Jewish History

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....

Born out of grief after the loss of her father, the author dives into family histories to search for answers and comfort. Bringing her ancestors to life, the author shares the stories of five immigrant Jewish families who shape Seattle's early years, its retail culture and its gilded age. In this delightful book, Karen Treiger places herself in the long arc of history and invites the listener to join her time travel. The story telling is masterful as she describes the origin of each family who emigrated to the United States from central and eastern Europe between 1874 and 1913.

In the late twentieth century, fundamentalism has emerged as one of the most powerful forces at work in the world, contesting the dominance of modern secular values and threatening peace and harmony around the globe. Yet it remains incomprehensible to a large number of people. In The Battle for...

At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.

In this definitive biography, Israel's leading journalist-historian, Tom Segev, uses large amounts of previously unreleased archival material to give an original, nuanced account, transcending the myths and legends that have accreted around Ben-Gurion. Segev's probing biography ranges from the villages of Poland to Manhattan libraries, London hotels, and the hills of Palestine, and shows us Ben-Gurion's relentless activity across six decades.

A tour de force historical mystery from Monica Hesse, the bestselling and award-winning author of Girl in the Blue Coat. Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to eighteen-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has...

A highly anticipated, rediscovered collection from Viktor Frankl, published for the first time in the United States, exploring freedom, responsibility, and how we can draw meaning from the temporary nature of our lives From the bestselling author of Man's Search for Meaning, which has sold over...

In Israel and Civilization, syndicated columnist, legal scholar, and popular commentator Josh Hammer makes a righteous case that the key to the prosperity of the West is the flourishing of the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel. Hammer’s uplifting offense is our best defense against the enemies of the Jewish people, the Jewish state, and all the West. As Hammer makes clear, manifesting the promise of Israel requires action by the United States and its allies.

A Holocaust historian, archivist, and history blogger adds a new dimension to the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II, shining a long overdue spotlight on five young, Polish Jewish women—champions who helped lead the resistance, sabotage the Nazis, and aid Jews in hiding...

Many years ago, in a lecture on the creation of the Mishnah, the Orthodox Jewish historian, Rabbi Berel Wein discussed the rise of early Christianity as a historical and theological backdrop. He mentioned that this era is of particular importance to Jews because of the complicated and tragic relationship between Jews and Christians over the centuries. He referred to Joseph Klausner, the famed Jewish professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who in the earlier part of the 20th century, had authored several works on early Christianity from a Jewish standpoint.

It is a common assumption that in Israel, Jews have sovereignty, and in most other places where Jews live today, they have religious freedom instead. As Simon Rabinovitch shows in this original work, the situation is much more complicated. Jews today possess different kinds of legal rights in states around the world; some stem from religious freedom protections, and others evolved from a longer history of Jewish autonomy.

A tale of Nazi lives, mass murder, love, Cold War espionage, a mysterious death in the Vatican, and the Nazi escape route to Perón's Argentina,"the Ratline"—from the author of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning East West Street. "Hypnotic, shocking, and unputdownable." —John le...

A major new work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest sacred documents of Judaism, which reveals their surprising connections to early Christianity. “A luminous treatment of a fascinating subject! Highly recommended!”—Scott Hahn, author of The Fourth Cup From award-winning scholar John...

“Kirsty Manning weaves together little-known threads of World War II history, family secrets, the past and the present into a page-turning, beautiful novel.""— Heather Morris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz A gripping historical novel that tells the...

In 1937, the Shwartz family lived a calm life in their small village in Poland. Fifteen-year-old Rachel liked to sing and go out dancing at a local night club, while her older brother David was busy running a farm and raising a family with his wife Hinda. But all that changed when the war reached Butla. First, the Russians came and kicked them out of their house. Then, the Nazis came to cart them off. But the Shwartz family resisted. David decided that no matter what, his family would not be taken captive. Instead, he snuck his family out of their village and into Hungary.

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers. Playmakers reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty.

The study of the apocryphal gospels, documents about the life or sayings of Jesus that did not become part of the New Testament, is a popular discipline among scholars that now fills several shelves of any respectable library. However, few consider the question of whether the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, is "complete" and whether in antiquity there were other books besides "Genesis", the "Exodus" or "Judges", with different histories and unknown characters, that were excluded from the canon and got lost in the sands of time.

The Big Jewish Book for Jews brings together Jewish wit, inspiring tales, classic skills, and even pickle recipes, for the instruction and edification of the modern Jew. Readers will learn how to sacrifice a lamb unto the Lord, the rules of Canasta, how to build a pyramid (the Bernie Madoff and the Egyptian kind), and how not to accept the first table you are shown to in a restaurant.

The Jewish War is an extraordinary historical document in that it details a calamitous period of four years during which the Jews pitted themselves against the might of the Roman empire. It is partly a remarkable account in that its author, Flavius Josephus (c.37–c.100 CE) was himself a Jew and yet, during the course of the conflict, found himself playing a prominent role for both sides. It is further underpinned by the fact that Josephus himself was not only a participant, but also an historian and a scholar of standing.

In July 1950, Avi Shlaim, only five, and his family were forced into exile, fleeing their beloved Iraq to the new state of Israel. Today the once flourishing Jewish community of Iraq, at one time numbering over 130,000 and tracing its history back 2,600 years, has all but vanished.