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From the author of Not Me, this powerful novel about an Israeli father and his daughter brings to life a rich canvas of events and unexpected change in the aftermath of a suicide bombing. In the galvanizing opening of The Wanting, the celebrated Russian-born postmodern architect Roman Guttman is injured in a bus bombing, causing his life to swerve into instability and his perceptions to become heightened and disturbed as he embarks on an ill-advised journey into Palestinian territory. The account of Roman’s desert odyssey alternates with the vivacious, bittersweet diary of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Anyusha (who is on her own perilous path, of which Roman is ignorant), and the startlingly alive witnessings of Amir, the young Palestinian who pushed the button and is now damned to observe the havoc he has wrought from a shaky beyond. Enriched by flashbacks to the alluringly sad tale of Anyusha’s mother, a famous Russian refusenik who died for her beliefs, The Wanting is a poignant study of the costs of extremism, but it is most satisfying as a story of characters enmeshed in their imperfect love for one another and for the heartbreakingly complex world in which that love is wrought.

The former owner/proprietor of the beloved appetizing store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side tells the delightful, mouthwatering story of an immigrant family’s journey from a pushcart in 1907 to “New York’s most hallowed shrine to the miracle of caviar, smoked salmon, ethereal herring, and silken chopped liver” (The New York Times Magazine). When Joel Russ started peddling herring from a barrel shortly after his arrival in America from Poland, he could not have imagined that he was giving birth to a gastronomic legend. Here is the story of this “Louvre of lox” (The Sunday Times, London): its humble beginnings, the struggle to keep it going during the Great Depression, the food rationing of World War II, the passing of the torch to the next generation as the flight from the Lower East Side was beginning, the heartbreaking years of neighborhood blight, and the almost miraculous renaissance of an area from which hundreds of other family-owned stores had fled. Filled with delightful anecdotes about how a ferociously hardworking family turned a passion for selling perfectly smoked and pickled fish into an institution with a devoted national clientele, Mark Russ Federman’s reminiscences combine a heartwarming and triumphant immigrant saga with a panoramic history of twentieth-century New York, a meditation on the creation and selling of gourmet food by a family that has mastered this art, and an enchanting behind-the-scenes look at four generations of people who are just a little bit crazy on the subject of fish.Color photographs © Matthew Hranek

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesIn 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty-three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza's progeny.In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition' s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe' s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero-a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.

Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistible drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historic, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt's writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard: relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world: and her later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a remarkable portrait of Arendt's developments as a thinker-and confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as provocative and seminal today as they were when she first set them down.

More than a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continental United States between 1840 and 1870, going west in one of the greatest migrations of modern times. The frontiersmen have become an integral part of our history and folklore, but the Westering experiences of American women are equally central to an accurate picture of what life was like on the frontier.Through the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of women who participated in this migration, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey gives us primary source material on the lives of these women, who kept campfires burning with buffalo chips and dried weeds, gave birth to and cared for children along primitive and dangerous roads, drove teams of oxen, picked berries, milked cows, and cooked meals in the middle of a wilderness that was a far cry from the homes they had left back east. Still (and often under the disapproving eyes of their husbands) they found time to write brave letters home or to jot a few weary lines at night into the diaries that continue to enthrall us.In her new foreword, Professor Mary Clearman Blew explores the enduring fascination with this subject among both historians and the general public, and places Schlissel's groundbreaking work into an intriguing historical and cultural context.

With a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould First published in 1859, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution inalterably transformed our view of the history of life on the planet-and along with it, how we understand ourselves, our origins, and our place in the world. As we stand before the dawn of a new century, this theory is still the source of heated debate. In medicine, psychology, sociology, and politics, controversial new ideas are being espoused to claim Darwin for their legitimacy, while religious opponents continue to press for their alternative theory of "creationism" to be taught in the public schools. To being light where there has been much heat, What Darwin Really Said offers an excellent introduction to this great thinker's discoveries, his view of human development, and the endurance of his theories against the test of time.

In this "powerful" (New York Times Book review) collection of personal essays and landmark speeches by "one of the great writers of our generation" (New Republic), Elie Wiesel weaves together reminiscences of his life before the Holocaust, his struggle to find meaning afterward, and the actions he has taken on behalf of others that have defined him as a leading advocate of humanity and have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.Here, too, as a tribute to the dead and an exhortation to the living are landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the Klaus Barbie trial, his impassioned plea to President Reagan not to visit a German S.S. cemetery, and the speech he gave in Oslo in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he voices his hope that "the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil."

A mesmerizing novel of two love stories, separated by half a century but connected by one enchanting act of devotion-from the internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev. During the 1948 War of Independence-a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages-a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon. The bird is carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Intertwined with this story is the contemporary tale of Yair Mendelsohn, who has his own legacy from the 1948 war. Yair is a tour guide specializing in bird-watching trips who, in middle age, falls in love again with a childhood girlfriend. His growing passion for her, along with a gift from his mother on her deathbed, becomes the key to a life he thought no longer possible. Unforgettable in both its particulars and its sweep, A Pigeon and A Boy is a tale of lovers then and now-of how deeply we love, of what home is, and why we, like pigeons trained to fly in one direction only, must eventually return to it. In a voice that is at once playful, wise, and altogether beguiling, Meir Shalev tells a story as universal as war and as intimate as a winged declaration of love.

The definitive guide to the conversion process, revised and updated for a new generation of Jews-by-choice However you choose to fashion your personal journey to Judaism, Anita Diamant is the perfect guide. In this comprehensive, wide-ranging book you will learn how to choose a rabbi, a synagogue, a denomination, and a Hebrew name; how to discuss your decision with your birth family; what happens at the mikveh (ritual bath) and at the hatafat dam brit (circumcision ritual for those already circumcised); how to find your footing in a new spiritual family and create a new Jewish identity; and how you and your children can maintain bonds to your family of origin. Also included are suggestions for readings, prayers, and poems that can personalize conversion rituals; a glossary of terms; and a short history of conversion in Judaism. This revised edition contains a completely updated chapter on how the mikveh is used in the conversion process and an updated list of online resources and books for further reading. Whether you are just beginning to consider converting or have already started down the path to Judaism, here is everything you will need to make the process joyous, sacred, and meaningful.

Edited by Nahum N. GlatzerWith a new Foreword by Rodger Kamenetz “The question I put before you, as well as before myself, is the question of the meaning of Judaism for the Jews. Why do we call ourselves Jews? I want to speak to you not of an abstraction but of your own life . . . its authenticity and essence.” With these words, Martin Buber takes us on a journey into the heart of Judaism—its spirit, vision, and relevance to modern life.

I have only one request," Kafka wrote to his publisher Kurt Wolff in 1913. "'The Stoker,' 'The Metamorphosis,' and 'The Judgment' belong together, both inwardly and outwardly. There is an obvious connection among the three, and, even more important, a secret one, for which reason I would be reluctant to forego the chance of having them published together in a book, which might be called The Sons."

When the Six-Day War began, Elie Wiesel rushed to Israel. "I went to Jerusalem because I had to go somewhere, I had to leave the present and bring it back to the past. You see, the man who came to Jerusalem then came as a beggar, a madman, not believing his eyes and ears, and above all, his memory."This haunting novel takes place in the days following the Six-Day War. A Holocaust survivor visits the newly reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall he encounters the beggars and madmen who congregate there every evening, and who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present. Weaving together myth and mystery, parable and paradox, Wiesel bids the reader to join him on a spiritual journey back and forth in time, always returning to Jerusalem.

Felice Bauer was Kafka's first great love and the inspiration for his first great fiction. Six weeks after they met, he wrote "The Judgment" for her in one night of feverish activity. Kafka always inferred to the traumatic, public breaking-off of their engagement as his "tribunal," and indeed he began work on The Trial within a month of that event.Kafka's letters to Felice offer rare insights into the writer's life and art. Elias Canetti's brilliant and sensitive examination of this moving correspondence to shows is the origins of Kafka's voice as a writer and his torment as a man.