Yakar L'Mordecai commemorates forty years of Rabbi Waxman's service to Temple Israel of Great Neck; it was initiated by his grateful congregants and carried through by his colleagues and friends. It mirrors his interests in and contributions to Jewish scholarship and thought, and is divided into four sections, each pertaining to an area in which Rabbi Waxman has been involved. Part I is a retrospective of Rabbi Waxman's career in the rabbinate and in Jewish scholarship; Part II, on Jewish thought, contains articles which reflect the honoree's broad knowledge of the topic, from Biblical studies to contemporary theology. Part III deals with Jewish-Christian relations, as well as the position of Jews in various parts of the world in their relations with the surrounding cultures, and Part IV with American Judaism. Along with the many other contributions, this volume contains articles by Rabbi Waxman's later father and wife and one by his son, Rabbi Jonathan Waxman.
This groundbreaking survey, written in 1860, is a radically open-minded look at the use of drugs across the world and throughout the ages. Early users of tobacco in Russia would have their noses cut off and repeat offenders their heads. Pope Innocent XII excommunicated any who used it in St. Peters. Marijuana users in 14th century Egypt would have their teeth extracted for the crime. Yet use of these and other forbidden substances continued to grow. If only as a record of the perennial failure of harsh punishments to deter drug use Victorian naturalist Mordecai Cooke's work The Seven Sisters of Sleep would remain significant. But Cooke's natural humor and keen insights have ensured this work's reputation as possibly the best early book from what has grown into an enormous body of literature on mind- and mood-altering substances. Written at a time, similar to our own, when drug use was being reconsidered, The Seven Sisters of Sleep is a thought-provoking and open-minded look at the use of drugs across the world and throughout the ages. Quite popular in its day and a major influence on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, this is an important book for anyone interested in an unbiased account of humanity's long involvement with psychoactive, hallucinogenic, and stimulant plants.
Level 7 is the diary of Officer X-127, who is assigned to stand guard at the "Push Buttons," a machine devised to activate the atomic destruction of the enemy, in the country’s deepest bomb shelter. Four thousand feet underground, Level 7 has been built to withstand the most devastating attack and to be self-sufficient for five hundred years. Selected according to a psychological profile that assures their willingness to destroy all life on Earth, those who are sent down may never return. Originally published in 1959, and with over 400,000 copies sold, this powerful dystopian novel remains a horrific vision of where the nuclear arms race may lead, and is an affirmation of human life and love. Level 7 merits comparison to Huxley’s A Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 and should be considered a must-read by all science fiction fans.
The Man Who Knew god unravels the complexities of the book of Jeremiah and argues that this prophet is the key figure in shaping Western civilization. Mordecai Schreiber posits that Jeremiah not only is the one who eradicated paganism among the Hebrew people but also can be considered the founder of the postbiblical Jewish faith. Offering intriguing insight into Jeremiah's role in the founding of Western monotheism and the eradication of paganism among the Hebrew people, this book should be read by all those interested in biblical studies, Jewish studies, and religion. Book jacket.
Charged with comic energy and a steely disregard for any pieties whatsoever, Barney's Version is a major Richler novel, the most personal and feeling book of a long and distinguished career. Told in the first person, it gives us the life (and what a life!) of Barney Panofsky--whose trashy TV company, Totally Useless Productions, has made him a small fortune; whose three wives include a martyred feminist icon, a quintessential JCP (Jewish-Canadian Princess), and the incomparable Miriam, the perfect wife, lover, and mother--alas, now married to another man; who recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early fifties, and his lifelong passion for wine, women, and the Montreal Canadiens; who either did or didn't murder his best friend, Boogie, after discovering him in bed with The Second Mrs. Panofsky; whose satirical eye for the idiocies of today's Quebec separatists (as well as for every other kind of political correctness) manages to offend his entire acquaintanceship (and will soon be offending readers everywhere); and whose memory--though not his bile--is, in his sixty-seventh year, definitely slipping . . .
Living in a rat-infested hotel in Franco’s post-war Spain, André Bennett, a Canadian painter, loves Toni, his girl friend, who wants him to return home. Roger Kraus, a Nazi on the run, shadows the young artist day and night. They meet on a bridge during the last night of the fiesta, and as the sky is shredded by exploding fireworks, the story draws to its violent climax. Originally published in 1954, The Acrobats marks Mordecai Richler’s stunning debut as a novelist.
In this remarkable, historically significant book, Mordecai Paldiel recounts in vivid detail the many ways in which, at great risk to their own lives, Jews rescued other Jews during the Holocaust. In so doing he puts to rest the widely held belief that all Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe wore blinders and allowed themselves to be led like “lambs to the slaughter.” Paldiel documents how brave Jewish men and women saved thousands of their fellow Jews through efforts unprecedented in Jewish history. Encyclopedic in scope and organized by country, Saving One’s Own tells the stories of hundreds of Jewish activists who created rescue networks, escape routes, safe havens, and partisan fighting groups to save beleaguered Jewish men, women, and children from the Nazis. The rescuers’ dramatic stories are often shared in their own words, and Paldiel provides extensive historical background and documentation. The untold story of these Jewish heroes, who displayed inventiveness and courage in outwitting the enemy—and in saving literally thousands of Jews—is finally revealed.
Transplanted to Toronto from his native Baffin Island, Atuk the poet is an unlikely overnight success. Eagerly adapting to a society steeped in pretension, bigotry, and greed, Atuk soon abandons the literary life in favour of more lucrative – and hazardous – schemes. Richler’s hilarious and devastating satire lampoons the self-deceptions of “the Canadian identity” and derides the hypocrisy of a nation that seeks cultural independence by slavishly pursuing the American dream.
Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983), founder of Reconstructionism, is the preeminent American Jewish thinker and rabbi of our times. His life embodies the American Jewish experience of the first half of the twentieth century. With passionate intensity and uncommon candor, Kaplan compulsively recorded his experience in his journal (some 10,000 pages). This first volume of Communings of the Spirit covers Kaplan's early years as a rabbi, teacher of rabbis, and community leader. Kaplan, who trained rabbis for half a century, gives us an inside picture of life at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the center of Conservative Judaism in America. He records his masterful weekly sermons, which were attended regularly by his students. With unflinching candor, he reveals his successes and failures, uncertainties and self-doubts. Undeterred by attacks on his radical beliefs, he never wavered in the pursuit of a more dynamic Judaism.
A study of Christian clerics who have been declared "Righteous among the Nations" by Yad Vashem; the number at present is close to 600. Examines activities of rescuers country by country, e.g. Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, other countries of Eastern Europe, and Italy. Aid given to persecuted Jews included protests against official antisemitism, intervention with authorities, sermons calling on congregations to help Jews, providing Jews with Christian identity papers, and hiding Jews. Stresses that the Churches did not abandon their anti-Judaic doctrines during the Holocaust, and many of the rescuers were known as antisemites before the war. Some of the clerics approved the early anti-Jewish measures of the occupiers or of the pro-Nazi governments, but protested when the deportations began. Examines the motives of the clerical rescuers, which involved compassion and a necessity to help the persecuted in the spirit of the parable of the Good Samaritan, as well as a deep respect for Jews and Judaism, which was especially typical of Protestants. Protestants in countries where they were a small and persecuted minority rendered more help to Jews during the Holocaust than the dominant Catholic or Orthodox populations. After World War II the Catholic and Protestant Churches acknowledged a measure of responsibility for the genocide of the Jews.
St. Urbain’s Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderfully comic evocation of a generation consumed with guilt—guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound. Thirty-seven-year-old Jake Hersh is a film director of modest success, a faithful husband, and a man in disgrace. His alter ego is his cousin Joey, a legend in their childhood neighbourhood in Montreal. Nazi-hunter, adventurer, and hero of the Spanish Civil War, Joey is the avenging horseman of Jake’s impotent dreams. When Jake becomes embroiled in a scandalous trial in London, England, he puts his own unadventurous life on trial as well, finding it desperately wanting as he steadfastly longs for the Horseman’s glorious return. Irreverent, deeply felt, as scathing in its critique of social mores as it is uproariously funny, St. Urbain’s Horseman confirms Mordecai Richler’s reputation as a pre-eminent observer of the hypocrisies and absurdities of modern life.
In this book, Kaplan enlarges on his notion of functional reinterpretation and then actually applies it to the entire ritual cycle of the Jewish year-a rarity in modern Jewish thought. This work continues to function as a central text for the Reconstructionist movement, whose influence continues to grow in American Jewry.
Since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to a level of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, technological innovation has transformed society, and a core priority of public policy has been promoting innovation. What is the relationship between economic inequality and technological change? Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: they sow the seeds of market power. In a free market economy with intellectual property rights, firms’ control over technology enables them to expand, attain monopoly power, and earn exorbitant profits. Competition among innovators does not eliminate market power because technological competition is different from standard competition; it results in only one or two winners. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis grounded on quantifying technological market power and its effects on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. He outlines what causes market power to rise and fall and details its macroeconomic and distributional consequences. Kurz demonstrates that technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth. Unchecked inequality threatens the foundations of democracy: public policy is the only counterbalancing force that can restrain corporate power, attain more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and make democracy compatible with capitalism. Presenting a new paradigm for understanding today’s vast inequalities, this book offers detailed proposals to redress them by restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, improving the balance of power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class.
The Path of The Righteous by Mordecai Paldiel recounts the inspiring stories of several hundred "Righteous Among the Nations" - heroic gentile men and women, in virtually all the countries of Nazi-occupied Europe, who put themselves and their families at risk in order to save the lives of Jews fleeing the Nazi terror. Drawn from the files of Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel, these stories are a badly needed corrective to the pessimistic view of human nature which has become all too common in the Holocaust's aftermath. They prove that decency, morality, and altruism can survive even under the most horrendous of circumstances, and that some people will always be willing to act selflessly. It also serves to disprove the cruel lie being promulgated by some that the Holocaust never took place, or did not take place as described in eye witness accounts. The courageous individuals whose tales are recounted in this book are monuments to the nobility of the human spirit. They did what they did not for the sake of reward or prestige, but because they believed it was right. Some of them were pious Christians motivated by religion. Others were energized by feelings of intense compassion. Neither the threat of punishment nor ostracism by relatives and neighbors deterred them. Love for their fellow human beings was a higher value. The book contains a foreword by Rabbi Harold Schulweis, founding chairman of the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers/ADL, and an afterword by Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor who was saved by his Polish nursemaid, poignantly express their recognition of and gratitude to the untold numbers of righteous gentiles, many of whom will never be known by us.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is the novel that established Mordecai Richler as one of the world’s best comic writers. Growing up in the heart of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, Duddy Kravitz is obsessed with his grandfather’s saying, “A man without land is nothing.” In his relentless pursuit of property and his drive to become a somebody, he will wheel and deal, he will swindle and forge, he will even try making movies. And in spite of the setbacks he suffers, the sacrifices he must make along the way, Duddy never loses faith that his dream is worth the price he must pay. This blistering satire traces the eventful coming-of-age of a cynical dreamer. Amoral, inventive, ruthless, and scheming, Duddy Kravitz is one of the most magnetic anti-heroes in literature, a man who learns the hard way that dreams are never exactly what they seem, even when they do come true.
Joshua Then and Now is about Joshua Shapiro today, and the Joshua he was. His father a boxer turned honest crook, his mother an erotic dancer whose greatest performance was at Joshua’s bar mitzvah, Joshua has overcome his inauspicious beginnings in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal to become a celebrated television writer and a successful journalist. But Joshua, now middle-aged, is not a happy man. Incapacitated by a freak accident, anguished by the disappearance of his WASP wife, and caught up in a sex scandal, Joshua is besieged by the press and tormented by the ghosts of his youth. Set in Montreal, the novel chronicles the rocky journey we all make between the countries of the past and the present. Raucous, opinionated, tender, Joshua Then and Now is a memorable excursion into Mordecai Richler's comic universe.
Moses Berger decides to write a history of the Gursky family and becomes obsessed with the evasive Solomon. He follows the family from Victorian London to the wastes of Canada and to the fleshpots of London and Oxford.
The author has collected the most amazing stories of people who secretly saved Jewish lives from 1933 to 1945 and arranged them chronologically and geographically to show us that there will always be a few righteous souls who have made a greater difference in favour of human goodness.
Deals with those embassy and consular workers throughout German-occupied Europe who, through granting visas to Jews or obtaining consular protection for them, rescued thousands of lives. Most of these diplomats acted contrary to their governments' policies of non-admission of Jews and infringed on instructions given to them or at least the spirit of these instructions, thereby risking their careers and sometimes their lives. Arranged according to the countries where these diplomats were accredited: Germany, Austria, Lithuania, France, Denmark, Hungary, and others. Ch. 7 (pp. 111-200), "Budapest: The Apocalypse", deals with events in Budapest in 1944, when diplomats of various countries, by concerted efforts, granted visas and consular protection to ca. 25,000 Jews. Dwells especially on the activities of Frank Foley, Jan Zwartendijk, Sempo Sugihara, Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, Carl Lutz, Raoul Wallenberg, Giorgio Perlasca, and Angelo Rotta.
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