General Non Fiction

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.

Do also look out for events information and keep us posted if you are an organiser.

And remember, feedback is always welcome.

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 the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad

Steven E. Aschleim

Princeton ISBN 978-0-691-12223-6
January 2007

The modern German-Jewish experience through the rise of Nazism in 1933 was characterized by an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity. Yet well after that history has ended, the influence of Weimar German-Jewish intellectuals has become ever greater. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss have become household names and possess a continuing resonance. Beyond the Border seeks to explain this phenomenon and analyze how the German-Jewish legacy has continuingly permeated wider modes of Western thought and sensibility, and why these émigrés occupy an increasingly iconic place in contemporary society.

Steven Aschheim traces the odyssey of a fascinating group of German-speaking Zionists--among them Martin Buber and Hans Kohn--who recognized the moral dilemmas of Jewish settlement in pre-Israel Palestine and sought a binationalist solution to the Arab-Israel conflict. He explores how German-Jewish émigré historians like Fritz Stern and George Mosse created a new kind of cultural history written against the background of their exile from Nazi Germany and in implicit tension with postwar German social historians. And finally, he examines the reasons behind the remarkable contemporary canonization of these Weimar intellectuals--from Arendt to Strauss--within Western academic and cultural life.

Beyond the Border is about more than the physical act of departure. It also points to the pioneering ways these émigrés questioned normative cognitive boundaries and have continued to play a vital role in addressing the predicaments that engage and perplex us today.

Steven E. Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews, and The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890-1990.

Menashe Kadishman

Edited by Jacob Baal-Teshuva

Prestel ISBN 978-3-7913-3844-6

August 2007

An in-depth monograph on the celebrated Israeli artist

Most renowned for his arresting sculpture Falling Leaves, Menashe Kadishman is a highly instinctive and at the same time conceptual painter and sculptor whose works are exhibited at some of the world’s most important museums. Born on a kibbutz, Kadishman was a shepherd for many years. This experience informs much of his work, especially his brightly hued sheep’s heads and sheep imagery. Kadishman’s unique ability to weave nature and art to tell stories of humanity make him among the most lyrical of living artists.

Here his career is traced from his artistic studies and early exhibitions to his recent works. A variety of critics draw attention to Kadishman’s themes, which embrace history, warfare, the Bible and the Holocaust, while others place him within the context of other artists at work today. A generous sampling of colour plates and black and white images illustrate Kadishman’s incredible range and deeply personal style.

Jacob Baal-Teshuva is a curator and writer who divides his time between

New York and Miami. He is the author of many books on art, including Andy

Warhol: 1928-1987 (Prestel).

On the Other Hand

Chaim Bermant

Valentine Mitchell ISBN 978 0 85303 870 2

February 2008

Chaim Bermant was The Jewish Chronicle’s main opinion columnist for

nearly forty years, until his death in 1998. He covered all aspects of Jewish life in his weekly column ‘On the Other Hand’, and his witty, wise and thought-provoking chronicling of Jewish life and concerns through the pages of the JC still have profound resonance today. His widow Judy has collected here a selection of his best writings as a tribute to one of the best loved and most important recorders of and commentators on modern Anglo-Jewry. This new edition by Vallentine Mitchell contains a new foreword and article.

Chaim Bermant was born in Lithuania and spent his early childhood in Barovke (Latvia) where his father was Rabbi. At the age of nine he moved with his family to Scotland and was educated at Glasgow Rabbinical College, Glasgow University and London School of Economics. A former schoolmaster, an economist and television screenwriter, he regularly wrote for the Daily Telegraph, the Observer and Newsweek, as well as ‘On the Other Hand’, his weekly column for The Jewish Chronicle. He was author of over thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction. His posthumous autobiography, Genesis: A Latvian Childhood, was published in 1998.

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.

Jewish Cultural Studies, Volume 1

Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation

Edited by Simon J. Bronner

Littman Library of Jewish Civilization ISBN 9781904113454

May 2008

The Jewish Cultural Studies series offers a contemporary view of Jewish culture around the globe. Multidisciplinary, multi-focused, and eclectic, it covers the cultural practices of secular Jews as well as of religious Jews of all persuasions, and from historical as well as contemporary perspectives. It also considers the range of institutions that represent and respond to Jewishness, including museums, the media, synagogues, and schools. More than a series on Jewish ideas, it uncovers ideas of being Jewish.

This volume proposes that the idea of ‘Jewish’, or what people think of as ‘Jewishness’, is revealed in expressions of culture and applied in constructions of identity and representation. In Part I, ‘Expression’, Elly Teman considers how the kabbalistic red string found at sites throughout Israel conveys a political and psychological response to terrorism. Sergey Kravtsov examines Jewish and non-Jewish narratives concerning a synagogue in eastern Europe. Miriam Isaacs looks at expressions of cultural continuity in DP camps in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and Jascha Nemtsov discusses how Jewish folk music was presented as high art in early twentieth-century Germany.

In Part II, ‘Identity’, Joachim Schlör enquires how the objects taken by emigrants leaving Germany for Palestine after Hitler’s rise to power represented their identities. Hanna Kliger, Bea Hollander-Goldfein, and Emilie Passow examine how survivors’ narratives become integrated into family identities. Olga Gershenson offers close readings of how the identities of Jews as enacted in post-perestroika films highlight conflicting Russian attitudes towards Jews. Ted Merwin considers commercial establishments as ‘sacred spaces’ for Jewish secular identities.

Part III, ‘Representation’, opens with stories collected in Israel by Ilana Rosen from Jews who lived in Carpatho-Russia, while Judith Lewin considers the characterization of the Jewish woman in French literature. Holly Pearse and Mikel Koven, respectively, decode the Jewishness of modern radio comedy and Hollywood film.

The idea of Jewishness is applied in the volume with provocative interpretations of Jewish experience, and fresh approaches to the understanding of Jewish cultural expressions.

Contributors Simon J. Bronner, Olga Gershenson, Bea Hollander-Goldfein, Miriam Isaacs, Hannah Kliger, Mikel J. Koven, Sergey R. Kravtsov, Judith Lewin, Ted Merwin, Jascha Nemtsov, Emilie S. Passow, Holly A. Pearse, Ilana Rosen, Joachim Schlör, Elly Teman

Simon J. Bronner is Distinguished University Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, where he is lead scholar of the campus’s Holocaust and Jewish Studies Center. He is the author and editor of over twenty-five books, including the Encyclopedia of American Folklife (2006), Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (1998), and Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities (2005). He has published in Jewish cultural studies in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Jewish History, Yiddish, Markers, and Chuliyot: Journal of Yiddish Literature. He has received the Mary Turpie Prize from the American Studies Association and the Wayland D. Hand Prize and Peter and Iona Opie Prize from the American Folklore Society for his scholarship and educational leadership.

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Judith Butler

Verso ISBN 1 84467 544 0

This profound appraisal of post-9/11 America considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global political community.

Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. She discusses the political implications of sovereignty in light of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. She argues against the anti-intellectual current of contemporary US patriotism and the power of censorship during times of war. Finally, she takes on the question of when and why anti-semitism is leveled as a charge against those who voice criticisms of the Israeli state. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

“If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.” — Judith Butler

“One of Butler’s most topical and accessible books.” — Women’s Review of Books

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

William D Cohan

Penguin ISBN 9780141036892
April 2008

They amassed unimaginable fortunes and would stop at nothing to make a deal, until their titanic egos started to jeopardize everything. This is the astonishing story of Lazard Frères, the world’s most elite and legendary investment bank – and the men who reigned over it all.

For over 150 years Lazard Frères had stood apart from other Wall Street firms by offering ultra-wealthy clients the wisdom of its ‘Great Men’: from Felix Rohatyn, the escapee from Nazi-occupied France turned financial genius, to Michel David-Weill, the inscrutable French billionaire ‘Sun King’; from Steve Rattner, the boy wonder from Long Island who clashed violently with the old guard, to larger-than-life CEO Bruce Wasserstein, ‘Bid-Em-Up Bruce’, who broke with the bank’s traditions and made himself billions in the process.

In The Last Tycoons William Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes us into their mysterious and secretive world, telling a story of ruthless ambition, whispered advice, explosive feuds, glamorous mistresses, decadent excesses and unimaginable wealth.

William D. Cohan was an award-winning investigative journalist before embarking on a seventeen-year career as an investment banker on Wall Street. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York and later became a Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase & Co. He is a graduate of Duke University and received both an MS from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and an MBA from its Graduate School of Business.

The Paradox of Anti-Semitism

Dan Cohn-Sherbok

Continuum ISBN 082649403X

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Nora Ephron

Transworld ISBN-10: 0385610939 

March 2007

With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.

The woman who brought us When Harry Met Sally . . . , Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Bewitched, and the author of best sellers Heartburn, Scribble Scribble, and Crazy Salad, discusses everything—from how much she hates her purse to how much time she spends attempting to stop the clock: the hair dye, the treadmill, the lotions and creams that promise to slow the aging process but never do. Oh, and she can’t stand the way her neck looks. But her dermatologist tells her there’s no quick fix for that.

Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent.  She recounts her anything-but-glamorous days as a White House intern during the JFK years (“I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the President did not make a pass at”) and shares how she fell in and out of love with Bill Clinton—from a distance, of course.  But mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age.

Utterly courageous, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, I Feel Bad About My Neck is a book of wisdom, advice, and laugh-out-loud moments, a scrumptious, irresistible treat.

The Last Jews of Kerala

Edna Fernandes

Portobello Books ISBN 9781846270987

July 2008

How does it feel to be the last survivors of a millennia-old community, to know that you will attend no more weddings, only funerals and to realize that one day soon you will close the door on your history forever?

In 70 CE, the Roman capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple scattered a wave of Jewish immigrants across the globe like seeds of last hope. One group settled in Kerala, southern India. Feted as foreign kings by Kerala’s rajas and lavished with land, privilege and autonomy, they lived in peace. Despite finding acceptance in this Indian paradise, despite every advantage, by the twenty first century they found themselves on the brink of demise.

This is the story of the Black and White Jews of Kerala – a community that chose to bury itself instead of burying its differences, fuelling a centuries-long feud instead of forsaking it to survive. In the end it was not persecution, pestilence or war that destroyed them, but one another. This is the story of a Jewish apartheid, a civil rights movement and finally a love affair between a Black Jew and a White Jewess who smashed apart the old divide – all set within the tranquil beauty of the backwaters of southern India.

In a land where Hindu, Christian, Muslim and Jew have lived and prayed in harmony for many centuries, the story of The Last Jews of Kerala is all the more apposite to our discordant times.

Edna Fernandes is a British Indian journalist who was born in Nairobi and grew up in London. A former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times in New Delhi and political and international business correspondent for Reuters and Dow Jones in London, her articles have been reproduced in newspapers around the world, including the Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune.
Her first book Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism was shortlisted for the UK’s Index on Censorship TR Fyvel prize and nominated for India’s Ramnath Excellence in Journalism Best Book Award.

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.

Get Out of My Life... But First Take Me and Alex Into Town

Suzanne Franks and Tony Wolf

Profile Books ISBN 9781846680878

April 2008

This is the best survival manual for parents who find themselves marooned among volatile and incomprehensible aliens on Planet Teen. It looks at all the difficult issues of bringing up teenagers – school, sex, drugs and even suicide. But it’s the title of the second chapter, ’What They Do and Why’ that best captures the book’s spirit and technique, explaining how to translate teenage behaviour into its true, often less complicated meaning. One key mistake, for instance, is getting involved in no-win conflicts instead of having the wisdom to shut up when shutting up would be the most effective – albeit least satisfying – thing to do.

Tony Wolf is a psychologist, a frequent contributor to parenting magazines and father of two. Suzanne Franks is a television producer, journalist and author with two teenage daughters. She lives in London.

McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers
Misha Glenny

Bodley Head ISBN 9780224075039

April 2008

In this powerful and groundbreaking book, Misha Glenny takes us on a journey through the new world of international organised crime. For three years, he has been recording the stories of gun runners in Ukraine, money launderers in Dubai, drug syndicates in Canada, cyber criminals in Brazil, racketeers in Japan and many more, including a chilling chapter on Israel. During his investigation of the dark side, he has spoken to gangsters, policemen and victims of organised crime while also exploring the ferocious consumer demand for drugs, trafficked women, illegal labour and arms across five continents.

The journey begins with an appalling and inexplicable murder in England’s stockbroker belt and continues with stories that are often horrifying, sometimes inspiring, usually bizarre and occasionally funny. But together they build a breathtaking picture of the shadow economy that has grown so fast that it may now account for about 20% of the world's GDP.

Usually the preserve of sensationalist reporting in the tabloid press, organised crime has seeped into our lives in so many ways and often without our knowledge. This consistently riveting account unveils the nature of crime in today's world but it also offers profound insights into the pitfalls of a globalisation where the rules dividing the legal from the illegal are often far from clear. McMafia unpicks the nexus of crime, politics and money worldwide which have become entangled and interdependent in entirely novel forms since the 1980s. It argues that conventional policing methods are no longer appropriate to deal with a problem whose roots lie in global poverty and the ever widening divisions between rich and poor.

East End Chronicles

Ed Glinert

Penguin ISBN 9780141017181

June 2006

The East End:  Roman burial ground, medieval rubbish tip, Victorian hellhole, WW2 bombing target, 21st century gentrification template.  Always a rum place, the industrial revolution replaced rose bushes and hedgerows with metallic roads and iron railways, mudbanks give way to deep-water docks and sweatshops.  East End Chronicles tells the story of this part of London that has always enthralled writers and readers through the bizarre, the unusual, the arcane and the mysterious.  Chapters on the Silk Weavers of Spitalfields; Docks, Dockers and River Pirates; Murder and Mayhem on the Radcliffe Highway; Myths and Mythmakers; The Blitz and Bombs; The Jewish Ghetto and more reveal the real underbelly of the history of the East End.

The Divided Self
Israel and the Jewish Psyche Today
David J. Goldberg
IB Tauris ISBN 978-1845110543

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.

The Book of "Exodus": The Making and Meaning of "Bob Marley and the Wailers'" Album of the Century

Vivien Goldman

Aurum Press ISBN 1845132106

Recorded in London after an assassination attempt sent him into exile from Jamaica, and named by "Time" magazine as the album of the century, "Exodus" is Bob Marley's masterpiece of spiritual exploration. Much more than just a making-of-the-record story, The Book of Exodus takes in the history of Jamaican music, Marley's personal journey from Trench Town ghetto to global superstardom, his political involvement, Rastafarianism, and the biblical roots of the "Exodus" story, culminating in his triumphant return to the stage in Jamaica at the Peace Concert of 1978.

As PR for Island Records, Vivien Goldman was instrumental in introducing white audiences to the Rasta sound of Bob Marley. Here, she provides a unique first-hand account of the album "Exodus", from its conception in Jamaica to the intense, sometimes raucous all-night studio sessions in London. The Book of Exodus is an unforgettable portrait of Marley from a member of his intimate circle and an acutely perceptive appreciation of his musical and spiritual legacy.

Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History

David B Goldstein

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300125832

May 2008

Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? What is the connection between an ancient Jewish priest in Jerusalem and today's Israeli sunbather on the beaches of Tel Aviv? These questions stand at the heart of this engaging book. Geneticist David Goldstein analyzes modern DNA studies of Jewish populations and examines the intersections of these scientific findings with the history (both biblical and modern) and oral tradition of the Jews. With a special gift for translating complex scientific concepts into language understandable to all, Goldstein delivers an accessible, personal, and fascinating book - the first to tell the history of a group of people through the lens of genetics.In a series of detective-style stories, Goldstein explores the priestly lineage of Jewish males as manifested by Y chromosomes, the Jewish lineage claims of an obscure black South African tribe, the differences in maternal and paternal genetic heritage among Jewish populations, and much more. The author also grapples with the medical and ethical implications of our rapidly growing command of the human genomic landscape. The study of genetics has not only changed the study of Jewish history, Goldstein shows, it has altered notions of Jewish identity and even our understanding of what makes a people a people.

David B. Goldstein is professor of molecular genetics and director of the Institute for Genome Science and Policy's Center for Population Genomics and Pharmacogenetics, Duke University.

Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations

Martin Goodman

Allen Lane ISBN 9780713994476

   In AD 70, after a war which had flared sporadically for four years, three  Roman legions under the future Emperors Vespasian and his  son Titus, surrounded, laid siege to, and eventually devastated the city of Jerusalem,destroying completely the magnificent Temple which had been built by Herod only 80 years earlier. What brought about this extraordinary conflict, with its extraordinary consequences? This superb book, by one of the world's leading scholars of the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds, narrates and explains this titanic struggle, showing why Rome's interests were served by this policy of brutal hostility, and how the first generation of Christians first distanced themselves from its Jewish origins and then became increasingly hostile to Jews as their influence spread within the empire. The book thus also provides an exceptional and original account of the origins of anti-semitism, whose history has had often cataclysmic reverberations down to our own time.

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.

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.

Dr Cecil Helman 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.

God's Troublemakers: How Women of Faith Are Changing the World

Katharine Rhodes Henderson

Continuum ISBN 9780826429254

May 2008

This is a book about women who are changing the world as leaders in the public arena. Whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim—their work is religiously or spiritually motivated. They are religious or socio-ethical entrepreneurs, who have invented organizations or movements to repair the world. What shaped and formed them? How do they integrate a progressive social agenda with their faith? How do they exercise public leadership in a world where women’s public roles are sometimes still suspect? The book is thematically organized and touches on many of the most relevant topics being discussed today: separation of church and state, the intersection of politics and religion, the silence of the progressive left and the embodiment of authentic religious pluralism. This book claims space for progressive forms of religion in an area dominated by the Religious Right.

 God's Troublemakers is based on extensive interviews with 11 women social entrepreneurs. The 3 best known are Sr. Helen Prejean, the anti-death-penalty activist; Ruth Messenger, former Manhattan Borough President and now executive director of American Jewish World Service; and Helen LaKelly Hunt, who has been a national activist funding women’s causes and a leader in persuading secular feminists to make common cause with religious women. 

Katharine Rhodes Henderson is an ordained Presbyterian minister, who for the past decade has been the executive vice president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. She is co-founder of Face to Face/Faith to Faith, a multifaith leadership bringing together teenagers--Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus--from the Middle East, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the US.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays

Abraham Joshua Heschel
Edited by Susannah Heschel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0-374-52495-5

A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700
Adnan Husain

One World Publications ISBN 1-85168-496-4

July 2007

Contemporary academia relies upon categorization. One can study Africa or Europe; East or West; the Middle Ages or the Early Modern period. In this innovative collection of essays, the Mediterranean is taken as a whole. Distinctive both in scope and approach, A Faithful Sea addresses a wide array of cases of Mediterranean interreligious tradition and identity in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. With contributions from leading specialists on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, readers will discover how the birthplace of the three principal monotheistic religions is a distinct cultural space characterized by hybridity, diversity, and cultural dynamism.

Adnan A. Husain is Associate Professor and a Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University, Kingston. K.E. Fleming is Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University, and Associate Director of the Remarque Institute.

Treasures of Jewish Heritage

The Jewish Museum, London

Scala Publishers  ISBN 978-1857594133

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. 

Jewish Travel Guide

Vallentine Mitchell  ISBN 9780853037361

For almost fifty years the Jewish Travel Guide has been the essential reference book for all Jewish travellers worldwide, whether travelling on business, for pleasure, or to seek their historical roots. Rigorously edited and up-dated every year, each country has a short commentary including demographic details, emergency numbers, and dialling codes. Other information includes restaurants, mikvaot, synagogues, theatres, embassies, museums, hotels, booksellers, cultural festivals, media, community organisations, groceries, bakeries, kosher food, butchers, delicatessens, libraries, and tourist sites. There's even a guide to kosher fish across the world. The Jewish Travel Guide is universally recognised as the ultimate source of information for the Jew abroad. The Jewish Review says, "It is a must for every traveller" the Jewish Chronicle observes, "The book validates its motto: ‘Don't go without it’" The Jerusalem Post comments, "The Guide offers a well-rounded demographic portrait of world Jewry today, serving as much as a handbook and resource for professionals in the Jewish world, as a travel guide." The Jewish Travel Guide is the essential travelling companion, making your journey even easier and more pleasurable!

Jewish Year Book 2008

Stephen W. Massil

Vallentine Mitchell  ISBN 9780853037354


The Jewish Year Book 2008 provides a comprehensive directory of the communal institutions and organisations that make up the fabric of British Jewish society. It is a guide to the structures and networks of the religious, social, educational, cultural, and welfare organisations of the Jewish community across the British Isles and reports the ever-changing pattern of websites, now such a pervasive feature of communal management and presentation. It also offers an extensive guide to the primary organisations of the Jewish communities of the world and a substantial survey of Israel and its organisations that have associations with British Jewry, including a comprehensive list of Israel’s overseas embassies and missions. It sets out the basic facts of the history of Jewish settlement in Britain and an up-to-date statement of UK legislation specifically concerned with the place of the Jews and Jewish identity in Britain. Updated annually, edited to provide the latest, up-to-date information, it includes contact details for Jewish institutions, local and international organisations, details on leading Jewish personalities, obituaries, and major events as well as principal festivals and fasts. There is also a detailed calendar, including the Jewish calendar for thirty years and evening twilight regional variations.

Loving Every Child: Wisdom for Parents

Janusz Korczak

Edited by Sandra Joseph

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill ISBN 139781565124899

Born in 1878 in Poland, Janusz Korczak was a doctor, broadcaster, philosopher, and fighter for the rights of the child. A visionary and an activist, he spoke of the need for a Declaration of Children’s Rights long before one was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924.

How to Love a Child makes Korczak’s philosophy available in the United States for the first time. This collection of 150 quotations illuminates the lives of children.As relevant and true as if it had been written today, its simple, basic premise is that understanding our children is the key to being able to take care of them, respect them, and love them.Korczak held strong convictions: A child hungry for advice and direction will absorb it, digest it and assimilate it. Overfed with moral rules the child will suffer from nausea; offered expert advice: If a child trusts you with her secret, be grateful. For her confidence is the highest

prize; and was a candid observer of human nature: Adults are unfair. When they’re in a good mood then everything is allowed, but when they’re cross, every little thing disturbs them.

We hope Korczak’s wisdom, presented in gift-book format, will inspire yet another generation of mothers, fathers, and teachers.

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
Tony Judt

Heinemann ISBN 9780434017416

May 2008

Today’s world is so utterly unlike the world of just twenty years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we could make sense of it. We literally don't know where we came from, and the results of this burgeoning ignorance are proving calamitous, with the clear prospect of worse to come. We have lost touch with three generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and we have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects key aspects of the world we have lost and reminds us how important they still are to us: now and to our hopes for the future.

Judt draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of ‘evil’ in understanding the European past, to the rise and fall of the state in public affairs and the displacement of history by ‘heritage’.Ranging with his trademark acuity and élan from Belgium to Israel, from the memory of Marxism to the practice of foreign policy, he takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it, and reveals how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we urgently need.

Professor Tony Judt was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which he founded in 1995.

God's Gold: The Quest for the Lost Temple Treasure of Jerusalem

Sean Kingsley

John Murray 071956803X

God`s Gold charts the fate of the greatest religious treasure in history, the key symbols of the Jewish faith – looted from the Temple of Jerusalem. The golden candelabrum, silver trumpets and bejewelled Table of the Divine Presence were ransacked by the Roman emperor Vespasian and his son, Titus, in AD 70. They were cast adrift in Mediterranean lands, which saw 550 years of turbulent history and the rule of four different civilisations. Now, only an intriguing trail of clues remains as to their whereabouts.

The Temple treasure is an immeasurably precious hoard, but it has yet greater significance as a symbol of man`s communications with God. The gold is central to Israel`s dreams for messianic redemption and it`s discovery could signify the return to an age of biblical sacrifice.

Using untapped historical texts and new archaeological sources, Sean Kingsley reveals the incredible history of this treasure, its composition and religious, political and financial meaning across the ages. Unexpected discoveries send him on a physical pilgrimage to trace the treasure`s destiny, which exposes facts more astonishing than fiction.

Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation

Paul Kriwaczek

Phoenix Press ISBN-10: 0753819031

A portrait of a civilisation which flourished within living memory and left an indelible mark on history. In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black Sea.

In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels.
Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture.

Paul Kriwaczek was born in Vienna in 1937. In London he trained as a dentist, and spent a decade working in Iran and Afghanistan. From there he travelled extensively in Asia and Africa before developing a career in broadcasting and journalism. In 1970 he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced and directed for 25 years. He is fluent in six languages, including Farsi and Yiddish.

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.

Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Barry Lando

The Other Press ISBN-10: 1590512383

An investigative history of Western complicity in Saddam Hussein’s crimes reveals the story his trial never will.

In February 1991, the Shia of southern Iraq rose against Saddam Hussein.
Barry M. Lando, a former investigative producer for 60 Minutes, argues compellingly that this ill-fated uprising represents one instance among many of Western complicity in Saddam Hussein’s crimes against humanity. The Shia were responding to the call for rebellion from President George H.W. Bush that was broadcast repeatedly across Iraq by clandestine CIA stations. But, just as the revolution was on the brink of success, the United States and its allies turned their backs. In the end, tens of thousands were massacred.

Because of restrictions imposed by the Special Tribunal prosecuting Saddam Hussein, the extensive role of the U.S. and its allies in his crimes will never be explored at his trial. But as Web of Deceit demonstrates, the nations that now denounce Saddam most prominently secretly backed the dictator from his rise to power in the 1960s and ‘70s to his offensives in Iran and, despite warnings, took no action to stop his invasion of Kuwait. They also turned their backs when he used chemical weapons against the Iraqi people and persisted in international sanctions long after they had proved ineffective and, for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, lethal.

Web of Deceit draws on a wide range of journalism and scholarship to present a complete picture of what really happened in Iraq under Saddam, detailing – for the first time – the complicity of the West in its full and alarming extent.

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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On God: An Uncommon Conversation

Norman Mailer with Michael Lennon

Continuum ISBN9781847062864

February 2008

Norman Mailer speaks intimately about the nature of God, His power and creativity, and the three way relationship between God, the devil, and man.

Anyone who's read Norman Mailer's work - from The Naked and the Dead to The Castle in the Forest - knows throughout his career he's been grappling with questions of good and evil. That lifetime search for truth has led Mailer to his largest subject yet, God. In God: An Uncommon Conversation, Mailer speaks intimately about the nature of God, His power and creativity, and the three way relationship between God, the devil, and man. Mailer's theological worldview is surprisingly centrist: he abhors the false piety of fundamentalism while at the same time rejects the bleakness of atheism. His God is not limited to the God of Christianity, Judaism, or any other organized religion. Rather, he views God as an artist, a divine creator, a superior being in constant struggle to create a better version of humanity. Here, Mailer speaks with astonishing intimacy and wisdom.

God: An Uncommon Conversation is written as a series of ten Platonic dialogues - the wise man speaking to his disciple about his philosophy. Yet you don't need to be familiar with Plato to understand the appeal of this form: by its very nature it's highly conversational, accessible, and humane. For the reader, it feels like sitting down one-on-one with Norman Mailer to discuss the large existential questions that we all struggle to understand.

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received another Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He died in November, 2007.

J. Michael Lennon is Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania and serves as Norman Mailer's literary executor and archivist. The author of six books on the works of Norman Mailer, he is the president of the Norman Mailer Society. He lives in Provincetown with his wife

The City of Words

Alberto Manguel

Continuum ISBN 9781847062703

March 2008

What is the role of the storyteller in 21st Century society? Do stories possess the power to change the world we live in?

In this most original and stimulating study Alberto Manguel, award winning author of A History of Reading, sets out to investigate the ways in which stories can lend an identity to a whole society. From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Don Quixote to The Fast Runner, Manguel explores how books can hold the secret to what binds us together. His thesis is argued here in an engrossing and highly personal book that encompasses narratives of autobiography, mythology, history and theology. He also raises concerns that technological developments – the internet, for one –  may well fatally undermine the publishing industry and threaten the survival of the individual around whom the entire literary industry was originally constructed: the beleaguered author. Do innovations like CD-Rom replace creative readers with passive viewers?
This book is also about the art of reading, at a time when Manguel argues that it is still possible for stories to change us and the world we live in.

The Library at Night

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300139143

May 2008

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. 'Libraries', he says, 'have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic'. In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the 'complete' libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought - the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral 'memory libraries' kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written - Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could.With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel's mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.

A Reading Diary

Canongate ISBN 1841958212

While travelling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading (Goethe's Elective Affinities) seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world he was living in. An article in the daily paper would be suddenly illuminated by a passage in the novel; a long reflection would be prompted by a single word.

He decided to keep a record of these moments, rereading a book a month, and formed A Reading Diary: a volume of notes, impressions of travel, of friends, of public and private events, all elicited by his reading.

From Don Quixote (January) to The Sign of Four (October) to The Wind in the Willows (December), Manguel leads us on an enthralling adventure in literature and life, and demonstrates how, for the passionate reader, one is utterly inextricable from the other.

Alberto Manguel was born in Buenos Aires but moved to Toronto early on in his life. He now lives in France. He is the author of some hugely successful books including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.

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..

Warhol's Jews: 10 Portraits Reconsidered

Richard Meyer

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300141153

June 2008

When it first appeared in 1980, Andy Warhol's "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" was adored by Jewish audiences even as it aroused antagonism from critics. Why did Warhol create this series? How did he select the figures to be portrayed? How has the passage of time reshaped the meaning of these portraits?This handsomely illustrated book examines the history of these silk-screen paintings and prints, delving into Warhol's refashioning of portraiture, his deep interest in repetitive art forms, and his embrace of commercialism. Richard Meyer shows how Warhol's unorthodox approach to portrait painting was a product of both his seriousness as an artist and his avowed interest in making money, and he explains how Warhol selected ten figures - from Bernhardt and Buber to Freud and Kafka - who would ensure the timelessness of his series. The volume, which also includes discussions of the celebrated subjects of "Ten Portraits", images of related prints, and a timeline, offers new insights into a significant series by an iconic American artist.

Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age

Julia Neuberger

HarperCollins ISBN 9780007226467

May 2008

Julia Neuberger addresses the question of what life will actually be like for us as we get old, and suggests answers for making our later years as good as when we were young.

Britain is getting old – and fast. Due to the combination of a decline in birth rates and an increase in life expectancy we are rapidly heading towards a crisis – in health, housing, finance and long-term care.

Despite this seismic shift in our demographic makeup, the way we view and treat the old has barely adjusted. It is shocking, for example, that despite less than 1 in 20 British people wanting to reside in a care home in their old age, 1 in 5 die in one.

It is time that we examined how we look after ourselves as we age – and address the issues that when young we take for granted as a right, not a privilege.

Why is housing not being built so that the less mobile amongst us can continue to look after ourselves for longer? Why when we have so much experience and no less intelligence are we not able to find work which benefits everyone? What are we supposed to do for fun? There must be more to life than bingo and bowls! Why is our approach to care so poor? If we neglect carers, will they not neglect us?

The opportunity to make life better as we age is being missed, but not necessarily because the solutions are so difficult… Are we even asking ourselves the obvious questions?

A manifesto on age that aims to change the way we think and to galvanise ourselves into action.

365 Ways to Change the World

Michael Norton

Harper Perennial ISBN 978-0-00-724230-6

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.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

Jeffrey Sachs

Allen Lane ISBN 9780713999198

March 2008

The global economic system now faces a sustainability crisis, Jeffrey Sachs argues, one that will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life. The twentieth century saw the end of European dominance of global politics and economics. The twenty-first century will see the end of United States dominance as well. The bloodshed in the streets of Baghdad reflects not merely poor US planning but the limits of US economic and political power. The world has become much too crowded and dangerous for more 'Great Games' in the Middle East or anywhere else. The defining challenge of the twenty-first century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate. We will flourish, or perish, together.

If we do the right things, there is room for all on the planet. We can achieve the key four goals of a global society: prosperity for all, the end of extreme poverty, stabilization of the global population and environmental sustainability. Common Wealth points the way to the course correction we must embrace for the sake of our common future.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and the global best-selling author of The End of Poverty. He is also the BBC’s Reith Lecturer for 2007 and is internationally renowned for his work as an economic advisor to governments around the world.

Jewish Identity in contemporary Architecture

Angeli Sachs and Edward van Voolen

Prestel ISBN 978-3-7913-3057-0

April 2004

This international exploration of Jewish buildings including museums, modern synagogues, community centres and schools demonstrates how these important structures lend architectural shape to the Jewish identity.

Accompanying a touring exhibition, this important work demonstrates the fundamental differences among fifteen buildings throughout the world. It covers sites in America, where the architecture of Jewish institutions looks back on a legacy of uninterrupted development; in Israel, where the great wave of immigration adopted modernist as well as Mediterranean traditions; and in Europe, where rebuilding and reconciliation attempt to balance a history of pain and tragedy. Includes works by Daniel Libeskind (The Jewish Museum, San Francisco), Frank O. Gehry (Jewish Museum of Tolerance, Jerusalem) and Mario Botta (Cymbalista Synagogue and Jewish Heritage Centre on the campus of Tel Aviv University).

Angeli Sachs is an art historian and architecture and design editor who lives in Munich, Germany. Edward van Voolen is an art historian, rabbi and curator of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture - A Modern Introduction

Victor Seidler

IB Tauris ISBN 9781845112813
November 2007

This is one of the first textbooks to try to set the entire discipline of Jewish philosophy in its proper cultural and historical contexts. In so doing, it introduces the vibrant Jewish philosophical tradition to students while also making a significant contribution to inter-religious dialogue. Victor J Seidler argues that the dominant Platonic tradition in the West has led to a form of cultural ethics which asserts false superiority in its relationships with others. He offers a critical reappraisal of the philosophical underpinnings of this western Christian culture which for so long has viewed Judaism with hostility. Examining the work of seminal Jewish thinkers such as Philo, Buber, Mendelsohn, Herman Cohen, Leo Baeck, Levinas, Rosenzweig and others, the author argues for a code of ethics which prioritises particular and personal moral responsibility rather than the impersonal and universal emphases of the Greek tradition. His provocative and original overview of Jewish philosophy uncovers a vital and neglected tradition of thought which works against the likelihood of a Holocaust recurring.

Victor J Seidler is Professor of Social Theory and Philosophy at Goldsmiths College in the University of London. His several books include 'Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identity and Belonging' (2000), 'Man Enough: Embodying Masculinities' (1997) and 'Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory' (1993).

Let's Schmooze: Jewish Words Today

Julian Sinclair

Continuum ISBN 082649711X

Can you tell Kol Nidre from kneidlach? Gushpankas from Gematrias? Naches from nachos? At last here is the book for you. With the belated entry of schlepp, shalom, spiel and scores of other Hebrew and Yiddish words into the melting pot of mainstream usage, English speakers today need to know what these words mean, where they come from and how they are used. Julian Sinclair's book fills this need and much more. As entertaining as it is erudite, "Let's Schmooze," traces the trajectory of 150 Jewish words from the Bible and Talmud to Yiddish slang, yeshivish creole and youth movement patois. Spanning a plethora of Jewish situations and subcultures, including food, magic, lifecycle events, the Joys of Yinglish, surviving synagogue and the Kabbalah craze, Let's Schmooze uses the lens of language to provide a snapshot of Jewish society and spirituality today. With a light touch it also raises critical questions about the acculturation of minorities in a post-multicultural world.

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.

The $3 Trillion War: The True Cost of the War in Iraq

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J Bilmes

Allen Lane ISBN 9781846141287

March 2008

The $3 Trillion War will be a devastating reckoning of the true cost of the Iraq war - quite apart from its tragic human toll - which the Bush administration has estimated at $50 billion, but which Stiglitz and Bilmes will show underestimates the real figure by approximately six times. The authors expose the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including not only big ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans - for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global perspective, the authors investigate the cost in lives and damage within Iraq and the Middle East generally. With chilling precision, they calculate what the money spent on the war would have produced had it been further invested in the growth of the economy, in the US and around the world, and in infrastructure building. Stiglitz and Bilmes write in simple language, which makes the details they present, and the sums they add up, all the more disturbing. This book will change forever the way we think about the Iraq war - and about the cost of war generally.

Linda J. Bilmes is a Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University and has
written widely on the cost of the Iraq War, veterans issues, and federal workforce
reform. During the Clinton administration, she served as Assistant Secretary for
Management and Budget in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Her articles have
been widely published.

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 University Professor of the Columbia Business School
and Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs,
Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester. He won the Nobel Prize
for Economics in 2001 and is the author of the best-selling Globalization and Its
Discontents and The Roaring Nineties.

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.

My Grandparents, My Parents and I: Jewish Art and Culture

 Edward van Voolen

Prestel ISBN 978-3-7913-3362-5

September 2006

A fascinating and enlightening examination of art through the lens of Jewish culture and history.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Rabbi and art historian Edward van Voolen has brought together numerous works that expand our view of Jewish life and art. Organised in a loosely chronological order, this book introduces readers to works that reflect the dramatic events of the past and explore the eternal search for Jewish identity.

He points out the Jewish aspects of works by predominantly nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists such as Modigliani, Pissarro and Frida Kahlo, among others, and discusses these themes within the paintings of Barnett Newman and the sculpture of Richard Serra. His accompanying text explores the connection between Judaism and art and culture, helping readers approach familiar images through a new and exciting perspective.

Edward van Voolen is curator of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. His previous books include Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture (Prestel).