Jewish History

In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan. The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there.

The Romans, through sheer military strength, turned Judea into a client state. They forced the Jews to submit to Roman law, Roman taxation, and to countenance Roman religion. The Jews of Judea exhibited unbelievable strength in resisting assimilation into Roman Hellenistic culture. Their history of dealing with foreign overlords inspired the Jews to hold out and revolt against the Romans.

Dr. Elisha Waldman's years at Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center were filled in equal measure with a deep sense of accomplishment, with frustration when regional politics sometimes got in the way of his patients' care, and with tension over the fine line he would have to walk when the religious traditions of some of his patients' families made it difficult for him to give these children the care he felt they deserved. Navigating the baffling Israeli bureaucracy, the ever-present threat of war, and cultural clashes, Waldman learned to be content with small victories.

The 10 Things Every Jew Should Know Before They Go to College is an essential reference guide for Jewish students navigating today’s college campuses. This fact-based book presents concise, easy-to-reference insights on Jewish history, Israel, and geopolitics, helping students engage confidently in complex discussions about their identity and heritage.

Chaim Gans's A Political Theory for the Jewish People examines the two dominant interpretations of Zionism, contrasts them with post-Zionist alternatives, and develops a third model.

Drawing on the manuscript of Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa, professional historians and Holocaust experts, have uncovered the full story of this remarkable woman. They interweave Mehlberg’s sometimes harrowing personal testimony with broader historical narrative.

Modern Israel's founding fathers provided some of the boldest and most principled leadership of any nation--now Israel needs their example more than ever. Modern Israel's founding fathers provided some of the boldest and most principled leadership of any nation. Now Israel needs their example...

A journalist and author of The Influence of Soros examines the history of Jewish people in America and explores their ever-evolving relationship to the nation’s culture and identity—and each other. What does it mean to be a Bad Jew? Many Jews use the term “Bad Jew” as a weapon against other members of the community or even against themselves. You can be called a Bad Jew if you don’t keep kosher; if you only go to temple on Yom Kippur; if you don’t attend or send your children to Hebrew school; if you enjoy Christmas music; if your partner isn’t Jewish; if you don’t call your mother often enough. The list is endless.

As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix. Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day - but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

A gorgeously told novel in verse written with intimacy and power, Audacity is inspired by the real-life story of Clara Lemlich, a spirited young woman who emigrated from Russia to New York at the turn of the 20th century and fought tenaciously for equal rights. Bucking the norms of both her traditional Jewish family and societal conventions, Clara refuses to accept substandard working conditions in the factories on Manhattan's Lower East Side. For years, Clara devotes herself to the labor fight, speaking up for those who suffer in silence.

From the bestselling author of Los Alamos and The Good German comes Joseph Kanon's riveting tale of love, revenge and murder set in postwar Venice. Winner of the Hammett Prize It is 1946, and Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has...

Ten-year-old Pinchas is separated from his parents and twin sister when they are deported from the Warsaw ghetto to the killing site of Majdanek. As Pinchas is sent on to a series of concentration camps, he shuts himself off to the terrors surrounding him and tries his best not to be noticed, to become almost invisible.

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.

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path.

The Jewish sect which ascribed Jesus the title of Messiah was eventually transformed into a non-Jewish movement wholly separated from its Jewish context. The transformation was not instantaneous, and there were deviating or at the least parallel streams of Jesus supporters early on. A critical mistake which has been made, in my opinion, is the assumption that the Jesus movement was uniform even among its early Jewish followers. Analyzing the original movement(s) in the first centuries of the Common Era can reveal how the schism between Judaism and Christianity evolved.

All his life, journalist Walter Shapiro assumed that the outlandish stories about his great-uncle Freeman were exaggerated family lore; some cockamamie Jewish revenge fantasies dreamt up to entertain the kids and venerate their larger-than-life relative. Only when he started researching Freeman Bernstein's life did he realize that his family was actually holding back.

Estelle’s memoir, published sixty-four years after her liberation from the Nazis, is a narrative of fear and hope and resiliency. While it is a harrowing tale of destruction and loss, it is also a story of the goodness that still exists in a dark world, of survival and renewal.

On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus's cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting "Death to Judas!" In this book, Maurice Samuels gives listeners new insight into Dreyfus himself—the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus's early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil's Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I.

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.