The Jews: Story of a People


Howard Fast - 1970
    With drama no fiction can match, master storyteller Howard Fast traces the evolution of a tradition powerful enough to give lasting identity to a scattered, wandering people. Bringing to life the extraordinary men and women who have shaped history-Moses, Hillel, Jesus (and many more)-this compelling book explores the customs and philosophies that have endured persecution, emigration, and the Holocaust. Fast also probes the towering achievements of this unique and fascinating people, illustrating their important role in the origins of Western culture, Christianity and modern Europe. The Jews is comprehensive, enlightening and utterly readable.

Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World


Edward W. Said - 1981
    In this classic work, now updated, the author of Culture and Imperialism reveals the hidden agendas and distortions of fact that underlie even the most "objective" coverage of the Islamic world.

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice


Bill BrowderBill Browder - 2014
    It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia. In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear. Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.

A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel


Ronald Radosh - 2009
    . .is told. . . with an elegance informed by thorough research." —Wall Street Journal"Even knowing how the story ends, A Safe Haven had me sitting on the edge of my seat.” —Cokie RobertsA dramatic, detailed account of the events leading up to the creation of a Jewish homeland and the true story behind President Harry S. Truman’s controversial decision to recognize of the State of Israel in 1948, drawn from Truman’s long-lost diary entries and other previously unused archival materials.

Settings of Silver: An Introduction to Judaism


Stephen M. Wylen - 1989
    Now, its author, Stephen Wylen, performs a genuine service by updating his critically acclaimed text for the 21st century. Settings of Silver, Second Edition, reflects the changes in the political structure of Eastern Europe and other recent events, while retaining its accessibility, easy-to-understand language, and compactness. In four sections, the author covers the history of Judaism. Section One includes basic beliefs, what it means to be a Jew, the role of Torah, and the Jewish view of God. Section Two covers faith, practices and customs, including holydays, marriage and family law and ritual, dietary laws, and beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife. Section Three is a history of Judaism, from its foundations to the early part of the 20th century, with a look to mysticism, literature, philosophy and daily life in the Jewish community. In Section Four the author continues the history of Judaism up to the present day, including the Holocaust, the State of Israel, the effects of modernism on Judaism, and the future of Judaism. Engaging, timely, and appropriate for persons of all religious backgrounds, this enduring work belongs in the library of anyone (Jews included) who wants to understand Judaism and the Jewish people.

Day After Night


Anita Diamant - 2009
    There about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant with infinite compassion and understanding tells the stories of the women gathered in this place. Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear these young women along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now


Ayaan Hirsi Ali - 2015
    With bracing candor, the brilliant, charismatic, and uncompromising author of the bestselling Infidel and Nomad argues that it is foolish to insist, as our leaders habitually do, that the violent acts of Islamic extremists can be divorced from the religious doctrine that inspires them. Instead we must confront the fact that they are driven by a political ideology embedded in Islam itself.Today, Hirsi Ali argues, the world's 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims, and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam, and as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings—not least the duty to wage holy war—inspire violence not just in the Muslim world but in the West as well.For centuries it has seemed that Islam is immune to historical change. But Hirsi Ali is surprisingly optimistic. She has come to believe that a Muslim "Reformation"—a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity—is at hand, and may even already have begun.Partly in response to the barbaric atrocities of Islamic State and Boko Haram, Muslims around the world have at last begun to speak out for religious reform. Meanwhile, events in the West, such as the shocking Charlie Hebdo massacre, have forced Western liberals to recognize that political Islam poses a mortal threat to free speech. Yet neither Muslim reformers nor Western liberals have so far been able to articulate a coherent program for a Muslim Reformation.This is where Heretic comes in. Boldly challenging centuries of theological orthodoxy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali proposes five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims must make if they are to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first. She also calls upon the Western world to end its appeasement of radical Islamists—and to drop the bogus argument that those who stand up to them are guilty of "Islamophobia." It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, she argues, not the opponents of free speech.Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies, and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures, Heretic is not so much a call to arms as a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global tolerance. As jihadists kill thousands, from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world's number one problem.

The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda


Victor Ostrovsky - 1994
    A former Israeli agent relates the story of his career as a double agent and his disruption of shocking Mossad assassination plans.

The Septembers of Shiraz


Dalia Sofer - 2007
    Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is now acting as an informer. And as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realizes that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger. A page-turning literary debut, The Septembers of Shiraz simmers with questions of identity, alienation, and love, not simply for a spouse or a child, but for all the intangible sights and smells of the place we call home.

Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry


Samuel G. Freedman - 2000
    secularist, denomination vs. denomination, liberal vs. conservative -- in the last forty years, American Jews have increasingly found themselves torn apart by their diversity. In this chronicle of the evolution of American Jewry, Samuel G. Freedman illuminates the forces that have undermined the traditional peaceful coexistence among the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist branches, and secular and unaffiliated Jews. Examining recent headline-making stories as well as less publicized controversies, Freedman discusses the vitriolic battles that have arisen over intermarriage, standards of conversion, the role of women in religious ritual, the Middle East peace process, and the secular influence on religious life. As he weighs the arguments of both extremes, Freedman comes to the controversial conclusion that the Jewish-American community is headed for a Reformation, a permanent fracture of one faith into many.

Ben-Gurion: A Political Life


Shimon Peres - 2011
    Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the “Old Man,” as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions—a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival. Ben-Gurion supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, though it meant surrendering a two-thousand-year-old dream of Jewish settlement in the entire land of Israel. He granted the Orthodox their first exemptions from military service despite his own deep secular commitments, and he reached out to Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust, knowing that Israel would need as many strong alliances as possible within the European community. A protégé of Ben-Gurion and himself a legendary figure on the international political stage, Shimon Peres brings to his account of Ben-Gurion’s life and towering achievements the profound insight of a statesman who shares Ben-Gurion’s dream of a modern, democratic Jewish nation-state that lives in peace and security alongside its Arab neighbors. In Ben-Gurion, Peres sees a neglected model of leadership that Israel and the world desperately need in the twenty-first century.

Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks: The Untold Story


Sebastian Rotella - 2011
    The trail of two key figures, an accused Pakistani mastermind and his American operative, traces the rise of a complex, international threat.

Occupation Diaries


Raja Shehadeh - 2012
    And so it is under occupation in Palestine. What most of us take for granted has to be carefully thought about and planned for: When will the post be allowed to get through? Will there be enough water for the bath tonight? How shall I get rid of the rubbish collecting outside? How much time should I allow for the journey to visit my cousin, going through checkpoints? And big questions too: Is working with left-wing Israelis collaborating or not? What effect will the Arab Spring have on the future of Palestine? What can anyone do to bring about change? Are any of life’s pleasures untouched by politics?

Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi


Neal Bascomb - 2009
    Following his escape from two American POW camps, his retreat into the mountains and out of Europe, and his path to an anonymous life in Buenos Aires, his pursuers are a bulldog West German prosecutor, a blind Argentinean Jew and his beautiful daughter, and a budding, ragtag spy agency called the Mossad, whose operatives have their own scores to settle (and whose rare surveillance photographs are published here for the first time). The capture of Eichmann and the efforts by Israeli agents to secret him out of Argentina to stand trial is the stunning conclusion to this thrilling historical account, told with the kind of pulse-pounding detail that rivals anything you'd find in great spy fiction.

A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump


Norman Eisen - 2020
    In his behind-the-scenes account of the attempts to bring the president to justice—from filing the very first legal actions against him, through the Mueller report, to the turbulent impeachment and trial, to the president’s ongoing wrongdoing today—Norman Eisen, at the forefront of the battle since the day of Trump’s inauguration, pulls back the curtain on the process. He reveals ten proposed articles of impeachment, not just the two that were publicly tried, all of which he had a hand in drafting. He then guides us through Trump’s lifelong instincts that have dictated his presidency: a cycle of abuse, corruption, and relentless obstruction of the truth. Since taking the oath of office, Donald Trump has been on a spree of high crimes and misdemeanors, using the awesome power of the presidency for his own personal gain, at the expense of the American people. He has inflamed our divisions for his electoral benefit, with flagrant disregard for the Constitution that makes us America. Each step of the way, he has lied incessantly, including to cover up his crimes. And yet he remains in the country’s highest office. Congress, federal and state prosecutors, and courts have worked to hold the president accountable for his myriad offenses—with some surprising successes and devastating failures. Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s impeachment and trial, presents the case against Trump anew. Eisen’s gripping narrative and rousing closing argument—at turns revelatory, insightful, and enraging—will inspire our nation of judges. History has proven that this president’s nefarious behavior will continue, no matter the crisis. But, as Eisen’s candid retelling affirms, there is an ultimate constitutional power that transcends the president’s, a power that can and must defeat him if our nation is to survive. The verdict of the American people remains in the balance. It is time for us to act.