Decodes the long history of Hebrew and its influential place as the ancestor of many modern written languagesHebrew as a language is just over 3,000 years old, and the story of its alphabet is unique among the languages of the world. Hebrew set the stage for almost every modern alphabet, and was arguably the first written language simple enough for everyone, not just scribes, to learn, making it possible to make a written record available to the masses for the firs...

What does this Biblical Hebrew book on vocabulary bring to the table for you that you will not find in any other vocabulary guide?In Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary Made Easy! you will:*Learn Hebrew vocabulary without the mechanical process of rote memory.*Learn Hebrew more quickly an easily than you thought possible.*Lean how to distinguish between "homophones" and "homonyms" in Hebrew - words that sound alike and words that are based on the same consonants....

The story of Michel Thomas reads like a thriller in which adventure and heartbreak combine to produce a unique form of wisdom. Until his death in 2005, he taught languages to ghetto kids, heads of industry and movie stars in a matter of days, succeeding even with people who considered themselves hopeless linguists. To those who have been taught by him, he seemed to be a miracle worker with a magical gift for unlocking the secret powers of the mind. This unique understanding was gained unde...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author shares a "valuable, wise, and quietly moving" meditation on orthodox Judaism ( Chicago Tribune ).Renowned for his sweeping historical novels such as The Cain Mutiny and The Winds of War, Herman Wouk now presents a brilliantly distilled examination of his own religious faith. A miracle of brevity, This Is My God guides readers through the world's oldest practicing...

The "remarkable" story of the grass-roots movement that freed millions of Jews from the Soviet Union ( The Plain Dealer).At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the USSR. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue.Journalist Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet gov...

The fascinating, true account of the quest for one of the Old Testament’s most infamous cities.Like many Christians today in the academic world, Dr. Steven Collins felt pulled in different directions when it came to apparent conflicts between the Bible and scholarly research and theory—an intellectual crisis that inspired him to lay it all on the line as he set off to locate the lost city of Sodom.Recounting Dr. Collins’s quest for Sodom in absorbing detail...

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal.Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau Concentration Camp became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a state detention center for political prisoners, subject to police authority and due process. The camp began its i...

The Night lasted five years and eight days.Before the Night began, Ernst Bornstein was a precocious eighteen-year-old¬ who had an ordinary family with three siblings, two parents, and a large circle of friends and relatives. But in the autumn of 1939, decades of anti-Semitic propaganda turned into full-fledged violence. Bornstein’s family was subsequently sent to Auschwitz where his parents and siblings were gassed to death.The Long Night is Bornstein’s firsthand account of...

"In fluent prose . . . makes a gripping and persuasive case that it was the Levites who escaped Egypt and carried the story of the Exodus into Canaan." — The New York Times Book ReviewThe Exodus has become a core tradition of Western civilization. Millions read it, retell it, and celebrate it. But did it happen? Unable to find physical evidence until now, many archaeologists and scholars claim this mass migration is just a story, not history....

An insightful collection of essays on the Kabbalah and Jewish spirituality—from the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism.Gershom Scholem was the master builder of historical studies of the Kabbalah. When he began to work on this neglected field, the few who studied these texts were either amateurs who were looking for occult wisdom, or old-style Kabbalists who were seeking guidance on their spiritual journeys. His work broke with the outlook of the scholars of th...

'The Jewish people in its very being constitutes a living protest against a world of hatred, violence and war' - Emeritus Chief Rabbi, Lord SacksThe history of Jewish persecution is as old as the written word, though the epithet `antisemitism` was only conceived in the late nineteenth century as it reached the beginning of its most horrifying chapter. Throughout Christian history the hatred and prejudice towards the Jewish people have often been blamed on ...

What the Rabbis Said examines a relatively unexplored facet of the rich social history of nineteenth-century American Jews. Based on sources that have heretofore been largely neglected, it traces the sermons and other public statements of rabbis, both Traditionalists and Reformers, on a host of matters that engaged the Jewish community before 1900.Reminding the reader of the complexities and diversity that characterized the religious congregations in nineteenth-cent...