Showing results for "Publishing" in History

Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews” are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. In this provocative book, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible - the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon’s vast empire - reflect the world of the later authors.

In a bold and moving book that is sure to spark heated debate, the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling 2,000-year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture.

A deathbed promise leads a daughter on an incredible journey to write about her grandfather who was a famous war hero. But this journey had a terrible destination: the discovery that he was a Nazi war criminal.

In August 1939, just days before World War II broke out in Europe, a Jewish man in Vienna named Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to a stranger in America who shared his last name. Decades later, journalist Faris Cassell stumbled upon the stunning letter and became determined to uncover the story behind it. How did the American Bergers respond? Did Alfred and his family escape Nazi Germany?

Nakam tells the story of “the Avengers” (Nokmim), a group of young Holocaust survivors led by poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner, who undertook a mission of revenge against Germany following the crimes of the Holocaust. Motivated by both the atrocities they had endured and the realization that murderous antisemitic attacks on survivors continued long after the Nazi surrender, these fifty young men and women sought retaliation at a level commensurate with the devastation caused by the Holocaust, making clear to the world that Jewish blood would no longer be shed with impunity.

The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago’s Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin “Zukie the Bookie” Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate’s “Jewish wing.”

In an urgent and personal new book, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-elected Jewish official in America, sheds light on the Jewish American experience and sounds the alarm about the troubling resurgence of antisemitism. For the first time in generations, antisemitism has become a...

In this biography of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, Alberto Manguel examines the question of his universal appeal. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.

**Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Book Award Finalist** The gripping story of a team of Nazi hunters at the U.S. Department of Justice as they raced against time to expose members of a brutal SS killing force who disappeared in America after World War Two. In 1990, in a drafty basement...

A thrilling mystery woven into a beautifully constructed family memoir: Meryl Frank’s journey to seek the truth about a beloved and revolutionary cousin, a celebrated actress in Vilna before World War II, and to answer the question of how the next generation should honor the memory of the...

In a memorable scene from Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, viewers the world over witnessed the clandestine marriage of two Jews in the Płaszów concentration camp: Joseph and Rebecca Bau. At once a tale of horror and beauty, Bau: Artist at War is one man’s memoir of a miracle: the bloom of love in the depths of a Nazi concentration camp. In his painstaking prose, Joseph Bau also shares his experience of other wartime traumas—the bombing of Kraków, the brutality of the ghetto, the harsh last days at Oskar Schindler’s factory—with surprising wit and irony.

Hetty’s family was torn apart following the German invasion of the Netherlands. Rounded up by the Nazis and then separated from their parents, Hetty and her brothers were sent to the Children’s House, within Belsen concentration camp. As one of the eldest, Hetty became the ‘Little Mother’, helping to care for not only her siblings, but the other children as well.In a direct and powerful style, Hetty recalls one of the remarkable, largely untold stories of the Holocaust – the extraordinary struggle and survival of this group of children through those terrible years.

When Nazi occupiers arrived in Greece in 1941, it was the beginning of a horror that would reverberate through generations. In the city of Salonica (Thessaloniki), almost 50,000 Jews were sent to Nazi concentration camps during the war, and only 2,000 returned. A Jewish doctor named Isaac Matarasso and his son escaped imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Nazis and joined the resistance. After the city’s liberation they returned to rebuild Salonica and, along with the other survivors, to grapple with the near-total destruction of their community.

From the survivor of ten Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, a "devastating...inspirational" memoir (The Today Show) about finding strength in the face of despair. On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a...