The disappearing history of Chicago's Jewish past can be found in the religious architecture of its stately synagogues and communal buildings. Whether modest or majestic, wood or stone, the buildings reflected their members' views on faith and their commitment to the neighborhoods where they lived in a time when individuals and the community were inseparable from their neighborhood synagogues, temples, and shuls. From Chicago's oldest Jewish congregation,...

Richmond's historic houses of worship cannot be separated from the city's storied past. A young Patrick Henry sparked a revolution with his Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech inside St. John's Episcopal Church on Church Hill. Congregation Beth Ahabah, with its awe-inspiring windows and adjoining museum, is one of the oldest and most revered synagogues in the country. An interstate highway was moved to save the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church,...

In 1740, Nathan Levy--one of the first Jewish residents of Philadelphia--requested a plot of land to give his child a Jewish burial. This plot on Spruce Street became the first Jewish communal cemetery and marked the beginning of organized Jewish life in the colonial city. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, floods of Jewish immigrants came to the United States from Europe and settled in Philadelphia and throughout the Delaware...

As Christianity spread across the Holy Land, synagogues became increasingly larger and more elaborate in an attempt to bolster Judaism. See how this was done by peering closely at the remains of the synagogues at Capernaum, Hammath Tiberias, and Beth Alpha: as well as their (sometimes surprising) decorations.

From the Publisher: In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise...

"As the Senior Rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone, but also the beauty of what remains"-- As the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply. Here he takes us on a journey...

"When Philip Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was still one of the most recognizable-and influential-figures on the American cultural landscape. The first recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA's founding architectural curator, Johnson made his mark as one of America's leading architects with his famous Glass House in New Caanan, CT, and his controversial AT & T Building in NYC, among many others in nearly every city in the country-but...

"Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany. Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had...

"An eminent sociologist--and coauthor, with Aziz Ansari, of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance--makes the provocative case that the future of democratic societies rests not only on shared values but also on shared "social infrastructure": the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, coffee shops, pools, and parks that promote crucial, sometimes life-saving connections between people who might otherwise fail to find common cause"-- "An...