Jewish History

The award-winning New York Times columnist and former foreign correspondent turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own family - most notably his mother's - in order to understand more profoundly the nature of modern Jewish experience. Through his emotionally lucid prose, we relive the anomie of European Jews after the Holocaust, following them from Lithuania to South Africa, England, the United States, and Israel.

“The most important book besides the Bible to read this year.” Rabbi Tuly Weisz, Founder of Israel365. Does the Old Testament feel difficult and harsh? That’s because we're reading somebody else’s mail! The good news is God’s original recipients are still with us! Relationship with the Jewish people unlocks the meaning and beauty of God’s Word. Discover forty Christian insights God gives those who befriend the people of Israel. “In this strikingly original read you will experience the awe of God, Israel and the Torah in a powerful new way.” Dr. Marvin Wilson, Author of Our ...

My Race is the memoir of a gifted Jewish athlete growing up under the apartheid system of South Africa. As both an outsider excluded from the conservative Christian mainstream and an insider who reaped many of the benefits of a society founded on white supremacy, South African track star Lorraine Lotzof Abramson had a unique vantage point on the apartheid experience.

The Hebrew People are the apple of God's eye. He loves them. He made promises to them and has protected them through amazing struggles and extreme trials. No other people group on earth has sustained such consistent persecution with such resilience and courage. From the time of Abraham until this moment God has been telling his special story through His earthly people - the Jews. He will never abandon them nor forsake them. Understanding the story of the Jewish people gives us keen insight into God's character and plan. It is the hope that this very short introduction to the History of the ...

Three young Jewish sisters from Leipzig, Germany huddle together in the cold darkness of night waiting for their smugglers to rescue them and bring them to freedom in Belgium. Their mother, in a state of shock following Kristallnacht, is left behind, sedated in a psychiatric hospital. November 1938 begins the four year ordeal of the seven member Kroch family who endure unfathomable conditions in their fight for survival: imprisonment in French internment camps, hiding in a tiny tool shed, and adapting to the deplorable conditions of a Nazi prison.

Before any type of unified political entity named Israel existed, the Jewish groups whose descendants would later form Israel identified themselves by their particular tribe. If asked their nationality or country of origin, they would likely identify themselves as Danites (from the tribe of Dan; Ex. 31:6) or Ephraimites (from the tribe of Ephraim; Judg. 12:5), etc.

On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents' homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women - many of them teenagers - were sent to Auschwitz.

After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she’d never really known. Sala Glass was a European expat in America – defiantly clinging to her French influences, famously reserved, fashionable to the end – yet to Hadley much of her life remained a mystery. Sala’s experience of surviving one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history was never spoken about.

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.

Los ejecutores: oficiales, médicos, antropólogos, abogados, funcionarios alemanes, nuevos alemanes pero también voluntarios de otras naciones. Las víctimas, identificables y contables en todo momento, experimentaron el impacto del genocidio de distinta manera, en el tiempo o en el espacio. Los testigos: los salvadores, individuales o colectivos, los aliados, los poderes neutrales, las organizaciones sionistas, las iglesias. En Ejecutores, víctimas y testigos Raul Hilberg nos sumerge en el factor humano del genocidio.

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.

WHEN THE UNIMAGINABLE IS THE ONLY THING LEFT TO DO... They are innocent schoolgirls ranging in age from 14 to 22. Under normal circumstances they should be learning, laughing, and playing. Unfortunately, the year is 1942 and the place is Nazi-occupied Poland. Nothing is normal. On the night of August 11, dressed only in cotton nightgowns, they await their fate at the hands of their Nazi captors. They are no match for the Nazi beast- or are they? Meanwhile, a young Jewish family is caught in a perilous game of cat and mouse with the Nazis in Berlin. How long can they possibly remain among ...

June 1942. The Third Reich is victorious everywhere. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who escaped to Britain just before the War. Many have lost their families, their homes - their whole worlds. And now, in the crucial final battles against the Nazis, they will stop at nothing to defeat them. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop.

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.

The History of Yud-Tes Kislev. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad- Lubavitch Chasidism, was arrested, persecuted, and imprisoned in the year 1798 for his selfless efforts to strengthen the Jewish people and to disseminate Chasidic teachings. Rabbi Schneur Zalman's arrest imperiled not only his own life, but also the future of Chasidism.This book explores this noteworthy turning point in the Chasidic movement, and its importance as a milestone in Jewish History.

In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler's Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile-composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.

In this haunting memoir that reflects on the Holocaust and its legacy, award-winning author Sandell Morse discovers stories of bravery and resistance enacted during WWII in Southern France. In the course of six years at a writing residency in France, during which she met with survivors and historians, she painstakingly pieces together the puzzle that had been beguiling her over the years: What was the real story of the French Jews under the Vichy government during The Second World War?

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.

How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of 100 Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age.

In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes the association of Jews with the economy by focusing on one specific time and place - the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil.