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The Galilee in Late Antiquity
Lee Levine
Harvard University Press, 1992

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Gates of Awe
Holy Day Prayers for Young Children
Rabbi Howard Bogot
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1991
The second in a series of prayerbooks for early childhood use, Gates of Awe contains rich and enchanting illustrations combined with poetic text that enhances the sense of awe found during the Holy Days. The special qualities of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are skillfully introduced to young worshippers through the inspiration of prayer, the excitement of the Shofar and the lessons in the stories of Abraham and Torah.
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Gates of Forgiveness
Shaarei Selicha
Chaim Stern
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1993
Shaarei Selicha contains an evening service adapted from Gates of Prayer, as well as extensive meditations and a complete new service for Selichot, the penitential service in preparation for the Rosh HaShanah and the Days of Awe.
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front cover of Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays - English-opening, Gender-Inclusive
Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays - English-opening, Gender-Inclusive
Chaim Stern
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1994
Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays contains services for Shabbat and weekdays, evening and morning, within the covers of a single, elegantly designed, hardbound volume.  The selection of three complete services for Erev Shabbat enables congregations to use this book regularly for most worship purposes.
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front cover of Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays-Hebrew-opening, Gender-Inclusive
Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays-Hebrew-opening, Gender-Inclusive
Chaim Stern
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1994
Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays contains services for Shabbat and weekdays, evening and morning, within the covers of a single, elegantly designed, hardbound volume.  The selection of three complete services for Erev Shabbat enables congregations to use this book regularly for most worship purposes.
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Gates of Prayer for Weekdays and at a House of Mourning
Chaim Stern
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1992
Includes services for the funeral home and the house of the bereaved, afternoon and evening services, special “At a House of Mourning” service, additional readings, meditations and Kaddish. 
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Gates of Prayer, Large Print, Hebrew Opening
Chaim Stern
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, while expressing that tradition within the context of Reform Judaism, this prayerbook contains a variety of services for weekdays, Shabbat and festivals, Israeli Independence Day, Holocaust Remembrance Day and Tisha B'Av.  It also includes special readings, meditations and 40 pages of songs complete with transliterations.
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Gates of Prayer
Shaarei Tefila - Hebrew-opening: The New Union Prayerbook for Weekdays, Sabbaths and Festivals
Chaim Stern
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, while expressing that tradition within the context of Reform Judaism, this prayerbook contains a variety of services for weekdays, Shabbat and festivals, Israeli Independence Day, Holocaust Remembrance Day and Tisha B'Av.  It also includes special readings, meditations and 40 pages of songs complete with transliterations.
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Gates of Repentance for Young People
Rabbi Judith Abrams
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2002
Gates of Repentance for Young People is the Machzor designed for children's High Holy Day services; it completes the series begun with Gates of Wonder, Gates of Awe, and Gates of Prayer for Young People. Each service emphasizes the significant themes of the High Holy Days in engaging ways. The volume includes services for Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur for both early and late primary grades in contemporary, gender-inclusive language, along with new translations of the High Holy Day readings from the Torah and Haftarot and illustrations by award-winning artist Neil Waldman.
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Gates of Understanding Volume 1 - PDF Electronic Version
A Companion Volume to Gates of Prayer
Chaim Stern
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1977
A book about prayer, written to enrich Gates of Prayer, for which it gives sources of al the prayers, additional meditatios and songs. Explores the worship service, obstacles to prayer, the function of the prayer book, and other topics.
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Gates of Wonder
A Prayerbook for Very Young Children
Rabbi Howard Bogot
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1989
This is the first official prayerbook for young children ever produced by the Reform Movement. Intended for pre-school children through six years of age, Gates of Wonder is beautifully illustrated by award-winning artist Neil Waldman. As young children enter the Gates of Wonder they will experience a world of beauty, a world of mystery and the enduring world of Jewish prayer.
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German Idealism and the Jew
The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses
Michael Mack
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In German Idealism and the Jew, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason.

Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality.

In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it.
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German Jerusalem
The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighborhood in the Holy City
Thomas Sparr
Haus Publishing, 2024
The fascinating history of German Jews who built a community just outside Jerusalem.

In the 1920s, before the establishment of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the fringes of the long-divided holy city. After the war, despite the weight of the Shoah, the neighborhood miraculously repaired shattered bonds between German and Israeli residents. In German Jerusalem, Thomas Sparr opens up the history of this remarkable community and the forgotten borderland they called home.
 
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Ghetto Kingdom
Tales of the Lodz Ghetto
Isaiah Spiegel
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Isaiah Spiegel was an inmate of the Lodz Ghetto from its inception in 1940 until its liquidation in 1944. While there, he wrote short stories depicting Jewish life in the ghetto and managed to hide them before he was deported to Auschwitz. After being freed, he returned to Lodz to retrieve and publish his stories.

The stories examine the relationship between inmates and their families, their friends, their Christian former neighbors, the German soldiers, and, ultimately, the world of hopelessness and desperation that surrounded them. In using his creative powers to transform the suffering and death of his people into stories that preserve their memory, Spiegel succeeds in affirming the humanity and dignity the Germans were so intent on destroying.

Originally published as Malchut geto (Malkhes geto) in Yiddish.
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Ghetto
The History of a Word
Daniel B. Schwartz
Harvard University Press, 2019

Just as European Jews were being emancipated and ghettos in their original form—compulsory, enclosed spaces designed to segregate—were being dismantled, use of the word ghetto surged in Europe and spread around the globe. Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics.

Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere.

Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for “premodern” Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-evolving word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled into New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side, then came to be more closely associated with African Americans than with Jews.

Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word. Paradoxically, the term ghetto came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews were no longer required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a disturbingly resilient word.

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Ghost Citizens
Jewish Return to a Postwar City
Lukasz Krzyzanowski
Harvard University Press, 2020

The poignant story of Holocaust survivors who returned to their hometown in Poland and tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered world.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the lives of Polish Jews were marked by violence and emigration. But some of those who had survived the Nazi genocide returned to their hometowns and tried to start their lives anew. Lukasz Krzyzanowski recounts the story of this largely forgotten group of Holocaust survivors. Focusing on Radom, an industrial city about sixty miles south of Warsaw, he tells the story of what happened throughout provincial Poland as returnees faced new struggles along with massive political, social, and legal change.

Non-Jewish locals mostly viewed the survivors with contempt and hostility. Many Jews left immediately, escaping anti-Semitic violence inflicted by new communist authorities and ordinary Poles. Those who stayed created a small, isolated community. Amid the devastation of Poland, recurring violence, and bureaucratic hurdles, they tried to start over. They attempted to rebuild local Jewish life, recover their homes and workplaces, and reclaim property appropriated by non-Jewish Poles or the state. At times they turned on their own. Krzyzanowski recounts stories of Jewish gangs bent on depriving returnees of their prewar possessions and of survivors shunned for their wartime conduct.

The experiences of returning Jews provide important insights into the dynamics of post-genocide recovery. Drawing on a rare collection of documents—including the postwar Radom Jewish Committee records, which were discovered by the secret police in 1974—Ghost Citizens is the moving story of Holocaust survivors and their struggle to restore their lives in a place that was no longer home.

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GI Jews
How World War II Changed a Generation
Deborah Dash Moore
Harvard University Press, 2004

Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million Jews entered the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. Uprooted from their working- and middle-class neighborhoods, they joined every branch of the military and saw action on all fronts. Deborah Dash Moore offers an unprecedented view of the struggles these GI Jews faced, having to battle not only the enemy but also the prejudices of their fellow soldiers.

Through memoirs, oral histories, and letters, Moore charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands. From confronting pork chops to enduring front-line combat, from the temporary solace of Jewish worship to harrowing encounters with death camp survivors, we come to understand how these soldiers wrestled with what it meant to be an American and a Jew.

Moore shows how military service in World War II transformed this generation of Jews, reshaping Jewish life in America and abroad. These men challenged perceptions of Jews as simply victims of the war, and encouraged Jews throughout the diaspora to fight for what was right. At the same time, service strengthened Jews' identification with American democratic ideals, even as it confirmed the importance of their Jewish identity. GI Jews is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual, as well as its profound consequences for these hitherto overlooked members of the "greatest generation."

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Good for the Jews
Debra Spark
University of Michigan Press, 2009

". . . a smart, sprightly, sex-drenched, and neatly plotted novel . . ."
---Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune

"Spark is at her sly, funny, and cutting best in her third novel, a clever and affecting variation on the biblical story of Esther."
---Booklist

"Spark's prose is tight, funny, insightful and occasionally heartbreaking as it probes the current education system, the arts and society's ills."
---Publishers Weekly

Good for the Jews is a smart, funny, sexy novel set in Madison, Wisconsin, during the Bush administration. Part mystery and part stranger-comes-to town story, Good for the Jews is loosely based on the biblical book of Esther. Like Esther, Debra Spark's characters deal with anti-Semitism and the way that powerful men---and the women who love them---negotiate bureaucracies.

At the core of the story of right and wrong are young, attractive Ellen Hirschorn and her older cousin Mose, a high school teacher who thinks he knows, in fact, what is "good for the Jews"---and for Ellen, too. Their stories intertwine with those of the school superintendent, his ex-wife and son, and a new principal. Workplace treachery, the bonds of family, coming of age, and romantic relationships all take center stage as the characters negotiate the fallout from a puzzling fire.

Spark's evocative writing style and sharp, understanding treatment of her diverse characters draw the reader into this surprising page-turner, a finalist for the 2009 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award.

Debra Spark is the author of two previous novels, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Coconuts for the Saint, as well as Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. She's been a fellow at Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Food and Wine, Esquire, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Yankee. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

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Grand River and Joy
Susan Messer
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"With unsparing candor, Susan Messer thrusts us into a time when racial tensions sundered friends and neighbors and turned families upside down. The confrontations in Grand River and Joy are complex, challenging, bitterly funny, and---painful though it is to acknowledge it---spot-on accurate."
---Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After and Half a Heart

"Grand River and Joy is a rare novel of insight and inspiration. It's impossible not to like a book this well-written and meaningful---not to mention as historically significant, humorous, and meditative."
---Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes and Be Mine

Halloween morning 1966, Harry Levine arrives at his wholesale shoe warehouse to find an ethnic slur soaped on the front window. As he scavenges around the sprawling warehouse basement, looking for the supplies he needs to clean the window, he makes more unsettling discoveries: a stash of Black Power literature; marijuana; a new phone line running off his own; and a makeshift living room, arranged by Alvin, the teenaged tenant who lives with his father, Curtis, above the warehouse. Accustomed to sloughing off fears about Detroit's troubled inner-city neighborhood, Harry dismisses the soaped window as a Halloween prank and gradually dismantles “Alvin's lounge” in a silent conversation with the teenaged tenant. Still, these events and discoveries draw him more deeply into the frustrations and fissures permeating his city in the months leading up to the Detroit riots.

Grand River and Joy, named after a landmark intersection in Detroit, follows Harry through the intersections of his life and the history of his city. It's a work of fiction set in a world that is anything but fictional, a novel about the intersections between races, classes and religions exploding in the long, hot summers of Detroit in the 1960s. Grand River and Joy is a powerful and moving exploration of one of the most difficult chapters of Michigan history.

Susan Messer's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, and Colorado Review. She received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in prose, an Illinois Arts Council literary award for creative nonfiction, and a prize in the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition of the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture.

Cover photograph copyright © Bill Rauhauser and Rauhauser Photographic Trust

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Green World
A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare
Michelle Ephraim
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.

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Growing Up Ethnic
Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction
Japtok, Martin
University of Iowa Press, 2005
Growing Up Ethnic examines the presence of literary similarities between African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories in the first half of the twentieth century; often these similarities exceed what could be explained by sociohistorical correspondences alone. Martin Japtok argues that these similarities result from the way both African American and Jewish American authors have conceptualized their "ethnic situation." The issue of "race" and its social repercussions certainly defy any easy comparisons. However, the fact that the ethnic situations are far from identical in the case of these two groups only highlights the striking thematic correspondences in how a number of African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories construct ethnicity. Japtok studies three pairs of novels--James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Edna Ferber's Fanny Herself, and Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Giver--and argues that the similarities can be explained with reference to mainly two factors, ultimately intertwined: cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman genre. Growing Up Ethnic shows that the parallel configurations in the novels, which often see ethnicity in terms of spirituality, as inherent artistic ability, and as communal responsibility, are rooted in nationalist ideology. However, due to the authors' generic choice--the Bildungsroman--the tendency to view ethnicity through the rhetorical lens of communalism and spiritual essence runs head-on into the individualist assumptions of the protagonist-centered Bildungsroman. The negotiations between these ideological counterpoints characterize the novels and reflect and refract the intellectual ferment of their time. This fresh look at ethnic American literatures in the context of cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary and race studies.
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