Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Judaism

Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem - the 20th-century thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical reading of Kabbalah - Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent reimagining of the future of Israel.

The Old Testament is one of the most carefully studied books in the world’s history. It is also one of the most misunderstood. This founding text of the world’s three largest religions is also, Erich Fromm argues, an impressive radical humanist text. He sees the stories of mankind’s transition from divided clans to united brotherhood as a tribute to the human power to overcome. Filled with hopeful symbolism, You Shall Be as Gods shows how the Old Testament and its tradition is an inspiring ode to human potential.

This book seeks to provide a guided examination of what unites and divides the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communities. With over 25 years of experience teaching in the subject area, Dr. Fritz Wenisch begins to unravel this complex and often contentious topic by first discussing the legal injunctions applying to religious studies courses at secular U.S. universities. He investigates the type of monotheism each religion shares before providing an in-depth overview of each religion, one by one.

When John Stoessinger was ten years old, Adolf Hitler annexed his homeland of Austria, ripping the boy from his home and his friends in Vienna. His grandparents encouraged his mother and stepfather to take young John somewhere safe. "You must have a future," his grandfather told him before he and his parents boarded the train and waved goodbye. As they trekked across the country, from Vienna to Prague and then finally settling in Shanghai, there was never a single moment Stoessinger was not afraid.

Queen of Thieves is the gritty, fast-paced story of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, a poor Jewish woman who rose to the top of her profession in organized crime during the Gilded Age in New York City. During her more than twenty-five-year reign as the country’s top receiver of stolen goods, she accumulated great wealth and power inconceivable for women engaged in business, legitimate or otherwise.

Offering rare insights into this iconic and enduring book, Larrimore reveals how Job has come to be viewed as the Bible's answer to the problem of evil and the perennial question of why a God who supposedly loves justice permits bad things to happen to good people.

Self-hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. Overbearing mother-love. In this witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated with modern Jews.

The Holocaust is the defining event of the twentieth century and perhaps all of modern history. Yet for too long, we have ignored the vital question of how and why such a monstrous event could have happened at all. Now, in How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the existing Holocaust research into a cogent explanation of the genocide’s causes, revealing how a once progressive society like Germany could commit murder on such a massive scale.

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project. My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning humanitarian and former Episcopal priest Ivan Backer.

While many readers may have heard of Kabbalah in recent years, how many understand the origins and unique perspective of this collection of Jewish mystical beliefs? Handed down in the oral tradition for thousands of years and transcribed in fourteenth-century Spain, the Kabbalah is the classical expression of Jewish mysticism. This collection draws from the main work of Kabbalah and offers insight into the great body of Hebrew literature that sprang up and grew parallel to the traditional writings of rabbinical literature.

In the spring of 1944 gendarmes forcibly removed Tibor “Max” Eisen and his family from their home, brought them to a brickyard, and eventually loaded them onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At 15 years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and he was inducted into the camp as a slave laborer. More than 70 years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, By Chance Alone details Eisen’s story of survival.

A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life. Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera’s survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything.

Telling the rousing story of a Jewish boy who fled persecution and returned to prosecute the Nazi oppressors, Walter Wolff's daughter Nina has reconstructed these events from family lore and her father’s own cache of more than 700 wartime letters and 200 photographs, which he revealed to her shortly before he died.

Good Book is what happens when a regular guy actually reads the book on which his religion, his culture, and his world are based. Along the way, he grapples with the most profound theological questions: Does God prefer obedience or good deeds? And the most unexpected ones: Why are so many women in the Bible prostitutes? Why does God love bald men so much? Is Samson really that stupid? Good Book is an irreverent, enthralling journey through the world's most important work of literature.

The co-editors of Gnosis magazine explore the many esoteric traditions that Western culture has to offer. While terms from Eastern spiritual practices such as Zen, mantra, and karma have become part of our daily lexicon, the traditions of Western spirituality have been largely unexplored by people searching for non-mainstream routes to spiritual experience. But for those who identify with Western culture, Western religious traditions have their own wisdom teachings that are more suitable to their needs and expectations.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Eluding the Nazis in Occupied France is an unusual memoir about the childhood and young adulthood of Sarah Lew Miller. Born in a large Orthodox Jewish family in Dereczyn, Poland, Sarah's family moved to Paris in 1937 to escape poverty.

The German Occupation of France just three years later threatened her family's existence with repressive anti-Jewish laws and massive deportations of Jews to death camps.

Can the Bible be approached both as sacred scripture and as a historical and literary text? For many people, it must be one or the other. How can we read the Bible both ways? The Bible and the Believer brings together three distinguished biblical scholars--one Jewish, one Catholic, and one Protestant--to illustrate how to read the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament critically and religiously.

The Fourth Commandment, a contemporary look at a cornerstone of Jewish life, explores the Sabbath’s origins and purpose, its basis in Jewish texts and traditions, and its meaning for the hurried lives we live today. Even people who have long observed the Sabbath will discover facets they know little about. Beautiful and evocative, the book takes listeners on a journey into understanding this sacred day in its many manifestations. Acclaimed writer and lecturer Francine Klagsbrun draws on her extensive knowledge of Judaism and personal experience in applying the profound lessons of the Sabbath to life today.

There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. 

Recently retired due to a freak accident, NYPD officer Moe Prager is lost. In pain and without the job he loves, Moe relunctantly settles on the notion of going into the wine business with his brother. But when a suburban college student vanishes off the streets of Manhattan, Prager's universe is turned upside down and his life changed forever. Hired by the student's desperate family, Moe plunges deep into the world of New York's punk underground, sex clubs, and biker bars.