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BOOKS

Learn the Surprising Way that Judaism Influenced the American Founding

https://tikvahfund.org/ajj-ebook/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIo_3i6fGM7gIVEPLICh1RsguOEAEYASAAEgIHjvD_BwE
One respected the Jews. One despised them. They both protected their religious liberty.

In July of 1776, a group of 56 men signed a document signifying the birth of a brand-new nation. This assembly of founders was seemingly in no way connected with the Jews, Judaism, or ancient Hebrew culture. But John Adams argued that Jewish concepts and principles permeate the framework of the American government — perhaps more than you might realize.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams disagreed on the contributions of the Jewish people — yet they protected the religious liberties of both Jew and Gentile. Why?

In this new e-book from the Tikvah Fund, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik examines Adams’ and Jefferson’s writings about the Jewish people, their teachings, and impact. With him you will explore:

How did the history, heritage, and practices of the Jewish people influence these two men and the foundation of our country?
How did the concepts of monotheism, morality, and divine intervention impact their thought?
Can the American Revolution be categorized as an achievement of Judaism?
What can this history teach us about the foundations and preservation of our religious liberty today?

Find out by reading Adams, Jefferson, and the Jews.

UNREPORTED TRUTHS ABOUT COVID-19 AND LOCKDOWNS: Combined Parts 1-3: Death Counts, Lockdowns, and Masks Paperback – by Alex Berenson

https://www.amazon.com/UNREPORTED-TRUTHS-ABOUT-COVID-19-LOCKDOWNS/dp/1953039103/ref=zg_bsnr_books_53?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RBY8TCS8A4MX1CT3XESD

Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson offers all a combined version of three booklets in the controversial and best-selling Unreported Truths about Covid series – at one low price.Since the publication of the first booklet in June, Unreported Truths has offered an honest counterpart to over-the-top media coverage about the risks of the coronavirus and ways to stop it. Part 1 focused on the ways governments count and report Covid-19 deaths. Part 2 covered the history of lockdowns and the evidence that they work – or don’t. And Part 3 gave the same treatment to masks and mask mandates.All three booklets draw on primary sources like Centers for Disease Control reports, news articles, and scientific papers – and all three offer direct links to the material so that you the reader can judge it for yourself.With a quarter-million copies sold, Unreported Truths has become an independent journalism phenomenon. And as the fight over our response to Covid drags on, knowing the facts is more important than ever! Now, for the first time, all three booklets are available in a single package. Whether you are wondering about the series, have read one booklet but are interested in the others, or simply want them together for convenience, the Combined Edition offers fresh flexibility.With a new introduction!

Barack Obama Hates Israel and Wants You to Hate It, Too His latest autobiography goes out of its way to demonize the Jewish state. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/barack-obama-hates-israel-and-wants-you-hate-it-robert-spencer/

Great news: Barack Hussein Obama is now not only a Nobel laureate, but he has opened up a big lead among the presidents as the one with by far the most autobiographies. The marvelous narcissist now leads all other presidents who have written autobiographies by two, as he has written three, compared to a number of his peers who are tied at one. However, his latest one, A Promised Land, is more than just an update on the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the Most Undeservedly Celebrated Man on the Planet; it’s a full-on apologia for his policies as president, and a program for his impending third term, aka the Biden administration.

The weighty 768-page tome not only tells you more about His Wonderfulness than you ever thought you wanted to know; it also provides a potted Leftist history of Israel that abundantly illustrates how Leftists see our most reliable ally in the Middle East, and why they hate it with such focused laser-beam intensity.

Obama portrays Britain and then Israel as occupying powers in Palestine, without ever explaining who actually owned the land they were and are supposedly occupying. He makes no mention of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. As The Palestinian Delusion explains in detail, the Mandate directed the British to encourage “close settlement by Jews on the land” for “the establishment of the Jewish national home.” What gave the League the right to do such a thing? The dying Ottoman Empire had ceded Palestine to the League in 1918. Jews had lived in that land from time immemorial, and it was otherwise sparsely populated. It was a perfect place for the Jews who faced discrimination, harassment and worse in Europe and elsewhere to settle.

Tintin and the Jews By Michael Connor

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/tintin-and-the-jews/

The journalist, one of the real figures on whom the cartoon Tintin was based, spent three days in the Lwow ghetto. What he saw overturns much that I thought I knew about the Holocaust. The Jews he observed in the pretty Polish city, now in Ukraine, were crammed into hell: “The life they live here is infernal. They all want to flee.”

The people:

The sons of Israel, walking vultures, wander day and night in the alleyways, as though searching for scraps. Their hands wrapped in pieces of cloth, black against the snow, heads hunched into their shoulders by the mallet of misery, thoughtful, idle, standing still for no reason, in the middle of squares like prophets without a voice and without listeners, they afforest this ghetto rather than animate it, with their tormented, cypress-like silhouettes.

The centre of the ghetto:

A market? A field of manure, yes! The rabbits, whose skins are on offer, appear to have been slaughtered with a machine gun. The furs are nothing more than a mass of hair.

Streets of misery:

On the first day, I had to rush out from one of these doghouses in order to overcome the nausea caused by the smell. For the same reason, I had to rush out on the second day and twice on the third day. The two Jews who accompanied me cried and, in the evening, they sat at my table but were unable to eat.

Here were families, their children “crying of cold and hunger and rotting on the foulest of dung heaps”. In one dark basement two small infants stand beside something:

The pallet seems to stir. We lower our candles. A woman is lying there. But in what is she lying? In wet shavings? In stable straw? I touch it; it is cold and sticky. What is covering the woman would have once been a quilt, but is now nothing more than a mush of feathers and cloth oozing damp like a wall. We notice two more heads in the mush, tiny tots, four months, fifteen months old. The oldest smiles at the flame, which we wave above them. The woman did not utter a word.

Devin Nunes Channels Thomas Paine as Patriots Fight the Deep State By Elise Cooper

Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) has always stood up for justice.  He has written a pamphlet book, Countdown to Socialism in the style of what Thomas Paine had distributed preceding the Revolutionary War. In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy, ringing the alarm for what was wrong and what needed to be done. Now, Congressman Nunes is warning Americans that something needs to be done before this country loses its morals and values.  American Thinker had the privilege of interviewing him.

In Chapter One, he wrote, “the Left has wholly rejected the fundamental principles that bound Americans together and allowed us to work out our differences democratically and peacefully. They now reject free speech, a fair voting system, private property, and the rule of law. They don’t dare yet admit it publicly, but as you’ll see in this book, their policies and rhetoric are incompatible with any of these principles as we understand them today.”

He explained in the book, “Socialist regimes tend to excel at propaganda. By necessity socialism is a resentful ideology that exploits and widens class conflict, racial strife, and other social cleavages, pitting countrymen against one another. Their proposals have one thing in common: they will increase the Democrats’ vote count. At both the state and national levels, they are working hard to fundamentally change the voting system by abolishing the Electoral College, greatly expanding mail-in voting, enfranchising felons, legalizing vote harvesting, lowering the voting age, and allowing current non-citizens to vote through mass amnesties and other means,” not to mention packing the Supreme Court by expanding it.

Book Review: “From Left to Right” — The Story of Holocaust Historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz By Helen Epstein

https://artsfuse.org/217348/book-review-from-left-to-right-the-story-of-holocaust-historian-lucy-s-dawidowicz/

This biography of Lucy S. Dawidowicz performs the invaluable function of gathering relevant documents and drafting a narrative that rescues a fascinating historian from oblivion. But it does not add much to the history of the New York intellectuals.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff. Wayne State University Press, 538 pp., $34.99.

There were several reasons I wanted to read a biography of historian and public intellectual Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915-1990). First, From Left to Right is yet another piece of the extensive feminist project of writing overlooked women back into history. Set mainly in 20th-century Manhattan among the New York Jews who then dominated its intellectual life, From Left to Right foregrounds a wren against a background of peacocks such as Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz — all male, with the notable exceptions of the formidable Hannah Arendt and Diana Trilling.

I was also interested in many particular facets of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s life. As a girl, Lucy Schildkret was a graduate, like Cynthia Ozick and Hortense Calisher (and later Elena Kagan and Avril Haines), of Hunter College High School — the only American public school for intellectually gifted girls. After school, she pursued a Yiddish-language education at the secular nonpolitically-affiliated Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. She graduated from Hunter College in 1936 and began a Master’s program in English literature at Columbia University, but dropped out after two weeks. She eventually obtained a Master’s in history but not a PhD.

Like many other intellectually gifted women of her generation, Dawidowicz would spend far too many years — the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — working out of public view as a secretary, translator, or researcher for men whose publications rarely acknowledged her in print. Finally, in 1967, at the age of 52, she published her own book, a massive anthology of primary sources titled The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, and was hired to teach at Yeshiva University’s all-female Stern College, where she created one of the first courses in what is now called Holocaust Studies.

Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona – by Walter R. Borneman

https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Down-Harbor-Aboard-Arizona/dp/0316560529/r

A deeply personal and never-before-told account of one of America’s darkest days, from the bestselling author of The Admirals and MacArthur at War.

The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 remains one of the most traumatic events in American history. America’s battleship fleet was crippled, thousands of lives were lost, and the United States was propelled into a world war. Few realize that aboard the iconic, ill-fated USS Arizona were an incredible seventy-nine blood relatives. Tragically, in an era when family members serving together was an accepted, even encouraged, practice, sixty-three of the Arizona’s 1,177 dead turned out to be brothers.

In Brothers Down, acclaimed historian Walter R. Borneman returns to that critical week of December, masterfully guiding us on an unforgettable journey of sacrifice and heroism, all told through the lives of these brothers and their fateful experience on the Arizona. Weaving in the heartbreaking stories of the parents, wives, and sweethearts who wrote to and worried about these men, Borneman draws from a treasure trove of unpublished source material to bring to vivid life the minor decisions that became a matter of life or death when the bombs began to fall. More than just an account of familial bonds and national heartbreak, what emerges promises to define a turning point in American military history.

What We Neglect in Tocqueville By Harvey C. Mansfield

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/what-we-neglect-in-tocqueville/

Democracy in America is about a lot more than democracy .

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French aristocrat and one of America’s very best friends, the special, rare kind that tells you the truth. His Democracy in America is quoted often for support, but less often sought for advice. Here are a few points in his great book, often neglected, from which we can learn. (An anniversary is a time to celebrate, but any time is a good time to learn.) 

The meaning of democracy. Many readers today wonder how Tocqueville could speak of “democracy” in 1835, when women had no vote and blacks were enslaved. Tocqueville specifies “equality of conditions” to define democracy, a state in which each individual thinks he has sufficient intelligence to rule himself, resulting in the rule of the majority of such individuals. It’s not that individuals are equal, but that they think they are. Others are held to be “similar” to oneself, neither inferior nor superior. Democracy is not a self-evident truth taken from nature’s God but a plausible convention held to be true. Democracy can become more equal — give women the vote and abolish slavery — when the majority rules it to happen, but the majority can also accept imperfections and inequalities if it wishes and still remain democratic. Such inequalities, for example offices filled by elections, often make democracy work better. Even in its normal functioning, even when officials have powers unequal to those of citizens, democracy has hidden aristocratic aspects necessary to its good functioning.

Democracy and aristocracy. Tocqueville — an aristocrat himself, living just after the French Revolution — knew the contrast between the Old Regime and the democratic future that he found in America in a way we cannot today. For us there is only one way to live justly and reasonably — in democracy. Even the hateful regimes we know, such as communism and Nazism, are perversions of democracy. Tocqueville refers to the “providential fact” that democracy in our time is inescapable, but he explains democracy to itself in constant contrast with its rival, aristocracy.

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton: A Review of “Abuse Of Power: Inside The Three-Year Campaign To Impeach Donald Trump” by Fred Lucas

https://www.trevorloudon.com/2020/12/book-review-abuse-of-power-inside-the-three-year-campaign-to-impeach-donald-trump/?

I have officially found a new author that I am adding to my ‘favorites’ list. His name is Fred Lucas. He has written a superb book entitled: Abuse of Power: Inside The Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump. If you want the truth about what went on during the witchhunt to impeach Trump, this is the book. I can’t recommend it enough and I personally believe everyone should get a copy.

Just as I strongly suspected, President Trump’s enemies had a plan in place to remove him even before he was inaugurated. Leftists could not stand the way the election turned out and how Hillary Clinton lost, so they implemented a strategy to bring a sitting president down in a soft coup. That coup had many facets, but the impeachment angle was one of the key elements of their plan. The hit job culminated in an election-year impeachment trial.

In the beginning… of the impeachment, per Lucas:

“And I document this in there that one of the first actions taken was [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren actually put forward a Senate bill on emoluments saying that Trump would be committing a high crime or misdemeanor if he did not divest all of his business holdings immediately. That bill went nowhere, but it was sort of symbolic.”

“From that point on, you had [Rep.] Maxine Waters pushing forward … what she called the “Impeach 45” movement. It had like a whole host of liberal nonprofits such as Tom Steyer, John Bonifaz, who ran this group Impeach Donald Trump Now.”

Barack Obama’s Visceral Dislike of Israel, the Jewish State, Revealed in his Latest Book By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/barack_obamas_visceral_dislike_of_israel_the_jewish_state_revealed_in_his_latest_book_.html

Though we have not over the years accused Barack Obama of anti-Semitism, we did feel even prior to his election in 2008 that Obama was uncomfortable with the idea of Jewish sovereignty, as well as Jewish rights in and of themselves, disconnected from intersectionality.

In his recent book, Promised Land, it is crystal clear that Obama is uncomfortable, perhaps even hostile to a specific Jewish state in the Land of Israel and used his tenure as president to undermine the proud and glorious history of Zionism. He spent excessive zeal and capital to reshape American and world policy so as to establish the Palestinian Arab narrative as the only legitimate political outlook and forum.

Had his book been written by someone else, many would have easily characterized the author’s anti-Zionism and non-regard for the right of the Jewish people to possess and control their land as bordering on anti-Semitism. As with many in the anti-Zionist movement, Obama grants credibility to all salutary comments for the Palestinian Arabs, portraying them as innocent victims in a Martin Luther King-like struggle, while caricaturing Israel and her Jewish inhabitants as oppressors.

Obama never seems shaken by the reality of Israelis bombarded in their kindergartens and homes by Palestinian Arab missiles. He refuses to acknowledge the restraint undertaken by Israelis against her attackers. He fails to recognize the enormous concessions that Israeli prime ministers offered, almost foolishly, to Palestinian Arab representatives in Israel’s quest to find peace. He is unmoved by the massive return of beleaguered Jews in pogrom-filled Europe that rebirthed the Land of Israel; a revived and resurrected land that provided opportunity for Muslims from other enclaves to find work, health, and civil rights absent in their own countries. He is guilty of revisionist history and indifferent to the Jews’ ancient and historical linkage to this land. To him, it seems, the region only came into being with the advent of the newly formed P.L.O.