S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon's death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon's late project could be appreciated.
"The Parable and Its Lesson" is one of the major stories from this work. Set shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Jewish communities in the Ukraine in 1648, it tells the tale of a journey into the Netherworld taken by a rabbi and his young assistant. What the rabbi finds in his infernal journey is a series of troubling theological contradictions that bear on divine justice. Agnon's story gives us a fascinating window onto a community in the throes of mourning its losses and reconstituting its spiritual, communal, and economic life in the aftermath of catastrophe. There is no question that Agnon wrote of the 1648 massacres out of an awareness of the singular catastrophic massacre of his own time--the Holocaust.
James S. Diamond has provides an extensive set of notes to make it possible for today's reader to grasp the rich cultural world of the text. The introduction and interpretive essay by Alan Mintz illuminate Agnon's grand project for recreating the life of Polish Jewry, and steer the reader through the knots and twists of the plot.

S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon's death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon's late project could be appreciated.
"The Parable and Its Lesson" is one of the major stories from this work. Set shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Jewish communities in the Ukraine in 1648, it tells the tale of a journey into the Netherworld taken by a rabbi and his young assistant. What the rabbi finds in his infernal journey is a series of troubling theological contradictions that bear on divine justice. Agnon's story gives us a fascinating window onto a community in the throes of mourning its losses and reconstituting its spiritual, communal, and economic life in the aftermath of catastrophe. There is no question that Agnon wrote of the 1648 massacres out of an awareness of the singular catastrophic massacre of his own time--the Holocaust.
James S. Diamond has provides an extensive set of notes to make it possible for today's reader to grasp the rich cultural world of the text. The introduction and interpretive essay by Alan Mintz illuminate Agnon's grand project for recreating the life of Polish Jewry, and steer the reader through the knots and twists of the plot.

James Diamond, a consummate teacher of the Bible, provides a clear and simple (but not simplistic) method for reading and understanding the weekly Torah portions. This is a how-to book, not an interpretive one. It is not a commentary on each week's reading, but rather an "instruction manual" on how each of us can read and interpret for ourselves the 54 Torah portions of the year. Diamond provides a set of structured guidelines to the readings, and then he leads us through one Torah portion from each of the five biblical books to give us examples of how we can continue the "stringing" process on our own. He concludes with a personal guide to recommended Bible commentaries so readers can engage in further study if they choose. Stringing the Pearls is intended for all who would like to reach a greater personal understanding of the Torah, no matter what their biblical knowledge. An invaluable resource for Jewish learners, this book will also be an important tool for rabbis and for Jewish educators. The JPS inadvertently failed to include Section 8 of Part V: Selected Books (following page 206) in James Diamond's new book Stringing the Pearls. We apologize to our readers for any inconvenience that this has caused. James S. Diamond teaches in the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. He combines two personal and professional personae, as a rabbi and an academic. Rabbi Diamond was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, and he holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Indiana University in Bloomington. Adult Jewish learning has been a focal point throughout Diamond's career. In recent years, he has taught the Tanakh course in the Me'ah program, a two-year intensive adult Jewish learning program that is sponsored by the Hebrew College of Boston.

"Profound, demanding, but lucid and well organized, Diamond's bookis a class act!" -- Choice

..". sensitive, magisterialstudy... " -- Macleans

..". a great interest to seriousreaders." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

..". a superb pieceof research, empathetic yet clear-headed evaluation. But there is also wit, eleganceand personal passion on these scholarly pages." -- The JewishSpectator

Homeland or Holy Land? is the study of a man and amovement -- the man is Yonatan Ratosh, Hebrew poet and thinker, and the movement isZionism, the ideological foundation of the Jewish state, Israel.

Important and provocative reading for anyone interested, concerned, or confused by the state of the state of Israel today.