 Tapping hidden undercurrents
Peter Ackroyd, to whom every detail of his beloved city's life and past is both familiar and poignant, sees London port's destruction and collapse as a sign of what happened to Britain as a whole during the Blitz of World War Two.
By Eli Shaltiel
 'Snapshots'
In 'Snapshots,' the contradiction between the heroine's vision of Jerusalem as a holy place of 'release' and the harsh political reality brings to an end her collaboration and romance with Sayyid, a Palestinian theater director.
By Michal Govrin
 Testament to women
The typical biblical woman was truly the original 'multi-tasker,' with little time for anything but completing the most basic and ongoing daily chores. It is little wonder that music and dance were an integral part of her life.
By Judy Baumel-Schwartz and Joshua Schwartz
 'Founder of the Jewish state?'
Martin Gilbert's new book, 'Churchill and the Jews,' reveals that the legendary British PM who led his people and the Allies to victory over the Nazis, also played a part in laying the cornerstone for a Jewish state.
By Isaac Herzog
 The missing voices
Berenice Carroll's book 'Liberating Women's History' (1975) was one of the first to affirm that women do have a history of their own, even if it's been repressed and even wiped from the collective memory.
By Yaffah Berlovitz
 Separation anxieties
Hadara Lazar's new book, 'Locals' is about the disintegration of the bond felt towards one's place, though her writing belongs to a 'softer,' more personal tradition and by no means takes an unequivocal political stand.
By Hanna Herzig
 Enemies, a love story
Reading 'Angels Don't Dream,' it is impossible not to see the similarities between the teachings of Sufi sheikh Ibn 'Arabi and the kabbala and medieval literature that grew up in the same cultural climate.
By Agi Mishol
 A conversation with Jon Entine
The Cincinnati-based professor is the author of 'Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People,' which may be the first to examine the history of the Jewish people with the benefit of recent research.
By David B. Green
 Lonely man of faith
What the careful research in this book translates into, on balance, is the presentation of Abraham Joshua Heschel as a flawed man. In much of the book, Heschel is lonely, insecure and melancholy.
By Bari Weiss
 Patches of color
Salman Masalha was born in Maghar, in the Galilee, and has been living in Jerusalem for many years. He has published six volumes of poetry in Arabic and one in Hebrew. This poem is from the latter, 'In Place.'
Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden
 They lost Iran
Two fictional portraits of Jewish life in Iran: One of a period when the biggest concern was the fear of being snubbed by other members of the Jewish community, the other set after the earthquake known as the Islamic Revolution.
By Ilene R. Prusher
 The Russians were coming
If the theories of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez are correct, everything we thought we knew about the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War is wrong.
By Reuven Pedatzur
 If you liked 'The Da Vinci Code'...
A Dan Brown cadet ups the ante with an enormously improbable plot in which not only is the future of mankind at risk but - shudder - so is the Ayalon-Nusseibeh peace initiative.
By Matt Beynon Rees
 American tale, Jewish accent
In his striking second novel, 'Bearing the Body,' contemporary Jewish writer Ehud Havazelet depicts a family for which the burden of the Jewish past only widens the American generation gap.
By Stephen Hazan Arnoff
 When the 'class leftist' is the victim
Tamar Verete-Zehavi's latest book, 'Aftershock,' is apparently an attempt to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but from a different angle: It is aimed at teenagers - not at young children, like her two previous ones.
By Efrat Even-Tzur
 A conversation with Peter Cole
The 50-year-old co-founder of the Ibis Editions publishing house, Peter Cole, was named one of the two dozen 'geniuses' to receive a half-million dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation of Chicago this year.
By David B. Green
 Uncomfortable genius
Again and again in her look into the extraordinary lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, in the book 'Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice', Janet Malcolm asks how the two Jewish lovers managed to escape the Nazis.
By Sarah Wildman
 A man of action
Though Herzl has already been the subject of not a small number of worthy books, the founder of political Zionism's misgivings, achievements and mistakes are all examined in Shlomo Avineri's new 'intellectual biography'.
By Yossi Sarid
 The politics of self-flagellation
'Jews and Power,' the eighth title in the impressive 'Jewish Encounters' series, is an elegant meditation on the Jews' vexing relationship with power and how their unique history continues to shape the Jewish political psyche.
By Evan R. Goldstein
 'Do not look at his deeds, look at the Torah he learned'
Though for centuries he was out of the Jewish collective memory, in the modern era, Elisha ben Abuya, a contemporary of Rabbi Akiva, regained a place of interest as one who 'hovered' between two cultures.
By Nissan Rubin
 Change of venue
In Haggai Dagan's new novel he sends Israel off on a search for a new mythology, but goes beyond the motion of the protagonists or the story's own movement between past and future, and takes the land itself on a journey.
By Omri Herzog
 Zuckerman unplugged
After featuring in eight previous books, Philip Roth's alter ego seems to have reached the end of the line. He's old, tired, leaky and running out of steam. But which of the lags are Philip Roth's fault and which are the narrator's?
By Yael Goldstein
 In search of the golden mean
Until he was forced to flee Iran, Ramin Jahanbegloo was a voice of sanity emanating from a land where extremism generally has the stage. But he continues to express his conciliatory message from his new home, in Delhi.
By Shlomo Avineri
 Interpreting the Interpreters
James Kugel's first-class book, How to Read the Bible, 'A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now', is exhaustive without in the least seeming exhausting. This book is certainly one of the best popular books on the Bible in many years.
By Jeremy A. Dauber
 A friendship interrupted
The troubled connection between Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, a member of the 1944 plot to kill Hitler, would have sufficed for a fine thriller. But to that, Justin Cartwright added a latter-day protagonist in search of the truth.
By David B. Green
 'Do not look at his deeds, look at the Torah he learned'
Aher is a figure who was ultimately not completely expelled from the Jewish people, but rather managed to hover: He is considered someone who was neither completely 'in' nor 'out,' while at the same time being both partly 'in' and 'out.'
By Nissan Rubin
 Change of venue
In Haggai Dagan's allegorical novel, the Big Earthquake hits the Land of Israel and sends it floating off into the sea. Tired of its given role, the country seeks to shake off the burden of sanctity and sacrifice, the burden of the mythic history.
By Omri Herzog
 Setting the record straight on 'New Jewish Time': Secularization as a set of circumstances
Two editors involved in the recent production of a 5-volume Hebrew encyclopedia on modern Judaism refute criticism of their work by sociologist Yehouda Shenhav.
By Yirmiyahu Yovel
Setting the record straight on 'New Jewish Time': Don't shoot the messenger
Two editors involved in the recent production of a 5-volume Hebrew encyclopedia on modern Judaism refute criticism of their work by sociologist Yehouda Shenhav.
By Menachem Brinker
 Not afraid to go all the way
Anyone who complains about the immorality of espionage should first ask themselves about the morality of producing such vile weapons, like those described by Marcus Klingberg in his memoirs.
By Yitzhak Laor
 Lonely no more
The first announcement was made in early October: Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who founded the Lonely Planet travel guide franchise 35 years ago, sold a 75-percent stake of the company to BBC Worldwide.
By Moshe Gilad
 What makes a foreign minister great?
In his massive tract 'Diplomacy,' Henry Kissinger delineates his belief in the need for realism in foreign policy, and the primacy of national interest. No wonder it sounds like he's describing himself.
By Avi Primor
 British chief rabbi: Multiculturalism is threat to democracy
Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks defines multiculturalism as an attempt to affirm Britain's diverse communities. But in his book, 'The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society,' he says the movement had run its course.
By The Associated Press
 Man of many cultures
Vikram Seth, 55, releases books only every few years. His most recent book, 'Two Lives,' is a memoir based on the life of his uncle, who married a Jewish woman from Berlin who lost her family in the Holocaust.
By Shiri Lev-Ari
 And we both say 'hello' with the word 'peace'
Gillian Laub, a young Jewish-American photographer, has succeeded in collating graphic testimony of the conflict that is both riveting and different. She spent years photographing young Jewish and Arab Israelis and Palestinians.
By Alex Levac
 Israeli historian awarded German prize
Israeli historian Saul Friedlaender was awarded the German Book Trade association's 2007 peace prize at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, in recognition of his narratives documenting the Nazi Holocaust.
By The Associated Press
 Citizens of the 'Photography Nation' unite
As a book that focuses on photography in the contexts of occupation, exploitation, extortion and rape, 'The Civil Contract of Photography' is one of the most vital books to have been written here in recent decades.
By Gideon Ofrat
 A loaded gun of doubt and longing
In his book 'God Won't Allow,' Chanoch Daum portrays the tension between the individual's sense of being 'the lowest of the low' and the brazen self-confidence of the national ultra-Orthodox public.
By Benny Mer
 'There's no one up there'
In a changing Bronx of the mid-'60s, two Jewish sisters find that the real threat comes from parents so preoccupied with their own obsessions and limitations that they are ill-equipped to respond to their daughters' needs.
By Ruth Margalit
 'Then shall the longings arise'
In Bialik's work, even the children's poems, the letters and the essays, there is something appealing in the man's capacious heart and his ability to do things, for himself for his Zionist idea, and for his collective.
By Yitzhak Laor
 'Ma'ayan and Motti were here and had wild sex'
For three decades, the woman whose husband is now Israel's prime minister has been photographing graffiti in the country's streets. Desirous of sharing the experience with readers, she has collected many of her photos into a book.
By Talya Halkin
 Deal with it
Given the controversy, it's no wonder that 'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy', Walt and Mearsheimer's attempt to answer the what-went-wrong-for-the-U.S.-in-the-Middle-East question, is on the New York Times Best-Seller list.
By Daniel Levy
 Parallel lives
There's no question that the paths of T.E. Lawrence ('of Arabia') and NILI spymaster Aaron Aaronsohn crossed repeatedly in WWI. Both men attempted to influence the way the Mideast was divided, and now they meet up again.
By Benny Morris
 The war's real tragedy was the concert that never occurred
Zubin Mehta's memoir deals largely with his belief that music can serve to 'conciliate' between peoples, an opportunity he and his friends Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pre were denied after the Six-Day War.
By Uri Hollander
 Sages beyond time
Nothing about the restrained cover of this book, not to mention its subject - a historical reading of Talmudic texts - hints at the great dramas, the personal and political tensions, even passions, that are described within.
By Noam Seri
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