsized personalities and politics, Genesis offers a fresh look at these critical postwar years, arguing that if we can understand how this stalemate originated, we will be better positioned to help end it.

Only Yesterday


S.Y. Agnon - 1945
    Agnon's famous masterpiece, his novel Only Yesterday, here appears in English translation for the first time. Published in 1945, the book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. Only Yesterday quickly became recognized as a monumental work of world literature, but not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence?Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him.Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters


Louis Begley - 2009
    The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards—committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another—against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army’s top brass in order to secure Dreyfus’s conviction.Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honor.

The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War


Steven Pressfield - 2014
    The Soviet-equipped Egyptian Army has amassed a thousand tanks on the nation’s southern border. Syrian heavy guns are shelling her from the north. To the east, Jordan and Iraq are moving mechanized brigades and fighter squadrons into position to attack. Egypt’s President Nasser has declared that the Arab force’s objective is the destruction of Israel.” The rest of the world turns a blind eye to the new nation’s desperate peril.June 10, 1967. The Arab armies have been routed, ground divisions wiped out, air forces totally destroyed. Israel’s citizen-soldiers have seized the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The land under Israeli control has tripled. Her charismatic defense minister, Moshe Dayan, has entered the Lion’s Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem to stand with the paratroopers who have liberated Judaism’s holiest site—the Western Wall, part of the ruins of Solomon’s temple, which has not been in Jewish hands for nineteen hundred years.It is one of the most unlikely and astonishing military victories in history.Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with veterans of the war—fighter and helicopter pilots, tank commanders and Recon soldiers, paratroopers, as well as women soldiers, wives, and others—bestselling author Steven Pressfield tells the story of the Six Day War as you’ve never experienced it before: in the voices of the young men and women who battled not only for their lives but for the survival of a Jewish state, and for the dreams of their ancestors.By turns inspiring, thrilling, and heartbreaking, The Lion’s Gate is both a true tale of military courage under fire and a journey into the heart of what it means to fight for one’s people.

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less


Sarah Glidden - 2010
    Her experience clashes with her preconceived notions again and again, particularly when she tries to take a non-chaperoned excursion into the West Bank. As she struggles to "understand Israel," Sarah is forced to question first her beliefs, then ultimately her own identity.Sarah Glidden won the prestigious Ignatz Award for "Most Promising New Talent" as well as the Masie Kukoc Award for Comics Inspiration. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies.

Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations


Martin Goodman - 2007
    Sixty years later, after further violent rebellions and the city’s final destruction, Hadrian built the new city of Aelia Capitolina where Jerusalem had once stood. Jews were barred from entering its territory. They were taxed simply for being Jewish. They were forbidden to worship their god. They were wholly reviled.What brought about this conflict between the Romans and the subjects they had previously treated with tolerance? Martin Goodman—equally renowned in Jewish and in Roman studies—examines this conflict, its causes, and its consequences with unprecedented authority and thoroughness. He delineates the incompatibility between the cultural, political, and religious beliefs and practices of the two peoples. He explains how Rome’s interests were served by a policy of brutality against the Jews. He makes clear how the original Christians first distanced themselves from their origins, and then became increasingly hostile toward Jews as Christian influence spread within the empire. The book thus also offers an exceptional account of the origins of anti-Semitism, the history of which reverberates still.An indispensable book.

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted


Daniel Sokatch - 2021
    As the head of the New Israel Fund, which is dedicated to equality and democracy for all Israelis, not just Jews, Sokatch is supremely well-versed on the Israeli conflict.Can We Talk About Israel? is the story of that conflict, and of why so many people feel so strongly about it without actually understanding it very well at all. It is an attempt to grapple with a century-long struggle between two peoples that both perceive themselves as (and indeed are) victims. And it's an attempt to explain why Israel (and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) inspires such extreme feelings-why it seems like Israel is the answer to "what is wrong with the world" for half the people in it, and "what is right with the world" for the other half.Complete with engaging illustrations by Christopher Noxon, Can We Talk About Israel? is an easy-to-read yet penetrating and original look at the history and basic contours of one of the most complicated conflicts in the world.

Hiding in the Open: A Holocaust Memoir


Sabina S. Zimering - 2001
    They missed the liquidation of their ghetto by mere hours, hiding in a shed all night listening to the screams of their fellow Jews. Then went into Germany and took up work in a hotel housing Gestapo officers. Many close escapes and daring moments make this book chilling.

A King to Rule


Dale Ellis - 2018
    They live in a world of vendettas, assassinations and endless war. Welcome to the Middle East during the Iron Age. The Philistines murdered Nathan's Father and God did nothing. His tribe was nearly exterminated and God did nothing. Invaders plunder his land and still God does nothing. So, when a kingdom is declared in Israel, a vengeful Nathan pledges himself to King Saul, the father of his boyhood friend Jonathan. Nathan is prepared to act…even if God is not. Achish is a prince, the son of one of the five Kings of Philistia who rule the Egyptian province of Canaan in Pharaoh’s name. Yet, Egypt grows weak and the time draws near for Philistia to forge an empire of its own. But Achish knows his allies will soon be his greatest rivals. So he casts his eyes on Israel with its rich lands, burgeoning population, and ineffectual leaders. If he can harness Israel’s resources, Achish would dominate first Philistia, and later all of Canaan. Achish believes a man makes his own miracles. However, it is dangerous to mistake God’s patience for apathy. God laughs at the schemes of men. He enjoys bending their plans to fit His own. "A King to Rule" is the first book in the "Empire of Israel" series. This exciting Biblical saga continues in the second book in the series, "A King to Fight".

The Righteous Spy


Merle Nygate - 2018
    BUT WHO IS THE REAL ENEMY? Eli Amiram is Mossad’s star spy runner and the man responsible for bringing unparalleled intelligence to the Israeli agency. Now, he’s leading an audacious operation in the UK that feeds his ambition but threatens his conscience.The British and the Americans have intel Mossad desperately need. To force MI6 and the CIA into sharing their priceless information, Eli and his maverick colleague Rafi undertake a risky mission to trick their allies: faking a terrorist plot on British soil.But in the world of espionage, the game is treacherous, opaque and deadly... A twisting international spy novel, The Righteous Spy is an intriguing tale of espionage that portrays a clandestine world in which moral transgressions serve higher causes. A must-read for fans of Homeland, Fauda and NCIS, it will also appeal to readers of Charles Cumming and John le Carré. 'Intriguing and atmospheric. Merle Nygate is a writer to watch' - Charles Cumming'A tense, compelling thriller, The Righteous Spy combines the high drama of a spy story with a clear-eyed telling of the grubby compromises and betrayals that are the reality of agents’ lives. With vividly drawn characterisation and a gripping plot, I couldn’t put it down' - Harriet Tyce, author of Blood Orange'Relentless - goes where le Carré fears to tread. Merle Nygate’s characters, their tradecraft and their dramas leap off the page in a spy tale that is as gripping as it is authentic' - Martin Fletcher, author of Promised Land'Gripping from the start, The Righteous Spy is a must read for fans of fast paced and intelligent thrillers' - Leigh Russell, author of the million-copy selling DI Geraldine Steel series

Modern Jewish Cooking: Recipes Customs for Today's Kitchen (Jewish Cookbook, Jewish Gifts, Over 100 Most Jewish Food Recipes)


Leah Koenig - 2015
    Author Leah Koenig shares 175 recipes showcasing handmade, seasonal, vegetable-forward dishes. Classics of Jewish culinary culture—such as latkes, matzoh balls, challah, and hamantaschen—are updated with smart techniques and vibrant spices. Approachable recipes for everything from soups to sweets go beyond the traditional, incorporating regional influences from North Africa to Central Europe. Featuring holiday menus and rich photography, this collection is at once a guide to establishing traditions and a celebration of the way we eat now.