Lone Stars of David

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Author :
Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 1584656220
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (846 download)

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Book Synopsis Lone Stars of David by : Hollace Ava Weiner

Download or read book Lone Stars of David written by Hollace Ava Weiner and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2007 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection of lively written, lavishly illustrated, and well-documented narratives on the history and culture of Texas Jews.

In Jewish Texas

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Author :
Publisher : TCU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780875651873
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis In Jewish Texas by : Stanley E. Ely

Download or read book In Jewish Texas written by Stanley E. Ely and published by TCU Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stanley Ely says that when the fiftieth or so person confronted him with a skeptical, "You mean you're Jewish, and you're from Texas?" he decided to do more than smile and say, "Yes." The result is this funny, caustic, and nostalgic tale in the tradition of popular regionally and ethnically focused memoirs. Around the beginning of this century, Ely's parents (as young children) and grandparents immigrated to Galveston, fleeing oppression as Jews in Russia and Romania. Their arrival sets Ely's memoir in motion. Combining the stories of the author's grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and friends and including an abundance of family photos, the book continues until today, as Ely faces his own senior years living in New York. Though the book is not a typical "coming out" story, the reader also learns of Ely's gradual and at times reluctant acceptance of himself as a gay man. The story of Ely's family and their friends reflects the impressive growth of Dallas and its Jewish population in the first half of this century. As he narrates the building of new lives in Texas, Ely also portrays the integration of a minority segment of Jewish immigrants in America outside the great cities of the North. Of himself, the author tells of growing up in Dallas within the security of an intensely Jewish society. Then he prepares for the moment of his first departure for college in the North, and he thinks of his mother's arrival from Russia as a girl of eight. Of his own first significant step away from Texas, he says his mother "probably knew--and later I also realized--that that was the eventual crossing of an ocean for me." By now, Ely has lived in Manhattan for four decades. Yet he finds himself telling friends, "I'm going home for Passover" as he prepares for another annual trip to Texas. Once there, he takes a fresh look and concludes that Texas Jews are different from those elsewhere: they have dual citizenship, in Judaism and in Texas.

Jewish Stars in Texas

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Author :
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781585444946
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (449 download)

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Book Synopsis Jewish Stars in Texas by : Hollace Ava Weiner

Download or read book Jewish Stars in Texas written by Hollace Ava Weiner and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas Jews may be only a small proportion of the state's population, but their leaders have often shone as unlikely stars in this Bible Belt state. Grounded in the culture that gave rise to Christianity and thus sharing many of the community's values, rabbis schooled outside the region brought erudition and an exotic individuality to the frontier. Furthermore, a rabbi's prophetic sense of social justice, honed through centuries of Talmudic thought, gave a Hebrew minister moral clout in a vigilante climate. Because Texas synagogues were small, rabbis served entire communities, evolving into public figures recruited for an array of roles. They blessed stock shows and rodeos. They founded hospitals, symphonies, and charities. They broadcast Sunday sermons over the radio. They challenged the Ku Klux Klan and fought for academic freedom and prison reform. Their names are etched on cornerstones and scrawled on state documents. Welcomed as leaders of the Chosen People, rabbis thrived, and many stayed their entire careers. Rabbis who accepted a call to the Lone Star State when it was still on the edge of the frontier often ventured out West as a last resort. Some were freelancers, never ordained. Others came because they had no better pulpit offers. A number had left Europe as rebels, seeking to escape traditional religious practices. These maverick rabbis were drawn to places with little Jewish history or hierarchy -- communities such as Beaumont, Galveston, Fort Worth, Lubbock, El Paso, and Tyler -- where they created their own religious blueprints. This thoroughly researched and engaging volume, covering a time span from the 1870s through the 1920s, tells the lively stories of elevenrabbis, their lives, and their Texas towns, from big cities such as Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio to the remote locales of Hempstead and Brownsville. Sit back and enjoy Texas history through rabbinical eyes.

Pioneer Jewish Texans

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Author :
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
ISBN 13 : 1603444238
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis Pioneer Jewish Texans by : Natalie Ornish

Download or read book Pioneer Jewish Texans written by Natalie Ornish and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With more than 400 photographs, extensive interviews with the descendants of pioneer Jewish Texan families, and reproductions of rare historical documents, Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans quickly became a classic following its original release in 1989. This new Texas A&M University Press edition presents Ornish’s meticulous research and her fascinating historical vignettes for a new generation of readers and historians. She chronicles Jewish buccaneers with Jean Lafitte at Galveston; she tells of Jewish patriots who fought at the Alamo and at virtually every major engagement in the war for Texan independence; she traces the careers of immigrants with names like Marcus, Sanger, and Gordon, who arrived on the Texas frontier with little more than the packs on their backs and went on to build great mercantile empires. Cattle barons, wildcatters, diplomats, physicians, financiers, artists, and humanitarians are among the other notable Jewish pioneers and pathfinders described in this carefully researched and exhaustively documented book. Filling a substantial void in Texana and Texas history, the Texas A&M University Press edition of Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans brings back into circulation this treasure trove of information on a rich and often overlooked vein of the multifaceted story of the Lone Star State.

Deep in the Heart

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Deep in the Heart by : Ruthe Winegarten

Download or read book Deep in the Heart written by Ruthe Winegarten and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully documented book with its unusual photographs is a powerful triute to the strengths and acheivements of Texas Jews. The heroes, heroines, and hell-raisers are all here.

The Chosen Folks

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Author :
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292756127
Total Pages : 477 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (927 download)

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Book Synopsis The Chosen Folks by : Bryan Edward Stone

Download or read book The Chosen Folks written by Bryan Edward Stone and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of Jewish history in the Lone Star State, from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to contemporary Jewish communities. Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that flourished far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish history and culture. The effects of this peripheral identity are explored in depth, from the days when geographic distance created physical divides to the redefinitions of “frontier” that marked the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement are covered as well, raising provocative questions about the attributes that enabled Texas Jews to forge a distinctive identity on the national and world stage. Brimming with memorable narratives, The Chosen Folks brings to life a cast of vibrant pioneers. “Stone is gifted thinker and storyteller. His book on the history of Texas Jewry integrates the collective scholarship and memoirs of generations of writers into a cohesive account with a strong interpretive message.” —Hollace Ava Weiner, editor of Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas and Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work “A significant addition to the growing canon of Texas Jewish history. . . . What separates [Stone’s] work from other accounts of Texas Jewry, and indeed other regional studies of American Jewish life, is a strong overarching narrative grounded in the power of the frontier.” —Marcie Cohen Ferris, American Jewish History “The Chosen Folks deserves widespread appeal. Those interested in Jewish studies, Texas history, and immigration will certainly find it a useful analysis. What’s more, those concerned with the frontier—where Jewish, Texan, immigrant, and other identities intertwine, influence, and define each other—will especially benefit.” —Scott M. Langston, Great Plains Quarterly

The Chosen Folks

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of TX + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0292792794
Total Pages : 477 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (927 download)

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Book Synopsis The Chosen Folks by : Bryan Edward Stone

Download or read book The Chosen Folks written by Bryan Edward Stone and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of Jewish history in the Lone Star State, from the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition to contemporary Jewish communities. Texas has one of the largest Jewish populations in the South and West, comprising an often-overlooked vestige of the Diaspora. The Chosen Folks brings this rich aspect of the past to light, going beyond single biographies and photographic histories to explore the full evolution of the Jewish experience in Texas. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and synthesizing earlier research, Bryan Edward Stone begins with the crypto-Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the late sixteenth century and then discusses the unique Texas-Jewish communities that flourished far from the acknowledged centers of Jewish history and culture. The effects of this peripheral identity are explored in depth, from the days when geographic distance created physical divides to the redefinitions of “frontier” that marked the twentieth century. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement are covered as well, raising provocative questions about the attributes that enabled Texas Jews to forge a distinctive identity on the national and world stage. Brimming with memorable narratives, The Chosen Folks brings to life a cast of vibrant pioneers. “Stone is gifted thinker and storyteller. His book on the history of Texas Jewry integrates the collective scholarship and memoirs of generations of writers into a cohesive account with a strong interpretive message.” —Hollace Ava Weiner, editor of Lone Stars of David: The Jews of Texas and Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work “A significant addition to the growing canon of Texas Jewish history. . . . What separates [Stone’s] work from other accounts of Texas Jewry, and indeed other regional studies of American Jewish life, is a strong overarching narrative grounded in the power of the frontier.” —Marcie Cohen Ferris, American Jewish History “The Chosen Folks deserves widespread appeal. Those interested in Jewish studies, Texas history, and immigration will certainly find it a useful analysis. What’s more, those concerned with the frontier—where Jewish, Texan, immigrant, and other identities intertwine, influence, and define each other—will especially benefit.” —Scott M. Langston, Great Plains Quarterly

Changing Perspectives

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Author :
Publisher : University of North Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 1574418378
Total Pages : 430 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis Changing Perspectives by : Allison E. Schottenstein

Download or read book Changing Perspectives written by Allison E. Schottenstein and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing Perspectives charts the pivotal period in Houston’s history when Jewish and Black leadership eventually came together to work for positive change. This is a story of two communities, both of which struggled to claim the rights and privileges they desired. Previous scholars of Southern Jewish history have argued that Black-Jewish relations did not exist in the South. However, during the 1930s to the 1980s, Jews and Blacks in Houston interacted in diverse and oftentimes surprising ways. For example, Houston’s Jewish leaders and eventually Black political leaders forged a connection that blossomed into the creation of the Mickey Leland Kibbutzim Internship in Israel for disadvantaged Black youth. Initially Houston Jewish leadership battled with their devotion to liberalism and sympathy with oppressed Blacks and their desire to acculturate. The distance between Houston’s Jews and Blacks diminished after changing demographics, the end of segregation, city redistricting, and the emergence of Black political power. Simultaneously, Israel’s victory during the Six-Day War caused the city’s Jews to embrace their Jewish identity and form an unexpected bond with Black political leaders over the cause of Zionism. Allison Schottenstein shows that Black-Jewish relations did exist during the Long Civil Rights Movement in Houston. Indeed, Houston played a significant role in the scope of Southern Jewish history and in expanding our understanding of Black-Jewish relations in the United States.

A Place of Exodus

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780982783856
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (838 download)

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Book Synopsis A Place of Exodus by : David Biespiel

Download or read book A Place of Exodus written by David Biespiel and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed poet and essayist David Biespiel tells the story of the rise and fall of his Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life's central riddle: Are we ever done leaving home? Raised in the 1970s in Meyerland, the historic Jewish neighborhood of Houston, Biespiel explores the story of triumph and shame that changed his relationship to the world around him. With cinematic fluidity, he writes of his early years as a teenager who yearns for bold self-invention as he grapples with the enigmas of illness, death, love, and the meaning of faith. Growing up in a family devoted to Jewish identity, Biespiel comes under the tutelage of the head rabbi of the largest conservative congregation in North America. But after the rabbi kicks him out of the synagogue during a public quarrel, Biespiel leaves Texas and his religious upbringing behind. After a near-forty-year exile, Biespiel returns for a day to the world he left behind as a different person, to offer a moving meditation on the meaning of home, uncovering bittersweet realities of age, youth, and family with tenderness and devastating honesty. Written in the years that followed the devastation of Houston wrought by three 500-year floods in three years-including Hurricane Harvey, the worst flood in Texas history-Biespiel's account is by turns personal and philosophical, a meditation on time's inevitable losses and a writer's hard-won gains. A Place of Exodus is not only a memoir, but an essential companion for anyone who has journeyed far - and equally those who have stayed close to the unresolvable paradoxes of home, the aches of time and heart none of us can escape.

Dear Mr. Dickens

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Author :
Publisher : Albert Whitman & Company
ISBN 13 : 0807515299
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (75 download)

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Book Synopsis Dear Mr. Dickens by : Nancy Churnin

Download or read book Dear Mr. Dickens written by Nancy Churnin and published by Albert Whitman & Company. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2021 National Jewish Book Award Winner - Children's Picture Book 2022 Sydney Taylor Book Award Honor for Picture Books Chicago Public Library Best Informational Books for Younger Readers 2021 The Best Jewish Children's Books of 2021, Tablet Magazine A Junior Library Guild Selection March 2022 The Best Children's Books of the Year 2022, Bank Street College 2022 First Place—Children's Book Nonfiction, Press Women of Texas 2022 First Place—Children's Book Nonfiction, National Federation of Press Women Eliza Davis believed in speaking up for what was right. Even if it meant telling Charles Dickens he was wrong. In Eliza Davis's day, Charles Dickens was the most celebrated living writer in England. But some of his books reflected a prejudice that was all too common at the time: prejudice against Jewish people. Eliza was Jewish, and her heart hurt to see a Jewish character in Oliver Twist portrayed as ugly and selfish. She wanted to speak out about how unfair that was, even if it meant speaking out against the great man himself. So she wrote a letter to Charles Dickens. What happened next is history.

Memories of Two Generations

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Author :
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817319034
Total Pages : 441 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Memories of Two Generations by : Alexander Z. Gurwitz

Download or read book Memories of Two Generations written by Alexander Z. Gurwitz and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1935 autobiography of Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz, an Orthodox Jew whose lively recounting of his life in Tsarist Russia and his immigration to San Antonio, Texas, in 1910 captures turbulent changes in early twentieth-century Jewish history In 1910, at the age of fifty-one, Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz made the bold decision to emigrate with his wife and four children from southeastern Ukraine in Tsarist Russia to begin a new life in Texas. In 1935, in his seventies, Gurwitz composed a retrospective autobiography, Memories of Two Generations, that recounts his personal story both of the rich history of the lost Jewish world of Eastern Europe and of the rambunctious development of frontier Jewish communities in the United States. In both Europe and America, Gurwitz inhabited an almost exclusively Jewish world. As a boy, he studied in traditional yeshivas and earned a living as a Hebrew language teacher and kosher butcher. Widely travelled, Gurwitz recalls with wit and insight daily life in European shtetls, providing perceptive and informative comments about Jewish religion, history, politics, and social customs. Among the book’s most notable features is his first-hand, insider’s account of the yearly Jewish holiday cycle as it was observed in the nineteenth century, described as he experienced it as a child. Gurwitz’s account of his arrival in Texas forms a cornerstone record of the Galveston Immigration Movement; this memoir represents the only complete narrative of that migration from an immigrant’s point of view. Gurwitz’s descriptions about the development of a thriving Orthodox community in San Antonio provide an important and unique primary source about a facet of American Jewish life that is not widely known. Gurwitz wrote his memoir in his preferred Yiddish, and this translation into English by Rabbi Amram Prero captures the lyrical style of the original. Scholar and author Bryan Edward Stone’s special introduction and illuminating footnotes round out a superb edition that offers much to experts and general readers alike.

Jewish Stars in Texas

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Jewish Stars in Texas by : Hollace Ava Weiner

Download or read book Jewish Stars in Texas written by Hollace Ava Weiner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas Jews may be only a small proportion of the state's population, but their leaders have often shone as unlikely stars in this Bible Belt state. Grounded in the culture that gave rise to Christianity and thus sharing many of the community's values, rabbis schooled outside the region brought erudition and an exotic individuality to the frontier. Furthermore, a rabbi's prophetic sense of social justice, honed through centuries of Talmudic thought, gave a Hebrew minister moral clout in a vigilante climate. Because Texas synagogues were small, rabbis served entire communities, evolving into public figures recruited for an array of roles. They blessed stock shows and rodeos. They founded hospitals, symphonies, and charities. They broadcast Sunday sermons over the radio. They challenged the Ku Klux Klan and fought for academic freedom and prison reform. Their names are etched on cornerstones and scrawled on state documents. Welcomed as leaders of the Chosen People, rabbis thrived, and many stayed their entire careers. Rabbis who accepted a call to the Lone Star State when it was still on the edge of the frontier often ventured out West as a last resort. Some were freelancers, never ordained. Others came because they had no better pulpit offers. A number had left Europe as rebels, seeking to escape traditional religious practices. These maverick rabbis were drawn to places with little Jewish history or hierarchy -- communities such as Beaumont, Galveston, Fort Worth, Lubbock, El Paso, and Tyler -- where they created their own religious blueprints. This thoroughly researched and engaging volume, covering a time span from the 1870s through the 1920s, tells the lively stories of elevenrabbis, their lives, and their Texas towns, from big cities such as Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio to the remote locales of Hempstead and Brownsville. Sit back and enjoy Texas history through rabbinical eyes.

Jewish Roots in Southern Soil

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Author :
Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 9781584655893
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (558 download)

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Book Synopsis Jewish Roots in Southern Soil by : Marcie Cohen Ferris

Download or read book Jewish Roots in Southern Soil written by Marcie Cohen Ferris and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively look at southern Jewish history and culture.

Stars of David

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Author :
Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 9781584653035
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Stars of David by : Scott R. Benarde

Download or read book Stars of David written by Scott R. Benarde and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2003 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look into how Judaism has shaped and influenced the makers of rock music over the past fifty years.

Genocide in Jewish Thought

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107011043
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Genocide in Jewish Thought by : David Patterson

Download or read book Genocide in Jewish Thought written by David Patterson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon Jewish categories of thought, this book suggests a way of thinking that might help prevent genocide.

Jewish Life in the American West

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Author :
Publisher : Heyday
ISBN 13 : 9781890771775
Total Pages : 143 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (717 download)

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Book Synopsis Jewish Life in the American West by : Ava Fran Kahn

Download or read book Jewish Life in the American West written by Ava Fran Kahn and published by Heyday. This book was released on 2004-02 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puts aside many stereotypes and examines the less-told story of the migration of Jews to Californiaand the West from the mid-19th century to the 1920's

Made In Texas

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0786728299
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis Made In Texas by : Michael Lind

Download or read book Made In Texas written by Michael Lind and published by . This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone knows that President George W. Bush is from Texas. But few of us know the role his home state plays in his presidency, and in our country. In this dual biography of man and state, Michael Lind confronts the chief crises of Bush's presidency--the economy, the Middle East, and religious fundamentalism--and traces their roots back to Texas, a state, Lind argues, that yields salient clues to the future course of our country.Widely praised as an iconoclastic and brilliant political observer, Lind, a fifth generation Texan, chronicles the ethnic clash that produced modern Texas, the well-known plundering of the state's natural resources at the hands of its elites, and finally the deep strain of "Old Testament religiosity" which, having originated in Texas, now reaches all over the globe in the form of Bush's foreign policy.In the tradition of Gary Wills's Reagan's America, Made in Texas provides a wholly original cultural history that should change the way we understand not just our president, but our country.