George Eliot's last, most ambitious novel, Daniel Deronda aroused scandal when it first appeared in 1876. What begins as a passionate love story takes a surprising turn into the hidden world of the early Zionist movement in Victorian England. The story opens memorably at a roulette table, where we first meet the young and idealistic Daniel Deronda and the enchanting Gwendolen Harleth, whom many critics consider to be George Eliot's finest creation....

Modern-day Israel, and the Jewish community, are strongly influenced by the memory and horrors of Hitler and the Holocaust. Burg argues that the Jewish nation has been traumatized and has lost the ability to trust itself, its neighbors or the world around it. He shows that this is one of the causes for the growing nationalism and violence that are plaguing Israeli society and reverberating through Jewish communities worldwide. Burg uses his own

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She is feared and desired. She is the symbol of a family's failure and a culture's dissolution. She is a courageous ally, a loyal fellow traveler, and a mother struggling for the survival of the same family and culture whose destruction she supposedly seeks.
The gentile woman has been all these things and more to the Jewish people. Her almost mythic status has its roots in the dawn of Jewish history and repercussions that extend beyond our own

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Argues for an American-Jewish community that is radically inclusive and embraces diversity and debate.

"Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what "the Jews" are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. The widespread conception is that the Jews were formerly either a religious community in exile or a nation based on Jewish ethnicity. The latter position is commonly known as Zionism, and all articulations of a political theory of Zionism are taken to be variations of that view. In this provocative book, based on his decades of...

"From an award-winning journalist, a perceptive study of how Israel's actions, which run counter to the traditional historical values of Judaism, are putting Jewish people worldwide in an increasingly untenable position. More than a decade ago, the historian Tony Judt considered whether the behavior of Israel was becoming not only "bad for Israel itself" but also, on a wider scale, "bad for the Jews." Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, this...

"Celebrated author Micah Goodman explores Israeli Judaism and the conflict between religion and secularism, one of the major causes of political polarization throughout the world. Goodman challenges both orthodoxies, proposing a middle ground to bridge the divide between religion and secularism and pave a path toward healing a society torn asunder by extremism"--Google Books.

What is exile? What is diaspora? What is Zionism? Jewish identity today has been shaped by prior generations' answers to these questions, and the future of Jewish life will depend on how we respond to them in our own time. In The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, celebrated rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid offers an essential contribution to this intergenerational process, inviting us to rethink our current moment through religious and political...

An accessible introduction to the many ways Jews understand Jewishness and identify themselves and their communities-throughout history and today. For everyone who wants to understand the varieties of Jewish identity, its boundaries and inclusions, this book explores the religious and historical understanding of what it has meant to be Jewish from ancient times to the present controversy over "Who is a Jew?" Beginning with the biblical period, it...

"The Holocaust followed by Israel's creation constituted a kind of civil religion for Jews, reminding them of their eternal vulnerability while offering salvation in the form of statehood. Memories inevitably change, however, and as the impact of these two titanic events fade, an increasingly number of Judiasm's next generation is starting to reject the particularism associated with both events in favor of a rebirth of the universalism that once characterized...