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Celebrate the joy of "making Shabbat" each week in your home-with rituals, prayers, blessings, food, and song. This expanded, easy-to-use edition of the classic spiritual sourcebook offers updated information, more ideas, and new resources for every aspect of the holy day. An inspiring how-to guide to every aspect of Shabbat, including:• History and meaning• How to prepare• Rituals, prayers, and blessings (step-by-step)• The Sabbath day•...
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A Step-by-Step Guide for Honoring the Dead and Empowering the Living
When someone dies, there are so many questions-from what to do in the moment of grief, to dealing with the practical details of the funeral, to spiritual concerns about the meaning of life and death. This indispensable guide to Jewish mourning and comfort provides traditional and modern insights into every aspect of loss. In a new, easy-to-use format, this classic resource is full...
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Create a meaningful and happy Hanukkah in your home-with story, celebration, food and song.
This newly-designed, easy-to-use edition of a classic spiritual sourcebook offers updated information, more family ideas, and new resources for every aspect of your holiday celebration.
Information on every aspect of Hanukkah is covered, including:
• The story of Hanukkah
• Celebrating-for families of every constellation
• Songs and prayers in English,...
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The cultural and psychological roots of Groucho Marx's genius are explored, uncovering the source of the performer's outrageous intellectual acuity and hilarious insolence toward convention and authority in his early upbringing and Marx family dynamics. -- Publisher's description.
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A spirited portrait of the colorful, irrepressible, and iconoclastic American collector who fearlessly advanced the cause of modern art. One of twentieth-century America's most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) brought to wide public attention the work of such modern masters as Jackson Pollock and Man Ray. In her time, there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde. Her midtown gallery was the...
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A riveting new examination of the leading progressive Supreme Court justice of his era. According to Jeffrey Rosen, Louis D. Brandeis was 'the Jewish Jefferson,' the greatest critic of what he called 'the curse of bigness' in business and government since the author of the Declaration of Independence. Published to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of his Supreme Court confirmation on June 1, 1916, Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet argues that...
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Harvey Milk-eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck-was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the age of forty-eight made him the most famous gay man in modern history; twenty years later Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the twentieth century. Before...
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A vibrant portrait of one of the most accomplished and prolific American screenwriters, by an award-winning biographer and essayist.
He was, according to Pauline Kael, 'the greatest American screenwriter.' Jean-Luc Godard called him 'a genius' who 'invented eighty percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.' Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts-including Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Notorious-Ben Hecht was known in his day...
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A fast-moving, musically astute portrait of arguably the greatest composer of American popular music Irving Berlin (1888-1989) has been called-by George Gershwin, among others-the greatest songwriter of the golden age of the American popular song. "Berlin has no place in American music," legendary composer Jerome Kern wrote; "he is American music." In a career that spanned an astonishing nine decades, Berlin wrote some fifteen hundred tunes, including...
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"Karl Marx (1818-1883)--philosopher, historian, sociologist, economist, current affairs journalist, and editor--was one of the most influential and revolutionary thinkers of modern history, but he is rarely thought of as a Jewish thinker, and his Jewish background is either overlooked or misrepresented. Here, distinguished scholar Shlomo Avineri argues that Marx's Jewish origins did leave a significant impression on his work. Marx was born in Trier,...
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From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an exuberant biography of the world's greatest escape artist.
In 1916, the war in Europe having prevented a tour abroad, Harry Houdini wrote a film treatment for a rollicking motion picture. Though the movie was never made, its title, 'The Marvelous Adventures of Houdini: The Justly Celebrated Elusive American,' provides a succinct summary of the Master Mystifier's life.
Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874,...
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Few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Stan Lee. The characters he created -- Spider-Man and Iron Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four -- occupy Hollywood's imagination and production schedules, generate billions at the box office, and come as close as anything we have to a shared American mythology. This illuminating biography focuses as much on Lee's ideas as it does on his unlikely rise to stardom. It surveys...
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An engrossing biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history, Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor's son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, above all else, movies. He was a self-taught filmmaker and self-proclaimed outsider, and his films exist in a unique world of their own outside the Hollywood mainstream. Kubrick's Jewishness played a crucial role in his idea of himself as an outsider. Obsessed...
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In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (1906-1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-twentieth-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity.
Through the 1920s, 1930s, and most of...
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The extraordinary story of a child's survival of the Holocaust and the basis for the award-winning documentary directed by Marek T. Pawlowski.
Henryk Schönker was born in 1931 into one of the most prominent and highly esteemed Jewish families of Oswiecim-the Polish town renamed Auschwitz during the German occupation. He and his family managed to flee Oswiecim shortly before the creation of the Auschwitz death camp, and survived the war through sheer...
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A riveting exploration of the brilliant, combative, and controversial "Father of the Nuclear Navy"
Admiral Hyman George Rickover (1899—1986) remains an almost mythical figure in the United States Navy. A brilliant engineer with a ferocious will and combative personality, he oversaw the invention of the world's first practical nuclear power reactor. As important as the transition from sail to steam, his development of nuclear-propelled submarines...
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The feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan (1921-2006), pathbreaking author of The Feminine Mystique, was powerful and polarizing. In this biography, the first in more than twenty years, Rachel Shteir draws on Friedan's papers and on interviews with family, colleagues, and friends to create a nuanced portrait.
Friedan, born Bettye Naomi Goldstein, chafed at society's restrictions from a young age. As a journalist she covered racism, sexism, labor,...
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A spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy
Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, throughout his career, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream.
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An insightful new biography of the central figure in the Dreyfus Affair, focused on the man himself and based on newly accessible documents
On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus's cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting "Death to Judas!" In this book, Maurice Samuels gives listeners new insight into Dreyfus himself-the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus's early life in Paris, his promising career as...
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Award-winning author Francine Klagsbrun reveals the complex life and work of Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah and a Zionist trailblazer
Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) is renowned as the founder of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, which quickly became one of the most successful of all Zionist groups. In her work with Hadassah, Szold used a combined ethical and pragmatic approach aimed at improving the lives of both Jews and...