In both Germany and Poland—primary locations of the Holocaust—the legacy of antisemitism remains a major obstacle to reconciliation with the past. Thomas Just asks: How does antisemitism typically manifest in these countries? What counterstrategies are being employed? And with what effect? Addressing these questions, Just contributes to a deeper understanding of the disturbing    More >

How did the vast Ottoman Empire, stretching from the Balkans to the Sahara, endure for more than four centuries despite its great ethnic and religious diversity? The classic work on this plural society, the two-volume Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, offered seminal reinterpretations of the empire's core institutions and has sparked more than a generation of innovative work since it    More >

When it was first published in 1980, Judith Laikin Elkin's foundational book on the Jewish communities of Latin America quickly became the standard resource on the topic. This new edition, the first in fifteen years, brings the story up-to-date, incorporating the events of recent decades and reflecting new insights provoked by the changing political, cultural, and economic conditions    More >

In these two extraordinary works, published posthumously, Gertrude Kolmar's elegiac prose transports us into her characters' rich inner worlds even as it depicts the cold material realities of 1920s Berlin. In A Jewish Mother from Berlin, Martha Jadassohn's seemingly conventional life descends into chaos after the brutal rape of her five-year-old daughter. The ethereally beautiful    More >

Rami Ginat offers an entirely new reading of the evolution of communism in Egypt, including the central role of Egyptian Jews in both its development and its impact on Egypt and the wider Middle East. Drawing deeply on previously inaccessible original sources, Ginat traces a story of intrigue and ideology from the late 1910s to the early 1950s. Many of his findings directly challenge the    More >

From the early Yiddish silent movies, to the innovative Soviet-supported productions of the 1920s, to the Golden Age of the 1930s, to the present revival of the genre, Eric Goldman traces the history of Yiddish cinema and the people who shaped its development. Goldman viewed scores of films (some of them considered lost) and combed archives in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United    More >

A little-known chapter in American Jewish history involves a wide network of Yiddish schools and camps—a vibrant, multifaceted educational movement—that sought to transmit a distinctive sense of secular yiddishkayt, or Jewishness. The first comprehensive record of this movement, Passionate Pioneers documents the myriad challenges, frustrations, and accomplishments of Yiddish secular    More >

In her moving reflection on growing up as the daughter of refugees from Hitler's Europe, Carol Ascher explores the conflicts of an émigré childhood and chronicles her return to Vienna to uncover her father's roots.    More >

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist! The editors have gathered a treasure trove of excerpts (some translated into English for the first time) from a variety of genres—novels, short stories, letters, plays, poetry, autobiographies—to showcase the work of both well-known and less familiar French Jewish women writers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The collection    More >

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist! Old Demons, New Debates offers a provocative new view of the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism in the West. The authors show how today's anti-Semitism draws on older forms of hatred toward Jews while being fueled by both anti-American and anti-Zionist sentiments—and how, far from being the exclusive province of the ignorant and unlettered, it is    More >

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist When the Germans overpowered the Netherlands in 1940, there were some 140,000 Dutch citizens who were considered Jews by Nationalist Socialist standards; more than half of them, about 80,000, lived in Amsterdam. Remembering Jewish Amsterdam is a celebration of their lives. The book consists of selections from seventy-seven interviews with Holocaust survivors    More >

Suzanne Rutland charts the vibrant history of the Australian Jewish community from its convict origins through the turmoil of the twentieth century.    More >

Amnon Rubinstein traces the history of the Israeli state, and of Zionism, moving deftly between the roles of objective historian and persuasive politician.    More >

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist! Humorous and endearing, while dealing with complex issues, the stories in Goodbye, Evil Eye reflect the tensions between Sephardic Jews and contemporary urban life in the United States. The characters—with their superstitions, myths, and contradictions, the still-palpable heritage of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain—fight    More >

Choice Outstanding Academic Book! Tracing the social history of Jews in Hungary from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Vera Ranki reveals how state policies shifted from encouraging assimilation to institutionalizing anti-Semitism. Her study provides a poignant illustration of the changing politics of nationalism, the failures of inclusion policies, and the role of the political    More >

Through the dramatic true story of one boy—Eliott "Lonek" Jaroslawicz—Dorit Bader Whiteman coveys the stories of the dramatic escape of thousands of Polish Jews from the encroaching Nazi menace. Whiteman draws on hours of interviews with Jaroslawicz, as well as extensive archival and other research, to narrate this saga of the only Kindertransport to leave from Russia.    More >

First published in 1892, Di Tsukunft [The Future]—the world's oldest and longest-running Yiddish publication—was touted as a sophisticated monthly that would enlighten Jewish immigrants with its political savvy and intellectual content. Steven Cassedy has gathered and translated articles from Di Tsukunft’s inception through 1914, providing an invaluable window into Jewish    More >

Heda Margolius Kovály (1919–2010) endured both the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and the brutality of Czechoslovakia's postwar Stalinist government. Her husband, after surviving Dachau and Auschwitz and becoming Czechoslovakia's deputy minister of foreign trade, was convicted of conspiracy in the infamous 1952 Slansky trial and then executed. This clear-eyed memoir of her life    More >

Offering a range of the liveliest, most informative writing on Jews in America from colonial times to the present, the revised edition of this popular collection, with nine new chapters, explores both contemporary issues and traditional areas of interest. An editor's note preceding each chapter highlights context and relevance, and a bibliographic essay follows each section.    More >

In the first analytical history of this important Jewish community, David G. Dalin and Jonathan Rosenbaum draw extensively on primary sources to place Hartford within the larger contexts of US social, urban, ethnic, and Jewish history.    More >

Why did New York City, the largest center of Jewish culture and home to more survivors than any other city in the United States, take more than half a century to finalize plans for its Holocaust memorial? Rochelle Saidel offers a detailed analysis of how local power brokers, real estate developers, major political players, and various groups within the national Jewish community      More >

During the Spanish Inquisition, daring individuals defied and thwarted persecution by writing works in which hidden meanings were apparent only to Jews or fellow conversos, the descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity. Colbert Nepaulsingh analyzes three seminal, sixteenth-century novels as converso works—Lazarillo, a prototype of the picaresque novel; El Abencerraje, of the Moorish    More >

Mathieu, the narrator of this novel, is compelled by his older sister's suicide to confront the effects of his family's tragic past. Born after the war, Mathieu is left to grapple with recovering his sister's memories—which he had resolutely tried to deny—and with it the meaning of his own identity, family origins, and historical predicament. As neither victim, survivor,    More >

Choice Outstanding Academic Book! Branching Out vividly tells the story of the migration of many thousands of German Jews—mostly poor, enterprising young people—to the US during the nineteenth century. Avraham Barkai draws on rare letters, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, journals, and other firsthand accounts as he chronicles the immigrants’ experiences in towns and cities    More >

Acclaimed as one of the most vivid and evocative autobiographies of the century, Manès Sperber’s trilogy All Our Yesterdays concludes in this final volume. Through the eyes of this eminent European intellectual and activist, we witness the years 1934–1984 including hostility between Croats and Serbs in Yugoslavia, the abortive workers' uprising in Vienna, and Stalin's    More >

Zvi Sobel's absorbing book draws readers into the world of Yavneel, a small Israeli village that is home to several diverse communities: the established core of settler-farmers, new immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, and, since 1986, the ultraorthodox Bratslav Hasidim. Yavneel has become a microcosm of Israeli society at large, reflecting the country's social, religious,    More >

The Unheeded Warning richly portrays the turbulent interwar period in Vienna and Berlin through the eyes of one of the century's foremost intellectuals and activists. Psychologist, novelist, essayist, and revolutionary, Manès Sperber begins his story in Vienna when he was thirteen years old and concludes the book—which is the second volume of his three-volume autobiography, All    More >

Nothing ever happens to Etienne. Born into a provincial French family, he grows up in the shadow of his ambitious successful brother. His personality passive, his life uneventful, he is resigned to his own inferiority—-until he meets Stefan. German, Jewish, outgoing, and cosmopolitan, Stefan Stein could hardly be more unlike Etienne. Yet, when the two young teenagers first meet, they form a    More >

In a challenging new interpretation of Jewish immigrant history, Nancy L. Green traces the westward movement of East European Jews to France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and explores their experiences as immigrant workers. By 1914 some 40,000 East European Jews had settled in France, many of them in Paris's Marais district, known in Yiddish as the Pletzl, or    More >

This student edition of The Destruction of the European Jews makes accessible for classroom use Raul Hilberg's landmark account of Germany's annihilation of Europe's Jewish communities in 1933-1945. Perhaps more than any other book, it answers the question: "How did it happen?"    More >

Fighting Back chronicles the activities of the Lithuanian Jews who fought against the Nazis—in the Soviet army, in the forests, in the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, Shavli, and Svencian, and even in the concentration camps. Dov Levin, a member of the Kovno ghetto underground and then a fighter with the Lithuanian partisans, brings both meticulous scholarship and his own personal experience to    More >

"Why does a Gentile with a strong Lutheran background put her mind and heart into the Holocaust for twenty long years?... Unless I confront, I betray those who suffered so dreadfully." Thus Konnilyn Feig begins her riveting study of the Nazi concentration camps and the people and system that maintained them. Based on two decades of study, including multiple visits to all nineteen of    More >

In 1880 a young Hungarian rabbi named Moses Weinberger arrived in New York City. Seven years later, he described—and deplored—a world turned upside down, where "people walk on their heads." In what has become a classic example of Jewish immigrant protest literature, Weinberger urges American Jews to defend their faith more forthrightly. Jonathan Sarna's translation    More >