Showing titles in History

A vast readership wants better access to the ancient words and ideas of the Bible. In The Bible Doesn't Say That, Dr. Joel M. Hoffman walks the listener through dozens of instances of mistranslations, misconceptions, and other misunderstandings about the Bible. In 40 short chapters, Hoffman covers fundamental theology, morality, lifestyle, and biblical imagery.

The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates.

In questo libro, uno dei più importanti del Marchese Alexandre Sant-Yves d'Alveydre, sono descritti alcuni fondamentali capitoli della Storia Sacra. D'Alveydre descrive l'inizio del nostro ciclo storico, partendo dalla riforma di Ram, con la fondazione dell'Impero Universale dell'Ariete e la Teocrazia dell'Agnello, fino ad arrivare alla vocazione di Mosè con la costituzione sinarchica di Israele, passando per la Storia Sacra di Krishna, Fo-Hi e Zoroastro. Prosegue poi analizzando la storia delle Comunità ebraiche e come abbiano favorito e stimolato il messaggio giudeo-cristiano.

The Kings of Israel and Judah is an expansive history of the many kings mentioned in The Books of Kings and Chronicles. For this reason, it is an often cited book for any scholar of Jewish and Christian history.

In this fascinating account, cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front. 

In 1654, 23 Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washington's army during the American Revolution.

Here the emotional journeys of two German Jewish refugees are reconstructed from a substantial collection of family material, archives and secondary historical sources, which are used imaginatively to explore and illuminate a wider history. The letters evoke how it felt at the time to be a refugee and express eloquently the distress and losses involved in exile, separation and internment, providing intense dynamic snapshots of how they managed their emotions from day to day. The author shows the complex interrelationship between personal lives and social/historical events.

Photographic images of the Holocaust are very rare. The perpetrators were careful to avoid leaving visual evidence of what they did in Poland and the Soviet Union during and after the summer of 1941. But Wendy Lower discovered an old print that captured the moment a woman and child were shot and pushed into a pit by two riflemen, while another uniformed figure looks complacently on. Through diligent research in archives and interviews with descendants and survivors, Wendy Lower was able to identify the place, the time and the identity of the killers and witnesses.

As the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days, the common perception is that after survivors arrived and settled in their new homes they continued on a successful journey from rags to riches. A closer look at the experience of Holocaust survivors in North America shows it to be untrue. Drawing on more than 60 interviews with survivors, hundreds of case files from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, and other archival documents, The Montreal Shtetl presents a portrait of the daily struggles of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal.

The Bible is the most influential book in Western history. As the foundational text of Judaism and Christianity, the Bible has been interpreted and reinterpreted over millennia, utilized to promote a seemingly endless run of theological and political positions. Adherents and detractors alike point to different passages throughout to justify wildly disparate behaviors and beliefs. Translated and retranslated, these texts lead both to unity and intense conflict.

In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.  

In 1940, the German sons and daughters of infamous Nazi dignitaries Himmler, Göring, Hess, Frank, Bormann, Speer, and Mengele were children of privilege at four, five, or 10 years old, surrounded by affectionate, all-powerful parents. Although innocent and unaware of what was happening at the time, they eventually discovered the extent of their fathers' occupations: These men were leaders of the Third Reich and would later be convicted as monstrous war criminals. 

It's been 2,000 years after most Jews were exiled from Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land, and two generations since the Holocaust led to the founding of modern Israel. Still, small yet resilient Jewish communities continue to endure and thrive around the world - sometimes in the most unlikely places, and often in the face of extreme persecution. Journalist Annika Hernroth-Rothstein has spent two years of her life uncovering the hidden beauty of these largely forgotten Jewish enclaves. 

A celebrated Israeli author explores the roots of the divide between religion and secularism in Israel today and offers a path to bridging the divide. 

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert. It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to NYC's Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood.

In 1937, the Shwartz family lived a calm life in their small village in Poland. Fifteen-year-old Rachel liked to sing and go out dancing at a local night club, while her older brother David was busy running a farm and raising a family with his wife Hinda. But all that changed when the war reached Butla. First, the Russians came and kicked them out of their house. Then, the Nazis came to cart them off. But the Shwartz family resisted. David decided that no matter what, his family would not be taken captive. Instead, he snuck his family out of their village and into Hungary.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements....

In this alternately humorous and horrifying memoir, a Jewish father shleps his reluctant children around Europe on a hard-charging tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in order to impress on them the profound evil of Hitler’s war against the Jews and the importance of combatting genocide.   

The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism traces the history of the JDC - an organization founded to aid victims of World War I that has played a significant role in preserving and sustaining Jewish life across the globe.

Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood.