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In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.
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NON FICTION
The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness
Mel Alexenberg
Intellect ISBN 1841501360
 This book develops the thesis that the transition from premodernism to postmodernism in art of the digital age represents a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture. Semiotic and morphological analysis of art and visual culture demonstrate the contemporary confluence between the deep structure of Hebraic consciousness and new directions in art that arise along the interface between scientific inquiry, digital technologies, and multicultural expressions. Complementing these two analytic methodologies, alternative methodologies of kabbalah and halakhah provide postmodern methods for extending into digital age art forms. Exemplary artworks are described in the text and will be illustrated with photographs.
Beyond These Walls
Janina Bauman
Virago Modern Classics ISBN 1-84408-319-5
 Janina Beauman was a year older than Anne Frank when the Second World War began but, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank, this is a story of survival. When Hitler's decree forced her family into the Warsaw Ghetto, Janina, an intelligent, lively girl, suddenly found herself in a cramped flat, hiding with other Jewish families. At first even curfews and the casual cruelty meted out by the German occupiers could not dim her passion for books, boys and romance. Then came the raids, and Janina, with her sister and mother, had to keep on the move, hiding in the ruins of the ghetto to avoid being one of thousands rounded up every day and deported to the camps. Their escape to the 'Aryan' side was followed by two years in hiding, taking shelter with those willing to help them and living in constant fear of betrayal. Told through her teenage diaries, giving her story a rare immediacy, this is the extraordinary tale of a passionate young woman's courage and survival.
Best of Blue
Lionel Blue
Continuum ISBN 082649045X
 A child of poor Jewish parentage, educated in the roughest part of the East End of London, Lionel Blue worked his way through Balliol College, Oxford and the Rabbinate to become a star of radio and stage. His ‘Thought for the Day’ broadcasts enchanted and invigorated millions of listeners. The Rabbi's humour became celebrated, making it even a regular feature of Private Eye, the satirical magazine, and his opening gambit of 'Good morning Peter, good morning Sue and good morning everyone' became famous. This new collection of the best of Lionel Blue’s writings sparkles with his characteristic and idiosyncratic humour. It is through this that his
profound wisdom has touched the hearts and minds of millions of appreciative listeners.
Rabbi Lionel Blue now lives in North London. He continues to appear frequently on radio and television. He is an honorary fellow of Grey College, University of Durham. He was once Chairman of the Beth Din of the RSGB
The Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
Penguin ISBN 9780241142486
 In his extraordinary new book, Alain de Botton explores the importance of buildings in our lives, pondering our attachment to our homes and considering such questions as: Why do people disagree about taste? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Not to mention: What makes a window frame attractive? Rooted in the idea that architecture has the power to influence how we feel and that we are different people in different buildings, The Beauty of Houses suggests how we might learn to build better, more attractive dwellings, in which we could stand a higher chance of happiness.
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Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
Carmen Callil
Jonathan Cape ISBN 0224078100
 Carmen Callil tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and conmen – Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and ‘Commissioner for Jewish Affairs’, who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work, ‘controlling’ its Jewish population.
Born into a politically moderate family, Louis Darquier (‘de Pellepoix’ was a later affectation) proceeded from modest beginnings to claw his way to power. He was the ultimate chancer: always broke, always desperate for attention, status, women and drink, he became ‘one of the few men to put on weight during the Second World War’. After it was over he decamped to Spain and would never be brought to justice for having sent thousands of Jews to the camps.
Early on in his career he married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of deception. Together they had a child, Anne Darquier, whom they promptly abandoned to grow up in England under an oppressive mantle of silence. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. Darquier’s ascent to power during the years leading up to World War II mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism and the role it played in the horrors that were to follow. The book is a portrait of a society that was desperate and fragmented and which was collectively guilty in choosing to turn a blind eye.
Carmen Callil founded the Virago Press. In 1982 she was appointed Managing Director of Chatto & Windus and The Hogarth Press. At Virago, she was responsible for the creation and development of the Virago Modern Classics list. Among the writers she published were Iris Murdoch, V.S.Pritchett, A.S.Byatt, Angela Carter, David Malouf, Rosamond Lehmann, Amos Oz, Edward Said, Antonia White, Michael Ignatieff, Marina Warner, Alan Hollinghurst, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison and Michael Holroyd. From 1985 she was a member of the Board of Channel 4 Television. She is now a critic and writer.
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Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait
Uri Dan
Palgrave ISBN 1403977909
In 1954 reporter Uri Dan met a young military commander named Ariel Sharon and followed him closely for more than half a century. Dan became Sharon's trusted advisor and a witness to the defining moments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- from secret meetings with heads of state, to open warfare in the Sinai. This riveting combination of political history, narrative biography, interviews, and correspondence sheds new light on the conflict in the Middle East and provides an intimate, definitive portrait of Ariel Sharon, a man whose life is inextricably intertwined with Israel's destiny. With Hamas governing Palestine, Ariel Sharon gravely ill and the party he founded, the Kadima, in control of the Knesset, this book couldn't be more timely.
I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
Bernice Eisenstein
Picador ISBN 0330441574
 A searing memoir told in a unique fusion of illustrations and prose
'The Holocaust is a drug and I have entered an opium den . . . I will discover that there is no end to the dealers I can find for just one more hit. My parents don't even realize that they are drug dealers. They could never imagine the kind of high H gives, making me want to dive into its endless depth. Sending me out to libraries to read any and every book that dealt with the Holocaust . . . the paper could all be chopped up into a fine powder, like ash, perhaps, laid down, row upon row, and snorted'
Uniquely structured and uniquely told, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is a distillation of Bernice Eisenstein's memories of her 1950s childhood as the daughter of Yiddish-speaking parents whose experiences during the war, while rarely spoken of, were nonetheless a constant presence.
Eisenstein's parents met in Auschwitz as the war was ending, and were married shortly after its liberation. This extraordinary memoir began to take root in her imagination several years ago, almost a decade after her father's death; she began with a series of drawings of her father, but realized that pictures alone could not convey what she had to say - 'And so I entered into a dance between pictures and the written word. I had two languages that worked together - to translate the layered meaning of my past, and that of my parents, on to the page.'
In an amazing synthesis of prose and illustration, and with poignancy and searing honesty, Eisenstein explores with ineffable sadness and bittersweet humour her childhood growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, while also addressing universal themes of memory, loss and recovery of the past. I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is striking, original and unforgettable; it has the makings of a classic.
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The Jewish Princess Cookbook
Tracy Fine & Georgie Tarn
Quadrille Publishing ISBN
1 84400 3620
 Perfectly attuned to todays Jewish Princess and all those who aspire to that lifestyle, this is a timely cookbook laced with humour and a dash of chutzpah. It brings the Jewish way of life, food and values into the 21st century!
In our ever changing world we have seen many trends concerning women come and go. Now the wheel has come full circle with the re-emergence of the modern housewife women who can combine family, work, looking great and, to put it in a nutshell, having their cake and eating it, but looking like they havent! The Jewish Princess Cookbook isnt just a cookbook its a way of life. Its slightly irreverent tone delivers a host of fabulous traditional as well as nouveau dishes of Jewish cuisine. With recent attention on Kabbalah, as well as the rise of bling, the playing field is more culturally diverse than ever. The Jewish Princess knows that eating remains at the heart of family life and this cookbook will be enjoyed by many for years to come.
By the time readers have read, cooked and enjoyed whats between the pages, they will realise they all have a little bit of the Jewish Princess within them.
Tracey Fine and Georgie Tarn first met at the tender age of nine and set off together down the road called life. They have both been very successful in their chosen fields: Georgie was a top London aerobics trainer and Tracey runs an international Internet giftware company. Now, with five children between them, they are involved in charity work, currently The Kiss for a Child which raises money for childrens projects in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. After a lifetime of experiences, they have used their knowledge and shared values to create The Jewish Princess Cookbook. Check out their website.
How Football explains the world
Franklin Foer
Arrow ISBN 0099492261
 What in the world has the power to liberate women in Iran while provoking antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland, to lure Nigerians to the cold of the Ukraine while heating up class warfare in the US heartlands, and both profit local gangsters and create local – and international - celebrities? Foer presents an unexpected, uniquely revealing tour of the politics and culture of football from Milan to Tehran. He examines the game’s role in sustaining ancient hatreds and rivalries (Serbia’s Red Star and Croatia’s Dinamo); in supporting the migration of players and the rise of the football oligarchs (such as Silvio Berlusconi, President of AC Milan – and of Italy); and in defending the virtues and vices of old-fashioned nationalism. As Foer brilliantly illuminates, the Balkan War, anti-Semitism, Jewish identity, racism, social integration, media manipulation, and American patriotism have all been influenced by, as well as have had a dramatic effect on, football. On his travels, Foer encounters a collection of fans that is stranger than fiction: from a British hooligan with a Jewish mother, a Nazi father and a career as a soldier of fortune, to a fan club in Serbia that turns into a brutal anti-Muslim paramilitary unit. The result is an unforgettable parade of uniquely memorable fans – each set into his – or her – unique political and cultural context.
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Yes, But Is It Good For the Jews?
Jonny Geller
Penguin ISBN
9780713999594
 For the first time, the secrets of the ancient art of Judology are revealed. Think of it as the third cousin of Kabbalah. Yes, but is it Good for the Jews? is a hilarious and indispensable A–Z of world history and popular culture, measuring whether a wide variety of subjects are, in fact, Good for the Jews.
We can reveal to the outside world (yes, Non-Jews are allowed to buy this book), the mathematical formula that determines whether someone or something is Good for the Jews. The Judological Institute of Spiritual Mathematics (or JISM) will show that while Guilt, Google and Star Wars are Good for the Jews, Sudoku and Colonic Irrigation are Not. In a whistlestop tour you’ll also discover just what’s right about Big Brother, what’s wrong about Madonna, what products you should avoid, and which ones you really should rush out and buy.
Bonus features include a list of top Jews to marry (Scarlet Johanssen is Jewish!), a ‘Jew or False’ quiz and ‘Ashamed of Your Name? Jews that Switched’ – which reveals the original name of Kirk Douglas, among others.
For the confused Gentile, a simple questionnaire ‘How Jew are You?’ may help. (Remember, as the first Prime Minister of Israel himself said, ‘Anyone meshugge enough to call himself a Jew, IS a Jew.’)
You can visit Jonny Geller's website and blog at www.isitgoodforthejews.com.
Jonny Geller, Director of JISM, whose international headquarters is in Cockfosters.
Surviving Hitler and Mussolini : Daily Life in Occupied Europe
Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka and Anette Warring
Berg ISBN 1845201809
 Surviving Hitler and Mussolini examines how far everyday life was possible in a situation of total war and brutal occupation. Its theme is the social experience of occupation in German- and Italian-occupied Europe, and in particular the strategies ordinary people developed in order to survive. Survival included meeting the challenges of shortage and hunger, of having to work for the enemy, of women entering into intimate relations with soldiers, of the preservation of culture in a fascist universe, of whether and how to resist, and the reaction of local communities to measures of reprisal taken in response to resistance. What emerges is that ordinary people were less heroes, villains or victims than inventive and resourceful individuals able to maintain courage and dignity despite the conditions they faced.
The book adopts a comparative approach from Denmark and the Netherlands to Poland and Greece, and offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War.
Robert Gildea is Professor of French History at the University of Oxford.
Olivier Wieviorka is Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, Paris. Anette Warring is Professor of History, University of Roskilde, Denmark.
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Leonard Woolf: A Biography
Victoria Glendinning
Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-4653-5
 Victoria Glendinning draws on her deep knowledge of the twentieth century literary scene, and on her meticulous research into previously untapped sources, to write the first full biography of the extraordinary man who was the "dark star" at the centre of the Bloomsbury set, and the definitive portrait of the Woolf marriage. A man of extremes, Leonard Woolf was ferocious and tender, violent and self-restrained, opinionated and non-judgmental, always an outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers.
He has been portrayed either as Virginia's saintly caretaker or as her oppressor, the substantial range and influence of his own achievements overshadowed by Virginia's fame and the tragedy of her suicide. But Leonard was a pivotal figure of his age, whose fierce intelligence touched the key literary and political events that shaped the early decades of the twentieth century and would resonate into the post-World War II era.
Glendinning beautifully evokes Woolf 's coming-of-age in turn-of-the-century London. The scholarship boy from a prosperous Jewish family would cut his own path through the world of the British public school, contending with the lingering anti-Semitism of Imperial Age Britain. Immediately upon entering Trinity College, Cambridge, Woolf became one of an intimate group of vivid personalities who would form the core of the Bloomsbury circle: the flamboyant Lytton Strachey; Toby Stephen, "the Goth," through whom Leonard would meet Stephen's sister Virginia; and Clive Bell. Glendinning brings to life their long nights of intense discussion of literature and the vicissitudes of sex, and charts Leonard's course as he becomes the lifelong friend of John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster.
She unearths the crucial influence of Woolf 's seven years as a headstrong administrator in colonial Ceylon, where he lost confidence in the imperial mission, deciding to abandon Ceylon in order to marry the psychologically troubled Virginia Stephen. Glendinning limns the true nature of Leonard's devotion to Virginia, revealing through vivid depiction of their unconventional marriage how Leonard supported Virginia through her breakdowns and in her writing. In co-founding with Virginia the Hogarth Press, he provided a secure publisher for Virginia's own boldly experimental works.
As the éminence grise of the early Labour Party, working behind the scenes,Woolf became a leading critic of imperialism, and his passionate advocacy of collective security to prevent war underpinned the charter of the League of Nations. After Virginia's death, he continued to forge his own iconoclastic way, engaging in a long and happy relationship with a married woman.
This is a shrewdly perceptive and lively portrait of a complex man of extremes and contradictions in whom passion fought with reason and whose far-reaching influence is long overdue.
The Divided Self
Israel and the Jewish Psyche Today
David J. Goldberg
IB Tauris ISBN 184511054
 How should Jews respond to an age of militant Zionism and resurgent anti-Semitism? Is insisting on a separate sense of identity anachronistic and dangerous, or is it the only way of preserving the Jewish cultural heritage? Rabbi David Goldberg, one of today's most respected and outspoken Jewish leaders, grapples with the dilemmas of contemporary Jewishness with characteristic candour, and sketches the emerging faultlines in the Jewish sense of identity. He offers up a completely fresh reading of Jewish history, arguing that the narrative of relentless woe and suffering popularised by nineteenth-century writers, such as George Eliot was based on a highly selective reading of the past. Goldberg retraces the history of the Jews, and rejects the mythology of eternal victimhood. Instead, he focuses on the survival strategies that have been pursued throughout the centuries. He contrasts the pragmatic flexibility of the Jewish Diaspora with the military assertiveness of modern Israel. With wit, insight and compassion he highlights the growing gulf between Israeli and Diaspora Jewishness. Following G.B. Shaw's quip about Britain and America, Goldberg argues that Israeli and Diaspora Jews are in danger of becoming divided by a common heritage. This book will stimulate, engage and provoke readers of all beliefs and cultures.
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Let Me Create a Paradise God Said to Himself
Hirsh Goodman
Public Affairs ISBN 1586482432
 Hirsch Goodman’s autobiography traces his ‘journey of conscience’ from Johannesburg to Jerusalem. The early chapters are among the most powerful as they trace his childhood and adolescence during the apartheid years in South Africa, his roots in a Zionist home and the influence of the Habonim movement.
After making aliyah to Israel in 1965, together with his Time magazine collection, he confronts the reality of the Zionist dream. On kibbutz he notes, “socialism seemed to stop at the front gate.”
Hirsch achieves his aim of serving in the army as a paratrooper so we are able to experience the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War from behind the scenes. In parallel runs his career as a journalist, first as military correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, then as editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Report. His insights into Israeli politics, the intifadas, the war in Lebanon and the anomalies of life in the Gaza settlements and refugee camps are particularly valuable.
Along the way there are two marriages and four children. His son Shai undertakes the reverse journey, from Israel to South Africa. Serving in the Israeli army during the intifada comes at a price.
You can hear Hirsch Goodman talking about his book at Jewish Book Week, with Jewish Chronicle editor Jeff Barak, and South African author Jonathan Kaplan, on Saturday 4 March at 9pm.
Click here to view this session
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For Those I Loved
Martin Gray
Hampton Roads ISBN 1571745270
 We need only to look back to Rwanda, and now to Darfur, to see that once again we are living the worst of times. Who better to guide our understanding and give us hope than Martin Gray—a man who survived the worst of times, flourished, and still managed to find joy in living?
Martin has come full circle since his boyhood world was turned upside down by the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Overnight, the teenage Martin and his family were immersed in the horrors of the Holocaust and held captive in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a nightmare of brutality, starvation, and death. Martin became a clever smuggler to help his family survive—until the “butchers” of Treblinka took his mother and brothers. Against impossible odds, Martin survived and returned to fight in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As the Nazis incinerated the ghetto, he escaped to fight with the partisans, and then the Red Army.
After the war, Martin made his way to New York. The cunning and skills he developed during the war enabled him to learn the language and create a successful business. At 35, he retired to France with a fortune and a beautiful Dutch wife, starting a family and living in happiness and peace. But his world was shattered once again by a forest fire that engulfed his fleeing family. In a tragic repeat of history, Martin alone survived.
Martin Gray's past could be our future if we don"t heed his call to be the change. In this 35th anniversary expanded edition of For Those I Loved, a book beloved by millions of readers worldwide, Martin reminds us that the past is connected to the present. Only we can ensure that history is not repeated.
Martin Gray still lives in the South of France and has devoted his life to his family, writing, human rights, and environmental and cultural causes. He received the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Award and the Gold Medal of European Merit.
Fear: Anti -Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation
Jan T. Gross
Princeton University Press ISBN: 0-691-12878-2
 Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Poles were killed. Of these, more than half were Jews killed in the Holocaust. Ninety percent of the world's second largest Jewish community was annihilated. But despite the calamity shared by Poland's Jews and non-Jews, anti-Semitic violence did not stop in Poland with the end of the war. Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their Polish hometowns after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in Kielce, Poland, a year after the war ended. Jan Gross's Fear is a detailed reconstruction of this pogrom and the Polish reactions to it that attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war?
Gross argues that postwar Polish anti-Semitism cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society filled with people who had participated in the Nazi campaign of murder and plunder, people for whom Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said that Poland's Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state.
For more than half a century, what happened to Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Gross at last brings the truth to light.
Jan T. Gross was a 2001 National Book Award nominee for his widely acclaimed Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. He teaches history at Princeton University, where he is Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society.
Shylock Is Shakespeare
Kenneth Gross
University of Chicago Press ISBN 0226309770
Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare’s most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare’s plays? Kenneth Gross posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself.
Marvelously speculative and articulate, Gross’s book argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard’s power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses—characters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the author’s control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare’s own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeare’s ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. Gross’s vision of Shylock as Shakespeare’s covert double leads to a probing analysis of the character’s peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, Gross examines the character’s hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity.
A bravura critical performance, Shylock Is Shakespeare will fascinate readers with its range of reference, its union of rigor and play, and its conjectural—even fictive—means of coming to terms with the question of Shylock, ultimately taking readers to the very heart of Shakespeare’s humanizing genius.
Lion’s Honey
David Grossman
Canongate ISBN 1841956562
 'There are few other Bible stories with so much drama and action, narrative fireworks and raw emotion, as we find in the tale of Samson: the battle with the lion; the three hundred burning foxes; the women he bedded and the one woman that he loved; his betrayal by all the women in his life, from his mother to Delilah; and, in the end, his murderous suicide, when he brought the house down on himself and three thousand Philistines.
'Yet, beyond the wild impulsiveness, the chaos, the din, we can make out a life story that is, at bottom, the tortured journey of a single, lonely and turbulent soul who never found, anywhere, a true home in the world, whose very body was a harsh place of exile.
'For me, this discovery, this recognition, is the point at which the myth - for all its grand images, its larger-than-life adventures - slips silently into the day-to-day existence of each of us, into our most private moments, our buried secrets.'
From David Grossman's Introduction to Lion's Honey
"His journey takes us to the heart of ourselves, in this millennia-old creation of a man like Oedipus whose tragedy was that his own predestined story was too big for his soul to bear." The Independent
"Taking each element of the Samson story as written in the Bible, Grossman approaches the text with the modern advantage of psychology and historical knowledge... Some might object to a psychological deconstruction of a story never intended to relate to an individual character but Grossman's engaging approach is certainly successful in keeping an ancient myth alive." Metro
Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with the Man who Led Mossad
Efraim Halevy
Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN 0297848313
From Operation Desert Storm to the beginning of US incursions into Iraq, Efraim Halevy was Deputy Director and then Director of Israel's Mossad, arguably the most developed and, sometimes, ruthless intelligence service in the world. Man in the Shadows is Halevy's memoir of that period from his vantage point inside the Mossad, as well as a look at what lies ahead for a world transformed by Islamic terrorism. Having served as the secret envoy to Prime Ministers Rabin, Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon, Halevy was privy to, and collector of, some of the most sensitive information coming out of the region. Beginning with a prologue that describes a visit he made to Jordan in 1993, Halevy looks back to Desert Storm, an event he calls 'an epic of unfinished business' and brings the reader up to the present day through 9/11 and the WMD crisis in Iraq.
Informed by his extraordinary access from the beginning of his Mossad career in 1961, he writes frankly of the Israeli PMs he worked under as well as most of the other major players in the region and around the world: Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, Hosni Mubaraq, Crown Prince Abdullah, Muammar Gaddafi, Presidents Clinton and Bush, as well as former CIA director George Tenet and counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. Though Halevy looks to the past, he also looks to the future and talks bluntly about how the world might achieve peace in the region and elsewhere. Much of what he has to say will surprise and shock even those readers well versed in the complexities of the region.
Efraim Halevy was born in London in 1934. He was head of the Mossad between 1998-2002 and then Head of the National Security Council and National Security Advisor to Prime Minister Sharon from 2002-2003. Previously he had been deputy head of the Mossad from 1990-1995 (which included Operation Desert Storm). Before his appointment to the Mossad he was Israel's ambassador to the European Union, from 1996-1998. During the time he worked for the Israeli government, he was the secret envoy to five of that country's Prime Ministers: Rabin, Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon. Efraim Halevy is now the Head of the Centre for Strategic and Policy Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In April 2005 he received the prestigious Chaim Herzog Prize for extraordinary contributions to the state of Israel.
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Suburban Shaman – Tales from Medicine’s Frontline
Cecil Helman
Hammersmith Press ISBN: 1-905140-08-8
 ‘Medicine is not just about science. It’s also all about stories, and about the mingling of narratives among doctors,
and between them and their patients.’
So writes Cecil Helman after 27 years as a family practitioner in and around London interlaced with training and research as a medical anthropologist, comparing a wide variety of medical systems and other forms of healing.This unique combination of frontline health worker and detached academic informs the many stories that make up this fascinating book. It also informs the author’s insights into what human suffering can teach us about ourselves and our own attitudes to health and illness, whether we are deliverers or recipients of health care.
With insight and compassion, Dr Helman’s stories take the reader on a journey from apartheid South Africa, where he did his medical training, to the London of the early 1970s, where for a short time he foreswore medicine to become an anthropologist and poet; from ship’s doctor on a Mediterranean cruise to family practitioner in London; from observing curative trance dances in the favelas of Brazil to interviewing sangomas in South Africa.
While trained in the Western tradition and with many years of practice in that system, Dr Helman’s anthropological insight leads him to view illness in a wider personal, social and cultural context, considering elements beyond the purely physical. In pleading for this holistic approach he celebrates family medicine which ‘in its quiet and unassuming way, and every day of the week, is still at the very frontline of human suffering’.
Dr Cecil Helman was born in Cape Town, South Africa into a family of doctors. He studied medicine there during the apartheid era before moving to the UK where he studied anthropology at University College London. After a spell as a ship’s doctor he became a family practitioner in London while also developing a distinguished academic career. He has been a Visiting Fellow in Social Medicine and Health Policy at Harvard Medical School and a Visiting Professor in Multi-cultural Health at University of New South Wales. He retired from clinical practice in 2002 and is currently Professor of Medical Anthropology at Brunel University and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Primary Care & Population Sciences, Royal Free & University College Medical School, London, UK. He is the author of the leading textbook Culture, Health and Illness which has been used in 42 countries, and of a book of essays, and several books of poetry. Suburban Shaman is the story of his experiences.
Mackerel at Midnight: Growing up Jewish on the Shetland Isles
Ethel G. Hofman
Mercat ISBN 1841831107
 Ethel Hofman grew up in the only Jewish family on Shetland. This is the story of her family and childhood, and of the meeting of two diverse cultures in a unique landscape. Mackerel at Midnight blends memoir and cookbook, showing how food can strengthen family and cultural bonds, and celebrates the tolerance and warmth of one Jewish family and the community that embraced them.
Ethel G. Hofman grew up in Lerwick, Shetland and later emigrated to America where she now lives. She is a food journalist, author, and a past president of the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
Treasures of Jewish Heritage
The Jewish Museum, London
Scala Publishers ISBN 1 85759 413 4
 The publication of Treasures of Jewish Heritage celebrates in a richly illustrated catalogue the outstanding collections of The Jewish Museum, London.
The history of Jewish people in Britain and the context of religious life, is interweaved with specialist essays by experts on the range of media represented within the collection (Manuscripts, Prints and Drawings, Life Cycle objects, Silver and Textiles). Further essays on the Jewish East End, refugees from Nazism and the diverse patterns of Jewish migration to Britain, are illuminated by fascinating photographs, prints and objects from the Museum's collection.
Contributors to the publication include historians Sir Martin Gilbert and Dr Anne Kershen, as well as authorities such as Dr David Bindman, Professor of Art History at University College London; Anthony Phillips, International Director of Silver and Objects of Vertu at Christie’s; Dr Shalom Sabar, Associate Professor of Jewish and Comparative Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ilana Tahan, Curator of Hebrew Collections at the British Library. The book is introduced with a foreword by Lord Moser.
This is the first major publication of the Jewish Museum in London’s collections for more than 30 years. The Museum has recently undertaken an extensive programme of digital photography which is utilised beautifully in this new publication. Treasures of Jewish Heritage updates the information in RD Barnett’s Catalogue of the Jewish Museum, published in 1974 and now out of print and a collector’s item in its own right, but also includes important new acquisitions of recent decades and essays on the social history collections of the former London Museum of Jewish Life, now amalgamated with the Jewish Museum. This catalogue publication complements the new online searchable collections, offering a comprehensive view of the collections, while the website www.jewishmuseum.org.uk allows researchers to search for more than 11,500 individual objects.
Available from The Jewish Museum Shop at 129-131 Albert Street, Camden Town NW1 7NB. Tel: 020 7284 1997. E: shop@jewishmuseum.org.uk.
Barrier: The Seam of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Isabel Kershner
 To the Israelis it is a security fence or separation barrier; to Palestinians “an apartheid wall”. The two sides agree that it is ugly, both in appearance and in effect. Looping around the Israeli-occupied West Bank, thrusting occasional fingers deep into the occupied lands to take in a far-flung settlement block, the wall divides many Palestinians from their own fields and schools, and traps thousands in a Kafkaesque “seam zone”, with the wall to the east of them and the old “green line” border with Israel to the west.
If you really wonder why Israel is building its wall, and want to understand its human consequences, invest in Isabel Kershner's readable, compassionate and thoroughly fair “Barrier”. An Israeli journalist, she talks to victims and activists from both sides of the line, bringing lives and landscape vividly to life at the same time as putting the wall in its political context.
The idea started on Israel's left, and was at first reviled on the right because it would signal plainly in concrete the end of the dream of a Greater Israel in the whole of the West Bank. Ms Kershner also does Israelis the common decency of taking seriously, as one should, the claim that one of the wall's primary purposes, and the reason for its popularity, was a desire to defend themselves from the suicide-bombings of the recent intifada.
The dominant tone of Ms Kershner's book is one of poignancy, captured best in the parallel interviews she conducts on each side of the line with Avi Ohion of the left-wing Kibbutz Metzer in Israel and Burhan Sirhan of the wretched Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank.
In November 2002 Mr Sirhan's son crossed the green line, kicked in the door of one of the Metzer bungalows and shot dead Mr Ohion's wife and two young sons. Through Ms Kershner, Mr Sirhan, a sad veteran of the Palestinian struggle, sends the father his condolences: “You lost your children and I lost my son through this crazy war.” Mr Ohion, in tears, is unconsoled. In the end, he recognises that there will be a Palestinian state. “In the meantime the fence has to go up all the way, however brutal it may be, in order to save life.” Grown men are crying on both sides of the wall.
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Wrestling Jacob : Deception, Identity, and Freudian Slips in Genesis
Shmuel Klitsner
Urim Publication ISBN 965-7108-93-4
 In Wrestling Jacob, a master teacher introduces us to the biblical Jacob in an original and compelling psychological reading that takes us inside the ancient Hebrew text.
As his lens focuses on the Bible’s artistic use of anomalous language and intertextual allusion, Klitsner moves seamlessly from text to subtext, from conscious to subconscious. Readers may be surprised to discover that the dynamics of the Genesis narratives closely mirror the psychoanalytic description of the universal human struggle for wholeness and autonomy.
Settle back and enjoy this intellectually exhilarating exploration of dreams, Freudian slips, resistances and transference, as Jacob, mirroring everyman, wrestles with men and God and struggles to be blessed.
The book Wrestling Jacob: Deception, Identity, and Freudian Slips in Genesis presents close readings of the biblical stories of Jacob from both literary and psychological perspectives. The readings explore the relationship between text and subtext as reflecting the relationship between the conscious and subconscious.
On one level, this book is about Jacob’s personal wrestling with his own angels and demons, his struggle to build a ladder between his own internal heaven and earth. On another level, it is about deceptions – of ourselves and of others – that threaten the fragile development of our identities.
Perhaps above all else, Wrestling Jacob introduces a new way to read the Bible, in which unusual word choices, odd syntax, and striking parallels conspire to reveal profound new meanings in an ancient text.
Rabbi Shmuel (Steven) Klitsner, a student of the late Nehama Leibowitz and co-author of the acclaimed novel The Lost Children of Tarshish, has trained a generation of Bible teachers at Jerusalem’s Midreshet Lindenbaum College and at the London School of Jewish Studies. His film credits include the award winning Hannukah animation “Lights.”
A Lover of Unreason : The Biography of Assia Wevill
Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev
Robson ISBN
1861059744
 'Assia was my true wife, and the best friend I ever had', wrote a heart-broken Ted Hughes, after Assia Wevill surrendered her life and that of their four-year old daughter to the fumes from the gas oven in her London flat, in March 1969 six years after Sylvia Plath had suffered a similiar fate.
Diva, she-devil, enchantress, muse, Lillith, Jezebel. The exquisitely beautiful Assia Wevill inspired or provoked many epithets in the course of three marriages and in pursuit of a destiny that took her from dark pre-war Berlin, to Palestine during the British Mandate and then to London in the swinging 'Sixties. In the end, none would prove to be more fitting than the epithet- and epitaph- she chose for herself: 'Here lies a lover of unreason, and an exile'.
The story of the ultimately tragic failure in the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, twentieth-century poetry's most celebrated literary couple, has always been related from one of two conflicting points of view: hers or his. Missing for more than four decades had been a third, equally relevant and no less fascinating perspective: that of Ted Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill.
The Lover of Unreason, the first biography of Assia Wevill, views afresh the Plath-Hughes relationship and marriage with a keen, revisionary eye, and at the same time, recounts the journey that shaped her life. Hers is a complex story, formed as it is by the pull of often contrary forces: fatal attraction and obsessive love, fidelity and adultery, cruelty and tenderness, dependence and rebellion, envy and self-sacrifice.
Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev are both distinguished literary journalists and authors, and have been researching Assia Wevill's story for 15 years. In the course of their research they have unearthed a mass of personal documents, and interviewed all the key witnesses, most of them speaking here for the first time. Koren and Negev's previous book, In Our Hearts We Were Giants, a dwarf family's survival of the Holocaust, was published in eight languages, and inspired two documentary films.
The Ladder of Jacob: Ancient Interpretations of the Biblical Story of Jacob and His Children
James L. Kugel
Princeton University Press ISBN: 0-691-12122-2
 The biblical story of Jacob and his children must have troubled ancient readers. By any standard, this was a family with problems. Jacob's oldest son Reuben is said to have slept with his father's concubine Bilhah. The next two sons, Simeon and Levi, tricked the men of a nearby city into undergoing circumcision, and then murdered all of them as revenge for the rape of their sister. Judah, the fourth son, had sexual relations with his own daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, jealous of their younger sibling Joseph, the brothers conspired to kill him; they later relented and merely sold him into slavery. These stories presented a particular challenge for ancient biblical interpreters. After all, Jacob's sons were the founders of the nation of Israel and ought to have been models of virtue.
In The Ladder of Jacob, renowned biblical scholar James Kugel retraces the steps of ancient biblical interpreters as they struggled with such problems. Kugel reveals how they often fixed on a little detail in the Bible's wording to "deduce" something not openly stated in the narrative. Thus, Simeon and Levi, they concluded, tricked no one. As for Reuben, he was led astray after having caught sight of Bilhah bathing, while Judah was the unfortunate victim of his own weakness for alcohol.
These are among the earliest examples of ancient biblical interpretation (midrash). Through careful analysis of these retellings, Kugel is able to reconstruct how ancient interpreters worked.
James L. Kugel, formerly Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, is Director of the Institute for the History of the Jewish Bible at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where he also serves as Professor of Bible. Kugel is the author of ten books, including The God of Old: Great Poems of the Bible and The Bible as It Was (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and the winner of the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion in 2001). He lives in Jerusalem.
Nonviolence
Mark Kurlansky
Jonathan Cape
ISBN: 0224077910
 The conventional history of nations, even continents, is a history of warfare. According to this view, all the important ideas and significant changes of humankind occured as part of an effort to win one violent, bloody conflict or another.
This approach to history is only one of many examples of how societies promote warfare and glorify violence. But there have always been a few who have refused to fight. Governments have long regarded this minority as a danger to society and have imprisoned and abused them and encouraged their persecution.
This was true of those who refused Europe’s wars, who refused to fight for their king, who refused to fight for Napoleon as well as against him. It was true of Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell – outcasts in rural Sussex because they opposed World War I at a time when the British socialist movement described a bayonet as a weapon with a worker on each end.It was true of the first American draft dodger, a Menonite who believed in American independence but believed it was wrong to use violence and rejected the call of his local militia. It was true of the many abolitionists who had dedicated their lives to stopping slavery but refused to fight in the Civil War.
Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and, most impressively, the Menonites and the Quakers - all have passages in their major teachings rejecting warfare as immoral. In this brilliant exploration of pacifism, these points of view are discussed alongside such diverse non-violence theorists as Tolstoy, Shelley, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aldous Huxley, Erasmus, Confucius and Lao Tse to show how many modern ideas - such as a united Europe, the United Nations, and the abolition of slavery - originated in such non-violence movements.
Parallel Lines
Peter Lantos
Arcadia ISBN 1905147201
 This is a story of a young boy’s journey from a sleepy provincial town in Hungary during the Second World War to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen.
Accompanied by his parents, he found himself uprooted from the cocoon of a secure family home in the wave of deportation of Hungarian Jews during the Nazi occupation. Unlike other books dealing with this period, this is not a holocaust story, but a child’s recollection of a journey full of surprise, excitement, bereavement and terror. Yet this remains a testimony of survival, overcoming obstacles which to adults may seem insurmountable but to a child were just part of an adventure and, ultimately, recovery. After having established a career in the West, the author decided to revisit the stages on his earlier journeys, reliving the past through the perspective of the present. Along the way, ghosts from the past are finally laid to rest by the kindness of new friends.
Peter Lantos is a clinical neuroscientist who has recently retired from a Chair at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. He is internationally renowned in his field and edited the leading textbook on neuropathology. Born in Hungary, he has been living in London for nearly four decades.
Anglo-Jewish poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein
By Peter Lawson
 Any book that brings John Rodker out of neglect claims attention. One that puts him alongside Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon upholds a challenge. A new biography of Sassoon was published last year and Rosenberg’s reputation has been appraised and raised afresh as new editions and studies have appeared. Peter Lawson’s approach sees these three early twentieth-century poets in the light of an Anglo-Jewish consciousness that brings them out from the critical shadows where, in particular, Rodker’s style and character as an English poet languish under the reputation of his contemporaries and semblables. By seeing how these writers display all the varieties of transition, inter-connection and contrast of a Jewish consciousness (regardless of whether grounded in Yiddish or even Hebrew at all) became grounded within the English tradition, Lawson refreshes the understanding of what these writers achieve within converging traditions and the strategies they use.
The other three poets that are the subject of Lawson’s approach are John Silkin, Karen Gershon and Elaine Feinstein. Karen Gershon (née KaetheLoewenthal) alone of the six writers was not born in England so as immigrant, refugee, and displaced person her work exemplifies most graphically the disparities and interconnections shared in different ways with the other subjects of the book. By working out how these writers assert themselves as Jewish writers in English, Lawson rescues them from the marginalisation that general criticism accords them and suggests how the Anglo-Jewish writer can stand unprompted.
The great question of identity that overshadows this book is the hyphen of the ‘Anglo-Jewish’ label. As in other areas this ‘hyphen’ represents diplomacy, negotiation and the braiding of cultures, and suggests that the ‘English’ with which the ‘Jewish’ is integrated is the better understood because of the negotiation achieved. It is a subject dear to Anthony Rudolf who contributes an introduction to the book. Peter Lawson’s credentials are grounded in his earlier project as editor of Passionate revival: Jewish poetry in Britain since 1945 (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2001) and as a poet in his own right.
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Mendel's Daughter
Martin Lemelman
Jonathan Cape ISBN: 0224078569
Just as Art Spiegelman’s Maus presented a dramatic new framework in which to view the Holocaust, Mendel’s Daughter combines an unforgettable true story with elegant, haunting illustrations to shed new light on one of history’s darkest periods. In 1989 Martin Lemelman videotaped his mother, Gusta, as she opened up about her childhood in 1930’s Poland and her eventual escape from Nazi persecution. Now, in Mendel’s Daughter, Lemelman lovingly transcribes his mother’s harrowing testimony in her own words. He brings her narrative to life with his own powerful black and white drawings, interspersed with reproductions of actual photos, documents and other relics from that unsettled era. The result is a wholly original, authentic and moving account of hope and survival in a time of despair.
Mendel's Daughter opens with a picture of shtetl life, filled with homey images that evoke the richness of foods and flowers, of family and friends and Jewish tradition. Soon, however, Gusta’s girlhood is cut short as her family becomes witness to the rise of Hitler, rumours of war, invasion, occupation, roundups and pogroms. We follow Gusta into flight, hiding and survival: into the unfolding uncertainty of those terrible times.
As solemn and as hopeful as a prayer, Mendel’s Daughter is Martin Lemelman’s testament to Gusta’s bravery and a celebration of her perseverance. The devastatingly simple power of a mother’s words and a son’s illustrations combine to create a work that is both intensely personal and universally resonant.
Female Chauvinist Pigs : Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Ariel Levy
Simon and Schuster ISBN
0743249895
 Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig--the new brand of "empowered woman" who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces "raunch culture" wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women--and of themselves. They think they're being brave, they think they're being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them.
In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the best-seller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture--the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be "one of the guys." And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women's movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved.
In the tradition of Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, Levy pulls apart the myth of the Female Chauvinist Pig and argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go.
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The Gibbon's in Decline but the Horse is Stable
Anthropoemorphic Ramblings
Maureen Lipman
Robson Books ISBN 1861059698
An Owl adored a sorceress
But loved a white witch too
Which to wed and which to bed?
To wit: which witch to woo?
From the ostra-cised Ostrich to the dandy Cayote they called Don Quixote, from the fetishistic Zebra to the missing Lynx, here is a delighful menagerie of irreverent, laugh-aloud animal verse from the ever-inventive pen of the wonderful Maureen Lipman. Brilliantly illustrated by Gerald Scarfe, Posy Simmonds,Mac, Jan Pienkowski and other leading cartoonists, and with all royalties going to the International Myeloma Foundation, here is a book destined for the best-seller lists.
One of Britain's best-loved actresses, Maureen Lipman is currently directing the BBC dramatisation of her late husband Jack Rosenthal's autobiography in which she appears. Her best-selling books include How Was It For You?, and Lip Reading.
In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture
Ted Merwin
Rutgers University Press ISBN 0-8135-3809-2
 The Jazz Age of the 1920s is an era remembered for illegal liquor, innovative music and dance styles, and burgeoning ideas of social equality. It was also the period during which second-generation Jews began to emerge as a significant demographic in New York City. In Their Own Image examines the growing cultural visibility of Jewish life amid this vibrant scene.
From the vaudeville routines of Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and Sophie Tucker, to the slew of Broadway comedies about Jewish life and the silent films that showed immigrant families struggling to leave the ghetto, images and representations of Jews became staples of interwar popular culture. Through the performing arts, Jews expressed highly ambivalent feelings about their identification with Jewish and American cultures. Ted Merwin shows how they became American by producing and consuming not images of another group, but images of themselves. As a result, they humanized Jewish stereotypes, softened anti-Semitic attitudes, and laid the groundwork for today's Jewish comedians.
An entertaining look at the role popular culture plays in promoting the acculturation of an ethnic group, In Their Own Image enhances our understanding of American Jewish history and provides a model for the study of other groups and their integration into mainstream society.
Ted Merwin teaches Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA) where he also directs the Milton B. Asbell Center for Jewish Life. For the last six years, he has served as chief theater critic of the New York Jewish Week, the largest-circulation Jewish newspaper in the United States. His articles appear in newspapers throughout the country.
The Earl of Petticoat Lane
Andrew Miller
William Heineman ISBN 0434013307
 When Henry Freedman met Miriam Claret in 1929, he was a barrow boy and she was a milliner's apprentice.
In 1953, they were presented to the Queen.
In this remarkable and moving work of narrative non-fiction, Andrew Miller tells the story of his grandparents, the children of Jewish immigrants to the East End, tracing their fortunes from Poland and Lithuania to their arrival in Regent's Park and the world of Astors and Parker-Bowles. It is a story of immigration and Anglicisation, of the significance of race and class and language and accent in our country, of how it has been possible for people in this country to change themselves and their lives.
Born in London in 1974, Andrew Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton. He worked as a television producer before joining the Economist to write about British politics and culture. He is currently the magazine’s Moscow correspondent. The Earl of Petticoat Lane is his first book.
This is a truly delightful book, full of colourful and moving details. It also has great resonance in the present ongoing debate on immigration.
The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust
Kristen Renwick Monroe
Princeton University Press ISBN: 0-691-12773-5
Through moving interviews with five ordinary people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, Kristen Monroe casts new light on a question at the heart of ethics: Why do people risk their lives for strangers and what drives such moral choice? Monroe's analysis points not to traditional explanations--such as religion or reason--but to identity. The rescuers' perceptions of themselves in relation to others made their extraordinary acts spontaneous and left the rescuers no choice but to act. To turn away Jews was, for them, literally unimaginable. In the words of one German Czech rescuer, "The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason."
At the heart of this unusual book are interviews with the rescuers, complex human beings from all parts of the Third Reich and all walks of life: Margot, a wealthy German who saved Jews while in exile in Holland; Otto, a German living in Prague who saved more than 100 Jews and provides surprising information about the plot to kill Hitler; John, a Dutchman on the Gestapo's "Most Wanted List"; Irene, a Polish student who hid eighteen Jews in the home of the German major for whom she was keeping house; and Knud, a Danish wartime policeman who took part in the extraordinary rescue of 85 percent of his country's Jews.
We listen as the rescuers themselves tell the stories of their lives and their efforts to save Jews. Monroe's analysis of these stories draws on philosophy, ethics, and political psychology to suggest why and how identity constrains our choices, both cognitively and ethically. Her work offers a powerful counterpoint to conventional arguments about rational choice and a valuable addition to the literature on ethics and moral psychology. It is a dramatic illumination of the power of identity to shape our most basic political acts, including our treatment of others.
But always Monroe returns us to the rescuers, to their strong voices, reminding us that the Holocaust need not have happened and revealing the minds of the ethically exemplary as they negotiated the moral quicksand that was the Holocaust.
Kristen Renwick Monroe is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. Her books include the prize-winning The Heart of Altruism (Princeton).
Londonistan
Melanie Phillips
Gibson Square ISBN 1903933765
 The suicide bombings carried out in London in 2005 by British Muslims revealed an alarming network of Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers. Under the noses of British intelligence, London became the European hub for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamist terror and extremism - so much so that it has been mockingly dubbed 'Londonistan'. In this ground-breaking book, Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of British self-confidence and national identity and its resulting paralysis by multiculturalism and appeasement. The result is an ugly climate in Britain of irrationality and defeatism, which now threatens to undermine the alliance with America and imperil the defence of the free world.
"Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan is a last-minute warning for Britain and for much of the free world ... This book is powerful and frightening, but also courageous. In dictatorships, you need courage to fight evil; in the free world, you need courage to see the evil." Natan Sharansky
Shared Histories
A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue
By Paul Scham, Walid Salem and Benjamin Pogrund
Left Coast Press, ISBN
1598740121
 'This book provides a view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unavailable in any other single volume...The reader, whether steeped in the history of the conflict or simply looking for some explanation of why it is so intractable, sees through the eyes of the protagonists themselves why mutual understanding is so difficult and, in the process, begins to understand why the two sides have not been able to come to terms.'
Edy Kaufman, University of Maryland & Hebrew University of Jerusalem
There is no single history of the development of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are two.
The Israeli historical narrative speaks of Zionism as the Jewish national movement, of building a refuge from persecution, and of national regeneration. The Palestinian narrative speaks of invasion, expulsion, and oppression. No wonder peace remains elusive.
This volume attempts to present both histories with parallel narratives of key points in the 19th and 20th centuries to 1948. The histories are presented by 14 Israeli and Palestinian experts, joined by other historians, journalists, and activists, who then discuss the differences and similarities between their accounts. By creating an appreciation, understanding, and respect for the "other," the first steps can be made to foster a shared history of a shared land. The reader has the opportunity to witness, at first hand, a respectful confrontation between the competing versions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Paul Scham, formerly a lawyer, is currently a Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., and a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University. Walid Salem is a journalist and director of the Palestinian Center for the Dissemination of Democracy and Community Development (Panorama), Jerusalem. Benjamin Pogrund is a journalist and director of the Yakar Center for Social Concern, Jerusalem.
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Making Globalization Work
Joseph Stiglitz
Allen Lane ISBN 0713999098
 From the million-copy selling author of Globalization and its Discontents, the book that lays out the next stage in our understanding of a globalized world
Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents, which has now sold one million copies worldwide, looked at the problems of globalization; Making Globalization Work looks at solutions and to the future. Drawing on many examples from real life, and from his experiences travelling around the world in the last four years, Stiglitz argues that not only is there now recognition that there are problems with globalization as it has been managed, but that the forces for reform are already at work. The international community must make many difficult choices and there is no single set of policies which works for everyone. Stiglitz is cautiously optimistic that another world is possible, and that we can indeed make globalization work.
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist at the World Bank until January 2000. Before that he was Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. He is currently Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.
You're Wearing That?
Deborah Tannen
Virago ISBN 1-84408-406-X
 Deborah Tannen's No. 1 New York Times bestseller You Just Don't Understand revolutionized communication between women and men. Mothers and daughters often misunderstand each other as they struggle to find the right balance between closeness and independence. They both want to be seen for who they really are, but tend to see the other as failing short of who she should be. Each overestimates the other's power and underestimates her own. Deborah Tannen examines every aspect of this complex dynamic, from the dark side that can shadow a woman throughout her life, to the new technologies like e-mail and Instant Messaging that are transforming mother-daughter communication. With groundbreaking insights, pitch-perfect dialogues, and deeply moving memories of her own mother, Tannen untangles the knots daughters and mothers can get tied up in. Eye-opening and heart-felt, You're Wearing THAT? illuminates and enriches one of the most important relationships in our lives.
L'Oreal Took My Home: The Secrets of a Theft
Monica Waitzfelder
Translated from the French by Peter Bush
Arcadia ISBN
1905147112
A legal case led by a lone woman against one of the largest multinationals. A personal and explosive true story.
Preface by Serge Klarsfeld
'A story both gripping and horrifying, the more so because the reader cannot help admire the persistence and diligence with which the author pursued her quest, and, under the circumstances, the restrained and dignified way in which she tells the story.'
- Hugo Vickers
 'L'Oreal took my home,' Edith Rosenfelder was always saying. This claim affected her daughter Monica, who decided when she grew up she'd try to understand what lay behind it. It was the start of true investigation leading to action in the French courts. Prior to 1937, Monica Waitzfelder's family lived in Germany. Being Jewish, they were forced to flee the country, abandoning all their possessions, and their property was looted in the same way as happened to many other European Jews, who were victims of persecution prior to the Holocaust.
This is the story of how the Rosenfelder family never recovered their house, which was located in the centre of Karlsruhe, Germany. It was a wonderful location in which the L'Oreal cosmetics firm opened its head office. It refused - and refuses - to recognisie the legitimate owners.
'Monica Waitzfelder tells a powerful story, and asks the perfectly obvious question- why won't L'Oreal recognise what they did before and during the war, and compensate her mother for their house in Karlsruhe? Court after court has decided that it is not a 'French' case, yet other courts in other jurisdictions have not had such problems. Read the book to see how the system just does not want to listen- but be assured that the Waitzfelder family will win in the end, because their case is just.'
- Rabbi Julia Neuberger
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