A biographical excavation of one of the world's great, troubled citiesA remarkable view of one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from...

A brilliant and moving evocation of the rhythms of life (and the darker shadows below it) in a working-class quarter of the world’s most fascinating and divided city.In the tradition of the literature of place perfected by such expatriate writers as M. F. K. Fisher and Isak Dinesen, Adina Hoffman’s House of Windows compellingly evokes Jerusalem through the prism of the neighborhood where she has lived for eight years since moving from the United States. In a series of inter...

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a vibrant portrait of Ben Hecht, one of the most accomplished and prolific American screenwriters"Richly informative. . . . A fine introduction to a seminal figure in American Jewish culture and Hollywood’s first century."—Glenn Frankel, Moment"To boil down such a profuse, not to say verbose, career, into so compact a volume was a challenge, but [Hoffman] has achieved much more tha...

A vibrant portrait of one of the most accomplished and prolific American screenwriters, by an award-winning biographer and essayist.He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter." Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented eighty percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today." Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts—including Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Notorious—Ben Hecht was known in ...

**NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALISTPart of the Jewish Encounter series**One May day in 1896, at a dining-room table in Cambridge, England, a meeting took place between a Romanian-born maverick Jewish intellectual and twin learned Presbyterian Scotswomen, who had assembled to inspect several pieces of rag paper and parchment. It was the unlikely start to what would prove a remarkable, continent-hopping, century-crossing saga, and one that in many ways has revolutionized ou...