Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Jewish Books An ancient rendering of scripture, a scholar's meditations on identity, a Holocaust survivor's testimony, and a young woman's search for meaning shed new light on what it means to be Jewish. "The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible" edited by Martin Abegg Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060600632/entertainmentsit "The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English" is the first full English translation of the Hebrew scriptures used by the Essene sect at Qumran. Translators Martin Abegg Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich have loaded this volume with scholarly notes and commentary, but their interpretations are formatted in a way that does not impede the general reader's enjoyment of the book. "The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible" breathes new life into scripture by delving into the earliest source material yet discovered. It is a crucial work to reckon with for anyone interested in Jewish life around the time of Jesus. "Multiple Identities of the Middle East" by Bernard Lewis http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805241728/entertainmentsit "The Multiple Identities of the Middle East" by Bernard Lewis is a sharp diamond of a book. It cuts to the essence of how identity has traditionally been experienced by people in the Middle East, how Western political concepts have altered Middle-Eastern notions of identity, and how these imported Western ideas have inflamed political conflicts in that region. "The primary identities are those acquired at birth," Lewis writes. The first determiner of identity is blood, the second is place, and the third is religious community, which for many is "the only loyalty that transcends local and immediate bonds." Lewis adds, "The second broad category of identity is that of allegiance to a ruler," and notes that these two categories of identity were the only ones that existed until modern times, when the Middle East came under the influence of Europe. Now, he says, "a new kind [of identity] is evolving" between the two traditional categories that existed before. This is "the freely chosen cohesion and loyalty of voluntary associations, combining to form what is nowadays known as the civil society." "I'm No Hero: The Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor" by Henry Friedman http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0295978015/entertainmentsit "I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor" is a memoir by Henry Friedman, a Polish Jew who escaped internment in the concentration camps with help from a Christian family who hid him in the loft of a barn for 18 months. He was 14 years old when he went into hiding, and he remembers his flight for safety from the German bombings of Poland this way: "[I saw] buildings burning, parts of human bodies, dead and wounded animals. I was mesmerized by a wounded horse. His blood was bubbling from his stomach, and my mother put her hand over my eyes and dragged me away." When the family was liberated by the Russians, Friedman grew up fast. He became involved in black market trading in a displaced persons camp in Austria, and he began seducing women with great regularity. He moved to America in 1949, finally returning to Poland to visit the family who protected him in 1988. His primary avocation in retirement is speaking to school children about surviving the Holocaust. Friedman is not a scholar, and his prose is workmanlike. But his book--even considering its detailed reports of his off- color adventures--will be most profitably read by adolescents and young people. It is a harsh, tough, simply-told story about growing up in very difficult circumstances, about forgiving oneself for moral failure, and about accepting second (and third, and fourth) chances with grace. "Generation J" by Lisa Schiffman http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062515772/entertainmentsit "Generation J" is a beautifully written, constantly courageous, hip, wise memoir by a young woman determined to figure out what it means to be Jewish. Lisa Schiffman, who grew up in the mostly Christian community of Levittown, New Jersey, writes of her own alienated adolescence: "We were a generation of Jews who'd grown up on television, with Barbie, with rhinoplasty as a way of life. Assimilation wasn't something we strove for; it was the condition into which we were born." Feeling unmoored in early adulthood, Schiffman begins a search for the essence of the Jewish identity she feels exiled from. She undertakes experiments such as eating nonkosher food every day for a week, and gently confronting her parents' ignorance of their own religion. Oddly, her greatest religious epiphany comes from the experience of getting a henna tattoo--a vine across her torso, with the Star of David at the end. The tattoo sets off what she calls, elsewhere in the book, "a big think- through": "There is the vine. There is me. There's Judaism, the religion of paradox and reconciliation. I'll learn from it what I can. I'll sort out my own conflicted truths. I refuse to reject myself--any part. I no longer choose to exile." --Michael Joseph Gross is a former political speech writer, now working as a freelance journalist. ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Religion & Spirituality section at Religion & Spirituality
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