Few authors are able to fuse facts with inner meaning like
Berel Wein. For many thousands of people, he is the voice of Jewish history
- better said, he is a wise and profound teacher who sees history not merely as
a collection of events, but as a continuum from Creation leading to the final
fulfillment of the Divine plan.
In this book, Berel Wein tells the Jewish story of a
turbulent century. In fast-moving prose, with his trademark wit and depth, he
navigates the dizzying pace of the busiest century in history, a century of hope
and Holocaust, of historic benevolence and unprecedented cruelty, a century that
saw the Jewish center of gravity transformed in unimaginable ways. Who, in 1900,
would have predicted that in 2000, Eastern Europe would be a Jewish cemetery,
that Orthodoxy in America would be resurgent, or that Eretz Yisrael would be the
State of Israel and that its yeshivos and seminaries would be magnets for our
finest and most committed young people?
This is a book about how Jews navigated through the
decades of the century, but it is not about Jews in isolation. Berel Wein
intertwines the story of the Jews with the events of the world and shows how
each affected the other.
There is only one Berel Wein - and he presents us with a
unique book. After all the hype about a new millennium, this is the book for
Jews who want to understand an incredible century.
