All Rivers Run to the Sea by
Nobel laureate Wiesel is the collective consciousness of the Holocaust, the premier voice of moral rectitude concerning the treatment of Jews in the twentieth century. With an expected poignancy and deft expressiveness and a commendable avoidance of self-righteousness, he turns now to memoir writing, revisiting the formative places, figures, and events in his life.
Rebels and Reformers by
Biographies of four Jewish Americans whose activities in women's rights, abolition, law, nursing, and the military contributed to the growth, development, and needed reform of the country.
We Are Witnesses by
We are the bleeding clouds, and from the seas of blood have we come... We are witnesses... we were brought into being by an inferno of suffering; and we are a sign of peace to you. - Moshe Ze'ev Flinker, Age 17 On the eve of Passover, 1944, shortly after he wrote these words, Moshe and his family were betrayed to the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. Like the other four diarists in this book, he did not survive the war. But their words did. Written in the midst of "an inferno of suffering," these fragile yet powerful records are a "sign of peace" to all of us. Each diary reveals one voice, one teenager coping with the impossible. We see David Rubinowicz struggling against fear and terror in Poland. Yitzhak Rudashevski in Lithuania shows us how Jews clung to culture, to learning, and to hope, until there was no hope at all. In Belgium, Moshe is the voice of religion, constantly seeking answers from God for relentless tragedy. Finally, in Hungary, Eva Heyman demonstrates the unquenchable hunger for life that sustained her until the very last moment.Yet We Are Witnesses is not just about any single victim in the Holocaust. Author Jacob Boas, who was born in the same camp to which Anne Frank was sent, ends by discussing her famous diary. Looking back at the other four through Anne, and at Anne with fresh eyes after the others, we see the largest truth they all left for us: Hitler could kill millions, but he could not destroy the human spirit. These stark accounts of how five young people faced the worst of human evil are a testament, and an inspiration, to the best in the human soul.
Constantine's Sword by
In a bold and moving book that is sure to spark heated debate, the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture. The Church’s failure to protest the Holocaust -- the infamous "silence” of Pius XII -- is only part of the story: the death camps, Carroll shows, are the culmination of a long, entrenched tradition of anti-Judaism. From Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus on the cross, to Constantine’s transformation of the cross into a sword, to the rise of blood libels, scapegoating, and modern anti-Semitism, Carroll reconstructs the dramatic story of the Church’s conflict not only with Jews but with itself. Yet in tracing the arc of this narrative, he implicitly affirms that it did not necessarily have to be so. There were roads not taken, heroes forgotten; new roads can be taken yet. Demanding that the Church finally face this past in full, Carroll calls for a fundamental rethinking of the deepest questions of Christian faith. Only then can Christians, Jews, and all who carry the burden of this history begin to forge a new future. Drawing on his well-known talents as a storyteller and memoirist, and weaving historical research through an intensely personal examination of conscience, Carroll has created a work of singular power and urgency. CONSTANTINE'S SWORD is a brave and affecting reckoning with difficult truths that will touch every reader.
Under Crescent and Cross by
Did Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages cohabit in a peaceful "interfaith utopia?" Or were Jews under Muslim rule persecuted, much as they were in Christian lands? Rejecting both polemically charged "myths," Mark Cohen offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West.
Tell Them We Remember by
A vital, award-winning introduction to the Holocaust, with photos and documents from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Drawing on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's large collection of artifacts, photographs, maps, and taped oral and video histories, this book tells the story of the Holocaust and how it affected the daily lives of innocent people throughout Europe. Excerpts from 'identity cards' that are part of the Museum's exhibit focus on specific young people whose worlds were turned upside down when they became trapped under Nazi rule. Many of these young people never had the chance to grow up. One and a half million of the victims were children and teenagers--the great majority of them Jewish children but also tens of thousands of Roma (Gypsy) children, disabled children, and Polish Catholic children. Like their parents, they were singled out not for anything they had done, but simply because the Nazis considered them inferior. Those who survived to become adults passed on the stories of relatives and friends who had been killed, with the hope that the terrible crimes of the Holocaust would never be forgotten or repeated. The powerful stories and images in this book are presented with the same hope. Only by learning about the Holocaust will we be able to tell the victims we remember.
The Complete MAUS by
Art Spiegelman is a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, which was also nominated for the National Book Critics Award. He lives in New York.
Suddenly Jewish by
One woman learned on the eve of her Roman Catholic wedding. One man as he was studying for the priesthood. Madeleine Albright famously learned from the Washington Post when she was named Secretary of State. "What is it like to find out you are not who you thought you were?" asks Barbara Kessel in this compelling volume, based on interviews with over 160 people who were raised as non-Jews only to learn at some point in their lives that they are of Jewish descent. With humor, candor, and deep emotion, Kessel's subjects discuss the emotional upheaval of refashioning their self-image and, for many, coming to terms with deliberate deception on the part of parents and family. Responses to the discovery of a Jewish heritage ranged from outright rejection to wholehearted embrace. For many, Kessel reports, the discovery of Jewish roots confirmed long-held suspicions or even, more mysteriously, conformed to a long-felt attraction toward Judaism. For some crypto-Jews in the southwest United States (descendants of Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition), the only clues to their heritage are certain practices and traditions handed down through the generations, whose significance may be long since lost. In Poland and other parts of eastern Europe, many Jews who were adopted as infants to save them from the Holocaust are now learning of their heritage through the deathbed confessions of their adoptive parents. The varied responses of these disparate people to a similar experience, presented in their own words, offer compelling insights into the nature of self-knowledge. Whether they had always suspected or were taken by surprise, Kessel's respondents report that confirmation of their Jewish heritage affected their sense of self and of their place in the world in profound ways. Fascinating, poignant, and often very funny, Suddenly Jewish speaks to crucial issues of identity, selfhood, and spiritual community.
Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives by
The most up-to-date critical guide mapping the history, impact, key critical issues, and seminal texts of the genre, Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives interrogates what makes a work a "Jewish graphic narrative", and explores the form's diverse facets to orient readers to the richness and complexity of Jewish graphic storytelling. Accessible but comprehensive and in an easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as: - The history of the genre in the US and Israel - and its relationship to superheroes, Underground Comix, and Jewish literature - Social and cultural discussions surrounding the legitimization of graphic representation as sites of trauma, understandings of gender, mixed-media in Jewish graphic novels, and the study of these works in the classroom - Critical explorations of graphic narratives about the Holocaust, Israel, the diasporic experience, Judaism, and autobiography and memoir - The works of Will Eisner, Ilana Zeffren, James Sturm, Joann Sfar, JT Waldman, Michel Kichka, Sarah Glidden, Rutu Modan, and Art Spiegelman and such narratives as X Men, Anne Frank's Diary, and Maus Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels includes an appendix of relevant works sorted by genre, a glossary of crucial critical terms, and close readings of key texts to help students and readers develop their understanding of the genre and pursue independent study.
Gastronomic Judaism As Culinary Midrash by
This book is about what makes food Jewish, or better, who and how one makes food Jewish. Making food Jewish is to negotiate between the local, regional, and now global foods available to eat and the portable Jewish taste preferences Jews have inherited from their sacred texts and calendars. What makes Jewish food "Jewish," and what makes Jewish eating practices continually viable and meaningful are not fixed dietary rules and norms, but rather culinary interpretations and adaptations of them to new times and places - culinary midrash. Jewish cuisine is a fusion of interactions, a reflection of displacement, and intentional positioning and re-positioning vis a vis sacred texts, old and new lands, Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors, old and new "family" combinations, re-imaginings of our personal ethnic, gender, and other identities. Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus questions Jewish identity in particular, and identity generally as something fixed, stable, and singular, and unintentional. Jewish food choices are situational, often temporary, expressions of Jewish identity. It addresses the tension between what Jewish "authoritative" textual sources and their proponents say is Jewish food and Jewish eating, and what Jews actually eat. So while discussing connections between ancient religious texts and modern Jewish food preferences, this book does not stop there. Using examples from his experience, Brumberg-Kraus describes the improvisational characteristics of gastronomic Judaism as the interplay of texts, tastes, artifacts, and everyday practices: not only in the classic sacred texts, but also in Jewish cookbooks and internet blogs on Jewish home cooking; seasonal intensification of "Jewish" food choices (e.g., latkes at Chanukah or keeping kosher for Passover); "safe treif;" the fusion/cultural appropriation of diasporic, "Biblical", and Palestinian foods in new Israeli cuisine; and the impact of the environmentalist "New Jewish Food movement" on contemporary Jewish food choices and identity.
The Complete Passover Cookbook by
In 19 chapters, spiced with history and laced with lore, the author shows how to make every Passover dish a succulent delight--from tempting hors d'oeuvres to elegant main dishes to luscious desserts and pastries.
The New Jewish Holiday Cookbook by
Interweaving folklore and the finest of Jewish cookery, this collection of original recipes, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, from around the world includes directions for kosher dishes to suit the diverse Jewish holidays.
Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking by
"In this book we are seeking the best of both worlds--the remembrance of tastes past and the thrill of the new. What matters in this updating of the classics and the culling of new ideas from communities around us is that we adapt and integrate them in the spirit of Jewish history, making them our own as our ancestors have always done. In doing so we continue a tradition that began more than five thousand years ago." --from the Introduction Two generations of Jewish women, mother and daughter, have come together to create this wonderful collection of recipes for cooks young and old. The mother, Evelyn Rose, offers traditional Jewish recipes, just the way your mother and grandmother used to make them. For more contemporary, bolder, and lighter tastes, her daughter, Judi, offers updated and all-new dishes. For example, the chapters on soups, starters, and salads include a recipe for traditional Chopped Liver (though it''s made with less fat), as well as Chicken Liver Pate with Pears and a Citrus and Red Currant Sauce, a totally contemporary hors d''oeuvre made with a fruit citrus-scented sauce. Try the beautiful, ruby-colored Traditional Beet Borscht for that old-world taste, or you might enjoy the satisfying and sophisticated Cream of Watercress Soup with a Toasted Walnut Garnish, which can be served hot or chilled. For the Kosher home, there are plenty of recipes for dairy meals, such as a traditional Onion Tarte from Alsace, or the exquisite and aromatic Provençal Sun-dried Tomato, Olive, and Basil Tarte. Many of the pasta dishes can be adapted to dairy or meat meals, such as Auntie Mary''s Savory Noodles and Noodles in Sesame Sauce, Hong Kong Style, both of which can be prepared with chicken or vegetable stock. There''s a bounty of meat recipes as well, from universal Eastern European favorites like Beef-Filled Cabbage Leaves in a Sweet-and-Sour Sauce to South African Curried Beef Gratin, a spiced and slightly sweet example of how much fun you can have with Kosher cooking. Succulent Roast Chicken with a Lemon and Herb Stuffing is comfort food at its best, and Chicken and Mushroom Puff is a delicious way to use up leftover chicken and gravy, or even leftover Thanksgiving turkey. If it sounds like there are too many delicious recipes to choose from, Judi and Evelyn have included menus for every holiday -- Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Hanukkah, and more. For each Jewish holiday, there is a discussion of the traditions and their cultural significance, such as why, during Purim, we eat all kinds of baked and fried sweet things using chickpeas, poppy or sesame seeds (to represent golden coins), and triangular pastries (Haman''s pockets). Finish your meal with desserts like Armenian Apricot Mousse with Pistachios, Auntie Annie''s Cinnamon Balls, or Great Grandma''s Feather-Light Lemon Cookies, and start creating a few traditions of your own. Cooking is as much about family and friends as it is about good food, and that''s just the spirit conveyed here. Whether you''ve been trying to remember the recipe for a favorite dish from your childhood or you want to keep a Kosher kitchen but are looking for some exciting new flavors, this is the book for you. Jewish people of all ages are returning to their roots and craving the long-lost recipes of generations past. What Jewish person doesn''t remember his or her grandmother''s special recipe for matzoh ball soup or his or her aunt''s recipe for brisket, and want to share those comforting recipes with the family? And what Jewish cook wouldn''t want to expand their repertoire with some fresher, lighter, more contemporary versions of their favorite family recipes? Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking offers recipes that embrace traditional Jewish cooking as well as innovations and world cuisines. Evelyn Rose, the mother, relates classic Jewish recipes, prepared the old-fashioned way and perfect for holidays and special occasions or those sentimental moods. Feeling more adventurous? Evelyn''s daughter, Judi, offers updated classics and all new Jewish-style recipes that incorporate a wide range of flavors. Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking is a book that can be shared across the generations. It is a perfect gift for friends and family at holiday times as well as an everyday cookbook, reached for night after night.Jewish people of all ages are returning to their roots and craving the long-lost recipes of generations past. What Jewish person doesn''t remember his or her grandmother''s special recipe for matzoh ball soup or his or her aunt''s recipe for brisket, and want to share those comforting recipes with the family? And what Jewish cook wouldn''t want to expand their repertoire with some fresher, lighter, more contemporary versions of their favorite family recipes?
American Pastoral by
American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving - and hating - America. It's a book about wanting to belong - and refusing to belong - to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral - a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement - against the indigenous American Berserk.
Chosen Tales by
Master the 2014 Curriculum with Scholastic's 100 Lessons. The new National Curriculum has landed ... and Scholastic's acclaimed 100 Lessons series is back to help your school prepare. Trusted by teachers for 15 years and selling more than one million copies, 100 Lessons has now been completely rewritten and is fully in line with the 2014 objectives. Our new 100 Lessons and Planning Guides will make planning and teaching the new requirements simple and stress-free. * Teach a whole year's lessons carefully matched to the new objectives * Flexible pick-up-and-use format containing over 100 ready-made lesson plans * Use the lessons as a complete plan for the year, or as a flexible filler when there's a gap in your planning. * Inspire pupils with photocopiable activities * Includes a CD-ROM full of interactive resources and media resources * View sample resources at www.scholastic.co.uk/100lessons Praise for Scholastic's 100 Lessons-Planning Guides: "With a radically different curriculum just around the corner, I was looking for something that would help ease the burden of increased paperwork. These books answer my prayers! Having access to long and medium term plans, as well as clear advice concerning progression and key concepts has already helped me to plan ahead. The inclusion of digital content that can easily be personalised is a real bonus, and completely welcome. Thank you, Scholastic for a fantastic resource.' Steven Gibson, Hyde Park Junior School, Plymouth
The Collected Plays of Neil Simon by
This first volume of The Collected Plays of Neil Simon contains the triumphs that put his unique brand of comic genius on the American stage, and made him the most successful playwright of his generation. This volume includes: * Come Blow Your Horn * Barefoot in the Park * The Odd Couple * Plaza Suite * The Star-Spangled Girl * Promises, Promises * Last of the Red Hot Lover * And an Introduction by the author: "Portrait of the Writer as a Schizophrenic" Neil Simon's mixture of verbal wit and beautifully crafted farce, ethnic humor and insight into universal foible, and above all compassion and understanding, make even his sharpest barbs touch the heart as well as the funny bone. These seven plays, beginning with his unforgettable debut, Come Blow Your Horn, make us laugh uproariously even as we indelibly identify with the objects of our laughter.
The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer by
The forty-seven stories in this collection, selected by Singer himself out of nearly one hundred and fifty, range from the publication of his now-classic first collection, "Gimpel the Fool," in 1957, until 1981. They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by
Already sold in eight countries around the world, these nine energized, irreverent stories from Nathan Englander introduce an astonishing new talent. In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command, and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi. In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit-- a spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance for the heart to deepen--and in the wisdom that so prodigiously transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly remarkable. Nathan Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for Auschwitz and in a deft imaginative twist turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way; he takes an elderly wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. Again and again, Englander does what feels impossible: he finds, wherever he looks, a province beyond death's dominion. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of stunning authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the arrival of a profoundly gifted new storyteller.
Night by
A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance ofNightand his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
Up from Orchard Street by
In the tradition of Like Water for Chocolate and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, this exhilarating novel centered around a memorable immigrant family brings to vibrant life the soul and spirit of New York's legendary Lower East Side. Up from Orchard Street... ...where three generations of Roths live together in a crowded tenement flat at number 12. Long-widowed Manya is the family's head and its heart: mother of dapper Jack, mother-in-law of frail and beautiful Lil, and adored bubby of Elka and Willy. She's renowned throughout the teeming neighborhood for her mouthwatering cooking, and every noontime the front room of the flat turns into Manya's private restaurant, where the local merchants come to savor her hearty stews and soups, succulent potato latkes and tzimmes, preserved fruits and glorious pastries. She is just as renowned for her fierce sense of honor, her quick eye for charlatans, and her generosity to those in need. But Manya is no soft touch-except, perhaps, where her adored granddaughter Elka is concerned. It is skinny, precocious Elka who is her closest companion and confidante-and the narrator of this event-packed novel. Through Elka's eyes we come to know the fascinating characters who come in and out of the Roths' lives: relatives, eccentric locals, doctors, busybody neighbors-as well as the many men who try fruitlessly to win voluptuous Manya's favors. We live through the bittersweet world of these blunt, earthy, feisty people for whom poverty was endemic, illness common, crises frequent, and zest for living intense. Money may have been short but opinions were not, and their tart tongues and lively humor invest every page. In this riveting story lies theheart of the American immigrant experience: a novel at once wise, funny, poignant, anguishing, exultant-and bursting with love.
The World's Religions by
The World's Religions, by beloved author and pioneering professor Huston Smith (Tales of Wonder), is the definitive classic for introducing the essential elements and teachings of the world's predominant faiths, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, as well as regional native traditions. This revised and updated edition provides sympathetic descriptions of the various traditions, explaining how they work "from the inside," which is a big reason why this cherished classic has sold more than two million copies since it first appeared in 1958.
This is not a complete list of everything that RCBC has, but a list of suggested reading. Please check out our catalog or ask a librarian for more suggestions!
Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions by
This multicultural reference work on Jewish folklore, legends, customs, and other elements of folklife is the first of its kind. The diverse range of articles covers specific artifacts, rituals, ceremonies, biblical figures, and legends-in addition to broad topics such as humor, folk dance, costumes, and folk narratives.
Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend, Thames and Hudson by
Provides a clear and systematic guide to a rich heritage of legend, folklore and tradition that is crucial to understanding Judaism. It describes the main characters and the tales that have grown up around them; Jewish methods of Biblical interpretation; the framework of Jewish law, literature and poetry; the festivals of the Jewish Year; the different languages and sub-groups within the Jewish community; and the many countries in which Jews have lived, as well as the importance of the Holy Land.
