The first childhood memory I have of my father is linked to the destruction of empires--the collapse of a world order that had once seemed eternal." So begins Avraham Burg's authoritative and deeply personal inquiry into the ambitions and failures of Israel and Judaism worldwide. Born in 1955, Burg witnessed firsthand many of the most dramatic and critical moments in Israeli history. Here, he chronicles the highs and lows of his country over the last five decades, threading his own journey into the story of his people. He explores the misplaced hopes of religious Zionism through the lens of his conservative upbringing, explains Israel's obsession with military might while relating his own experiences as a paratrooper officer, and probes the country's democratic aspirations, informed by his tenure in the Knesset. With bravery and candor, Burg lays bare the seismic intellectual shifts that drove the country's political and religious journeys, offering a prophecy of fury and consolation and a vision for a new comprehensive paradigm for Judaism, Israel, and the Middle East.
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 family history--his parents were Holocaust survivors--to inform his innovative views on what the Jewish people need to do to move on and eventually live in peace with their Arab neighbors and feel comfortable in the world at large. Thought-provoking, compelling, and original, this book is bound to spark a heated debate around the world.
The book is a new interpretation of the weekly torah reading. It is written from a world view deeply committed to Judaism, which places the responsibility of interpretation and identity on each one of us. The Torah is not in heaven but in the heart and mouth of you and me, to study it and to live by it. Through this book the author tries to involve the reader in the language of the five books of Moses that has been present in our lives for thousands of years. It s a language which is human, universal, moral, historical and national. "My interpretation is one of many and I try to invite the reader or student to argue or to agree, to add or to subtract from my interpretation, or even better to develop their own interpretation and spread it around.
The book is a new interpretation of the weekly torah reading. It is written from a world view deeply committed to Judaism, which places the responsibility of interpretation and identity on each one of us. The Torah is not in heaven but in the heart and mouth of you and me, to study it and to live by it. Through this book the author tries to involve the reader in the language of the five books of Moses that has been present in our lives for thousands of years. It s a language which is human, universal, moral, historical and national. "My interpretation is one of many and I try to invite the reader or student to argue or to agree, to add or to subtract from my interpretation, or even better to develop their own interpretation and spread it around.
The first childhood memory I have of my father is linked to the destruction of empires--the collapse of a world order that had once seemed eternal." So begins Avraham Burg's authoritative and deeply personal inquiry into the ambitions and failures of Israel and Judaism worldwide. Born in 1955, Burg witnessed firsthand many of the most dramatic and critical moments in Israeli history. Here, he chronicles the highs and lows of his country over the last five decades, threading his own journey into the story of his people. He explores the misplaced hopes of religious Zionism through the lens of his conservative upbringing, explains Israel's obsession with military might while relating his own experiences as a paratrooper officer, and probes the country's democratic aspirations, informed by his tenure in the Knesset. With bravery and candor, Burg lays bare the seismic intellectual shifts that drove the country's political and religious journeys, offering a prophecy of fury and consolation and a vision for a new comprehensive paradigm for Judaism, Israel, and the Middle East.
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 family history--his parents were Holocaust survivors--to inform his innovative views on what the Jewish people need to do to move on and eventually live in peace with their Arab neighbors and feel comfortable in the world at large. Thought-provoking, compelling, and original, this book is bound to spark a heated debate around the world.
This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January 1944, was written under conditions of extreme danger by a Ghetto inmate and secretary of the Jewish Council. After the war, in order to escape from Lithuania, the author was forced to entrust the diary to leaders of the Escape movement; eventually it made its way to his new home in Israel. The diary incorporates Avraham Tory’s collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. It depicts in grim detail the struggle for survival under Nazi domination, when—if not simply carted off and murdered in a random “action”—Jews were exploited as slave labor while being systematically starved and denied adequate housing and medical care. Through it all, Tory’s overriding purpose was to record the unimaginable events of these years and to memorialize the determination of the Jews to sustain their community life in the midst of the Nazi terror. Of the surviving diaries originating in the principal European Ghettos of this period, Tory’s is the longest written by an adult, a dramatic and horrifying document that makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary history. Tory provides an insider’s view of the desperate efforts of Ghetto leaders to protect Jews. Martin Gilbert’s masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.
Every human being is presented with the ''human challenge'': How do I grow? How do I become wise? How do I sanctify the world around me and make it a better place? How do I work on my character? How do I integrate work and food and intimacy into my life's goals? This volume is an attempt to answer these questions for the intelligent and sensitive adult reader. It draws significantly on deeper Jewish thought, balancing brevity with profundity. The Human Challenge provides a rich and exciting entry point for those who are at the early stages of their relationship with Judaism as well as significant benefit to those with an extensive background, as it provides a methodical and sourced overview of topics that may otherwise remain as fragmented insights.
Referring to several important introductory books written about the archaeology of the land of Israel, William Dever once stated: “However adequate these may be as introductions to the basic data, none makes any attempt to organize the data in terms of social structure. . . . This is a serious deficiency in Syro-Palestinian and biblical archaeology, when one considers that the general field of archaeology has been moving toward social archaeology for 20 years or more. (Dever, “Social Structure in Palestine in the Iron Age II Period on the Eve of Destruction,” in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land [ed. T. E. Levy, London, 1995, p. 416]). Lack of discussion of social questions has characterized the archaeology of the land of Israel for some time, even though around the world these questions constitute an important component of archaeological research (see, for instance, the work of Renfrew, Flannery, Gibbon, Blanton, Dark, Bahn, Hodder, Trigger, and many others). The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II fills this gap and analyzes the structure of society in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah from an archaeological viewpoint. It also applies models and theories from the field of social and cognitive archaeology, using the tools of various social-science disciplines (anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, and so on). Due to his ability to use what is probably the largest archaeological data set in the world—hundreds of planned excavations, thousands of salvage excavations, and extensive surveys, all from the small region that was ancient Israel—Avi Faust contributes not only to the study of ancient Israelite society but to the most fundamental questions about ancient societies. These questions include the identification of socioeconomic stratification in the archaeological record, the study of family and community organization, the significance of pottery, small finds and architecture as indicators of wealth, and more. This groundbreaking monograph is one of the first attempts at a large-scale study of Israelite society based primarily on the archaeological evidence. The following acknowledgments were inadvertently omitted from the front matter of the volume: Amihai Mazar: figure 31 Amnon Ben-Tor: figures 40, 41 Israel Antiquities Authority: figures 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30., 32, 33, 36, and Photo 5 Israel Exploration Society: figures 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 27, 42 Israel Finkelstein: figure 28 Izhak Beit Arieh: figures 34, 35 Shimon Dar: figures 22, 23 The Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University: figures 7, 8 The Institute of Archaeology, the Hebrew University: figures 40, 41 Zeev Herzog: figures 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20
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