THE B'NEI MENASHE are certifiably one of the newest, possibly remnants of one of the oldest, and certainly one of the most unusual Jewish communities in the world today. Hailing from a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group known as the Kuki- Mizo that inhabits the remote Himalayan foothills of northeast India, they are equally divided today between India and Israel. Lives of the Children of Manasia is composed of twelve comprehensive oral history interviews with elderly members of the community in Israel.

Conducted in the Mizo and Kuki languages by Isaac Thangjom, the interviews were translated by him into English and edited by Hillel Halkin. Many of the men and women interviewed here were among the founders of the Judaizing movement that led to the formation of the B'nei Menashe community in the early 1970's. Their individual life stories, remarkable in their own right, narrate a collective drama that until now has been shrouded in myth and misconceptions.

This book reveals how an initially small group of people descended from jungle warriors, illiterate rice farmers, and practitioners of a traditional tribal religion courageously found their way to Judaism; what about the latter attracted them, though they had never before met a real Jew in their lives; and how their fierce attachment to their new faith eventually brought them and many others to Israel, where some five thousand of them live today as full citizens.

An insightful biography of the most controversial and perhaps most fervent of all Zionist political figures

A beautifully written short biography of an exceedingly interesting man: a novelist, translator, poet, playwright, journalist, polemicist, and probably the most remarkable public speaker in modern Jewish life. Halkin's account of him is credible and vivid.--Avishai Margalit, New York Review of Books

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was a man of huge paradoxes and contradictions and has been the most misunderstood of all Zionist politicians--a first-rate novelist, a celebrated Russian journalist, and the founder of the branch of Zionism now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. This biography, the first in English in nearly two decades, undertakes to answer central questions about Jabotinsky as a writer, a political thinker, and a leader. Hillel Halkin sets aside the stereotypes to which Jabotinsky has been reduced by his would-be followers and detractors alike.

Halkin explains the importance of Odessa, Jabotinsky's native city, in molding his character and outlook; discusses his novels and short stories, showing the sometimes hidden connections between them and Jabotinsky's political thought, and studies a political career that ended in tragic failure. Halkin also addresses Jabotinsky's position, unique among the great figures of Zionist history, as both a territorial maximalist and a principled believer in democracy. The author inquires why Jabotinsky was often accused of fascist tendencies though he abhorred authoritarian and totalitarian politics, and investigates the many opposed aspects of his personality and conduct while asking whether or not they had an ultimate coherence. Few figures in twentieth-century Jewish life were quite so admired and loathed, and Halkin's splendid, subtle book explores him with empathy and lucidity.

A deeply personal look at death, mourning, and the afterlife in Jewish tradition

After One-Hundred-and-Twenty provides a richly nuanced and deeply personal look at Jewish attitudes and practices regarding death, mourning, and the afterlife as they have existed and evolved from biblical times to today. Taking its title from the Hebrew and Yiddish blessing to live to a ripe old age--Moses is said to have been 120 years old when he died--the book explores how the Bible's original reticence about an afterlife gave way to views about personal judgment and reward after death, the resurrection of the body, and even reincarnation. It examines Talmudic perspectives on grief, burial, and the afterlife, shows how Jewish approaches to death changed in the Middle Ages with thinkers like Maimonides and in the mystical writings of the Zohar, and delves into such things as the origins of the custom of reciting Kaddish for the deceased and beliefs about encountering the dead in visions and dreams.

After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is also Hillel Halkin's eloquent and disarmingly candid reflection on his own mortality, the deaths of those he has known and loved, and the comfort he has and has not derived from Jewish tradition.

An insightful biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the most controversial and perhaps most fervent of all Zionist political figures

A well-written, passionate survey of Jabotinsky's life and contributions to political Zionism.--Jeffrey Veidlinger, Marginalia Blog, Los Angeles Review of Books

For many, [this book] will open up a man and his ideas whose influence is still felt today and who had an important role in the ideological struggles that shaped the Zionist movement and the modern Jewish state.--Chicago Jewish Star

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was a man of huge paradoxes and contradictions and has been the most misunderstood of all Zionist politicians--a first-rate novelist, a celebrated Russian journalist, and the founder of the branch of Zionism now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. This biography, the first in English in nearly two decades, undertakes to answer central questions about Jabotinsky as a writer, a political thinker, and a leader. Hillel Halkin sets aside the stereotypes to which Jabotinsky has been reduced by his would-be followers and detractors alike.

Halkin explains the importance of Odessa, Jabotinsky's native city, in molding his character and outlook; discusses his novels and short stories, showing the sometimes hidden connections between them and Jabotinsky's political thought, and studies a political career that ended in tragic failure. Halkin also addresses Jabotinsky's position, unique among the great figures of Zionist history, as both a territorial maximalist and a principled believer in democracy. The author inquires why Jabotinsky was often accused of fascist tendencies though he abhorred authoritarian and totalitarian politics, and investigates the many opposed aspects of his personality and conduct while asking whether or not they had an ultimate coherence. Few figures in twentieth-century Jewish life were quite so admired and loathed, and Halkin's splendid, subtle book explores him with empathy and lucidity.

A deeply personal look at death, mourning, and the afterlife in Jewish tradition

After One-Hundred-and-Twenty provides a richly nuanced and deeply personal look at Jewish attitudes and practices regarding death, mourning, and the afterlife as they have existed and evolved from biblical times to today. Taking its title from the Hebrew and Yiddish blessing to live to a ripe old age--Moses is said to have been 120 years old when he died--the book explores how the Bible's original reticence about an afterlife gave way to views about personal judgment and reward after death, the resurrection of the body, and even reincarnation. It examines Talmudic perspectives on grief, burial, and the afterlife, shows how Jewish approaches to death changed in the Middle Ages with thinkers like Maimonides and in the mystical writings of the Zohar, and delves into such things as the origins of the custom of reciting Kaddish for the deceased and beliefs about encountering the dead in visions and dreams.

After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is also Hillel Halkin's eloquent and disarmingly candid reflection on his own mortality, the deaths of those he has known and loved, and the comfort he has and has not derived from Jewish tradition.

An inspiring novel; a philosophical love story; a moving ode to a woman, as joyful and celebratory as it is elegiac. The narrator is a man in his forties, a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy known as Hoo. He has been given the nickname by Mellie, the woman he addresses in this book while exploring his memories of their years together and apart. The two of them have known each other since high school in New York in the 1950s - and perhaps, Hoo thinks, much longer than that. Only as the novel unfolds do his reasons for writing to her, and the full nature of their relationship, become clear.

Elegant and learned, personal and universal, literary, philosophical, and historical--Hillel Halkin's finely wrought essays on themes of Jewish culture and life are an education in themselves.

Hillel Halkin is widely admired for his works of literary criticism, biography, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as for his celebrated achievements as a translator. Born and raised in New York City, he has lived most of his life in Israel. His complex sensibility, deeply rooted in Jewish literature and history no less than in his own personal experience, illuminates everything it touches. In A Complicated Jew, Halkin assembles a selection of essays that form, if not a conventional memoir, a haunting and intimate record of a profoundly Jewish life that defies categorization. It is a banquet for the mind.

Hillel Halkin is a master storyteller and a brilliant cultural critic, and in A Complicated Jew he combines both talents to take his readers on an intellectual thrill ride through his encounters with Jewish thought, art, and life. I envy him his lifetime of adventures and am grateful to him for sharing them with all of us.
Dara Horn, novelist and author of Eternal Life and People Love Dead Jews

I have been reading Hillel Halkin for well on to half a century, always deriving pleasure from his stately prose, intellectual profit from his deep learning, and inspiration from his integrity. I am pleased to think of him as my contemporary.
Joseph Epstein, author of Life Sentences: Literary Essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool and Fabulous Small Jews, and former editor of The American Scholar.

Hillel Halkin himself has always been even more interesting to me than his highly interesting subjects, and here he gives us full access to his adventurous mind, the dazzling range of his learning, and his passionate spirit. More than a collection of essays, this book charts the intellectual journey of one of our most original Jewish writers.
Ruth Wisse, Professor emeritus of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and author of If Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Jews and Power, and No Joke: Making Jewish Humor.

Even when Hillel Halkin exasperates, there is no voice on the contemporary Jewish scene more intellectually alert or lucid. The work of a cultural critic of rare breadth, this keenly personal, fiercely argued volume is as trenchant of tour of Jewry's dilemmas of the last half-century as any I know.
Steven J. Zipperstein, Professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University and author of Imagining Russian Jewry and Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.

During World War I, the head of a British spy ring in a Jewish colony in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, the beautiful Sarah Aaronsohn, killed herself. When the ring was broken by the Turks, leaving behind a letter in which she asked to be avenged. Was she? And what did this have to do with the spectacle of four women who ran through the town, jeering and cursing the arrested spies as though let loose from an infernal world of Gorgons and Furies? A Strange Death is the answer to this. But it is many other things, too. A tantalizing murder mystery. A lyrical evocation of an Israeli town in the 1970s and of its old farming population, the descendants of the colonists who founded it in 1882. The story of an American couple that romantically settled there and of what they found. And last but not least the question: Was there a path not taken from those days to ours that might have made all the difference?

Hillel Halkin is an American-born Jew who has cast his personal and historical lot with Israel. The imaginary American Jewish friend to whom Halkin directs his onrush of argument is an equally committed young Jew who, however, upholds the possibility of a viable Jewish life outside of Israel. He has just returned to the United states after his second visit to Israel and written a letter of his impressions, which triggers the present correspondence. The two friends argue about Zionism, Israel, Jewish history and culture, the nature of Jewishness. As the gauntlet is flung back and forth, Halkin elaborates his case that Jewish history and Israeli history are two lines in the process of converging, so that for all practical purposes the struggle for Jewish survival and the struggle for Israel are the same; and that any Jew who chooses, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, not to live in Israel is removing himself to the peripheries of the struggle for Jewish survival and away from the center of Jewish history. Either/or...sooner or later, today or tomorrow, you will have to decide, Halkin concludes.