Jewish History

One of the most important untold stories of World War II, The Light of Days is a soaring landmark history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who inspired Poland's Jewish youth groups to resist the Nazis.

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.

Gilbert Michlin's sober text thoroughly documents the story of a Jewish immigrant family in France during the war years. Known as the country of enlightenment and human rights, France drew many Jews from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, including Michlin's parents, who fled the harsh conditions of Poland in the mid-1920s. Michlin's memoir evokes the golden years of his family's life in prewar Paris, where he was born, but also reflects on the difficulties of being Jewish in France.

From April 1942 to March 1944, Hélène Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star.

In ways visible and invisible to their fellow recruits and conscripts, the experience of Jews was distinct from that of other soldiers who served in Lincoln's armies. Adam D. Mendelsohn draws for the first time upon the vast database of verified listings of Jewish soldiers serving in the Civil War collected by The Shapell Roster, as well as letters, diaries, and newspapers, to examine the collective experience of Jewish soldiers and to recover their voices and stories.

"Always remember you are the son of two proud nations," Elan's parents tell him when he turns 13. After celebrating his Bar Mitzvah in San Francisco, Elan, with his Jewish father and Native American mother, travels to New Mexico, where he takes part in a Pueblo manhood ceremony. Based on a true story.

It’s 1940, and Sarah Goldstein is hiding in plain sight as Ursula Haller, the Shirley Temple of Nazi high society. She helps the resistance by spying on Nazi generals at cocktail parties in Berlin, but she yearns to do more. Then the spy she works for, the Captain, gets word of a German doctor who’s gone rogue in Central Africa. Rumors say the doctor is experimenting with a weapon of germ warfare so deadly it could wipe out entire cities. It’s up to the Captain and Sarah to reach the doctor and seize this weapon - known as “the Bleeding” - before the Nazis can use it.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

Ninette Dreyfus belonged to one of the most influential Jewish families in Paris—second only to the Rothschilds—her parents' social circle ranging from Einstein to Colette. But all that privilege counted for nothing when the Nazis arrived; the family was high up on the list of Philippe Petain's targets.

This audiobook is the first audiobook in the new academic book series, Hermit Kingdom Studies in Christianity and Judaism, which seeks to encourage advancement of knowledge in the area of Hebrew language studies, Jewish historical studies, and Early Christianity/New Testament studies. The academic series particularly encourages the use of interdisciplinary approaches and creative thinking.

In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China's "Wild East"—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspe, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father's wealth.

In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, upon arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand their father's relentless drive and sometimes eccentric behavior. As Hans enters old age, he and Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin.

La larga pugna entre el naciente Estado Judío de comienzos de la era cristiana, y la opresión de sus conquistadores, los romanos, en este audiolibro que pretende rescatar los momentos más álgido de estas guerras. Por las consecuencias de estos hechos, su escucha resulta imprescindible.

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.

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.

Jews are indisputably the most persecuted people in the annals of history. At the source of Jew-hatred in its myriad forms is anti-Semitism, a sinister and vile mindset that has existed since Old Testament times, that is, thousands of years. Anti-Semites pervade social, religious, economic and political confines, even mainstream Christianity, and their dislike for people of Jewish ancestry often translate into mindless persecution and slaughter, such as the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War in the mid-twentieth century whereby over six ...

From the creators of the smash hit play comes the ultimate audiobook of Jewish humor, a hysterical guide to Judaism that explores all of the religion's stereotypes, history, and shameless guilt trips.

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.

Ben Katchor retells the history of where we choose to eat - a history that starts with the first man who was allowed to enter a walled garden and encouraged by the garden's owner to enjoy its fruits. He examines the biblical milk-and-meat taboo, the first vegetarian practices, and the invention of the restaurant. Katchor illuminates the historical confluence of events and ideas that led to the development of a “milekhdike (dairy) personality” and the proliferation of dairy restaurants in America.

In the years preceding the height of the European Holocaust’s worst atrocities, Adolf Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany, confronted the world with a moral test. His early experiment of allowing Jews to seek homelands elsewhere came to define his future course of action toward the Jewish population of the continent. The acidic hatred he bore for the Jewish presence in European society was clear enough, but the leader of the Nazi Party could not precisely gauge the international community’s likely response to a campaign of extreme abuse directed against his own citizens.