When Isobel visits her Aunt Luisa at Hanukkah, she not only has a wonderful time, she learns some new things about this special holiday.

This book is a comprehensive, hands-on volume that provides an up-to-date overview of the practices and beliefs of the Jews, as well as a guide to religious traditions, everyday practices, philosophical beliefs, and historical foundations of judaism.

"An introduction to Jewish beliefs and history -- In-depth look at sacred texts, Jewish law, and more -- The branches of Judaism and the customs of each" -- Front cover.

Describes Judaism.

"An urgent and deeply necessary work, Dear Zealots offers three ... essays that speak directly to our present age, on the rise of zealotry in Israel and around the world. From the incomparable Amos Oz comes a series of three essays: on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures, on the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for a secular pride in Israel, and on the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally....

In 1996, Hanna Heath, a young Australian book conservator is called to analyze the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless six-hundred-year-old Jewish prayer book that has been salvaged from a destroyed Bosnian library. When Hanna discovers a series of artifacts in the centuries' old, she unwittingly exposes an international cover up.

"A world-renowned scholar uses the Bible's own words to understand a fateful change that occurred during the biblical era, one that would ultimately determine the whole way in which Jews and Christians would encounter God ever since. A great mystery lies at the heart of the Bible. Early on, people seem to live in a world entirely foreign to our own. God appears to Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and others; He buttonholes Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and...

"Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world, and it has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied over the course of more than three millennia... In this...book, Martin Goodman takes readers from Judaism's origins in the polytheistic world of the second and first millennia BCE to the temple cult at the time of Jesus. He tells the stories of the rabbis, mystics, and messiahs of...