Drawing on research from various historians, the author offers opinions on how to define and explain the Holocaust, comparison to other genocides, and the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.
Of the multitude of toxins known and the enormous variety of effects they cause, of particular interest are those that influence signal transduction. Intercellular communication by chemical signals is essential for the functioning of multicellular organisms. Many toxins exert their biological effects by interfering with the signal transduction initiated by these chemicals (hormones, transmitters, growth factors, and other mediators). Up-to-date information is provided by outstanding experts, who discuss the molecular mechanisms involved in the action of many toxins, as well as the use of toxins as informative tools with which to study signal transduction and their potential therapeutic usage. This volume contains useful information for the experimentalist interested in toxins or in signal transduction, as well as for the reader interested in gaining a comprehensive overview of the field. The Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms of Toxin Action series will include monographs on signal transduction, secretory systems, cytoskeleton, selective neurotoxicity of natural, recombinant and chimeric toxins giving a broader emphasis on the mechanism of action, structure-function relationship, and use of toxins as research tools and their therapeutic applications.
In this volume Yehuda Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. In this volume Yehudi Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry's chief representative abroad. Drawing on the mass of unpublished material in the JDC archives and other repositories, as well as on his thorough knowledge of recent and continuing research into the Holocaust, he focuses alternately on the personalities and institutional decisions in New York and their effects on the JDC workers and their rescue efforts in Europe. He balances personal stories with a country-by-country account of the fate of Jews through ought the war years: the grim statistics of millions deported and killed are set in the context of the hopes and frustrations of the heroic individuals and small groups who actively worked to prevent the Nazis' Final Solution. This study is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the American Jewish response to European events from 1939 to 1945. Bauer confronts the tremendous moral and historical questions arising from JDC's activities. How great was the danger? Who should be saved first? Was it justified to use illegal or extralegal means? What country would accept Jewish refugees? His analysis also raises an issue which perhaps can never be answered: could American Jews have done more if they had grasped the reality of the Holocaust?
Drawing on research from various historians, the author offers opinions on how to define and explain the Holocaust, comparison to other genocides, and the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.
The very foundation of Judaism is examined in this epic work, written as a dialogue between the famous King of the Khazars and the Chacham. A standard text in Jewish schools worldwide, and a basic necessity for every Jew with a thirst for knowledge and understanding. A faithful English translation of the contemporary Hebrew rendition.
In 73 A.D., legend has it, 960 Jewish rebels under siege in the ancient desert fortress of Masada committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman legion. Recorded in only one historical source, the story of Masada was obscure for centuries. In The Masada Myth, Israeli sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda tracks the process by which Masada became an ideological symbol for the State of Israel, the dramatic subject of movies and miniseries, a shrine venerated by generations of Zionists and Israeli soldiers, and the most profitable tourist attraction in modern Israel. Ben-Yehuda describes how, after nearly 1800 years, the long, complex, and unsubstantiated narrative of Josephus Flavius was edited and augmented in the twentieth century to form a simple and powerful myth of heroism. He looks at the ways this new mythical narrative of Masada was created, promoted, and maintained by pre-state Jewish underground organizations, the Israeli army, archaeological teams, mass media, youth movements, textbooks, the tourist industry, and the arts. He discusses the various organizations and movements that created “the Masada experience” (usually a ritual trek through the Judean desert followed by a climb to the fortress and a dramatic reading of the Masada story), and how it changed over decades from a Zionist pilgrimage to a tourist destination. Placing the story in a larger historical, sociological, and psychological context, Ben-Yehuda draws upon theories of collective memory and mythmaking to analyze Masada’s crucial role in the nation-building process of modern Israel and the formation of a new Jewish identity. An expert on deviance and social control, Ben-Yehuda looks in particular at how and why a military failure and an enigmatic, troubling case of mass suicide (in conflict with Judaism’s teachings) were reconstructed and fabricated as a heroic tale.
An eminently thorough and authoritative book on the laws of honoring parents. This book discusses, in great detail, the various laws of honoring and respecting parents, in an extremely practical, contemporary manner. Discusses topics such as: standing up for parents, expenses incurred for Kibbud Av v'Eim, honoring parents who do not keep Torah and mitzvot, listening to parents regarding shidduchim, etc. Translated from the Hebrew Otzar Kibbud Av V'Eim.
In Betrayals and Treason Nachman Ben-Yehuda identifies the universal structure of betrayals as the violation of trust and loyalty and charts the different manifestations and constructions of these violations, all within numerous cases across time, place, and cultures. Betrayals do not just lie in the eyes of the beholder, completely relative. While the very idea of betrayals is a social construct, underlying it is a universal structure of violations of both trust and loyalty. Whenever this structure materializes, the label "betrayal" is invoked and applied.
Assia was my true wife, and the best friend I ever had', wrote Ted Hughes, after his lover surrendered her life and that of their young daughter in 1969, six years after Sylvia Plath had suffered a similiar fate. Diva, she-devil, enchantress, muse, Lillith, Jezebel - Assia inspired many epithets during her life. The tragic story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has always been related from one of two points of view: hers or his. Missing for over four decades had been a third: that of Hughes's mistress. This first biography of Assia Wevill views afresh the Plath-Hughes relationship and at the same time, recounts the journey that shaped her life. Wevill's is a complex story, formed as it is by the pull of often contrary forces.
The world has recently learned of Oskar Schindler's efforts to save the lives of Jewish workers in his factory in Poland by bribing Nazi officials. Not as well known, however, are many other equally dramatic attempts to negotiate with the Nazis for the release of Jews in exchange for money, goods, or political benefits. In this riveting book, a leading Holocaust scholar examines these attempts, describing the cast of characters, the motives of the participants, the frustrations and few successes, and the moral issues raised by the negotiations. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined sources, Yehuda Bauer deals with the fact that before the war Hitler himself was willing to permit the total emigration of Jews from Germany in order to be rid of them. In the end, however, there were not enough funds for the Jews to buy their way out, there was no welcome for them abroad, and there was too little time before war began. Bauer then concentrates on the negotiations that took place between 1942 and 1945 as Himmler tried to keep open options for a separate peace with the Western powers. In fascinating detail Bauer portrays the dramatic intrigues that took place: a group of Jewish leaders bribed a Nazi official to stop the deportation of Slovakian Jews; a Czech Jew known as Dogwood tried to create an alliance between American leaders and conservative German anti-Nazis; Adolf Eichmann's famous "trucks for blood" proposal to exchange one million Jews for trucks to use against the Soviets failed because of Western reluctance; and much more. Tormenting questions arise throughout Bauer's discussion. If the Nazis were actually willing to surrender more Jews, should the Allies have acted on the offer? Did the efforts to exchange lives for money constitute collaboration with the enemy or heroism? In answering these questions, Bauer's book—engrossing, profound, and deeply moving—adds a new dimension to Holocaust studies.
Ben-Yehuda presents an in-depth inquiry into the nature and patterns of political assassinations and executions by Jews in Palestine and Israel. Extensive empirical evidence is used to analyze the social construction of violent and aggressive human behavior, using a sociology of deviance perspective. Political assassinations and executions are placed within their particular cultural matrix to describe how this specific form of killing has been conceptualized as part of an alternative system of justice. "The taking of a human life is generally regarded as the ultimate evil. Given this fact, it is important to examine and understand how it is explained, justified, and cloaked in a 'vocabulary of motives.' Such acts are, in the author's words, 'socially constructed and interpreted,' dependent on the observer's location in a specific 'symbolic-moral universe.'Moreover, such acts (political assassination specifically) are manifestations of struggles that represent attempts to legitimate these world-views, rhetorical devices that serve to define 'boundary-markers' between such universes — moral crusades that attempt to validate one view vis-a-vis another. This general approach to political assassinations is original. Its application to assassinations by Israelis is original. The fact that the book is empirical marks it off from many speculations on the subject. A number of the author's findings make a distinct contribution.
For the last fifty years I have been studying the genocide of the Jews, which we call the Holocaust. For the last thirty years I have been studying antisemitism, and for the last fifteen years genocide generally, and ways to prevent it. That is the prism through which I view Jewish history, past and present - I prefer to look at it from a contemporary point of view. That is also the way I view human history in general. It is quite possible that this view from the present to the past is decisively influenced by the fact that my professional life is determined by the most tragic and serious issues that any historian, and most certainly a Jewish one, can deal with: the Holocaust, antisemitism, and genocide." -- Yehuda Bauer (Series: LIT Premium) [Subject: Sociology, Jewish Studies, History]
In this remarkable, never-before-told account of the Ovitz family, seven of whose ten members were dwarves, readers bear witness to the best and worst of humanity and to the terrible irony of the Ovitz's fate: being burdened with dwarfism helped them endure the Holocaust. Israeli authors Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev weave the tale of a beloved and successful family of performers who were famous entertainers in Central Europe until the Nazis deported them to Auschwitz in May 1944. Descending into the hell of the concentration camp from the transport train, the Ovitz family—known widely as the Lilliput Troupe—was separated from other Jewish victims. Dr. Josef Mengele was notified of their arrival and they were assigned better quarters and provided more nutritious food than other inmates. The authors chronicle Mengele's experiments upon the Ovitz's, and the creepy fondness he developed for these small people, even the songs he composed and sang to this family of singers, dancers, and klezmorim. Finally liberated by Russian troops, the family returned to their deserted village in Transylvania, and eventually found their way to a new home in Israel. They resumed their careers, overcame their handicaps and became wealthy and successful performers.
This book deals with the nature and development of Jewish myth from the Talmudic period through Kabbalah to Hasidism. It describes the changes in this myth in its various stages and the external influences on it. The author shows that myth is in the essence of the Jewish religion and that, rather than being created out of external influences, Kabbalah is one of its manifestions. The book also deals with the related subject of Messianism, and delves into the special spiritual personalities of some messianic figures in Jewish history to show how myth was incarnate in them.
The New Babylonian Diaspora: Rise and Fall of Jewish Community in Iraq, 16th–20th Centuries C.E. provides a historical survey of the Iraqi Jewish community's evolution from the apex of its golden age to its disappearance, emergence, rapid growth and annihilation. Making use of Judeo-Arabic newspapers and archives in London, Paris, Washington D.C. and other sources, Zvi Yehuda proves that from 1740 to 1914, Iraq became a lodestone for tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Kurdistan, Persia, the Mediterranean Basin, and Eastern and Central Europe. After these Jews had settled in Baghdad and Mesopotamia, they became “Babylonians” and ‘forgot’ their lands of origin, contrary to the social habit of Jews in other communities throughout history.
The second volume in a series based on Rabbi Yechiel Perr's Vaʻadim in Sefer madreigas Ha'adam. This book sheds light on the fundamentals of becomming a ba'al bitachon, as elucidated by the Alter of Novaradok" -- page 4 of cover.
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