Dan Brown fans rejoice with the latest installment (2013) of the adventures of the fictional symbologist from Harvard, Professor Robert Langdon. Like the Da Vinci Code, Inferno is set mainly in Italy, but this time in Florence and Venice. Visitors to these...
Wrestling With God is a valuable contribution to Holocaust literature. Edited by Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg and published in 2007, it is a comprehensive volume appropriately subtitled “Jewish Theological Responses during and after the...
Stephen Greenblatt makes a good case for dating the beginning of the modern period to the fifteenth century when, because of the rediscovery of the writing of Lucretius “On the Nature of Things” by Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini and their subsequent publication,...
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons designed one of the most repeated - and still shocking - psychological experiments. University students were asked to count the number of passes made between players on one team in a basketball game. After the video...
Dr. Michael V. Pantalon came to the conclusion that the only way people will change is if they want to change. And people will only want to change if change is to their advantage. Getting people to recognize that a change in behaviour is to their advantage...
These days the city of Aleppo, Syria is the news because of its importance in the raging rebellion against the Assad regime. But Aleppo was once the home of arguably the oldest text of the Bible and one that Maimonides credited with being the model of accuracy. The...
THE JEWS of IBERIA ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Prepared by Rabbi Wayne Allen, Ph.D. General History: There are two classics still available: Yitzhak Baer’s A History of the Jews in Christian Spain is a two-volume comprehensive study that has held up well...
Catherine Thimmesh recently published a book simple called Friends. It is a photo essay of the special relationships of animals with each other accompanied by some brief reflections. What is surprising is the number of friendships that cross the boundary of species,...
Dead at 39 in 1745, victimized by an outbreak of plague in the land of Israel, Rabbi Chaim Moshe Luzzatto nonetheless left behind an extraordinary legacy. A brilliant thinker and Kabbalist, he is now closely associated with the study of mussar (Jewish ethics of the...
Rabbi Neil Gillman, Professor Emeritus at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, has burnished his reputation as one of the pre-eminent contemporary Jewish theologians with the publication of his latest book, Doing Jewish Theology: God, Torah & Israel in...