Ben-Eliezer grew up in Germany in a Jewish family under the shadow of the Nazis. He was forced into exile in Siberia, barely escaping with his life from starvation and disease in southern Asia, and finally made it to the land of Israel. Faced with the horror of the Holocaust, he was determined to fight for the independence of his new homeland. But the inhumanity of war continued to pursue him, along with the question: why cannot men and women live together in peace?--From the publisher's description.

Elucidates and argues for the author's concept of human history from the past to the present.

The diverse contributors to this issue of Plough Quarterly focus on what it means to be a peacemaker. Peacemaking, they show, is a riskier and more ambitious undertaking than we may have imagined. Today we must wage peace where thousands of children are being murdered by militias or forced to fight as soldiers. We need peacemakers in divided cities from Paris to Baltimore, peacemakers in a culture with little tolerance for Christian witness, and peacemakers in churches riven by ideological fights and petty grudges, not to mention making peace with our spouses, and with ourselves. Hear from active peacemakers on the frontlines of these battles and explore insights on peacemaking from Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Badshah Khan, Jeannette Rankin, Charles Spurgeon, André Trocmé, Peace Pilgrim, Albert Schweitzer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Eberhard Arnold. And as always, Plough Quarterly includes world-class art by the likes of Marc Chagall, Egon Schiele, Lisa Toth, Carl Larsson, Ben Shahn, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Paul Klee, Antonello da Messina, and others. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, fiction, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus' message into practice and find common cause with others.

This is the first environmental history of Russia's steppes. From the early-eighteenth century, settlers moved to the semi-arid but fertile grasslands from wetter, forested regions in central and northern Russia and Ukraine, and from central Europe. By the late-nineteenth century, they had turned the steppes into the bread basket of the Russian Empire and parts of Europe. But there was another side to this story. The steppe region was hit by recurring droughts, winds from the east whipped up dust storms, the fertile black earth suffered severe erosion, crops failed, and in the worst years there was famine. David Moon analyses how naturalists and scientists came to understand the steppe environment, including the origins of the fertile black earth. He also analyses how scientists tried to understand environmental change, including climate change. Farmers, and the scientists who advised them, tried different ways to deal with the recurring droughts: planting trees, irrigation, and cultivating the soil in ways that helped retain scarce moisture. More sustainable, however, were techniques of cultivation to retain scarce moisture in the soil. Among the pioneers were Mennonite settlers. Such approaches aimed to work with the environment, rather than trying to change it by planting trees or supplying more water artificially. The story is similar to the Dust Bowl on the Great Plains of the USA, which share a similar environment and environmental history. David Moon places the environmental story of the steppes in the wider context of the environmental history of European colonialism around the globe.

This book offers a historically and ethnographically informed case study of environmental governance, institutional and land-use change, and livelihood strategies in a former homeland in the South African Free State province. Based on rich archival material, the author reconstructs how the state invented a degradation narrative and used it as legitimation for the regulation of human-environment relations during the twentieth century. In addition, the study investigates how people today make a living in a post-agrarian society characterized by low agricultural production, diversification of non-farm incomes, and declining population numbers, declining population numbers. Author Christiane Naumann is a lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne.