Showing titles in History

It's Christmas 1980, and inside a sprawling Upper West Side apartment, Faye Bascov is about to throw an opulent Christmas dinner - a tradition for this secular, well-educated Jewish family. But any family gathering is an invitation for old resentments to boil over, as Faye's sister-in-law Julie and the extended family have plenty to hash out. Flash-forward to 2000, and the apartment, now much shabbier, reflects how the family's fortunes have changed, and the Bascovs now have to reckon with the legacy of their family discord.

The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex - and so ambivalent.

A publishing sensation, the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. 'A classic ... Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank's' SUNDAY TIMES 'I can't remember when I read a more engrossing book'...

Throughout the 1970's until his untimely death in 1979, writer/educator/dramatist Dr. Samuel J. Citron took it upon himself to interview leading authorities on special topics in contemporary Jewish history, mostly relating to the State of Israel. Over the course of ten years of painstaking work...

In 1980 Thomas Keneally walked into a shop in Beverley Hills to buy a briefcase, an impulse that was to change his life. For the owner, Leopold Pfefferberg, had a story he'd been trying to interest writers and Hollywood in for years. It was the story of Oskar Schindler. In SEARCHING FOR...

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE A TIMES & SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE CONVERSATION'S 5 BEST NON-FICTION BOOKS OF 2024 'A truly radical book; radical in subject, radical in form. For the most tragic reasons, it...

Noted journalist Yardena Schwartz draws on her extensive research and wide-ranging interviews with both sides to tell a timely, eye-opening story. She expertly weaves the war between Israel and Hamas into a historical framework, demonstrating how the conflict today cannot be understood without the context of ground zero of this century-old war, which began long before the occupation, the settlements, or the state of Israel ever existed.

In September 1984, Lisa Paul, an American college student and nanny living in Moscow, entered Inna Meiman’s house for her first Russian language lesson. And so began a two–year friendship and a fight for Inna’s life. In Swimming in the Daylight, Lisa chronicles her friend’s struggle to shed her refusenik status, obtain a visa to America, and find medical treatment for her malignant cancer. Inna endured a perverse reality as a citizen of the Soviet Union....

‘Haunting.’ Jonathan Freedland ‘Powerful.’ Daniel Finkelstein The profoundly moving and deeply intimate story of one Jewish family’s fate in the Holocaust, following the thread from Germany to Latvia and to Britain. In November 1941, Peter Bradley's grandparents, Sally and Bertha...

According to Alan M. Dershowitz, "chutzpah" is "boldness, assertiveness, a willingness to demand what is due, to defy tradition, to challenge authority, to raise eyebrows." Assessing his experiences, he brings to bear all the chutzpah for which he is famous in examining such issues as antisemitism, assimilation, the Holocaust, and Zionism.

Since they were first discovered in the caves at Qumran, in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls have aroused more fascination - and more controversy - than perhaps any other archaeological find. They appear to have been hidden in the Judean desert by the Essenes, a Jewish sect that existed around the time of Jesus, and they continue to inspire veneration and conspiracy theories to this day. John Collins tells the story of the bitter conflicts that have swirled around the scrolls since their startling discovery, and sheds light on their true significance for Jewish and Christian history.

In the early 1980s on a remote part of the Sudanese coast, a new luxury holiday resort opened for business. Catering for divers, it attracted guests from around the world. Little did the holidaymakers know that the staff were undercover spies, working for the Mossad - the Israeli secret service. Providing a front for covert night-time activities, the holiday village allowed the agents to carry out an operation unlike any seen before. What began with one cryptic message pleading for help, turned into the secret evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews....

Benno Neuburger, a modest land investor from Munich, and Anna Einstein, daughter of a cattle dealer from Laupheim, marry in 1907. They begin their lives together with great hope. It is a relatively prosperous time and a very optimistic one for German Jews who are enjoying a social renaissance in the industrializing, urbanizing rising star that is Germany. It’s not clear that this good fortune might begin to unravel.

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.

It's a great irony that Israel was more secure as an idea than its ever been as a nation with an army. In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it - by taking what had been a national religion, identified with a particular place, and turning it into an idea. Jews no longer needed Jerusalem to be Jews.

Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story - the extraordinary saga of two thirds of Polish Jewish survivors - has never been fully told. Author Mikhal Dekel's father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as "special settlements". 

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project. My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning humanitarian and former Episcopal priest Ivan Backer.

In 2018 Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media to share her suspicions that the California wildfires were started by 'space solar generators' which were funded by powerful, mysterious backers. Instantly, thousands of people rallied around her, blaming the fires on "Jewish space lasers" and, ultimately, the Rothschild family. For more than 200 years, the name "Rothschild" has been synonymous with two things: great wealth, and conspiracy theories about what they're "really doing" with it.

A new history of the American Jewish relationship with Israel focused on its most urgent and sensitive issue: the question of Palestinian rights.