A powerful hero of the Bible, Jacob is also one of its most complex figures. Bible stories recounting his life often expose his deception, lies, and greed—then, puzzlingly, attempt to justify them. In this book, eminent biblical scholar Yair Zakovitch presents a complete view of the patriarch, first examining Jacob and his life story as presented in the Bible, then also reconstructing the stories that the Bible writers suppressed—tales that were well-known, perhaps, but incompatible with the image of Jacob they...

According to the Bible, Solomon’s wisdom was so great, his knowledge so vast, that "there was nothing hidden from the king"—no secret he could not uncover, no riddle he could not solve. The king knew everything there was to know—the mysteries of nature, of love, of God himself. But what do we know of Solomon? The king himself remains a mystery.

In this "unauthorized biography,"Biblical scholar Steven Weitzman seeks to illuminate this mystery through an account of King Solomon’s life that aims to...

Irving Berlin has been called—by George Gershwin, among others—the greatest songwriter of the golden age of the American popular song. “Berlin has no place in American music,” Jerome Kern wrote. “He is American music.” In a career that spanned an astonishing nine decades, Berlin wrote thousands of tunes, including many that will endure as long as music itself: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “God Bless America,” “White Christmas,” and on and on.

A singular individual with a multitude of talents and myriad accomplishments, Leonard Bernstein was also sometimes disparaged as one who spread himself too thin, abandoned his true musical calling, or sacrificed substantive achievement for glamour and worldly success. Shawn presents Bernstein whole, showing how his diverse activities grew organically out of his ancestral roots, early experiences, expansive personality, and extravagant gifts.

Seventy-five years after his death, George Gershwin remains a nettlesome figure, recognized for his genius but criticized as a poacher of African-American culture. Yet he was the golden boy of the Jazz Age, beloved by the public, performers, and fellow songwriters, and he remains a buoyant presence in our own time, bestriding every aspect of our musical culture to a degree that no other composer does.

Behind the light of Rothko's abstract paintings lies the complex truth of his journey from immigrant to celebrated artist--his path from Marcus Rothkowitz, born in Dvinsk, to Mark Rothko (1903–1970). It includes his years at Yale where he felt as an outcast, his first one-man show at 30 and his greatest achievement, the Rothko Chapel, a place of oecumenical meditation, in Houston. Cohen-Solal unveils the many elements of Rothko's genius based on his secular judeity--as a scholar, artist and educator.

Ben Hecht wrote some of the greatest Hollywood movies ever made, including Scarface, His Girl Friday, and Notorious. Yet as he was tossing off the breeziest scripts, he was also becoming a fierce propagandist for pre-state Israel’s terrorist underground. A self-described “child of the century,” the charismatic and contradiction-ridden Hecht came to embody much that defined America—and especially Jewish America—in his time.

Now in his fifth decade of making, Steven Spielberg has achieved a career unprecedented both its successes and longevity. The little boy from a Jewish family who wanted desperately to be accepted by his gentile school friends, the son whose parents’ divorce left him deeply wounded, grew into a man who never lost touch with his childhood trauma. Wonder and terror go hand in hand in the work of one of the great storytellers of our time.

This biography of Léon Blum explores the political and social experience of the first Jew (and socialist) to become prime minister of a major European country, France. Coming to politics as a well-known intellectual and jurist, he developed his leadership skills in the interwar years, when European countries, France among them, were divided between Right and Left. It was also a period of rampant anti-Semitism in France, and Blum's Jewishness became a central part of the story.

Raised in the first cooperative Zionist settlement in Palestine, Moshe Dayan was a powerful yet controversial personality in Israeli politics and defense during the nation's first decades; Israelis saw him as both a fearless warrior and strong-headed, charismatic politician. In his early career, Dayan was admired for his military leadership—as the IDF chief of staff during the 1956 Sinai War and as minister of defense during the 1967 Seven Day War—yet he was blamed for the catastrophic Yom Kippur War of 1973....

Emma Goldman is the story of a modern radical who took seriously the idea that inner liberation is the first business of social revolution. Her politics, from beginning to end, was based on resistance to that which thwarted the free development of the inner self.

The right to stay alive in one’s senses, to enjoy freedom of thought and speech, to reject the arbitrary use of power—these were key demands in the many public protest movements she helped mount.

Gornick's biography describes...

Born in Odessa in 1880, Ze’ev Jabotinsky left his hometown in 1898 for Switzerland and Italy, where he studied and worked as a correspondent for Russian newspapers. A Zionist and rival to Ben-Gurion, he was the only major Zionist politician of his time to believe with equal passion in both a "greater Land of Israel" and in liberal, European-style democracy. He would become the head of the Zionist Right and the rival of some of the World Zionist Organization's leaders, namely Ben-Gurion.

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in Southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat, who staked the fate of the Bolshevik revolution on the meager foundation of a Europe-wide Communist upheaval. He was a master politician who played his cards badly in the momentous struggle for power against Stalin in the 1920s. And he was an assimilated, indifferent Jew who was among the...

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was one of the holy eccentrics of poetry, a gay, Leftist, Jewish Buddhist, a spiritual seeker who combined a utopian politics with a faith in the boundlessness of human consciousness. He was a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic rhapsodist, whose blistering jeremiad “Howl” defined his generation. He was a visionary with an unlikely genius for marketing, who launched the Beat movement, and became the most famous poet of his generation.

Glamorous, talented, audacious—her life Lillian Hellman knew everyone, did everything, had been everywhere. By the age of twenty-nine she had written The Children’s Hour, the first of four hit Broadway plays, and soon she was considered a member of America’s first rank of dramatists, a position she maintained for more than twenty-five years. Apart from her literary accomplishments—eight original plays and three volumes of memoirs—Hellman lived a rich life filled with notable friendships, controversial...

In 1943, twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi had just begun a career in chemistry when, after joining a partisan group, he was captured by the Italian Fascist Militia and deported to Auschwitz. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, he was one of fewer than 25 who survived the eleven months before the camp’s liberation. Upon returning to his native Turin, Levi resumed work as a chemist and was employed for thirty years by a company specializing in paints and other chemical coatings. Yet soon after his return to...

Pursuing a distinctive path to a Jewish Cultural Renaissance, Martin Buber sought to tap the Jewish mystical tradition, particularly as embodied in Hasidism. Buber’s most famous book, I and Thou, put forth the claim that relationships with our fellow human beings are essentially identical to our relation with God. Buber’s writings are intimately bound to his own personal journey, which intersected with the major junctures of twentieth-century Jewish history.

The “German Socrates,” Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Berlin celebrity and a major figure in the Enlightenment, revered by Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities common to Jews of his time while formulating the philosophical foundations of a modern Judaism suited for a new age. His most influential books included the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that paved the way for...

Albert Einstein was a man of his times. His theory of relativity reshaped our concepts of space, time, and motion. His science sparked the development of the atomic bomb – an odd convergence for an outspoken pacifist. But his hatred of war was overshadowed by his fear of the acquisition of such weapons by the Nazis, who were labeling Einstein’s theory “Jewish science.” The symbol of scientific modernism, Einstein came to embody the complexities of being Jewish in our contemporary world.