This book is both a portrait of Martin Buber and an introduction to his thought.Table of Contents: The Asylum. Meeting and Living. Answering for Ourselves. The Need to say No. The Test. Childhood: The Horse. The Way to Hasidism. The Narrow Ridge. Hebrew Humanism. Facing the Middle East. Germany and Eichmann. The Teacher. Buber. Hammaskjold, and Schweitzer. Bertrand Russel. Gandhi and Tagore. Dialogue with Christians. Talking with Sabras. Buber and the Young Protesters. Eighty-five.

In 1953 I was living in a kibbutz in the hills of Nazareth. A close relative was in the schizophrenic ward of a Jerusalem mental hospital, and twice a week I visited her. I found these visits horrifying and deeply upsetting. The hospital itself was in the suburb of Talbieh, and I often walked its streets after seeing my relative in an attempt to shake off the terrifying aura of the hospital and to come to terms with my distress over her misery. My customary route lay towards Mount Zion, but once I walked in another direction. It was on a day when my relative had been violent and I had lost all hope for her recovery. AS I walked I came to a green street in which I saw a garden with two tall trees, a cypress and a palm. For some reason it attracted me and I walked over to it; I stood looking at the tranquil, shuttered house it surrounded and then at the metal nameplate:

Martin Buber

An account of the creation and development of the State of Israel since it was established in 1948.  Table of Contents: The Land and the People. Historical Background - Palestine 1918-1948. The United Nations and Israel 1947-1952. Before and after the Sinai Crisus 1952-1959. The Jews in the World Today. Immigration and Integration. Israel's Economy of Faith. The Democratic Government. The Law and the Courts. The Social Order. Education, Research and Archaeology. The Press, Literature and Art. Arab Refugees and Arab Citizens. Jerusalem. Israel and the Religions. Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.

Palestine of the British Mandate, it was said, was a geographical expression, and a very indefinite expression at that. To the Jews the country was known as the land of Israel; to the Arabs as Southern Syria. Since the decision of the United Nations Assembly 1947, providing for the partition of the British Mandated Territory into two states, and since the Declaration of Independence by Israel in May 1948, Palestine has ceased to be either a political or a geographical unit. Israel is the name of the new State whose territory is included in a State now called Jordan.  

This book unravels the mysteries and tragedies of Begin's life. It demonstrates the misstatements about the man by both friend and foe. It reveals the roots and inner thoughts of one of Israel's controversial public figures. It shows a man who is painfully shy, lacerated by self-doubt, but who is scrupulously honest and a genuine believer in the cause to which he dedicated his life.

460 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, good condition: jacket is chipped.

menachem Begin was born August 16, 1913—the final child in a family about to be torn apart by war.

He had two years of peace, in a Jewish market town ruled by czarist Russia, and would toddle along the porch of his grandfather's home while his brother and sister romped through the yard. Grandfather Begin was the last in a line of timber barons, and his house nestled near the Mukhavets River on the edge of town. Menachem's parents' home, in town, was not much smaller. They had a Russian pessant for a maid. "Before the war," recalls Menachem's sister, Rachel, "we had a wonderful life. We used to dream of going all the way to Saint Petersburg to study. Bet Menachem was born into Gone With the Wind! The war tore everything apart. My grandfather and grandmother died. My grandfather's house was burned. By the age of two, it was all over for Menachem. He did not have a childhood like me or my other brother, Herzl. He did not even remember his grandparents. He knew nothing."

A focus on the secret relationshipbetween Israeli and American intelligence. The authors have compiled a detailed history of the unique cooperation between the CIA, the Pentagon and Israel's multifaceted intelligence system.

On a spring day not long before the war against Iraq, a convoy of fifty red buses set out from the beachfront hotels of Tel Aviv and headed north. Each of the buses carried an identical slogan: "Philadelphia - Mitzvah," mitzvah being a Jewish religious term meaning a duty owed to God alone and performed in his honor. The 980 pilgrims were not, however, on their way to a traditional religious celebration. Their destination was the Barak battalion base of the Northern Command of Israeli army on the Golan Heights.
The passengers on the buses, mostly middle-aged and all wearing identical blue windbreakers with insignia declaring "We are with you" and "We fly El Al," were in the country for a week of sightseeing and "identification." Today was the high point of their trip. They were going to see the Israeli army in action.

The epic story of the Jewish people. The book relives the drama of Abraham - the time of the first covenant; the giving of the law of Moses; the Prophetic vision; the terrifying march of the Roman legions; the haunting shadows of exile; the brilliance of the Enlightenment; the unparalleled agony of Auschwitz; and the victorious renewal of a birthright. With 120 pages of photographs. Table of Contents: The Age of the Patriarchs. A Nation is Born. Israel in the Land. The Fall of Israel and Judah. Prophecy. Exile and Return. The Hellenistic Period. Under Roman Dominion. The Rise of Christianity. New Centers of Diaspora. The Age of Islam. The Jews in Europe to 1492. New Centers of Jewish Settlement. Mysticism and Messianism. The Dawn of Emancipation. Anti-Semitism and Migrations. Nationalism, Assimilation, Zionism. World War 1 and the Balfour Declaration. Palestine Between the Wars. The Holocaust. Israel Is Born. American Jewry in the Twentieth Century. The Jewish World Today: Israel 1968.

Israel's history opens in a twilight zone where fact and legend meet. The legend has entered so deeply into human experience that it has aquired its own reality. What men believe to have happened in the Middle East has been no less formative in world history than that which is known to have occured.
Fact and legend come together to describe Israel's emergence into a Middle East dominated by the river empires of the Nile and the Euphrates. Around these opulent waters it was possible to build settled societies which were not dependent on the unequal fortune of the skies. Those who lived in the green valleys were immune from the nomadic destiny which, elsewhere in the Middle East, sent thirsty men in anxious quest of pasture from year to year.

Haim Kalinsky is slowly dying of lung cancer in a Beer-Sheba hospital. Across the road, watching unseen, awaiting his death, is his son Daniel. Between the two men hovers the memory of a terrible moment during the war when smiling Nazi soldiers forced Haim to choose between his two sons - one to live, the other to die. Twenty years after the war, Daniel and Haim meet in the port of Haifa, strangers from two worlds: the Kibbutz and post-war Warsaw, the Israeli and the Jew. Yael Dayan is the daughter of General Moshe Dayan.

191 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, good condition: few tears to jacket.

Yesterday he moved to a friend's flat across the road from the hospital. The old-fashioned long key turned once to let him in and he immediately registered the comforting emptiness of his new residence. The walls were recently whitewashed but everything else about the two rooms suggested a neglect and indifference which he found appealing.

Wir hatten zu Hause eine Spieluhr. Jede volle Stunde spielte sie nach dem letzten Schlag ein altes Menuett, und zwei Porzellanfiguren, ein Herr mit weißem Zopf und weißem strümpfen und eine Dame in Rosa Krinoline, tanzten dann immerdazu.

Selected stories by I.L. Peretz: Berl the Tailor, The Magician, Thou Shalt Not Covet, The Hermit and the Bear, If Not Higher, Three Gifts, The Shabbes-Goy, A Pinch of Snuff, Motl Prince, Bontsha the Silent, Joy Beyond Measure, Between Two Peaks, Ne'ilah in Gehenna, Devotion Without End, A Musician Dies, Venus and Shulamith, The Poor Boy, Travel Pictures. With an introduction by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg.

159 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, good condition: ex-kibbutz library, jacket shows signs of wear.

It is the eve of Yom Kippur at the Berdichev synagogue. Night falls. The old people have finished their prayers. Rabbi Levi-Yitzkhok stands before the lectern. The time has come for him to chant the Kol Nidre - but he remains silent.
All eyes rest upon his back. In the woman's section there's a stillness as before a storm. Perhaps, as is his custom, Levi Yitzkhok will begin with a few words of his own, talking things over with the Almighty, as a man talks to a friend: in Yiddish.
But Levi-Yitzkhok remains silent,

I was born in the Nahlat Shiva neighbourhood in Jerusalem in 1912. My mother's family had lived in Jerusalem for six generations (twelve generations on my maternal grandmother's side), which made me a seventh or thirteenth generation Jeruselamite - depending on how you look at it. My father, Jacob Tschianouroff had been born in Tibilisi, Georgia, and was brought to Palestine as a two-year old by his aunt, Mazal, and her husband, Eliyahu Sacharoff, My mother, Vida (Victoria) was the youngest daughter of Rabbi Eliahu Moshe Panigel, Rishon le-Zion and Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.
My parents' wedding was one of the first mixed marriages in Jerusalem - between a girl of the Sepharadi community (a daughter of the Chief Rabbi, no less) and a Jew from Georgia, where he had gone in order to get to know his family whom he had not seen since early childhood.

Israeli fiction and poetry. Fiction: Wartime in Leipzig / Shmuel Yosef Agnon; Badenheim 1939 / Aharon Appelfeld; A Village Death / Yitzhak Ben Ner; The Terrible Tale of Joseph de la Reina / Dan Tsalka; Ring Around the Little Cranes / Hayim Be'er. Poetry: Night / Esther Raab; Place of Fire / Zelda; Jerusalem, the Place in Which All Remember / Yehuda Amichai; Our Baby Was Weaned in the First Days / Yehuda Amichai; Anatomy of a War / T. Carmi; Serpent, Serpent / T. Carmi; Observations at the End of a Journey / Abba Kovner; Behold how the nations / Amir Gilboa; If you get up and leave / Amir Gilboa; Love Song / Anton Shammas; Sitting on the Rail / Anton Ahammas; In Camera / Meir Wieseltier; Fruit / Meir Wieseltier; Anemones / Reuven Ben-Yosef; Forever / Gad Aviasaf; When Children Close Their Eyes / Gad Aviasaf; Balloons / Dan Pagis; Jason's Grave in Rehavia / Dan Pagis; You Have No Right / Itamar Yaoz-Kest; Death: She Was Always Here / Yona Wallach.

224 pages, soft cover, good condition.

Since the day I came to live in Leipzig it was my habit to drop in on him often. And it was as though he was expecting me each time I entered his shop. If he was sitting and writing, he'd push pen and paper aside just to talk with me, if he was on the telephone, he'd cut short the conversation and pull up a chair for me to chat. And yet there was nothing about me, neither socially or financially, to justify his attentions.
(Wartime in Leipzig)

For decades, Arab states and societies have been involved in a conflict-ridden contest over the goals and norms of Arabism. In this comprehensive study, Michael N. Barnett explores the changing relationship between Arab identity, the meaning of Arabism, and desired regional order in the Middle East from 1920 to the present. He provocatively argues that the Arab states' symbolic and strategic interactions were responsible for the alterations in the norms of Arabism, and, ultimately, the fragmentation that currently defines the region.

Many of the best-known accounts of Arab politics are informed by a realist narrative. Realism's defining and cyclical narrative - the ongoing pursuit of states to provide for their security in an environment that is incertain and dangerous because of the condition of anarchy, conflict as a way of life, and war as ever present or looming - seems to capture Arab politics. Arab politics is renowned for its contending bids by Arab states for leadership, shifting alliances, steady stream of crises, occasional war, and ongoing pursuit of security and survival in a very rough neighborhood. If Arab politics has any distinguishing traits, it is  the dramatic relief of the supposed existence of a community and shared identity against the harsh reality of anarchy and rivalry.

Tales and anecdotes from the career chronicles of a New York City book editor. The stories are set down in the midst of the mostly Jewish New York world of publishing and art.

I suppose I wanted to be a ski instructor because when I was a boy ski instructors married movie stars. It's true. When the Jewish movie-producer husbands of movie stars died, their widows went to Sun Valley, where they married ski instructors named Eric and Rolfe, and their pictures appeared in the forbidden Photoplay or Silver Screen, tall handsome scandinavians with peaked caps and pleated woolen knickers, holding ski poles with baskets the size of bicycle tires, staring into the sun and looking Godlike next to tiny little Norma Shearer photographed in front of the Sun Valley Lodge. So this is about wanting to marry a movie star, but I expect it to have a darker side.
When I was six my father, the coach, threw a ball at me, I dropped it. He laughed. I went to my room with my books and my bear and stayed there for forty years.

An album of 223 black and white pictures taken in Israel by photographer Bruno Bernard. At the end there are Bernard's comments on his pictures.

The story of Ariel Sharon's trial vs. Time magazine. The author spent time in the courtroom and met many of the key principals in the case. He also began to dig deeper into the background issues, which figured in the legal battle: Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon, the killings in Sabra and Shatilla, and Time magazine's abysmal record of Middle East coverage since the creation of the State of Israel.

336 pages, paperback, pocket book,  good condition: small stain on for edge.

It was a bitter winter's day. Inside the courtroom, a tense atmosphere prevailed. It was evident on the faces of spectators and principals alike, as the jury of six filed into their reserved box for one last verdict.

This book tells the story of the ansorption of Ethiopian Jewry in Israel from the perspective of both the immigrants and Jewish Agency Personnel. Each chapter deals with a stage in the absorption process: reception center, absorption center, programs for children, programs for young adults, affective responses to the cultural changes, housing and employment.

Diaspora Jewry - dispersed, fighting to preserve its distinctiveness, rejected by the environment, subjected to harsh edicts, discrimination and hostility - a familiar description that has been valid during different periods in various countries inhabited by white people with a well-documented history.
Far less known is the story of the black Jews whose written history dates from the 12th century. The Jews of Ethiopia, blacks in a black population - a different world and yet similar. The description of their historical experience and their relations with their neighbors is all too reminiscent of what their fellow Jews endured in many and distant lands. Nevertheless, before history made sure to match the fate of Ethiopian Jewry to that of Jews elsewhere in the world, the Jews of Ethiopia enjoyed independence during various periods, maintaining a Jewish kingdom for 350 years, until the middle of the 13th century. The final dissolution of Jewish autonomy in the middle of the 16th century is preserved in tribal memory as an epoch of heroic Jewish warriors, an era that saw numerous Jews die for a religious principle rather than fall into Christian captivity.

This book exposes the machinations of Israel, the US, the Eastern bloc and the major Middle East powers in a maze of arms deals which built up a slush fund of hundreds of millions of dollars. The reliability of the author is questionable.

394 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, very good condition.

Perhaps it was written that political chaos would follow me through life. I was born into it in Tehran, Iran, in 1951. My parents, affluent Jews, had been married in Baghdad in 1945, but settled in Tehran the same year. Briefly, in late 1950 and early 1951, they visited Israel to explore the possibility of moving there. On that trip, in Jerusalem, I was conceived. But my parents, for the time being, decided to return to Iran, a country deeply divided against itself.

The author met Israeli women and wrote their stories. The women are: Golda Meir, Miriam Baratz, Anne Marie Lambert, Dr. Pearl Ketcher, Hannah Rovina, Hannah Marron, Antoinette Khoury, Huguette Sarfati, Esther Miller, Sara Kahn, Dina Raskov Cohen, Lena Kuchler Silberman

190 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, good condition: browned pages. Inscribed by the author.

When does the world's only woman Foreign Minister begin the journey to her extraordinary career? Perhaps, in the case of Golda Meir, it was one summer's night, when, against strong objection from her father, she took to a soapbox on the corner of Eleventh and Chestnut Streets in Milwaukee, close to where they lived.

Why does God exist? How have the three dominant monotheistic religions shaped and altered the conception of God? How have these religions influenced each other? Karen Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present.

In the beginning, human beings created a God who was the First Cause of all things and Ruler of heaven and earth. He was not represented by omages and had no temple or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that they did not want him anymore. Eventually he was said to have disappeared.
That, at least, is one theory, popularized by Father Wilhekm Schmidt in The Origin of the Idea of God, first published in 1912.