Jewish History

In Superman Is Jewish? Harry Brod reveals the links between Jews and superheroes in a penetrating investigation of iconic comic book figures. He describes how the role of each hero reflects the evolution of the Jewish place in American culture - an alien in a foreign land, like Superman; a figure plagued by guilt for not having saved his family, like Spider-Man; outsiders persecuted for being different (X-Men); a nice, smart guy afraid people won't like him when he's angry (the Hulk).

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.

In 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and her family had become registered Jews under the ever-increasing statutes against them enacted by Petain's government. Her father had been arrested and interned at the Drancy detention camp and Brull-Ulman had become an intern at the Rothschild Hospital.

Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.

Anne Frank is a cultural icon whose diary painted a vivid picture of the Holocaust and made her an image of humanity in one of history’s darkest moments. But she was also a person - a precocious young girl with a rich inner life and tremendous skill as a writer. In this masterful new novel, David R. Gillham explores with breathtaking empathy the woman - and the writer - she might have become.

Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson, immigrated from a shtetl in Lithuania to the United States in 1894 after his father secured a job as a rabbi in Washington, D.C. A poor, Yiddish-speaking newcomer navigating a racially segregated and antisemitic America, young Jolson dreamed of becoming a star, and he did. Through Jolson, Bernstein simultaneously breaks open the history and legacy of the cultural sensation The Jazz Singer. Not only was The Jazz Singer the first feature-length film with synchronized music and dialogue, but it was also taboo smashing in its content.

Growing up, Tony Bernard knew that his father, Henry, had been in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He was familiar with the tattoo bearing his Auschwitz number-B1224-and the scar resulting from a suicide attempt while in a camp in Blizyn. As an Australian boy growing up on Sydney's Northern Beaches where Henry was a well-respected doctor, Tony simply accepted these facts. Only as a young man, on a trip to Poland with his father, did he begin to uncover the secrets that filled Henry with regret, anguish, and guilt.

In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler's Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile-composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.

When the rabbis composed the Mishnah in the late second or early third century C.E., the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed for more than a century. Why, then, do the Temple and its ritual feature so prominently in the Mishnah? Against the view that the rabbis were reacting directly to the destruction and asserting that nothing had changed, Naftali S. Cohn argues that the memory of the Temple served a political function for the rabbis in their own time.

Jason Sommer's father, Jay, is ninety-eight years old and losing his memory. More than seventy years after arriving in New York from WWII-torn Europe, he is forgetting the stories that defined his life, the life of his family, and the lives of millions of Jews who were affected by Nazi terror. Observing this loss, Jason vividly recalls the trip to Eastern Europe the two took together in 2001.

From the bustling city of Paris to the quaint countryside village of Champlost, France, Where Courage Lives follows ten-year-old Muguette Szpajzer and her family as they seek refuge from the war. Written in vignettes with child-like charm and innocence, Muguette’s memoir provides rich insight into rural life during wartime upheaval, honoring both her indomitable mother and the courage of the people of Champlost.

A young girl is suddenly all alone and on the run from the Nazis in her hometown in Poland. Having survived an aktion that was intended to completely rid Czestochowa of all the Jews, she and her father try to make their way back to their home during the late hours of the night.

With these last words from their mother, two little girls, Marguerite and her older sister, will begin a long wandering that will last two years. Equipped with a new identity, they must cut themselves off from everything that constitutes their familiar universe. Led from farms to convents, they learn to keep quiet, to pretend, to lie, to adapt and above all to keep hope, against all odds. The story that Marguerite Élias Quddus gives us takes one to the centre of it and lets us glimpse history through the eyes of a very young child.

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.

Los antiguos israelitas introdujeron una de las primeras religiones monoteístas del mundo. ¡Y todavía hoy se practica! Los antiguos israelitas emergieron desde el monte Sinaí en las llanuras montañosas de Canaán y establecieron una civilización que perduró durante cientos de años. Incluso cuando los israelitas cayeron ante las incursiones de invasores extranjeros y fueron sometidos a torturas y al exilio, se aferraron a su sistema de creencias. Emergieron del cautiverio babilónico como el pueblo de Yehud.

In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes the association of Jews with the economy by focusing on one specific time and place - the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil.

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people - from the colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to labor organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity.

In 1948, Stan Andrews left a comfortable postwar life in Los Angeles to travel to the war-torn Middle East, where a four-front Arab invasion threatened to destroy the newly-declared State of Israel. There he joined the Israeli Air Force and became one of its first fighter pilots. Andrews was an unexpected volunteer for the fight for a Jewish state. He had previously been aloof from the struggle for Jewish independence but found himself so roused by the anti-Semitism of 1940s America that he decided to go to Israel and risk everything.

Alice is 11 years old, and it is wartime. She is on a train with no seats, no lights, and no sanitary facilities. Her parents and her grandmother are missing, and Alice doesn't know where she is going. Maybe she will get to play outside again, maybe she will see her parents. But as the train rolls on, Alice begins to realize that just when you think things can't possibly get any worse, they do.

Judah Maccabee is no longer a youth, but a great warrior and the unchallenged leader of the Jewish People. He leads his people to victory after victory on the fields of battle and diplomacy, shocking the leaders of the mighty Seleucid Empire. Relentlessly, the armies of the empire are sent to crush the rebellion in Judea. They will do anything to eliminate the Maccabee army and suppress the Jewish faith. But although the Maccabees are massively outnumbered, they have no choice but to overcome their foes. They know that their defeat would be the end of the Jewish People.