Demonstrating his political skills in adolescence, he became immersed in paramilitary operations against the British, and was a crucial part of the 1948 war for independence. A protégé of David Ben-Gurion, Peres not only helped create modern Israel, but would shape it in the years to come as the first director general of its Defense Ministry, as prime minister (twice), as the head of other key ministries—including foreign affairs, transportation, and finance—and until 2014, as president. Under his visionary stewardship, Israel became a formidable military power and global leader in high-tech. Peres was also instrumental in growing Israel's population—facilitating the immigration of millions of Jews worldwide-and in securing peace with its enemy the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which earned him the Nobel Prize.In this, his final testimonial, finished in the last weeks of his life, this man of war and peace reflects on key events and fundamental Israeli principles to provide an understanding of his nation's rise and the challenges it faces. No Room for Small Dreams spans decades, events, and places—from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Washington, D.C. and Gaza; from the Arab riots in the wake of World War I and the success of Israeli spy operations to the creation of Israel's nuclear program and the birth of its astonishing high tech industry; from its controversial wars and contentious peace treaties to the early kibbutz movement and today's extremist settlers. In looking back Peres also looks forward, offering a provocative meditation on Jewish success, the difficulties and sacrifices of making peace, and the courage necessary to emerge from the dark shadows of history into the bright promise of tomorrow.

    

    Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists. This amazing journey through Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots.

    However, youth ministry expert Andrew Root explains that this focus is central to Bonhoeffer's story and thought. Root presents Bonhoeffer as the forefather and model of the growing theological turn in youth ministry. By linking contemporary youth workers with this epic theologian, the author shows the depth of youth ministry work and underscores its importance in the church. He also shows how Bonhoeffer's life and thought impact present-day youth ministry practice.

    At its center lies Sherwin Nuland’s Rembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish garment worker who came to America in the early years of the last century but remained an eternal outsider. Awkward in speech and movement, broken by the premature deaths of a wife and child, Meyer ruled his youngest son with a regime of rage, dependency, and helpless love that outlasted his death. In evoking their relationship, Nuland also summons up the warmth and claustrophobia of a vanished immigrant New York, a world that impelled its children toward success yet made them feel like traitors for leaving it behind. Full of feeling and unwavering observation, Lost in America deserves a place alongside such classics as Patrimony and Call It Sleep.

    The NFL's Most Valuable Player for the 2005 season, Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander has gained a reputation that's one for the record books.? And now in his inspiring autobiography, Shaun shares his amazing journey to success both on and off the field.Written with award-winning author Cecil Murphey, Shaun recounts how God first gave him the dream for the achievements that have made him a household name among football fans everywhere.? He also shares his passion for helping other young men through his Shaun Alexander Foundation, focusing on improving the lives of fatherless young men through education, athletics, character programs, and leadership training, inspiring them to reach their God-given potential.

    Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years - across oceans, deserts, and mountains - but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator - the girl, grown into a young mother - must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

    He called for help, but it was too late. Two trials and eight years later, the founder of the largest reform synagogue in southern New Jersey became the first rabbi ever convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.In a gripping examination of the misuses of the pulpit and the self-delusions of power, Arthur J. Magida paints a devastating portrait of a manipulative man who used his position of trust in the temple to attract several mistresses -- and to befriend a lonely recovering alcoholic, whom he convinced to kill his wife "for the good of Israel."The Rabbi and the Hit Man straddles the juncture of faith and trust, and confronts issues of sex, narcissism, arrogance, and adultery. It is the definitive account of a charismatic clergyman who paid the ultimate price for ignoring his own words of wisdom: "We live at any moment with our total past ... What we do will stay with us forever."

    Unexcelled for beginners as well as the religiously observant, To Pray as a Jew is intended to show the way, to enlighten, and hopefully to inspire.

    Raised a Catholic in California, "New York Times"journalist Doreen Carvajal is shocked when she discovers that her background may actually be connected to "conversos" in Inquisition-era Spain, Jews who were forced to renounce their faith and convert to Christianity or face torture and death. With vivid childhood memories of Sunday sermons, catechism, and the rosary, Carvajal travels tothesouth ofSpain, to the centuries-old Andalucian town of Arcos de la Frontera, to investigate her lineage andrecover her family s original religious heritage. In Arcos, Carvajal is struck by thewhite pueblo'sancient beauty and the difficulty she encounters in probing the town's own secret history of the Inquisition. She comes to realize that fear remains a legacy of the Inquisition along with the cryptic messages left by its victims. Back at her childhood home in California, Carvajal uncovers papers documenting a family of Carvajals who were burned at the stake in the 16th-century territory of Mexico. Could the author sfamily history be linked to the hidden history of Arcos? And could the unfortunate Carvajals have been her ancestors? As she strives to find proof that her family had been forced to convert to Christianity six-hundred years ago, Carvajal comes to understand that the past flows like a river through time and that while the truth might be submerged, it isnever truly lost."

    It is a profound excursion into religious psychology and phenomenology, a pioneering attempt at a philosophy of halakhah, and a stringent critique of mysticism and romantic religion.

    In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream--the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals--may die.In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the center of the crisis: Barack Obama, America's first "Jewish president," a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people's special curse. These two men embody fundamentally different visions not just of American and Israeli national interests but of the mission of the Jewish people itself.Beinart concludes with provocative proposals for how the relationship between American Jews and Israel must change, and with an eloquent and moving appeal for American Jews to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late.

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    That interest took him down an unlikely path to becoming a fighter pilot in the Israel Air Force. After years of service, though, he began to question what he was fighting for. If Israeli society was based on Jewish ideals, what distinctive qualities in those ideals were worth the sacrifices he was making? Realizing he knew little about Judaism, Keinan then set out on a mission to educate himself. What he discovered was that Judaism is very much worth saving, but also that the number of Jews in the world is decreasing at an alarming rate. What could be done to reverse those numbers? Through the prism of his own dramatic personal story and the lessons he learned from his professional life, Keinan embarks on an investigation of the core values of Judaism in the twenty-first century. He argues forcefully that the science of Crowd Wisdom (aka swarm intelligence or collective intelligence) has played a key role in Jewish survival over the centuries, and looks to the relationship between American and Israeli Jews to enrich world Jewry in a post-Diaspora age. God Is in the Crowd presents an innovative plan in which the wisdom of the Jewish crowd is harnessed to endow Judaism with new purpose and save it from extinction.