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12/11/2024
profile-icon Robyn Williams

In this month of holy religious holidays, here are a few great titles to study the major Abrahamic religions and their tenets.  

 

Christian Nativity

Cover ArtA History of the Bible by John Barton

ISBN: 9780143111207
A literary history of our most influential book of all time, by an Oxford scholar and Anglican priest In our culture, the Bible is monolithic: It is a collection of books that has been unchanged and unchallenged since the earliest days of the Christian church. The idea of the Bible as "Holy Scripture," a non-negotiable authority straight from God, has prevailed in Western society for some time. And while it provides a firm foundation for centuries of Christian teaching, it denies the depth, variety, and richness of this fascinating text. In A History of the Bible, John Barton argues that the Bible is not a prescription to a complete, fixed religious system, but rather a product of a long and intriguing process, which has inspired Judaism and Christianity, but still does not describe the whole of either religion.

 

Hidden Christmas by Timothy Keller

ISBN: 9780735221659
 
From pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller comes the perfect gift for the Christmas holiday--a profoundly moving and intellectually provocative examination of the nativity story Even people who are not practicing Christians think they are familiar with the story of the nativity. Every Christmas displays of Baby Jesus resting in a manger decorate lawns and churchyards, and songs about shepherds and angels fill the air. Yet despite the abundance of these Christian references in popular culture, how many of us have examined the hard edges of this biblical story? In his new book Timothy Keller takes readers on an illuminating journey into the surprising background of the nativity. By understanding the message of hope and salvation within the Bible's account of Jesus' birth, readers will experience the redeeming power of God's grace in a deeper and more meaningful way.
 
 
 

Martyrdom of Lady Fatima

Cover ArtExploring Islam by Salih Sayilgan

ISBN: 9781506468020
Exploring Islamis a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the foundations of the Islamic faith, including its history, theology, and spiritual practice. The book also deals with issues such as jihad, the status of women, and the various sectarian divisions in Islam. Most distinctive about this work is its analysis of the lived experience of Muslims in modern American life. The book explores questions such as: - What are the foundations of Islam? - How do Muslims relate to and interpret the Qur'an? - Who is the Prophet Muhammad? - What does Shari'a law really mean? - What are the major themes of Islamic theology? - What are the theological and political issues that led to divisions among Muslims? - Do Muslims and Christians believe in the same God? - How do Muslims practice Islam in America? - What are the challenges and opportunities for American Muslims? In addressing these questions, Sayilgan offers readers a perspective that is scholarly, judicious, and engaging.
 
 

Cover ArtThe Life of the Qur'an by Mohamad Jebara

ISBN: 9781250282361
Over a billion copies of the Qur`an exist - yet it remains an enigma. Its classical Arabic language resists simple translation, and its non-linear style of abstract musings defies categorization. Moreover, those who champion its sanctity and compete to claim its mantle offer widely diverging interpretations of its core message - at times with explosive results. Building on his intimate portrait of the Qur`an's prophet in Muhammad the World-Changer, Mohamad Jebara returns with a vivid profile of the book itself. While viewed in retrospect as the grand scripture of triumphant empires, Jebara reveals how the Qur`an unfolded over 22 years amidst intense persecution, suffering, and loneliness. The Life of the Qur`an recounts this vivid drama as a biography examining the book's obscured heritage, complex revelation, and contested legacy. The Qur`an re-emerges with clarity as a dynamic life force that seeks to inspire human beings to unleash their dormant potential despite often-overwhelming odds - in order to transform themselves and the world.

 

 

Hanukkah

Cover ArtAmerican Judaism by Jonathan D. Sarna

ISBN: 9780300190397
Jonathan D. Sarna's award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Sar­na describes, with cap­ti­vat­ing detail, the social, cul­tur­al and his­toric fac­tors which have shaped today’s vibrant Jew­ish Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty. Sar­na rec­og­nizes that it is impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the sec­u­lar his­to­ry of Jews in Amer­i­ca from our reli­gious expe­ri­ence. Look­ing at our his­to­ry through the lens of reli­gious change is a unique approach. Sar­na uses it effec­tive­ly to guide us through the dilem­mas faced by gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­can Jews. We learn that con­cerns about anti-Semi­tism, inter­mar­riage, edu­ca­tion, Zion­ism and reli­gious obser­vance are not unique to our gen­er­a­tion. Nei­ther are the result­ing respons­es.

 

 

Cover Art#antisemitism by Samantha A. Vinokor-Meinrath

ISBN: 9781440879005
Exploring what it means to come of age in an era marked by increasing antisemitism, readers see through the eyes of Jewish Gen Zers how identities are shaped in response to and in defiance of antisemitism.Using personal experiences, qualitative research, and the historic moment in which Generation Z is coming of age, Jewish educator Samantha Vinokor-Meinrath uses antisemitism from both the political left and the right to explore identity development among Jewish Generation Zers. With insights from educators, students, activists, and more, she holds a lens up to current antisemitism and its impact on the choices and opinions of the next generation of Jewish leaders.Chapters cover Holocaust education for the final generation able to speak directly to Holocaust survivors and learn their stories firsthand; anti-Zionism as a modern manifestation of antisemitism; and how the realities of 21st-century America have shaped the modern Jewish experience, ranging from the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh to how Generation Zers use social media and understand diversity. The core of this book is a collection of stories: of intersectional identity, of minority affiliations, and of overcoming adversity in order to flourish and thrive.
 
 
03/25/2024
profile-icon Robyn Williams

This Hindu festival celebrates spring, love and new life. Holi marks the end of winter and beginning of spring. It also celebrates the Hindu god Krishna and the legend of Holika and Prahlad.  The wicked Holika tried to kill Prahlad in flame, but Lord Krishna stepped in to save Prahlad, and Holika was left in the fire and burned to death. On the night before the festival, images of Holika are burned on huge bonfires, drums pound, horns blow, and people whoop.  Since Antiquity, to mark the spring equinox, the whole of India celebrates Holi, the festival of colors. During this celebration, Indians of all castes throw colored powder in the faces of those they meet.  It doesn't matter if you're lower caste, a widow, a person marked by society -- the powder makes everyone look the same. 

 

Covering in red is for love, green is happiness, orange is for prosperity, and gold is considered sacred. 

 

Restrictions of caste, sex, age, and personal differences are ignored.  The festival reminds the Hindi peoples that all discrimination disappears in the holiest gazes.

 

 

02/13/2024
profile-icon Robyn Williams

 

Colorful Carnival Parade Float, Sambadrome, Sapucai, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Rio Carnival is by far the largest Carnival celebration in the world.For 14 centuries the season of Lent has been a time for self-examination and penitence in preparation for Easter.  When public penitents came to the church for forgiveness, the priest would take some ash (made by burning the palms used on Palm Sunday of the previous year) and mark their foreheads with the sign of the cross as a reminder that they were but ashes and dust.  The period lasts for two lunar months through Easter of the year. 

So, for centuries, the first day of Lent was marked by a pre-Lent period of revelry, usually commencing on the last day of Christmas season and gaining traction as the faithful knew that "Fat Tuesday" would mark the last day of enjoyment of pleasures of the body.  The first day of Carnival (the celebratory lunar cycle) varies with both national and local traditions. Thus, in Munich in Bavaria the Carnival season, there called Fasching, begins on the feast of the Epiphany (January 6), while in Cologne in the Rhineland it begins on November 11 at 11:11 am (11th month, day, hour, and minute). In France the celebration is restricted to Shrove Tuesday (the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday) and to mi-carème (the Thursday of the third week of Lent). More generally, the commencement date is Quinquagesima Sunday (the Sunday before Ash Wednesday), and the termination is Shrove Tuesday. 

In the United States, New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama became epicenters for Mardi Gras celebrations.

In 1872, the Krewe of Rex initiated the Mardi Gras colors of purple (for justice), gold (for power), and green (for faith). These were the family colors of visiting Russian Grand Duke Alexis Romanoff, whose favorite song, “If Ever I Cease to Love,” also became the official anthem of the New Orleans Mardi Gras.   Carnival unleashed the urban tensions between these ethnic and religious groups through clouds of flour. A visitor from Britai‘Red Hawk Hunters’ Spy Boy at Claiborne Street overpass. Photo by Stephen C. Wehmeyer, 2006.n described the Mardi Gras of 1846, saying, "There was a grand procession parading the streets, almost every one dressed in the most grotesque attire, troops of them on horseback, some in open carriages, with bands of music, and in a variety of costumes... All wore masks, and here and there in the crowd, or stationed in a balcony above, we saw persons armed with bags of flour, which they showered down copiously on any one who seemed particularly proud of his attire." A local told the Brit that Mardi Gras meant "flour and fun." Some scholars have viewed the raucous dusting as a remnant from Roman festivals, in which flour symbolized fertility. In New Orleans, it was a commodity symbolic of the agricultural riches that flowed down the Mississippi River to the city's docks.

Communities in New Orleans, of both sacred and secular identity, employ images of Native Americans as icons of spiritual power and presence. Acting as an instance of co-narration,  clergy and congregants of Spiritualist/Spiritual churches - whose narratives of the Indian spirits find expression through interlacing oral and ritual performances - have helped to establish a sacred dimension for Indian processions in New Orleans, adding an overtly spA parade participant spreads her wings as a butterfly, walking the route during the Mardi Gras parade in St. Louis on March 1, 2014. UPI/Bill Greenblattiritual note to otherwise secular 'rites of territory repossessed'. Through community response to the death of Big Chief Allison 'Tootie' Montana, and the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras in 2006, Indian icons and imagery still stand for many New Orleanians as powerful signs of something in the soul that, to paraphrase a popular Mardi Gras Indian song, won't kneel and won't bow down. 

Mardi Gras arrived with French settlers to New Orleans in 1703, but in Mobile they like to start the story with Michael Krafft, a one-eyed cotton broker who got drunk with friends on New Year's Eve in 1830 and raided Partridge Hardware Store, seizing hoes and forks and marauding through the streets to the mayor's house, where he was invited in for breakfast. Krafft formed the first society--or "mystic order" --to lead a parade around the city. Other cotton workers set up a rival group. Then more emerged, tied up with the city's businesses, with names like medieval guilds: the Knights of Revelry, the Maids of Mirth.

 

Where you celebrate, how you celebrate -- it's all a party during Mardi Gras!

06/12/2023
profile-icon Robyn Williams

On June 12, 1942, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. For two years, her family and other families will be hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends.  Her words and thoughts form the basis of an on-the-ground cultural interpreter of a horrific historical event, a small red-and-white checked remembrance of war and bigotry, and of the courage of families who sought a way out of the Nazi regime.  

Her name was Anne Frank.   She received her diary 93 years ago.  

Cover ArtThe Diary of a Young Girl by Susan Massotty (Translator); Nadia Murad (Introduction by); Anne Frank; Otto M. Frank (Editor); Mirjam Pressler (Editor)

ISBN: 9780385480338

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic--a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. Updated for the 75th Anniversary of the Diary's first publication with a new introduction by Nobel Prize-winner Nadia Murad By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.

In her first entry, Anne wrote to her diary as if it was a personal friend; “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.”  But she was also growing in maturity, and realizing that her parents' birthday present was a way to answer the call of the Dutch government-in-exile: tell us your stories.  For two years, the girl wrote in the diary, describing her most intimate thoughts and feelings, as well as documenting what it was like to live under German occupation and in hiding.  The adults around her and in far flung places begged their children to remember these times, and Anne wrote as a diarist with a mission: to preserve her thoughts and ideas as well as the actions of those around her.  Her hope was that she would survive to contribute the diary to a larger purpose.   Her horror is that she did not survive, but the diary did.   

 

 

 

Interpretations of the diary in the years after Otto Frank provided it as an example of Holocaust diarist writing abound.  Several plays completely dolled up his daughter into the perfect icongraphic dead Jewish girl whose death happens off-stage; at least one novel sexed her up, by speculating on her secret romance with a boy from another family.   Otto himself stands accused of tearing out pages that described unhappy marital relations with his wife.  It seems that Anne's writing changed perspective with the editors who were studying her life.  The runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published.  As Dara Horn described it in her book People Love Dead Jews, her first entry in the original diary, for instance, begins with a long description of her birthday gifts (the blank diary being one of them), an entirely unself-conscious record by a 13-year-old girl.  Anne rewrote the diary; she edited and prepared it for revisions, a talented writer far from the public perception of a mindless girl documenting her life.   Horn writes:  "The line most often quoAn image of two pages of Anne Frank's diary.ted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. "

 

Over time various cultures have interpreted the text in different ways.  What the reception of Frank's text in Cambodia and North Korea suggests is that the way in which an account travels primarily indicates the text's usefulness in the contexts in which it's received.  Much has been written about teaching and learning about the Holocaust in social studies classrooms.  The redemptive power of Anne's story is seen as neglible to school children exposed to her diary in 8th grade or thereabouts; while the work is relatable to them, containing both arguments with parents and melodramatic declarations they may be akin to understand, it also presents a somewhat sanitized version of "the Holocaust."   They do not get to see Anne dying slowly in Bergen-Belsen, rather seeing only the girl who took off her shoes to avoid heel clatter and whose story ends at the window rather than the grave.

 

 

The diary remains a substantial artefact from the German occupation, its talented author a quintessential unknown in a Holocaust of her Jewish heritage, a voice cut short but living on in our collective memory.   And there, as they say, may her memory be a blessing.

 

01/27/2023
profile-icon Robyn Williams



"It's a warning, I suppose, to people to be vigilant, not to be bystanders, but to speak out if they encounter bad things, or evil things."



"We've been working with a group called 3GNY. And it is the grandchildren of survivors who are being trained to tell their grandparents' stories. We did talk about, what does it mean to pass on your story? OK, because we're not on this world forever. So what do you leave behind?"



"People ask me, how do you feel that you survived and other members didn't? You know what I answer them? I say God needed a witness, someone who can tell the story."

 

Cover ArtLily's Promise by Lily Ebert; Dov Forman

ISBN: 9780063230279
Lily Ebert, a Holocaust survivor, and her great-grandson, Dov Forman, come together to share her story--an unforgettable tale of resilience and resistance. On Yom Kippur, 1944, fighting to stay alive as a prisoner in Auschwitz, Lily Ebert made a promise to herself. She would survive the hell she was in and tell the world her story, for everyone who couldn't. Now, at ninety-eight, this remarkable woman--and TikTok sensation, thanks to the help of her eighteen-year-old great-grandson--fulfills that vow, relaying the details of her harrowing experiences with candor, charm, and an overflowing heart.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtHidden from the Holocaust by Kerry Bluglass; Anthony Clare (Foreword by)

ISBN: 9780275974862
From twins torn away from their family and separated, to a girl shut in a basement, maltreated and malnourished, the world of Jewish children who were hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust becomes painfully clear in this volume. Psychiatrist Bluglass presents interviews with 15 adults who avoided execution in their childhoods thanks to being hidden by Christians, all of whom have since developed remarkably positive lives. All are stable, healthy, intelligent, and share a surprising sense of humor. Together, they show a profound ability to recover and thrive--an unexpected resilience. That their adjustment with such positive outcomes was possible after such harsh childhood experiences challenges a popular perception that inevitable physical and psychological damage ensues such adversity. Their stories offer new optimism, hope and grounds for research that may help traumatized children of today, and of the future, become more resilient.
 
 
 
 
 

Cover ArtNot in My Family by Roger Frie

ISBN: 9780199372553
Even as the Holocaust grows more distant with the passing of time, its traumas call out to be known and understood. What is remembered, what has been imparted through German heritage, and what has been forgotten? Can familiar family stories be transformed into an understanding of the Holocaust's forbidding reality? Author Roger Frie is uniquely positioned to answer these questions. As the son of Germans who were children during World War II, and with grandparents who were participants in the War, he uses the history of his family as a guide to explore the psychological and moral implications of memory against the backdrop of one of humanity's darkest periods. From his perspective of a life lived across German and Jewish contexts, Frie explores what it means to discover the legacy of a Nazi past. Beginning with the narrative of his grandfather, he shows how the transfer of memory from one German generation to the next keeps the Holocaust at bay. Not in My Family is rich with poignant illustration: Frie beautifully combines his own story with the stories of others, perpetrators and survivors, and the generations that came after. As a practicing psychotherapist he also draws on his own experience of working with patients whose lives have been directly and indirectly shaped by the Holocaust.
 
 

Cover ArtWhen Memory Speaks by Nelly Toll

ISBN: 0275955346
Although the Holocaust represents one of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind, it is thought of by many only in terms of statistics--the brutal slaughter of over 6 million lives. The art of those who suffered under the most unspeakable conditions and the art of those who reflect on the genocide remind us that statistics cannot tell the entire story. This important and diverse collection focuses on the art expression from the inferno, documenting the Holocaust through sketches of camp life drawn surreptitiously by victims on scraps of paper, and through contemporary paintings, sculpture, and personal reflections.