Showing titles in History

The 7 Deadly Myths traces antisemitism from its earliest origins to the present day and uncovers the dangerous conspiracy theories that have corrupted reasoning and led people and nations to diabolical acts. Exploring some of the most significant events in history and uncovering little-known villains, this book answers the questions of how antisemitism takes hold, how it is transmitted, and how it inspires violence to the present day.

In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the Christian community, as is often assumed, but rather were startlingly assertive, forming a Jewish civilization within Latin Christian society. Both Jews and Christians considered themselves to be God's chosen people. These dueling claims fueled the rise of both cultures as they became rivals for supremacy. In How the West Became Antisemitic, Ivan Marcus shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism.

"Monsieur, pourquoi ne pas étudier une photographie où l'on sait qui sont les personnes et ce qu'elles sont devenues ? "Une question anodine posée en cours d'histoire, et voilà toutes les certitudes du professeur qui volent en éclats ! Lui-même, que sait-il de son passé, de cette photographie du cousin Georges dont on tait l'existence dans sa famille ? Raflé dans une pharmacie tenue par un couple juif, le jeune homme aurait été déporté à Auschwitz. Piqué au vif par la question de l'élève, Frédéric Sallée entreprend d'enquêter sur ce qu'il pressent être un lourd secret.

The title itself represents the mysteries of the origins of the Jewish People, their endurance, and their unique place in the history of humankind. The book opens with a reflection on the nature of humans, and how story telling is both intrinsic to and essential for our species; and what follows is how the Jews formed as a people, were first identified archeologically as such in the monuments of Egyptian pharaohs, and how they cohered tightly by telling their story from generation to generation.

The Kron family survived the horror of the Nazi regime, thanks to the resourcefulness of Meyer and Gita Kron and the bravery of their rescuers. While Ruta’s Closet is based on fact, it flows like fiction. The drama of the events described and the richness of the characters make it a compelling work of narrative nonfiction—as intriguing as it is inspirational.

In Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War Friedman takes the listener on a personal journey to understand the history of the Cohens. At the center of the story is a sensitive young man pulled between love and duty, a close-knit family straining under moral and political conflicts, and a city coming into its own.

At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap. For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors' testimonies as well as children's diaries, letters, drawings, songs, and poems, Who Will Rescue Us? recreates their journeys.

August 25, 1943. A lone bicyclist transports a cache of explosives, hidden in a beer crate, to a Copenhagen hall being readied to house German troops. In a violent blast, the would-be barracks is reduced to rubble. It's the boldest act yet of Holger Danske and the growing Danish resistance combating the oppressiveness of Hitler's Reich. In 1940, on its way to conquering Western Europe, Germany coerced the Danish government into a "cooperative" agreement that lasted three long years until the increasing brazenness of the Resistance movement prompted a crackdown. 

Though the Torah prohibits eating pig meat, it is not singled out more than other food prohibitions. The pig has become a symbol for people to signal their Jewishness, non-Jewishness, or rebellion from Judaism. Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Jordan D. Rosenblum historicizes the emergence of the pig as a key symbol of Jewish identity, from the Roman persecution of ancient rabbis, to the Spanish Inquisition, to Shakespeare's writings, to modern memoirs of those leaving Orthodox Judaism.

A comprehensive guide to the medicinal plants and folk healers of Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement—mapping ancestral folkways, herbal traditions, and shared legacies of Ashkenazi Jews and their neighbors Includes a materia medica of healing plants and their traditional applications A...

¿Por qué existen los judíos? O mejor dicho, ¿por qué quedan judíos en el mundo? No se ha podido identificar ningún otro grupo de personas que haya sobrevivido tanto tiempo en exilio de su tierra. Tampoco hay otro pueblo presente en el mundo cuyos orígenes estén más envueltos en misteriosos y mitos. Ni hay otro identidad que haya vido mas difícil para un pueblo. Ni hay otro pueblo más dispuesto a soportar las dificultades de su identidad.

Brought to you by Penguin. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science...

Antisemitism, an American Tradition investigates the depths of this fraught history and its recent manifestations. At a time when prejudice, discrimination, and hate against Jews is flaring across the country, Antisemitism, an American Tradition argues that we must understand the past. This momentous work reveals how antisemitism—and resistance to that hatred—endures, representing not a rupture from America's history, but a centuries-old legacy.

Embracing Exile analyzes biblical and rabbinic texts, philosophical treatises, studies of Kabbalah, Hasidism, and a multiplicity of modern expressions. It offers revised readings of the Bible's book of Esther, a survey of Talmudic treatments of exile, an in-depth analysis of the thought of the Maharal of Prague, as well as the work of Philip Roth, among other modern authors. David Kraemer shows that Diaspora Jews through the ages insisted that God joined them in their exiles and that, as citizens of the world, Jews could only live throughout the world.

In this new biography of Abraham, Judaism's foundational figure, Anthony Julius offers an account of the origins of a fundamental struggle within Judaism between skepticism and faith, critique and affirmation, thinking for oneself and thinking under the direction of another. Julius describes Abraham's life as two separate lives, and as a version of the collective life of the Jewish people.

Saying No to Hate grounds listeners contextually in the history of antisemitism in America by emphasizing the legal, political, educational, communal, and other strategies American Jews have used through the centuries to address high-profile threats.

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.

In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China's "Wild East"—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspe, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father's wealth.

A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law. In the face of centuries of this widespread misrepresentation, Rabbi Shai Held—one of the most important Jewish thinkers in America today—recovers the heart of the Jewish tradition, offering the radical and moving argument that love belongs as much to Judaism as it does to Christianity.

In The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, celebrated rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid offers an essential contribution to this intergenerational process, inviting us to rethink our current moment through religious and political resources from the Jewish tradition.