“Jonathan Rabb is one of my favorite writers, a highly gifted, heart-wise storyteller if ever there was one. What a powerful, moving book.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author A moving novel about a Holocaust survivor’s unconventional journey back to a new normal in 1940s Savannah, Georgia In late summer 1947, thirty-one-year-old Yitzhak Goldah, a camp survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives. They are Abe and Pearl Jesler, older, childless, and an integral part of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the founding of the colony. There, Yitzhak discovers a fractured world, where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives--distinctions, to him, that are meaningless given what he has been through. He further complicates things when, much to the Jeslers' dismay, he falls in love with Eva, a young widow within the Reform community. When a woman from Yitzhak's past suddenly appears--one who is even more shattered than he is--Yitzhak must choose between a dark and tortured familiarity and the promise of a bright new life. Set amid the backdrop of America's postwar south, Among the Living grapples with questions of identity and belonging, and steps beyond the Jewish experience as it situates Yitzhak's story during the last gasp of the Jim Crow era. Yitzhak begins to find echoes of his own experience in the lives of the black family who work for the Jeslers--an affinity he does not share with the Jeslers themselves. This realization both surprises and convinces Yitzhak that his choices are not as clear-cut as he might have thought.
After the mysterious death of one Vatican priest and the disappearance of another, Father Ian Pearse, an American working on ancient Christian texts in the Vatican, comes into possession of a mysterious scroll. He discovers ingeniously coded letters and the text of an ancient Manichean prayer that has never before been found in written form. These reveal a Manichean conspiracy - a sect long-thought dead - reaching deep into the present Vatican hierarchy. Racing from the Vatican via an ancient Greek monastery to war-torn Bosnia, Father Pearse has to decipher the cryptograms and codes before the closely guarded heresy is unleashed on the world.
A debut thriller of global intrigue and political conspiracy In the summer of 1531, Medici soldiers, working for Pope Clement VII, tortured to death an obscure Swiss monk, Eusebius Eisenreich. What Eisenreich would not reveal was the location of a simple manuscript, On Supremacy, that far surpassed anything imagined by Machiavelli. The Pope never found the manuscript. This deadly document is at the heart of The Overseer. It has fallen into the hands of a cabal intent on ripping apart society as we know it and creating the terrifying new world order described in the manuscript. A faimile of Eisenreich's disturbing document has been reprinted in this book.
November 1918. A socialist revolution is sweeping across Germany, wreaking havoc on war-torn Berlin. Amid the ruin of the city's slums, four women are found dead—all with identical scars on their backs. Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his assistant, Hans Fichte, are baffled by the killings, and when another body is discovered, the case takes an ominous and unexpected turn. The fifth victim is none other than Rosa Luxemburg—a leader of the suppressed socialist uprising. Now, the Polpo, political police, are interested in the murders, and the mystery of Rosa's death leads Hoffner into the heart of Weimar's political turmoil, where ideas can be fatal. A spellbinding historical thriller from the author of The Second Son and Shadow and Light, Rosa is "a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and André Malraux . . . astonishing" (John Leonard, Harper's Magazine).
An Intriguing Historical Thriller Set in the Barcelona of the Spanish Civil War On the eve of Hitler's Olympics, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, a half Jew, has been forced out of the Kriminalpolizei. Luckily, Hoffner's focus is elsewhere. His son Georg is missing in Spain, swept up in the sudden outbreak of the civil war. He has already lost Sascha, his elder son, who is fully entrenched in the Nazi regime. But Georg is not what he appears to be, and when Hoffner discovers this, he is determined to save the one son he can. The Second Son is the eagerly awaited final installment in Jonathan Rabb's Berlin trilogy, set between the two world wars. In Harper's Magazine, John Leonard called the first, Rosa, "a ghostly noir that could have been conspired at by Raymond Chandler and André Malraux." The second, Shadow and Light (2009), garnered rave reviews—in The Washington Post, Wendy Smith praised its "atmosphere" and "brilliantly plotted narrative." Now, nearly ten years after the events of Shadow and Light, Hoffner finds himself tossed into the chaos that is Spain— where he quickly meets anarchists, Soviet and British secret agents, and a female doctor called Mila Pera—as he follows a trail of clues left by Georg. Jonathan Rabb delivers another atmospheric work, rich with his storytelling talent and historical expertise.
Berlin, 1927. When a studio executive at Ufa -- the home of German Cinema -- is found dead in his office bathtub, Herr Kriminal-Oberkommissar Nikolai Hoffner is determined to uncover the truth behind what he firmly believes is murder. With the help of Fritz Lang and Alby Pimm, the leader of the most powerful crime syndicate in Berlin, Hoffner finds his case taking him beyond the world of film and into the far more treacherous landscape of Berlin's sex and drug trade, the rise of Hitler's Brownshirts, and the even more astonishing attempts by onetime monarchists to rearm a post-Versailles Germany. Jonathan Rabb's Shadow and Light is an electrifying thriller set in a darkly beautiful Berlin poised on the edge of destruction.
In this powerful and timely book, one of the most admired and authoritative religious leaders of our time tackles the phenomenon of religious extremism and violence committed in the name of God. If religion is perceived as being part of the problem, Rabbi Sacks argues, then it must also form part of the solution. When religion becomes a zero-sum conceit—i.e., my religion is the only right path to God, therefore your religion is by definition wrong—and when individuals are motivated by what Rabbi Sacks calls “altruistic evil,” violence between peoples of different beliefs appears to be the inevitable outcome. But through an exploration of the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, and employing groundbreaking biblical analysis and interpretation, Rabbi Sacks shows that religiously inspired violence has as its source misreadings of biblical texts at the heart of all three Abrahamic faiths. By looking anew at the book of Genesis, with its foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Rabbi Sacks offers a radical rereading of many of the Bible’s seminal stories of sibling rivalry: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Rachel and Leah. Here is an eloquent call for people of goodwill from all faiths and none to stand together, confront the religious extremism that threatens to destroy us all, and declare: Not in God’s Name.
This book was originally published in 1988. Although they pursue divergent lines of analysis, these essays by historians and art historians reveal their mutual appreciation of art as historic evidence shaped by imagination as well as tradition and purpose.
The Shemitah, or Sabbath year, is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the land of Israel. Understanding this pattern is essential for understanding the prophecy and mysteries of the Bible that are still applicable today.
Faith in the Future addresses some of the major themes of our time: the fragmentation of our common culture, the breakdown of family and community life, the lack of moral direction, and the waning of religious belief. How, Sacks asks, can we construct a humane social order that honors human dignity and difference, one in which we can be both true to ourselves and a blessing to others? In the confusing state of postindustrial societies in the post-Cold War situation, can we give those who come after us a coherent map of hope? In treating such questions, Faith in the Future is structured in four parts. In the first, The Moral Covenant, Sacks touches on the broadest of issues: morality, the family, and the importance of communities in the life of society. In the second, Living Together, he asks how we can co-exist while remaining faithful to our distinctive identities and traditions. In the third, Jewish Ethics and Spirituality, he sketches some of Judaism's leading themes. There is such a thing, says, as an ecology of hope, and it lies in restoring to our culture a sense of family, community, and religious faith.
Ruth tells a true, simple, engaging and well-crafted story, teaching us about Gods sovereign control of history and God's transforming kindness to individuals.
A renowned diviner. An approaching and victorious army. A divine encounter. A talking donkey. And the message of Yahweh reigning as King. Balaam is well known as the primary example of a false prophet in the New Testament. But he wasn't a false prophet in the way that many of us would define them today. His story remains shocking and often misunderstood. While many remember the story of the talking donkey from the book of Numbers, few remember Balaam's incredible insights and battle of wills with Yahweh the Creator of the Universe. Balaam's God reveals the depths of Balaam's powers, the source of his accurate insight, and the weaknesses that led him astray. Balaam's reputation within the New Testament is as one of the worst false prophets in all of history. Yet his history outside of the New Testament is as one of the greatest diviners in all of antiquity. Balaam is a mysterious figure, yet the biblical text and context reveal the nature of his gifts and powers as well as the nature of his character. And there are important connections between Balaam and both the true and false prophets of today. Balaam's story doesn't end after his last oracle in the book of Numbers. It continues into the book of Revelation and even into our current day. In these pages you will discover the secrets to Balaam's communication with God, how God turned wrong divination into pure prophecy, and how to turn from Balaam's ways to a true mouthpiece of Yahweh.
This is a story about a natural athlete whose father was world renown in this regard. It is the sequel to “Nature’s Gift” and takes place in Israel and Italy in his early years and then mostly in the US. The tale quickly moves through Jacob’s time in the Army, to his travels in Asia and finally to his days as a student at a prestigious American university. Almost by instinct he is attracted to American football where he soon becomes a star both as a quarterback and linebacker. But trouble erupts and he leaves the University to become a professional.
The figure Balaam has interested exegetes and scribes for millennia. Jonathan Miles Robker examines the different versions of the literary character Balaam as attested in biblical and epigraphic literature. By contrasting the distinct information about Balaam presented in the various sources (the plaster inscription from Della, Numbers 22-24; 31; Deuteronomy 23; Joshua 13; 24; Judges 11; Micah 6; and Nehemiah 13), the author seeks to trace the development of characterizations of Balaam from the oldest available material to the youngest in the Hebrew Bible. In this way, Jonathan Miles Robker advances discourse about the literary and tradition-historical development of the texts that became the Hebrew Bible. Beyond the text of the Hebrew Bible, he also traces the continued development of Balaam's characterization through the texts of Qumran and the New Testament. To this end, the author contributes discussions of the history of religion in Antiquity.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is constantly in the news, but what about the people who live through it? Their lives are often overlooked, their stories ignored. This is especially true of Israelis and Palestinians who follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and seek to meet with each other and reconcile in the context of brotherly and sisterly love. But they do exist, and they do have a story to tell. They have chosen to seek reconciliation by participating in activities organized by Musalaha, an organization which facilitates Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and this book, skillfully written by Jonathan McRay, is an attempt to allow their voices and their stories to be heard. This collection of stories is an excellent introduction to some of the many issues faced by these followers of Christ on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, and chronicles the journey toward reconciliation they have chosen to take. The road to reconciliation is long and difficult, and the struggle is vividly portrayed in these narratives. Reading these stories, and the reflection pieces that follow them, leaves one with a picture of real human interaction which goes beyond the stereotypes and caricatures, and offers an authentic glimpse at the lives of Israeli and Palestinian believers, the lives they live, they challenges they face, their fears and their hopes. The stories told in this book are at times difficult to read, as they indicate how much distance still needs to be covered. But they also inspire hope; the brave example of those few who are working toward reconciliation proves that coexistence is possible, and can serve as a model for the future.
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