Jewish History

The ancient Israelites emerged from Mount Sinai onto the hilly plains of Canaan and established a civilization that endured for hundreds of years. Even when the Israelites fell to incursions from foreign invaders and were subjected to torture and exile, they held fast to their belief system. They emerged from the Babylonian captivity as the people of Yehud. With the aid of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid Empire, they rebuilt their sacred temple and got back on their feet.

‘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...

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker In the tradition of The Hare with Amber Eyes, this “profound…comic…[and] unconventional” (The New York Times) family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up...

When three little girls—Anna, Bernie, and Elica—make a pact to be blood sisters for life, they believe nothing can come between them. Anna is from an affluent Jewish family, while Bernie and Elica are from poor Austrian families who barely make ends meet. As they get older, their social differences become all too real. With infectious Jew-hate-laden rhetoric from Nazi Germany spreading into Austria, it is only a matter of time before their bond of friendship gets severely tested.

From the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer comes a "dazzling and stimulating" exploration of how the creation of the ten commandments provides the origins to today's law (Library Journal). Alan Dershowitz is one of America's most famous litigation experts. In the Genesis of...

Although the area had fallen under the dominion of Rome in the first century BCE, it was still a Jewish Kingdom under the Herodian dynasty. The author draws on Christian, Greek, Jewish, and Roman sources to present life in Jerusalem, Judea, and the Galilee, including quotes from scripture, rabbinic sources, and the works of the Alexandrian philosopher Philo and the historian Josephus. Sketches of Jewish Social Life is highly regarded as an authoritative work of history.

In The Women of Rothschild, Natalie Livingstone reveals the role of women in shaping the legacy of the famous Rothschild dynasty, synonymous with wealth and power. From the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park...

From an acclaimed historian, the definitive story of the Venetian Ghetto and the emergence of modern antisemitism In the early sixteenth century, amidst the ruins of war and mounting religious hatred, the world’s first Jewish “ghetto” was established in Venice. Constrained in cramped...

Jerusalem, 180 BCE. For 800 years the Zadokite priesthood has led the Jewish people. But the world is changing. Without, Rome is rising, crushing the other powers of the ancient world beneath it. Within, a power struggle inside the House of Zadok is a golden opportunity for interlopers, who seek to unseat them from the throne. On the background of these tumultuous times, Judah, scion of a minor priestly lineage, comes of age in Judea. While experiencing love, friendship, and conflict, he slowly transforms into the warrior and leader his people are waiting for.

A Paste Most Anticipated Historical Fiction for Fall An “epic and marvelously entertaining” family saga by award-winning author Linda Grant about the European Jewish experience from WWI to the present day, that “constantly moves forward even as it looks sorrowfully back” (Financial...

COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNER “The hidden gem of the year . . . Sensational and gripping, and shedding light on some of the most urgent issues of our time, this was our unanimous winner.” —Judges of the 2018 Costa Award The extraordinary true story of a young Jewish girl in Holland...

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.

Alan Dershowitz has spent years advocating for his "most challenging client" - the state of Israel - both publicly and in private meetings with high-level international figures, including every US president and Israeli leader of the past 40 years. Replete with personal insights and unreported details, Defending Israel offers a comprehensive history of modern Israel from the perspective of one of the country's most important supporters. Listeners are given a rare front-row seat to the high-profile controversies and debates that Dershowitz was involved in over the years.

Eastern Europe, August 1942. The Khazar kaganate, an isolated nation of Turkic warrior Jews, lies between the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Khazar Sea (the Caspian). It also happens to lie between a belligerent nation to the west that the Khazars call Germania - and a city the rest of the world calls Stalingrad. After years of Jewish refugees streaming across the border from Europa, fleeing the war, Germania launches its siege of Khazaria. Only Esther, the daughter of the nation's chief policy adviser, sees the ominous implications of Germania's disregard for Jewish lives.

WINNER OF THE RABBI SACKS BOOK PRIZE A nuanced examination of the Israel’s past, present, and future, after reaching its seventy-fifth anniversary and enduring its most challenging year ever, from the two-time National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Israel. Revised and updated...

A spellbinding history of the hidden world below the Holy City—a saga of biblical treasures, intrepid explorers, and political upheaval “A sweeping tale of archaeological exploits and their cultural and political consequences told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a...

Idit, a polyglot and literary translator, falls in love with Halimi, a magnetic and philandering magazine editor. Idit, who cannot handle his indiscretions, proposes an open marriage to try and save what they've built. In the midst of a full-blown marital crisis, they take their daughter Lily...

The illuminating and deeply moving true story of twin sisters who survived Nazi experimentation, against all odds, during the Holocaust. Eva and her identical twin sister, Miriam, had a mostly happy childhood. Theirs was the only Jewish family in their small village in the Transylvanian...

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt.

Spanning nearly a century, from 1930s Siberia to contemporary Brighton Beach, a page turning, epic family saga centering on three generations of women in one Russian Jewish family—each striving to break free of fate and history, each yearning for love and personal fulfillment—and how the...