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United Service Organizations

(Encyclopedia)United Service Organizations (USO), organization that supplies social, recreational, welfare, and spiritual facilities to members of the armed services. The USO was organized in 1941, originally to co...

Minsk

(Encyclopedia)Minsk mĭnsk, Rus. mēnsk [key], city (1990 est. pop. 1,610,000), capital of Belarus and of the Minsk region, on a tributary of the Berezina. It is a railroad junction with machine, machine-tool, trac...

Hirschman, Albert Otto

(Encyclopedia)Hirschman, Albert Otto, 1915–2012, U.S. economist and social scientist, b. Berlin, Germany, as Otto Albert Hirschmann, Ph.D. Univ. of Trieste, 1938. Of Jewish descent, he fled Germany when Hitler ca...

Judgment Day

(Encyclopedia)Judgment Day or Doomsday, central point of early Christian, Jewish, and Islamic eschatology, sometimes called the Day of the Lord. References to it throughout the Bible are numerous. The Christian bel...

Pentecost

(Encyclopedia)Pentecost pĕnˈtəkôst [key] [Gr.,=fiftieth], important Jewish and Christian feast. The Jewish feast of Pentecost, in Hebrew Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, one of the three pilgrimage festivals, arose...

Richler, Mordecai

(Encyclopedia)Richler, Mordecai, 1931–2001, Canadian novelist, b. Montreal. He fled his native city in the early 1950s and lived mainly in London, returning to Canada in 1972 and from then on spending part of his...

Yehoshua, A. B.

(Encyclopedia)Yehoshua, A. B. (Abraham, or Avraham, “Bulli” Yehoshua), 1936–, Israeli writer.He has taught at several schools, and since 1967 has lived in Haifa, where he teaches at the city's university. One...

Buber, Martin

(Encyclopedia)Buber, Martin bo͞oˈbĕr [key], 1878–1965, Jewish philosopher, b. Vienna. Educated at German ...

Blum, Léon

(Encyclopedia)Blum, Léon lāôNˈ blo͝om [key], 1872–1950, French Socialist leader and writer. Well established in literary circles, he entered politics during the Dreyfus Affair and rose to party leadership. I...