Jewish History

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.

Most Holocaust survivors who came to the US after WWII settled in big cities, but some chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this chapter in American Jewish history when these refugees—including the author's grandparents—found an unlikely gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms.

Oppenheimer meets Hidden Figures in this sweeping historical debut where two Jewish physicists form an inseverable bond amidst fear and uncertainty. Sure to captivate readers of Kate Quinn and Bonnie Garmus, The Sound of a Thousand Stars eerily mirrors modern-day questions of wartime ethics and...

A probing biography of world-renowned Jewish singer and actor Al Jolson and the history of his performance in and the making of The Jazz Singer 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...

The secret history of one of the largest—and least-known—rescue operations of World War II Between 1940 and 1943, a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable—and until now, completely unknown—humanitarian operation. In concert with Jewish activists, they...

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.

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.

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...

Both a love letter to America and a stirring rallying cry for the country to live up to the ideals on which it was founded, this propulsive biography from National Book Award Finalist and “nonfiction maestro (Horn Book)" Deborah Heiligman chronicles the extraordinary life and work of...

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.

Subsequent to the attack on the USS Cole in October of 2000, British intelligence reports pinpointed bin Laden's location in a safe house outside of Abyan, Yemen. A top secret project, code named Perfect Justice, was carried out by a team of highly-trained CIA operatives, two male and two female, in a commando-style raid. It was to be a Black operation, one that would be conducted in absolute secrecy under the cover of official deniability.

Practiced for centuries by Jewish mystics, Kabbalah is a belief system of mystical teachings offering insight into the nature of God, the universe, and the human soul. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Kabbalah—from its origins and key concepts—to its major practitioners and their impact on the world today.

Imagine having the entire Jewish people over for dinner—and hosting a raucous, creative, riveting debate about their collective future. Jewish Priorities offers, for the first time, a wide-ranging, ambitious, and genuinely "pan-Jewish" conversation. Encompassing more than sixty top authors from around the Jewish world—Israelis and Diaspora writers; younger influencers and veteran opinion leaders; rabbinic and communal leaders, journalists and scholars, and literary and cultural figures, ranging from secular to ultra-Orthodox—each contributor offers a different priority for the Jewish people.

Experience a beautiful, humorous, universal love story with this memoir about learning to live with another human being and how every relationship is a mystery—and a miracle. When they first meet, John, a dashing European, a Latvian refugee, a physics PhD, is hoping to settle down...

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.

In the year 999, when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant, takes a second wife, he commits an act whose unforeseen consequences will forever alter his family, his relationships, his business-his life. In an attempt to forestall conflict and advance his business interests at the same time, Ben...

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.

Lala Reyes' grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo—, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala's possession. The novel opens with the Reyes' annual car...

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.

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.