Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City-based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn't just a family legend-it made headlines across Canada in 1913-but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her, Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing another: his mother's decline from Alzheimer's. Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dramatic ...

Does ancient wisdom provide the path toward less conflict and more freedom? Yes!For more than two millennia, the Tao Te Ching has been regarded as a guide for self improvement. But former journalist and public policy expert Wayne Hoffman suggests in that the teachings of Lao Tzu is, simply, the world's oldest written case for limited government.Hoffman's Tao of Liberty takes the ancient verses of the Tao Te Ching, chapter by chapter, and shows h...

An accidental friendship unfolds between a widowed octogenarian Orthodox rabbi and a gay, Jewish twenty-something in this witty & thoughtful novel.In Yiddish, there is a word for it: bashert—the person you are fated to meet. Twentysomething Benji Steiner views the concept with skepticism. But the elderly rabbi who stumbles into Benji’s office one day has no such doubts. Jacob Zuckerman’s late wife, Sophie, was his bashert. And now that she’s gone, Rabbi Zuckerman g...

Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City–based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn’t just a family legend—it made headlines across Canada in 1913—but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her, Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing another: his mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s.Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dr...

Inside the closed community of Borough Park, where most Chassidim live, the rules of life are very clear, determined by an ancient script written thousands of years before down to the last detail-and abuse has never been a part of it. But when thirteen-year-old Gittel learns of the abuse her best friend has suffered at the hands of her own family member, the adults in her community try to persuade Gittel, and themselves, that nothing happened. Forced to remain silent, Gittel begins to ques...

Robert Vishniak is the favored son of Oxford Circle, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1970s Philadelphia. Handsome and clever, Robert glides into the cloistered universities of New England, where scions of unimaginable wealth and influence stand shoulder to shoulder with scholarship paupers like himself who wash dishes for book money. The doors that open there lead Robert to the highest circles of Manhattan society during the heart of the Reagan boom where everything Robert has learn...

When Catherine da Costa, a wealthy Manhattan matron, learns she has only a short time to live, she realizes that her family tree will die unless she passes on its legacy and traditions to her granddaughters. But Suzanne and Francesca, beautiful young women caught up in trendy causes and ambitious careers, have no interest in the past. Catherine almost despairs until one night she is visited by the ghost of her family's anscestor, an indomitable Renaissance businesswoman named Hannah Mandes...

Tamar Finegold is twenty-one years old, the happy, beautiful bride of a rising young Rabbi in one of Brooklyn's insulated, ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Having married the man of her dreams and taken her place as a wife—and hopefully soon-to-be mother—in her community, Tamar feels as though the world is at her feet. But her secure, predictable existence is brought to an abrupt end when she is raped by an intruder. Fearing the unbearable stigma and threat to her marriage that could res...

The pampered daughter of a wealthy Hasidic businessman, Batsheva Ha-Levi grows up in the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles. But everything changes when she turns eighteen and finds that her loving father has made a secret vow which will shatter her life, forcing her to marry a man she hardly knows and sending her to the exotic, golden city of Jerusalem. On her wedding day, she enters a strange and foreign world steeped in tradition and surrounded by myth. Shackled by ancient rules, she soon ...

Living in Jerusalem, Elise Margulies fears for the lives of her husband and daughter every day. Then comes the day when her worst fears come true. Cancer specialist Dr. Jonathan Margulies drives his young daughter home from her ballet recital. His bullet-ridden car is found empty on the side of the road hours later. Elise, in the last stages of a difficult pregnancy, desperately calls her grandmother Leah in America for help and unknowingly revives a decades-old oath. Over five terror and ...

A shattering betrayal sends a mother on a desperate journey to save her daughter and uncover the truth in this heart-wrenching novel from an international bestselling author.Abigail Samuels has no reason to feel anything but joy on the morning her life falls apart. The epitome of a successful Jewish American woman, she is married to a respected accountant and in the middle of planning her daughter Kayla's wedding. Kayla, too, wakes up that morning with the world in...