The life of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a...

He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter". Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today". Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts – including "Scarfac...

Comprehensive and easy to use, this guide covers the architectural riches of Ireland's largest county. The many atmospheric castles and tower houses include Carrigadrohid, Lohort, and Kanturk; among later country houses, Kilshannig and Fota represent...

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work – over the centuries countless thousands of poems h...

Irving Berlin (1888-1989) 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", legendary composer Jerome Kern wrote; "he is American musi...

Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) was one of the most influential – and controversial – rabbis of the twentieth century. A maverick thinker, he combined strict traditionalism with an embrace of modernity and its heresies, Orthodoxy and tolerance, sc...

Harvey Milk – eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck – was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the a...

While the canonical scriptures were produced over many centuries and represent a diverse library of texts, they are unified by stories of divine covenants and their implications for God's people. In this deeply researched and thoughtful book, Scott H...

Karl Marx (1818-1883) – philosopher, historian, sociologist, economist, current affairs journalist, and editor – was one of the most influential and revolutionary thinkers of modern history, but he is rarely thought of as a Jewish thinker, and his Je...

What did it mean for members of a Jesus movement in the first century to promote their understanding of Jewish history and of the Jewish way of life? John Kampen explores the nature of sectarianism in Jewish society at the time of Matthew's compositi...