For Jews today, the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, a vicious assault that killed more Jews in one day than any time since the Holocaust, has drawn a clear and irreversible demarcation in time. The Jewish community woke to an unrecognizable new reality on the 7th, witnessing first the horror and sheer brutality of the atrocities in Israel, followed immediately by the stark and unprecedented rise in antisemitism in its aftermath. In the wake...
Bonny Reichert avoided engaging with her family's Holocaust history until, in midlife, she unexpectedly confronted it while writing an article. Her father's survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau was a backdrop to her upbringing, but a transformative experience in Warsaw--a perfect bowl of borscht--sparked a journey to explore her culinary roots. This journey intertwined with her personal life, from her childhood in the restaurant business to the challenges...
"In Peter Beinart's view, one story has long dominated Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of sacred Jewish tradition and history, and also warps our understanding of modern history. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history, and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, he argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations,...
"Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian--an enigmatic and volatile man--spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian's servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with...
Exploring American Jewish History through 50 Historic Treasures offers students and general readers new perspectives on the rich complexity of Jewish experiences in America. As one of America's most fascinating and enduring minorities, American Jews have played key roles in every era of American history and every region of the country. The 50 treasures are depicted in full color and range from a family cookbook to a college campus and include items...
Before the United States officially entered the war, American aid workers were already involved in rescue operations across Europe. Among them were Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who were initially sent to Prague for a relief mission but shifted their focus to helping Jews and dissidents following Germany's invasion in 1939. They were part of a larger group of individuals working in various European cities. Historian Debórah Dwork examines the efforts...
"A memoir of the author's attempt to escape the biblical story he'd been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family"-- Provided by publisher.
" In 1944, at the height of World War II, 982 European refugees found a temporary haven at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. They were men, women, and children who had spent frightening years one step ahead of Nazi pursuers and death. They spoke nineteen different languages, and, while most of the refugees were Jewish, a number were Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. From the time they arrived at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee...
"It's never too late for new beginnings. On the cusp of turning eighty, newly retired pharmacist Augusta Stern is adrift. When she relocates to Rallentando Springs-an active senior community in southern Florida-she unexpectedly crosses paths with Irving Rivkin, the delivery boy from her father's old pharmacy-and the man who broke her heart sixty years earlier. As a teenager growing up in 1920's Brooklyn, Augusta's role model was her father, Solomon...
"No longer the exclusive province of the far right and far left, anti-semitism finds a home in identity politics and the reaction against identity politics, in the renewal of "America first" isolationism and the rise of one-world socialism. An ancient hatred increasingly allowed into modern political discussion, anti-semitism has been migrating toward the mainstream in dangerous ways, amplified by social media and a culture of conspiracy that threatens...
"Falling in love with your husband is anything but convenient in this steamy romance from the New York Times bestselling author of Business or Pleasure. Dani Dorfman has somehow made it to her thirties without knowing what she wants to do with her life. So when an office romance ends poorly and gets her fired, she applies for a job in Amsterdam, idly dreaming of escaping the mess she's created, but never imagining she'll actually get it. Except she...
"The first lyricist to win the Pulitzer Prize, Ira Gershwin (1896-1983) has been hailed as one of the masters of the Great American Songbook, a period which covers songs written largely for Broadway and Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1950s. Now, in the first full-length biography devoted to his life, Michael Owen brings Ira out at last from the long shadow cast by his younger and more famous brother George. Drawing on extensive archival sources and...
Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence,...
For Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby no question about Jews is off-limits. They go there. They cover Jews and money. Jews and power. Jews and privilege. Jews and white privilege. The Black and Jewish struggle. Emmanuel asks, Did Jews kill Jesus? To which Noa responds, "Why are Jewish people history's favorite scapegoat?" They unpack Judaism itself: Is it a religion, culture, a peoplehood, or a race? And: Are you antisemitic if you're anti-Zionist? The...
Poems on a Jewish theme. In Eat Fruit, she writes: "Custom agents throw open my suitcase and draw / out with gingerly leer from under my negligee / a melon. Drug smugglers feed their self-importance, / but me they hate along with the guy trying to smuggle / in a salami from the old country his uncle gave him."
Kel Saren, body double to Prince Conor, and Lin Caster, a healer with dangerous powers, navigate a web of royal conspiracies, criminal underworlds, and dark magic in Castellane, where their choices between love, loyalty, and betrayal could cost them everything, including their lives.
The first-ever biography of Anna Marie Rosenberg, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who became a real power behind national policies critical to America winning World War II and prospering afterwards, chronicles her extraordinary career as FDR's special envoy to Europe during the war and an adviser to five presidents.
"A coming-of-age story set during the rising tide of World War II, How to Find Your Way in the Dark follows Sheldon Horowitz from his humble start in a cabin in rural Massachusetts, through the trauma of his father's murder and the murky experience of assimilation in Hartford, Connecticut, to the birth of stand-up comedy in the Catskills--all while he and his friends are beset by anti-Semitic neighbors, employers, and criminals"-- Provided by publisher
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