Jewish History

Relli, a Jewish girl in Poland, was denied a normal childhood. When Relli was just a baby, the Nazis occupied Poland and she, together with her parents, were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, a way station before death. Her parents correctly assessed the new situation and decided to act heroically in order to save their only child. They succeeded in smuggling her out of the Ghetto and entrusted her to a Gentile Polish couple who agreed to hide her for the duration of the war under a false identity.

A new history of the American Jewish relationship with Israel focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights.

Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives.

There was not any one entity more central to the Yahwistic Judean religion during the monarchy than the temple of Solomon. It symbolized the presence of YHWH in the nation, as well as his enduring protection of the nation and the Davidic royal throne. Judean worshippers directed their prayers toward the Solomonic temple, and eventually, the Judean prophets and theologians declared that this was the only legitimate location where priests could perform sacrifices and other religious rites for YHWH.

As a young adult in wartime Vienna, Georg Rauch helped his mother hide dozens of Jews from the Nazis behind false walls in their top-floor apartment and arrange for their safe transport out of the country. His family was among the few who worked underground to resist Nazi rule. Then came the day he was shipped out to fight on the eastern front as part of the German infantry—in spite of his having confessed his own Jewish ancestry.

Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, The Jews of Summer demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life.

Based on the acclaimed multi-volume series, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, Jewish New York reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city's most important ethnic and religious groups. Spanning three centuries, Jewish New York traces the earliest arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the recent immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

An insightful, myth-busting biography of early 20th-century Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, seen through the lenses of the artist’s tuberculosis and other ailments. Becoming Modigliani is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Written by Dr. Henri Colt, an internationally recognized lung specialist, the book examines the artist's legend and Modigliani's creative journey from a medical perspective, from his birth in Livorno, Italy, to his tragic death in a paupers' hospital in Paris at the age of thirty-...

As a child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl’s cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna’s Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic famiy. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died.

Jankele Kuperblum was just nine years old when he returned home and found his family gone. The night before, Germans had come to his town in rural Poland and taken away all the Jews. Now alone in the world, he has to change his name, forget his language, and abandon his religion in order to survive. Jack wanders through Nazi-occupied Poland for four years, with no place to hide and no one to trust.

How has a small nation of 9 million people, forced to fight for its existence and security since its founding and riven by ethnic, religious, and economic divides, proven resistant to so many of the societal ills plaguing other wealthy democracies? Dan Senor and Saul Singer have long been students of the global innovation race. But as they spent time with Israel's entrepreneurs and political leaders, soldiers and students, scientists and activists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Tel Aviv techies, and Israeli Arabs, they realized that they had missed what really sets Israel apart.

Most Holocaust survivors who came to the US after WWII settled in big cities, but some chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this chapter in American Jewish history when these refugees—including the author's grandparents—found an unlikely gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms.

Marianne Szegedy-Maszák’s parents, Hanna and Aladár, met and fell in love in Budapest in 1940. He was a rising star in the foreign ministry - a vocal anti-Fascist who was in talks with the Allies when he was arrested and sent to Dachau. She was the granddaughter of Manfred Weiss, the industrialist patriarch of an aristocratic Jewish family that owned factories. Though many in the family had converted to Catholicism decades earlier, when the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, they were forced into hiding.

The Land of Eighteen Dreams is an episodic novel made up of chronologically-connected stories, each of which is self-contained. All are in the form of a narrative by Lily Siegel, who uses each incident to describe her relationship with her grandfather, Benjamin Kagan. Benjamin describes his life and, in doing so, simultaneously offers the wider story of American Jews over the last century, and distills the inherited folk wisdom of Eastern European Jews.

Alexander Rosenberg was a smart and curious teenager who spoke many languages, and lived a pampered life with his parents in a tranquil Czechoslovakian town. The rise of fascism and Nazi Germany causes his protected existence to collapse, alongside the illusion of secular Jewish assimilation in 1930s Europe. Using their last reserves of wealth and influence to escape extermination, the Rosenbergs go underground to avoid the Gestapo. Eventually exposed, captured, and taken to Buchenwald, the largest concentration camp in Germany, Alexander and his father collaborate to survive one day at a time

Judah Maccabee is no longer a youth, but a great warrior and the unchallenged leader of the Jewish People. He leads his people to victory after victory on the fields of battle and diplomacy, shocking the leaders of the mighty Seleucid Empire. Relentlessly, the armies of the empire are sent to crush the rebellion in Judea. They will do anything to eliminate the Maccabee army and suppress the Jewish faith. But although the Maccabees are massively outnumbered, they have no choice but to overcome their foes. They know that their defeat would be the end of the Jewish People.

The fighting between the Romans and Jews in the first century CE, brought about some of the most important events in Jewish history. The Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, a disaster that would eventually prove both permanent and catastrophic since it was never rebuilt.

The Maccabees: The Hasmonaean Dynasty between Malachi and Matthew delves into the fascinating history of the Hasmonaean dynasty, which played a critical role in shaping the Jewish religion and culture during the Second Temple period. The book tells the story of the Maccabees, a Jewish family who rose to power in the 2nd century BCE and led a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire to reclaim their religious freedom. The book takes a detailed look at the key players of the Hasmonaean dynasty, including Mattathias ben Johanan, who helped spark the Maccabean Revolt, and John Hyrcanus, the first ...

The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts - first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets - by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life - to literature and art. And it is entirely true.

Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in an old Egyptian synagogue - the amazing story of one of the most important discoveries in modern religious scholarship. In 1897, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered.