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Since its first year in 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has attracted visitors more than 15 million visitors, sometimes at the rate of 10,000 a day, each of whom has walked away with an indelible impression of awe in the face of the unimaginable. This lively, honest, behind-the-scenes account details the emotionally complex fifteen-year struggle surrounding the museum´s birth. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

It's Fine
I haven't read the book yet, but it arrived as promised and in good condition.

An Interesting Read
A Highly informative and yet very readable account of the building of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and the politics behind it.This is one of those books that by the end you have learned alot. ... Read more

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A magnificent array of Hanukkah menorahs and lamps that shed light on the Jewish traditions that produced them

The ceremonial kindling of lights each night during the eight-day holiday of Hanukkah commemorates an ancient victory for religious freedom—the liberation and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BCE. As their diversity and beauty attest, Hanukkah lamps are singularly important as a form of ceremonial art and are among Judaism’s best-loved traditional objects. This superbly illustrated book showcases more than 100 Hanukkah lamps selected from the extensive collection of The Jewish Museum in New York. The featured lamps date from the Renaissance to our own time, and were created from a wide variety of materials in virtually every part of the world, including the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Susan L. Braunstein provides an engaging overview of the Hanukkah lamp and discusses its origins in Jewish tradition, its many innovative forms, its enduring ritual uses, and its social context. She also includes a short informative essay about each of the wonderfully varied lamps pictured in the book.

Susan L. Braunstein is curator of archaeology and Judaica and head of the Judaica Department at The Jewish Museum in New York. She is also adjunct instructor of Jewish art and material culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She is coeditor of Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880–1951 and coauthor of Israel in Antiquity: From David to Herod.


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Customer Reviews (1)

a classic
The richcollection of New York's Jewish Museum houses wonderful historical menorahs.I treasure this beautiful work and have found it invaluable in writing my own book Lighting the Way to Freedom: Treasured Hanukkah Menorahs of Early Israelthat provides an intense focus on Israel's early days and the 'golden age' of hanukkiot. ... Read more

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Since the beginning of the diaspora, the myriad of communities throughout the world where Jews settled have influenced Jewish life and art. This exchange between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures has generated a rich variety of Judaica, however it was only in the late nineteenth century that a conscious attempt was made to establish Jewish museums to preserve the Jewish heritage. Jewish Museums of the World celebrates these important museums. This large format book showcases the incredible array of Jewish art, manuscripts, books, ceremonial objects, and historic artifacts that have been produced and collected in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Featured museums include: The Jewish Museum, New York; Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Beth Hatefutsoth, Tel Aviv; and the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. 250 four-color illustrations, as well as a directory with phone, fax, and website information on the 200 museums visited in this book are included. ... Read more

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Beautiful, but costly
A lovely coffee-table book. Weighs a ton! While the pictures are beautiful, there are surpringly few of them. Even the text is scantier than might be expected -- the type is very large! What's there is fine -- but for the price I might have expected more.

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The collection of late hieratic religious papyri in the British Museum is one of the most important in the world. This volume deals with the Books of Breathing and related texts, comprising about fifty papyri all from the Ptolemaic or Roman periods. The catalogue provides a general introduction, complete translation and commentary for each papyrus. ... Read more

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With style and depth, Lorna Marshall leads the reader through the intricacies, ambiguities, and silences of !Kung beliefs. Her narrative, based on fieldwork among the Bushmen of the Kalahari in the early 1950s, brings into focus a way of life that appears to have existed for millennia. She presents the culture, beliefs, and spirituality of one of the last true hunting-and-gathering peoples by focusing on members of different bands as they reveal their own views. This account, with photography by John Marshall, presents a system of beliefs, one in which personified deities and unpersonifled supernatural forces (n!ow and n/um) interact with man and the natural world. The !Kung believe that this interaction accounts for much of the mystery of life and the vicissitudes of the good and evil that befall mankind. The book also depicts an egalitarian lifestyle based on sharing and group awareness, a lifestyle that has not survived intact the increasing integration of the Bushmen into the modern world.

A companion volume to her 1976 work, The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, this book is published to mark the recent one-hundredth birthday of Lorna Marshall.

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This Symposium volume discusses comparative perspectives as constituents of History of Religion as an academic discipline and the validity of comparative studies in the field of religion. The papers deal with the origin of comparative studies in European scholarship, with the methods and the role of the phenomenology of religion, with comparative Indo-European mythology, and, on the whole, address a wide range of comparative issues. ... Read more

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The authors have been asked to present their ideas of what a secular study of religion should be like, what methods it should apply, what aims, and what kind of scientific thinking to pursue. The result is a broad pattern of approaches, some wholly theoretical, some also based on case studies. All in all, the texts offer a comprehensive account of modern scholarly positions and summarizes much of the ongoing theoretical debate and the effort to further emancipate the study of religion from theological biases. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Excellent
Extremely helpful overview of archaeological discoveries, their significance, present location in museum, etc. Agree with another reviewer that more pictures, esp. in color, would greatly enhance the book.

Unbiased review.
It is the best of its kind--actually, there isn't another. Brilliantly written, ingeniously devised, with excellent photographs throughout....oh...well...I am a coauthor.

A treasure for your Biblical library
This book is a wealth of information on Biblical archaeological finds in museums today. I only wish there were more pictures. If you are an evangelical conservative like I am and like to keep up with what is happening in the Biblical archaeological world this book is a great resource. We have a small museum in our church with over 150 artifacts so it's great to have this on hand for questions that come up. The only other problem I have is the liberal slant on the "Biblical Significance" sections. But discernment is always needed when studying about Biblical subjects. ... Read more

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This book covers divination, figurine-making, and women's ritual treatment of ancestors in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, from 1600 to 500 B.C. Women's ritual was distinguished from men's through excavation strategy: houses, dooryards, activity areas, features, middens and public buildings were excavated and studied as separate units, and context was used to link artifacts with women's domains. They were then interpreted using ethnographic and ethnohistoric data on women's ritual. Included are illustrations of more than 800 figurines or figurine parts. This monograph is Vol. 11 of the subseries Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca. ... Read more

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In an age when religion and religious interpretation have become ever more contentious, how should museums fulfill their roles as stewards and interpreters of sacred material? Stewards of the Sacred helps museums strike a balance between the traditions of the past, the demands of the present, and the opportunities of the future as they engage in a discourse about the principle and practices of faith. Drawn from a conference organized by Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, the book's leading authors cover a full range of topics, including community involvement in conservation and interpretation of sacred objects, representing spirituality for widely diverse visitors, acknowledging the sacred nature of non-religious objects, and sharing authority with Native communities. Includes sample policies and procedures related to these activities, as well as a comprehensive bibliography. A must-read for museums concerned with this rapidly growing interpretive arena. ... Read more

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The Department of Egyptian Antiquities in the British Museum preserves one of the most extensive collections outside Egypt of funerary papyri, among which the greatest number bear texts from the repertory known to the ancient Egyptians as the "Formulae for Going Forth by Day", and known to modern scholarship as the "Book of the Dead". This work presents the papyrus of Nu, an 18th Dynasty official. This early manuscript is shown in its original form with full photographic reproduction and colour photographs of its several fine vignettes. These are accompanied by an introduction on the identitiy of the owner and the reasons for the selection and order of the particular texts included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

No Translation
I must first say that the papyri that are in this book are beautifully presented, and if you happen to be fluent in reading Egyptian hieroglyphics then it is no doubt a real treasure for your collection. However, for those of us who are a little more ignorant, a decent translation could have proved most helpful! ... Read more

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Baba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced.

Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader. She studied with Baba Rexheb in his community for more than twenty years. As a linguistic anthropologist, she taped twelve years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic. She draws extensively on Baba's own words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center, for a remarkable perspective on our times.

You come to know Baba Rexheb and his gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America. It attests to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.

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