I read this book in one sitting, snowed in at the Boston Greyhound station. It's a tribute to Schwartz's clean writing and thorough knowledge of Jewish folklore that I remember that night as one of my best. Schwartz traces how Biblical imagery and themes have been expressed through Jewish folklore, religious writings, and literature, and leaves the reader with an appreciation for the spiritual content of children's stories. As a folklore enthusiast, I've also found that this book has provided a better context for understanding the wonderful stories collected in Schwartz's many other collections of stories.

Another view of Jewishness is seen in this rich compendium of evocative Jewish poetry by modern masters of the craft as each page unfolds its richness of language with its own beauty and revealing emotional intensity. THE VOICES WITHIN THE ARK is edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudoph. It includes poets of the American scene and across the world as well. The general introduction provides a very necessary key to the enjoyment of this collection. END

Try this : buy this book and read a tale before you go to bed at night. You probably won't be able to stop at just one! Schwartz has put together a great collection of supernatural tales, both long and short, that throw a fascinating light on Jewish folk culture. The general reader will appreciate the writing style, while folklore specialists will be glad he has included notes and references (in the back, thank you!) Fascinating elements to this goyisch reader : the magical power of simply studying the Torah and the frequent resort to a rabbinic court as a form of protection against and release from demons and spells.

This is an excellent book of supernatural Jewish folktales. It's very well written. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in Judaism, mythology, storytelling or the occult.

This is a reference for every eerie and nasty folktale in Jewish culture. From Maimonides and the Homonculus to tales of the angel of death this book can only be compared to the Grimm Brothers at their most evil.

It is so sad that Sarah MacLachlin and neo-pagan feminists have tried to make Lilith into some Gloria Steinem type of symbol. Her destructive and glorious power is something that should never be defanged, and the Lilith stories in this volume prove it.

I think this book is good for kids that can handle very scary stories. If you do not like to read scary stories, do not read this book at all. I think that the grownups would like the story called, "The Handkerchief." I think grownups would like it because it is very scary, and I think that's what you grownups like. I think this book is appropriate for 7 to 13 year olds. I think that because I have just begun to read it this year, and I'm sure I would have liked it last year. I'm eight right now. Even though you may be older than 13, you may still like this book. The book is pretty scary. A lot of kids fight over this book at school because they think it is the greatest.

If you're heading to camp this summer, this might be the perfect book to read before you go. It's not a handbook or manual on survival, rather it's a compilation of 22 scary folktales to tell around the fire or during a late-night gabfest in the cabin.

Between these pages you'll encounter ghosts, witches, demons, evil eyes, giants, monsters, talking heads and other beasties from near and far, Japan to Iceland, Eastern Europe to Mexico. The sources for the tales are listed at the back of the book. Many of them come from respected regional and national archives.

Even so, the stories vary in their effectiveness and "scare factor." Some don't rise much above the level of urban legends passed around on the Internet. Others, like the title story, are true folk tales, with obvious staying power.

The stories are short, just five-six pages each. Several of them are illustrated with pencil drawings, which are moody, if not exactly scary.

Older elementary and middle school students will get a kick out of scaring themselves silly with these horror stories.

The book Ask The Bones retold by Arielle North Olson and Howard Schwart, is a great book. This book has many stories from around the world but my favorite one is called " Next- To- Kin." This story is about this boy's aunt that is very jealous if someone goes near her husband and she has a forked tongue. She can also turn into a snake but the boy does not know this. Once the aunt grabbed the boy in jealousy and stuck her fingernails in his skin. The boy went to the old man so he could heal the wound. The old man was very wise and told the boy that his aunt is really a snake women! The old man said "If you really want to see if she really is a snake women, then, when she turns into a snake cut off the tip of the tail. If she is wounded tomorrow that means she is a snake women." The old man continued " And if you see the snake skin around then burn it so the snake women could die!" That night the boy was awake for the whole night to see if the old man was right. The snake came under the door and SLASH, the boy cut of the tip of the snake's tail. The snake went back to the other room. In the morning the boy's aunt's toe was wounded and she said she needed to rest and so she did. When the boy's aunt was better, the boy went to the room she was in and found snake skin! He quickly took it and burned it in his room. ...If you want to know what happened to the boy and his uncle then read, Ask The Bones and the story "Next- To- Kin."

Because ancient Judaism shares features with "savage" belief systems does not make ancient Judaism a savage religion itself.

The differences between savage religions and ancient Judaism are many.

1. The Jews (not most) were literate and possessed written scriptures. No "savage" religion does.

2. Most "savage" religions are nature worship without definite calendars. Ancient Judaism, despite prayers for rain etc, was far from nature worship and possessed a definite calendar with dates corresponding to historical events.

Please be aware, the title and cover of this book are misleading. The bk is not about violence in Judaism, but simply comparisons to primitive religions.

Interdisciplinary studies are exciting because they hold the promise of radically new insights into familiar subjects. This book lives up to this promise in every way; in fact, it ranks as one of the most thought-provoking and enlightening books I have read in years. Applying anthropology to the study of Judaism, the author argues persuasively that circumcision among the ancient Israelites, as indeed among many other people, originated as a symbol of kinship and as a means of cementing solidarity between father and son and all male cohorts. Only later, as Judaism evolved in the direction of ethicizing and historicizing all human experience, did the circumcision rite become invested with distinctively Judaic religious significance. Many other provocative insights await readers of this book. Admittedly, anthropological studies into worlds now vanished can rarely provide conclusive evidence for their theses. Still, this author's approach deserves serious attention by anthropologists, historians, and the general public.

Interdisciplinary studies are exciting because they hold the promise of radically new insights into familiar subjects. This book lives up to this promise in every way; in fact, it ranks as one of the most thought-provoking and enlightening books I have read in years. Applying anthropology to the historical study of Judaism, the author argues persuasively that circumcision among the ancient Israelites, as indeed among many other people, originated as a symbol of kinship and as a means of cementing solidarity between father and son and all male cohorts. Only later, as Judaism evolved in the directing of ethicizing and historicizing all human experience, did the circumcision rite become invested with distinctively Judaic religious significance. Many other provocative insights await readers of this book. Admittedly, anthropological studies into worlds now vanished can rarely provide conclusive evidence for their theses. Still, this author's approach deserves serious attention from anthropologists, historians, and the general public.

The subtitle, An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness, makes a lot of promises that aren't kept. Schwartz correctly identifies some huge problems facing men in today's society, and at Universities. He calls feminazism a "sexist holy war" against men. Unfortunately he rapidly gets bogged down into Freudian psychobabble that makes us wonder if he's writing from the iron mines on Uranus. His "roots" are a strange interpretation of the worst of Freudian nonsense about a mythical "primordial mother" complex. Has he ever actually men a real human being. For reasons never really explained he blames PC attitudes on daughters who resent evil fathers. He beats around the bushes a lot, talking about some real problems facing men today, but I didn't find any value in the psychobabble. Still it was an interesting perspective, worth scanning through.

To me, the riddle of feminism poses only half of a conundrum.

Why are women feminists? Why do they bash men so readily? Well, why do wolves have sharp teeth? The better to eat you with, of course.

Conversely, why do women untruthfully DENY that they are feminists or male-bashers? For the same reason that the wolf doesn't show his teeth. It might frighten away one's quarry.

There's just no mystery about female motivation for the war on men and surely no need for an explanatory book.

But why do many MEN become feminists and self-bashers? What makes men, large numbers of them, adopt a philosophy of shame and self-hate? Why do men follow the women in their lives to that evolutionary blind alley?

That is TRULY a mystery which I hoped that Howard Schwartz's "Revolt of the Primitive" would answer.

Schwartz's analysis, as others have noted, is primarily a Freudian one, to which he adds his own flourish.

He postulates that men go into the outside world and seek to tame it in order to impress women and concurrently as a means of making it more closely resemble the world of the primordial mother that they long for (and that girls and women are more easily linked to).

He further suggests that as women enter the work force and other institutions outside the home in large numbers, they see these differently from the men who understand the hardship and seeks to gain the respect of the women by engaging in it for their sake.

Women see these institutions from the point of view of the primordial mother herself, who unrealistically expects the world of work to resemble her own primarily maternal sphere, a sphere "where the expression of her nurturing power could be given its freest expression".

As Schwartz explains, women treat the revelation that the outside world isn't truly like that, not with a concession to reality, but with hostility towards the men who inhabit it, rejecting any notion of gratitude for the sacrifices made by men within that world. Rather, women blame men for the world's flaws.

And here we come to what Schwartz would view as the answer to the riddle of male feminism. Men respond to the rejection of women not with remonstrations for their ingratitude but with fearful acquiescence to the female view. To do otherwise would be to incur the wrath of the primordial mother.

As Schwartz describes, "He must therefore...follow her lead, not move from her project, never question her claim that were it not for the father, her life...would have been perfect. In all of this, he relinquishes any possibility he has of an emotional life as a competent male adult, substituting instead the idea that male adulthood is the root of his problem."

The male feminist as the eternally childlike naif - I like it. This is the triumph of the revolt of the primitive - the conquest of the primordial mother.

Schwartz specifically looks at several issues through the prism of this analysis: martial dissolutions and domestic violence (in both of them, actual male guilt is routinely overstated and female guilt understated), workplace conditions (the myths of the "pay gap" and the "glass ceiling"), political correctness on campus, and women in combat.

Schwartz is on the right track when he talks about the dictatorial reign of political correctness on campus. The substitution of feelings and group-think for rigorous academic critique does indeed smack of a triumph of the feminine (the primordial mother, if you will) over the masculine, even as female students pile up a super-numerical advantages on campus.

And the feminist assault on the military taking place under the Tailhook banner - of course, it's a thinly-veiled assault on male sexuality. To recognize that, one would not even need to be familiar with the specific examples that Schwartz provides.

But Schwartz's analysis isn't quite complete. Male self-hatred today is toxic, absolutely toxic. Anyone who surfs Usenet can see that men have not only accepted as true the charge that they are oppressors (which ready acceptance might be accounted for by Schwartz's analysis) but also, as true, the charge that they are actually inferior to women.

Men have, by and large, accepted all of the ugly descriptions that feminazi junk science imposes on them: weak-kneed sissies incapable of giving birth and therefore incapable of dealing with pain and stress (though, as Schwartz shows, it's WOMEN who refuse to accept the world as it is), Y-chromosome mutants who are subject to genetic disease and early death. The "weaker sex". And so on.

Schwartz's "revolt of the primitive" might explain a certain measure of weary male passivity and acquiescence in the face of the female onslaught. But it seems horribly inadequate as an explanation for sexual suicide and for intense and widespread male self-hatred.

Then too, Schwartz's description of the world would have us believe that with the triumph of the primordial mother, the feminine is in ascendance and the masculine is in retreat.

But the masculine ISN'T in retreat, not at all. Our popular culture is littered with karate-kicking, groin-stomping men inhabiting the bodies of women such as Jennifer Lopez. Snarling, tight-lipped, soccer playing "role models" Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain preach "fierceness" as a standard for little girls to emulate. Hairy-lipped small-breasted women put on their gym pants and actually run marathons and triathlons, but only when they're not practicing their boxing moves.

The masculine isn't in retreat but the purveyors of culture honor it ONLY when it finds expression in the actions of WOMEN.

It's really not the feminine that's in ascendance, of course; it's androgyny. Our cultural gurus are busy turning men into women and women into men and it's ANDROGYNY, no less than the primordial mother, which represents the real horror. I find nothing in Schwartz's book to account for this development.

Your patient is dying, doctor. You need to recognize ALL of the symptoms before your diagnosis can be completed.

This book is worth the time and money. It moves fast and is easy to follow becasue it is so interesting all the time, so it would make good reading for students. The case is nicely laid out. Women and feminism are the objects and sources of impossible moralities, impossible burdens and impossible logic. That has been observed before, and many have noted that feminism is ever the more central to all things today, especially political correctness. However, I know of no other sustained discussion of these and related ideas. Schwartz's final chapter on feminism is a page turner. His implication that all hope now rides with woman, along with his diagnosis of political correctness as infantile narcissistic attachment to the mother are exceptionally worth thinking about these days. Schwartz uses very interesting examples at times, especially in his analysis of the attempt to feminize and PC-ise the workplace, also in his analysis of the controversy over women in combat--a study of the irrational that is based on statements from our highest level military and state officials. One has a lot to chew on after seeing how PC logic, which is the logic of the ad hominem argument, is winning the day on this issue. ...

My daughter was given this gift by her Hebrew School teacher. We read the book together and enjoyed the tales very much. I think I liked the illustrations more than she did though. Still, it's a nice batch of Jewish folklore for kids.

Like all of Howard Schwartz's books that I know, this is a collection of fairy tales with a Jewish or biblical theme. The stories in this collection are fun to read, geared for kids 9-12, but appropriate for younger ones too. One of the things I liked about these stories was that when reading them to a younger child, I enjoyed them too. So many books for kids are crashing bores for an adult reader. This one definitely isn't!

Howard Schwartz is an extremely prolific story teller, both for children and adults. Gabriel's Palace: Jewish Mystical Folktales is a very good collection of stories involving Jewish mysticism. Many of them are suspenseful and leave you thinking about the true meaning and implications. It is also interesting to compare some of the stories with non Jewish folk tales. I found a number of the stories somewhat dark, but not terrifying. It is interesting to try to determine what reality led to the initial establishment of such ledgends.

The true gifts of great storytelling are subtle gifts. Such gifts are not brazen statements of right and wrong, or tired hollywood plot lines, but rather gifts of inspiration, gifts that challenge the heart and spirit. "Gates to the New City" is replete with such gifts. A spectacular collection of stories lies within its covers, often merging modern perspectives with timeless stories and themes. Howard Schwartz's collection is suitable for readers both new to Jewish storytelling and those long familiar with the legacies of Midrash, Agadah and Chassidic stories. Howard Schwartz is a poet and professor at the University of Missouri -St. Louis. He has written several books of fiction and poetry, as well as having edited many marvelous compilations of Jewish lore, including "Gabriel's Palace," "Lillith's Cave," and "Elijah's Violin." This collection of modern tales, however, is distinguished on two levels. The first is that the volume has a series of explanatory passages that explain the multiple layers of Jewish legend; ranging from the earliest elements of the Midrash and rabbinic legends to the powerful masters of Chasidic Judaism. These chapters allow the reader to learn (or relearn) the a great deal about these sources of Jewish literature. The source of the stories is the second way in which "Gates to the New City" shows its remarkable nature. The authors are modern writers, ranging from a former president of the State of Israel to a former principal of Ida Crown Jewish Academy High School in Chicago. These are authors who mix the timeless and the modern with ease. For example, "Forcing the End" retells the story of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai's escape from a besieged Jerusalem, not in the past, but in a future of Nuclear brinksmanship. "Seven Gates in Six Days" uses the language of the midrash to tell of a passionate debate in God's court that will decide the fate of Jerusalem in the Six Day War. Not all of the collected stories mix themes and times. Many are bold and original stories, albiet a few are less than incredible. However, all are rooted deeply in the rich traditions that nourish Jewish stories. These stories provides fantastic reading for both those familiar with and those new to modern Jewish literature. Merged by superb writing, it is this mix of the new and old that creates the subtle gifts of great storytelling. Howard Schwartz's "Gates to the New City" presents these gifts in abundance.