Rabbi A. James Rudin (he/him) is the former head of the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Interreligious Affairs and author of seven books, including The People In The Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, And Presidents. He served as a U.S. Air Force chaplain in Japan and Korea.
In Houdini: The Elusive American, Adam Begley, tells the remarkable story of how a Hungarian-born rabbi’s son achieved global fame as the world’s greatest magician and the master of “self-liberation.”
In her book, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, author and book critic Donna Rifkind vividly describes the 1930s and 1940s, when 10,000 German-speaking refugees, most of them Jews, found a safe haven from Nazism in Los Angeles.
When the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) convenes its 2019 Biennial this December in Chicago, it will shine the spotlight on a city with a rich Jewish heritage.
Tom Segev’s voluminous biography, A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, gives new meaning to the Latin phrase – carpe diem – seize the day. That is just what David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) did when he proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948.