American Pastoral by Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece--an elegy for the American century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.
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 of Night and 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.
The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II. In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth's story, incredibly, has never been told. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation's history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma--and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life. Fagone unveils America's code-breaking history through the prism of Smith's life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson's bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.
Collected Poems in English by One of the greatest and the grandest advocates of the literary vocation, Joseph Brodsky truly lived his life as a poet, and for it earned eighteen months of internal exile at hard labor, expulsion from his native country, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here, collected for the first time, are all the poems he published in English, from his earliest collaborations with Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, Howard Moss, and Anthony Hecht to the moving farewell poems he wrote near the end of his life. With nearly two hundred poems, several of them never before published in book form, this will be the essential volume of Brodsky's work.
Forbidden Music by With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany's historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment.
Jewish American Poetry by From Emma Lazarus to Allen Ginsberg, Jewish American poets have long been a presence in American poetry. Once a group of isolated voices, their number and range has grown in the last 50 years to reveal a distinct American poetic tradition. The first complete guide to the diversity and vitality of this tradition, Jewish American Poetry features poems by 26 leading poets (some written especially for this volume) followed by the poets' own reflections on the Jewish and American aspects of their work. The second half of the book gathers ten wide-ranging essays on the history and scope of Jewish American poetry, offering an unprecedented introduction to its Yiddish and Sephardic heritage, its distinctive poetics of commentary, its Kabbalists, its feminists, and more. With a general introduction that places this literature in the contexts of both Jewish culture and American poetry, Jewish American Poetry opens the door to a much-needed discussion of the significance of the Jewish voice in American literature.
Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World by Offers the first in-depth look at the art of Marc Chagall and the meanings of the sometimes hidden but more often overt images found in the lost Jewish world of his childhood, from his early masterpieces made in Russia and in Paris to his Yiddish art theater paintings.
Superman Is Jewish? by As brilliant as it is witty, Harry Brod's surprisingly insightful expos#65533; delves into the secret identities of the world's most famous superheroes. Many of us know that the superheroes at the heart of the American comic book industry were created by Jews. But we'd be surprised to learn how much these beloved characters were shaped by the cultural and religious traditions of their makers. Superman Is Jewish? follows the "people of the book" as they become the people of the comic book. Harry Brod reveals the links between Jews and superheroes in a penetrating investigation of iconic comic book figures. With great wit and compelling arguments, Brod situates superheroes within the course of Jewish- American history: they are aliens in a foreign land, like Superman; figures plagued by guilt for not having saved their families, like Spider-Man; outsiders persecuted for being different, like the X-Men; nice, smart people afraid that nobody will like them when they're angry, like the Hulk. Brod blends humor with sharp observation as he considers the overt and discreet Jewish characteristics of these well-known figures and explores how their creators--including Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby-- integrated their Jewish identities and their creativity. Brod makes a strong case that these pioneering Jews created New World superheroes using models from Old World traditions. He demonstrates how contemporary characters were inspired by the golem, the mystically created artificial superhuman of Jewish lore. And before Superman was first drawn by Joe Shuster, there were those Jews flying through the air drawn by Marc Chagall. As poignant as it is fascinating, this lively guided tour travels from the Passover Haggadah's exciting action scenes of Moses's superpowers through the Yiddish humor of Mad to two Pulitzer Prizes awarded in one decade to Jewish comic book guys Art Spiegelman and Michael Chabon. Superman Is Jewish? explores the deeper story of how an immigrant group can use popular entertainment media to influence the larger culture and in the process see itself in new, more empowering ways. Not just for Jewish readers or comic book fans, Superman Is Jewish? is a story of America, and is as poignant as it is fascinating. *** A surprising question, one that takes a certain amount of chutzpah to even raise. To add even a bit more chutzpah, this book considers questions about the Jewishness of more superheroes than just Superman, and offers answers that will surprise many. You mean Spider-Man is Jewish too? Well, actually, yes, but in a very different way than Superman is. And, as we'll see, the shift between them reflects the evolution of Jewish life in America itself in the generation between the two, the generation that gets us from World War II and the "Golden Age" of comics to the 1960s and the "Silver Age" of comics. The historical turning points of those tumultuous years and others, like the powerful 1950s crusade against comics for supposedly causing juvenile delinquency, turn out to be central to our story because these events, and their great impact on American Jews, appear on comic book pages themselves, and behind the scenes in their production. For it turns out that the history of Jews and comic book superheroes, that very American invention, is the history of Jews and America, particularly the history of Jewish assimilation into the mainstream of American culture.
Tree of Souls by The first anthology of Jewish mythology in English, Tree of Souls reveals a mythical tradition as rich and as fascinating as any in the world. Drawing from the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Talmud and Midrash, the kabbalistic literature, medieval folklore, Hasidic texts, and oral lorecollected in the modern era, Schwartz has gathered together nearly 700 of the key Jewish myths. The myths themselves are marvelous. We read of Adams diamond and the Land of Eretz (where it is always dark), the fall of Lucifer and the quarrel of the sun and the moon, the Treasury of Souls and theDivine Chariot. We discover new tales about the great figures of the Hebrew Bible, from Adam to Moses; stories about God's Bride, the Shekhinah, and the evil temptress, Lilith; plus many tales about angels and demons, spirits and vampires, giant beasts and the Golem. Equally important, Schwartzprovides a wealth of additional information. For each myth, he includes extensive commentary, revealing the source of the myth and explaining how it relates to other Jewish myths as well as to world literature (for instance, comparing Eves release of evil into the world with Pandoras). For ease ofuse, Schwartz divides the volume into ten books, Myths of God, Myths of Creation, Myths of Heaven, Myths of Hell, Myths of the Holy Word, Myths of the Holy Time, Myths of the Holy People, Myths of the Holy Land, Myths of Exile, and Myths of the Messiah.
Becoming Eve by The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life. Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be?
Beyond the Golden Door by Beyond the Golden Door is the first book devoted to showing how Jewish playwrights of the twentieth century have dramatized the Jewish encounter with America. Questions dealt within this study include - How do you balance old world heritage with new world opportunity? What does it mean to be a Jew - or to be an American, for that matter?
Eat First -- You Don't Know What They'll Give You by EAT FIRST--YOU DON´T KNOW WHAT THEY´LL GIVE YOU, written with warmth and humor, is the story of Sonia Pressman Fuentes, one of the pioneers of the Second Wave of the women´s movement and her family. Fuentes, who was born in Berlin, Germany, came to the US with her immediate family to escape the Holocaust. Her memoirs reveal how the five-year-old immigrant in 1934 became the first woman attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1965, one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, the highest-paid woman at the headquarters of two multinational corporations: GTE and TRW, and an international speaker on women´s rights for the US Information Agency. The story begins with the wedding of Fuentes´ parents, Hinda and Zysia Pressman, in Piltz, a town in Poland. It goes on to the adventures of the Pressmans and Fuentes in Berlin, Antwerp, the Bronx, the Catskills, Miami Beach, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Stamford (Connecticut), and Washington, DC. Along the way, Fuentes had encounters with Pat Ward (a notorious call girl in the ´50s), Betty Friedan, Harry Golden, Dr. Cecil Jacobson (a prominent geneticist convicted on fifty-two counts of perjury and fraud), and many others. At forty-two, she married a handsome Puerto Rican and 1 years later, her Puerto Rican Jewish daughter was born. She tells about it all in Eat First. "I walk in the footprints of Sonia Pressman Fuentes." --Patricia Ireland, president, NOW "Evoking a tear here and a chuckle there, with her heart- warming wit and wisdom, Sonia Pressman Fuentes recounts the story of a Jewish family, her family, from her grandparents´ origin in a shtettl in Poland right through her own career as a founder of NOW and beyond." --Gus Tyler, columnist, contributing editor, The Forward "Sonia Pressman Fuentes played a major role in the birth of the new women´s movement and her tales of its early days will delight historians and those who are curious about the beginnings of this great social movement. Fuentes is a born story-teller, with a particular knack for seeing the humorous aspects of her life." --Dr. Bernice Sandler, Senior Scholar in Residence, National Association for Women in Education "I referred to you just the other day (as I frequently do) as one of the `great, unsung heroes´ of the women´s and civil rights movements. You single-handedly persuaded Roosevelt, Edelsberg, me and others to take sex discrimination seriously which, without you, we would not have done." --Charles T. Duncan, former General Counsel, EEOC; former Corporation Counsel of the District of Columbia; former Dean, Howard University School of Law For more reviews and interviews with the author of Eat First--You Don´t Know What They´ll Give You, please visit http://www.erraticimpact.com/fuentes
History Lessons by Most American Jews today will probably tell you that Judaism is inherently democratic and that Jewish and American cultures share the same core beliefs and values. But in fact, Jewish tradition and American culture did not converge seamlessly. Rather, it was American Jews themselves who consciously created this idea of an American Jewish heritage and cemented it in the popular imagination during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. History Lessons is the first book to examine how Jews in the United States collectively wove themselves into the narratives of the nation, and came to view the American Jewish experience as a unique chapter in Jewish history. Beth Wenger shows how American Jews celebrated civic holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July in synagogues and Jewish community organizations, and how they sought to commemorate Jewish cultural contributions and patriotism, often tracing their roots to the nation's founding. She looks at Jewish children's literature used to teach lessons about American Jewish heritage and values, which portrayed--and sometimes embellished--the accomplishments of heroic figures in American Jewish history. Wenger also traces how Jews often disagreed about how properly to represent these figures, focusing on the struggle over the legacy of the Jewish Revolutionary hero Haym Salomon. History Lessons demonstrates how American Jews fashioned a collective heritage that fused their Jewish past with their American present and future.
Howl and Other Poems by The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1965 is here presented in a commemorative 40th Anniversary Edition. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the Fall of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. customs and the San Francisco police, it was the subject of a long court trail at which a series of poets and professors persuaded the court that the book was not obscene. Howl & Other Poems is the single most influential poetic work of the post-World War II era, with over 1,000,000 copies now in print. "Howl was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard."--Michael McClure "It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages." --William Carlos Williams "At the height of his bardic powers, Allen Ginsberg could terrify the authorities with the mere utterance of the syllable "om" as he led street throngs of citizens protesting the Vietnam War. Ginsberg reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer whose freewheeling masterwork "Howl" prevailed against government censorship in a landmark obscenity trial 50 years ago." -- New York Times "Fifty years ago, on October 3, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Allen Ginsberg's great epic Beat-era poem HOWL was not obscene but instead, a work of literary and social merit. This ruling allowed for the publication of HOWL and exonerated the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who faced jail time and a fine 50 years ago for publishing 'HOWL.'" -- Pacifica.org Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and schoolteacher, in Paterson, New Jersey. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote Kaddish 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile. Carl Solomon to whom Howl is addressed, is a intuitive Bronx dadaist and prose-poet."
A Jewish Feminine Mystique? by In The Feminine Mystique, Jewish-raised Betty Friedan struck out against a postwar American culture that pressured women to play the role of subservient housewives. However, Friedan never acknowledged that many American women refused to retreat from public life during these years. Now, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? examines how Jewish women sought opportunities and created images that defied the stereotypes and prescriptive ideology of the "feminine mystique." As workers with or without pay, social justice activists, community builders, entertainers, and businesswomen, most Jewish women championed responsibilities outside their homes. Jewishness played a role in shaping their choices, shattering Friedan's assumptions about how middle-class women lived in the postwar years. Focusing on ordinary Jewish women as well as prominent figures such as Judy Holliday, Jennie Grossinger, and Herman Wouk's fictional Marjorie Morningstar, leading scholars explore the wide canvas upon which American Jewish women made their mark after the Second World War.
Judaism by The story of Judaism is a story of paradox. It is the story of how a small cluster of desert tribes gave birth to a monotheistic doctrine that profoundly shaped the history of human civilization. It is the story of how that initially obscure desert doctrine came to be codified into the Hebrew Bible, one of the world's greatest works of literature. It is the story of how a small minority came to be viewed by the majority as disproportionately powerful and, following pogrom and Holocaust, were driven to the edge of extinction. And it is the story of how a displaced people, globally dispersed throughout other nations for two-and-a-half millennia, came to forge a modern, secular Israeli state which many Jews believe to have been granted an explicitly divine mandate. Oliver Leaman carefully and creatively explores the nature of these apparent contradictions. He discusses the origins of the Jewish Bible; recounts the history of the Jewish people from the era of Patriarchs and Prophets through the Middle Ages up to the contemporary era; outlines the Jewish liturgical calendar and its major rites and modes of worship; and, considers the great variety of Jewish literatures (including modern post-Holocaust writers like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel), art, food and culture. Further chapters examine such topics as mysticism and kabbalah; modern Hebrew; interfaith relations; and, the highly contested question, 'Who is a Jew?'
The Adventures of Augie March by As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this novel by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Augie, the exuberant narrator-hero is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Deptression. A "born recruit," Augie makes himself available for a series of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as unworthy. His own oddity is reflected in the companions he encounters--plungers, schemers, risk-takers, and "hole-and corner" operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn or the would-be siren Thea, who travels with an eagle trained to hunt small creatures. This Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction by celebrated writer and critic Christopher Hitchens, makes a literary masterpiece available to a new generation of readers. 
How Should a Person Be? by A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium--a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum) Reeling from a failed marriage, Sheila, a twentysomething playwright, finds herself unsure of how to live and create. When Margaux, a talented painter and free spirit, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, enter her life, Sheila hopes that through close--sometimes too close--observation of her new friend, her new lover, and herself, she might regain her footing in art and life. Using transcribed conversations, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, the brilliant and always innovative Sheila Heti crafts a work that is part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part bawdy confessional. It's a totally shameless and dynamic exploration into the way we live now, which breathes fresh wisdom into the eternal questions: What is the sincerest way to love? What kind of person should you be?
We Are on Our Own by A stunning memoir of a mother and her daughter's survival in WWII and their subsequent lifelong struggle with faith In this captivating and elegantly illustrated graphic memoir, Miriam Katin retells the story of her and her mother's escape on foot from the Nazi invasion of Budapest. With her father off fighting for the Hungarian army and the German troops quickly approaching, Katin and her mother are forced to flee to the countryside after faking their deaths. Leaving behind all of their belongings and loved ones, and unable to tell anyone of their whereabouts, they disguise themselves as a Russian servant and illegitimate child, while literally staying a few steps ahead of the German soldiers. We Are on Our Own is a woman's attempt to rebuild her earliest childhood trauma in order to come to an understanding of her lifelong questioning of faith. Katin's faith is shaken as she wonders how God could create and tolerate such a wretched world, a world of fear and hiding, bargaining and theft, betrayal and abuse. The complex and horrific experiences on the run are difficult for a child to understand, and as a child, Katin saw them with the simple longing, sadness, and curiosity she felt when her dog ran away or a stranger made her mother cry. Katin's ensuing lifelong struggle with faith is depicted throughout the book in beautiful full-color sequences. We Are on Our Own is the first full-length graphic novel by Katin, at the age of sixty-three.The Montgomery College Library celebrates Jewish American Heritage Month (May 1-31, 2022).
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