Book picks similar to
Nietzsche and Zion by Jacob Golomb


nietzsche
judaica
nationalism-ethnos
taboo

Drawing in the Dust


Zoe Klein - 2009
    By turns philosophical, suspenseful, and passionate, this debut novel transports readers into a mystical world and takes them on a journey they won't soon forget.

Boone's Crew: A Mafia Romance Box Set


Sofia Westlake - 2019
    Not just any man, but a naked man with severe injuries all over her body. She should have driven on, should have left him there. But how could she leave a man to die that way? She took him home, aware that it could be the biggest mistake she’d ever made. She was already on the run, already trying to live as much off the grid as possible. What was she going to do with an injured man? What if he died in her bed? What would she do then? Teaching Lincoln Janet Spence—Summer—is the daughter of the local district attorney who plays at being a thief, doing all she can to humiliate her mother. That is until she gets caught by a local football hero who kidnaps her and plans a dark sort of revenge. Just her luck that Lincoln happens to choose that day to break into the football star’s house and recover items that will just pay off his gambling debts to the Gabbana family. Lincoln shows no interest in the tied up girl at first, but when he learns who she really is, how could he resist collecting this bit of leverage against a district attorney who ran on the campaign promise that she would rid Tampa of Lincoln and his faction of criminals? Cason's Girl Cason Durst was once carefree and popular, the kind of college kid who thinks he knows everything. And then he was arrested and met Lincoln Steele. Lincoln saved him, fixed his problems, and offered him a job. Now Cason keeps to himself, learning all he can from the men who formed Boone’s crew. He’s learned that making friends, falling in love, all those things he once took for granted, are dangerous to him now. He’s learned to keep to himself. In fact, he’s become kind of awkward. Shy, even. Therefore, he’s the last one anyone could have expected Lincoln to send out on a mission to romance a pretty girl. Let It Raine Kara Tripp walks into Jett’s office one afternoon, begging him to forgive the debt of her lover, Harry. She’s willing to do anything, a fact that’s underscored when she begins to undress right there in his office. Jett has had a lot of offers over the years, and he’s never had the patience for it. But when he hears that Kara just happens to be a therapist who works with autistic children, he can’t pass up the opportunity to see if her skills can help improve Raine’s behavior. Jett and Kara make a deal in which she goes to work for him and Raine for six months, and he will forgive Harry’s debt. And it works, for four months, it works perfectly. But then a mole pops up in Boone’s Crew, and Jett finds himself questioning everything, and everyone, around him. Boone's End Titus betrayed his crew. In his world, betrayal was a crime punishable by death. He has two choices: embrace the very enemy that threatens to rip his world apart, or turn himself in to the very men who would like nothing more than to put a bullet in his brain. It’s not a simple choice. Titus has to decide where his loyalties really lay, and figure out who he can trust before it’s too late and an innocent pays for his mistakes. Jude Volz lost her brother to violence, and her father went to jail when she needed him the most. Determined to make someone pay, she trusted the wrong man, and now she’s caught up in something she can’t control. Locked in a car with a traitor, she has no choice but to trust Titus, to open up to him, and hope that together they can find a way out of an impossible situation. But now they’re running not just from his crew, but from hers as well.

The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education


David Tyack - 1974
    At the same time it is a narrative in which the participants themselves speak out: farm children and factory workers, frontier teachers and city superintendents, black parents and elite reformers. And it encompasses both the achievements and the failures of the system: the successful assimilation of immigrants, racism and class bias; the opportunities offered to some, the injustices perpetuated for others.David Tyack has placed his colorful, wide-ranging view of history within a broad new framework drawn from the most recent work in history, sociology, and political science. He looks at the politics and inertia, the ideologies and power struggles that formed the basis of our present educational system. Using a variety of social perspectives and methods of analysis, Tyack illuminates for all readers the change from village to urban ways of thinking and acting over the course of more than one hundred years.

One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them


Ammiel Hirsch - 2002
    What resulted is this book: an honest, intelligent, no-holds-barred discussion of virtually every “hot button” issue on which Reform and Orthodox Jews differ, among them the existence of a Supreme Being, the origins and authenticity of the Bible and the Oral Law, the role of women, assimilation, the value of secular culture, and Israel.Sometimes they agree; more often than not they disagree—and quite sharply, too. But the important thing is that, as they keep talking to each other, they discover that they actually like each other, and, above all, they respect each other. Their journey from mutual suspicion to mutual regard is an extraordinary one; from it, both Jews and non-Jews of all backgrounds can learn a great deal about the practice of Judaism today and about the continuity of the Jewish people into the future.From the Hardcover edition.

Swimming Across the Hudson


Joshua Henkin - 1997
    What if he hadn't been adopted by Jews, what if his brother, Jonathan, had been adopted by a different couple? He and Jonathan fantasize about being the secret sons of Sandy Koufax, of coming to earth in a spaceship. They make blood pacts and switch names. But while they imagine other identities, they search for ways to feel that they belong to each other, to their parents, to their home. As adolescents, even in the familiar and happy comfort of the Manhattan apartment where they live, their dreams of girls and rock stars are colored by these concerns. Now Ben Suskind is thirty years old, living in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Jenny, and her daughter. He still reflects on the questions of his youth; Jenny often has to pull his head out of the clouds. So when he receives a letter from a woman claiming to be his birth mother, he is unprepared, panicked, but curious. He tells his adoptive parents about the letter, and they fly him home to New York and reveal a secret about his past, one that turns Ben's whole world upside down. Without telling anyone, Ben embarks on a journey, risking his relationship with everyone - his girlfriend, his brother, his parents. He combs through the records of his family's past, trying to find the facts about who he and Jonathan really are, and in the process learns the price of the lies people tell in the name of truth and good intentions.

The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE – 1492 CE


Simon Schama - 2013
    It spans the millennia and the continents - from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain.And a great story unfolds. Not - as often imagined - of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

Claimed By Dad's Italian Best Friend


Flora Ferrari - 2020
    It doesn't matter that he's Dad's best friend and business partner, or that out in Italy, he might as well be my boss. I've wanted him since before I met him, but now I'm here, is there really a chance for all my Italian dreams to come true?BeppeDana's all the woman I can handle, and the only woman that I want. We share an appetite for more than good food and it doesn't matter that she's my best friend's daughter. This older man can't wait to claim her and show her what an Italian lover can really do.*Claimed By Dad's Italian Best Friend is an insta-everything standalone instalove romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

Here and There: Leaving Hasidism, Keeping My Family


Chaya Deitsch - 2015
      Even as a child, Chaya Deitsch felt that she didn’t belong in the Hasidic world into which she’d been born. She spent her teenage years outwardly conforming to but secretly rebelling against the rules that tell you what and when to eat, how to dress, whom you can befriend, and what you must believe. Loving her parents, grandparents, and extended family, Chaya struggled to fit in but instead felt angry, stifled, and frustrated. Upon receiving permission from her bewildered but supportive parents to attend Barnard College, she discovered a wider world in which she could establish an independent identity and fulfill her dream of a life unconfined by the strictures imposed upon her by a belief system that she had never bought into, a life that would be filled with the secular knowledge and culture that were anathema to her friends and relatives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. As she gradually shed the physical and spiritual trappings of Hasidic life—the long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, the rules of kashrus, the meticulous observance of the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays—Chaya found herself torn between her desire to be honest with her parents about who she now was and her need to maintain loving relationships with the family that she still very much wanted to be part of.   As she navigated the complexities of her new life, Chaya and her parents eventually came to an understanding that was based on unqualified love and a hard-won but fragile form of acceptance. With honesty, sensitivity, and intelligence, Chaya Deitsch movingly shows us that lives lived differently do not have to be lives lived apart.

Whispers from the Cove


Jeanne Hardt - 2017
     Her beautiful home in Cades Cove, Tennessee, lies deep in the Smoky Mountains. For decades, her family has farmed and lived peacefully, until the soldiers came and made every day a struggle to survive. Whether they wear gray or blue, the men in uniform arrive unexpectedly and take whatever they want. Not only do they steal food and livestock, but some believe they can help themselves to anything they desire. Lily now has something to fear. Caleb Henry is running from his own battles, bleeding and broken. He seeks refuge in the cove and literally runs into Lily. Because he’s injured, she shows compassion and sneaks him into her cabin, trusting her folks to tend him. But there’s more to Caleb than they see on the surface. His arrival changes their lives, and what happens going forward can never be undone.

Dandelion Summer


Mary Ellen Bramwell - 2019
    But missing him is soon replaced with the challenges and surprises right in front of her. What is her mother hiding? Why has her grandfather disappeared from their lives? Unraveling the mysteries brings about unexpected discoveries and connections, ultimately leading her to know herself and understand what matters most.

The Lords of Dûs


Lawrence Watt-Evans - 2002
    The answer sent him into a web of treachery, of ancient secrets and forbidden knowledge, and entangled him in matters far beyond his understanding, until he found himself face to face with the gods of destruction and death.

How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st-Century Left


Jonas Čeika - 2021
    At the same time, as a new wave of nationalism and right-wing politics spreads across the world, fewer and fewer people are being convinced that socialism could improve their everyday lives, let alone save us from our own destruction.In this timely and explosive book, philosopher and YouTuber Jonas Čeika (aka Cuck Philosophy) re-invigorates socialism for the twenty-first century. Leaving behind its past associations with bureaucracy and state tyranny, and it's lifeless and drab theoretical accounts, Čeika instead uses the works of Marx and Nietzsche to reconnect socialism with its human element, presenting it as something not only affecting, but created by living, breathing, suffering human individuals.At a time when ecological collapse is hurtling towards us, and capitalism offers no solution except more growth and exploitation, How to Philosophise with a Hammer and Sickle shows us the way forward to a socialism grounded in human experience and accessible to all.

Lost Desires


Rachael Orman - 2014
    Their life together has become routine, no longer filed with fun and spontaneity. And their love life? Non-existent. Longing to break the dull, repeating pattern that is her life, Brittany looks to a friend for some advice on how to put some spice back into her marriage. Her friend’s advice? A hands on, in home sex therapist.Brittany brushes her off at first, but after another night of unexciting sex, she’ll try anything…ANYTHING to save her love life, even if it is an unconventional route. Journey through the ups and downs of love, life, and lust with Brittany, Ian, and their sex therapist.

A Letter to Harvey Milk: Short Stories


Lesléa Newman - 1988
    Newman’s readers accompany her quirky Jewish characters through all types of experiences from an initial lesbian sexual encounter to being sequestered in a college apartment after paranoid Holocaust flashbacks. In these stories characters anxiously discover their lesbian identities while beginning to understand, and finally to embrace, their Jewish heritage. The title story, "A Letter to Harvey Milk," was the second place finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Competition.

After Anatevka: A Novel Inspired by Fiddler on the Roof


Alexandra Silber - 2017
    In stories originally written by Sholem Aleichem and then made world-famous in the celebrated musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, his wife Golde, and their five daughters dealt with the outside influences that were encroaching upon their humble lives. But what happened to those remarkable characters after the curtain fell?In After Anatevka, Alexandra Silber picks up where “Fiddler” left off. Second-eldest daughter Hodel takes center stage as she attempts to join her Socialist-leaning fiancé Perchik to the outer reaches of a Siberian work camp. But before Hodel and Perchik can finally be together, they both face extraordinary hurdles and adversaries—both personal and political—attempting to keep them apart at all costs.A love story set against a backdrop of some of the greatest violence in European history, After Anatevaka is a stunning conclusion to a tale that has gripped audiences around the globe for decades.