This action-packed tale focuses on a young U.S. Naval Academy graduate who helped create the Israeli Navy and led it into battle at the onset of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. J. Wandres’s book is the first to record the crucial role played by Paul Shulman in the formation of the new nation, and in doing so, he provides a unique window on Israel’s history and its relations with the United States. Following his WWII service on a U.S. Navy destroyer, Shulman resigned his commission to help smuggle Holocaust survivors into Palestine, and by early 1948, at the age of twenty-six, was training officers for a new Israeli Navy. The author draws on interviews and correspondence with those who knew Shulman, Israeli and American archives, and declassified secret U.S. State Department documents to tell the story.

A fantastical propaganda play depicting an armed revolt financed the purchase of the yacht Abril and its conversion to an “illegal” immigrant passenger ship renamed the Ben Hecht. The plan was to evade the British naval blockade and bring Holocaust survivor refugees to Palestine. Henry Mandel volunteered aboard the Ben Hecht, a converted yacht that challenged the British blockade of Jewish immigrants to pre-state Israel. Captured and detained in Acre Prison, Mandel aided the efforts of prisoners planning an escape. After release, Mandel helped set up a secret bazooka shell plant in New York, which he helped to reassemble in Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Mandel was an Orthodox Jew whose reminiscences provide a uniquely illuminating perspective on the creation of the Jewish state. Mandel’s story is explicated in a running commentary that includes the personal narratives of other members of the Ben Hecht crew as well as historical background.

Originally published in 1995, The Antievolution Pamphlets of Harry Rimmer is the sixth volume in the series, Creationism in Twentieth Century America. The volume brings together original sources from the prominent evangelist and pastor Harry Rimmer. The consortium of pamphlets in this volume detail Rimmer’s antievolutionist sentiments, a notion which characterized his early writings. The pamphlets detail Rimmer’s rhetoric on evolution and science from the early part of the 20th century as he travelled across America to disseminate his writings. The works in this volume address Rimmer’s polemic on the danger posed by modern science and the consequential disassociation with religion. While Rimmer did not discount science itself, he argued for, what he termed, ‘true science’, claiming that modern science was based only in scientific opinion and not fact. As a self-proclaimed scientist, these writings take a unique view of the relationship between religion and science from this period through Rimmer’s dual nature as both scientist and pastor. This volume will be of great interest to historians of natural history, science and religion.