Japanese Gardens An Illustrated Guide to Their Design and History Book

I love Dimont's writing style. He writes assertively and passionately with little quibbling about stepping on his reader's toes and with great dry humor. Makes reading about history quite lively and interesting. Dimont's theses in this book have to do with revealing the true origins of Jews in the U.S. (not religiously observant in the least) and his assertion that Judaism as re-envisioned in the U.S. might prove to be the Judaism that allows Jews to continue thriving in the world at large. To move the reader from the roots to the destiny, Dimont gives nice overviews of trends in Western and Eastern Europe from the Middle Ages onwards to explain the reasons why Jews immigrated to the U.S., who they were, and why they changed. The last section is Dimont's reasoning behind why he sees American Judaism as the "salvation" for post-WWII Jewry.

Some of my favorite quotes:

About Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam, classically labeled an anti-Semite but who, Dimont argues, may have been just "an ordinary bigot"- "Among his civic activities at the time the Portuguese Jews arrived were prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors on the Sabbath, making church attendance compulsory, flogging a group of Catholics, and getting rid of some Lutherans. Now came the Jews."

About the Reform movement in the 1800's in the U.S.-"During this period, whenever Reform sneezed, Orthodoxy caught a cold and the Conservatives took preventative medication."

About Stephen S. Wise, pro-Zionist rabbi in early 1900's- "Wise was a formidable orator, incomparable in invective. He did not venerate logic and never aimed for total accuracy."