The life of David “Mickey” Marcus has become the stuff of legends and myths (even fantasy), conspiracy, wild exaggeration, and untethered embellishment. The image of Marcus cast by the character portrayed by Kirk Douglas in the film version of his life still dominates most evocations of the man, for good or ill. And these days, reactions to the book or film rest mostly on the current headlines rather than the historical context of the struggle in which Marcus died, or the events that cast him as a real-life player in an event marked by destiny. 

Chasing the Shadow: Mickey Marcus’s 200 Days of Destiny is the first comprehensive and balanced biography of David Daniel “Mickey” Marcus, a founder of American Civil Affairs and Military Government doctrine and practice and a seminal figure in early Israeli military history. Far from merely a tribute to Mickey Marcus's legacy, Ossad’s work serves as a critical tool for understanding the realities of mid-20th-century warfare in a Postwar colonial struggle and the dynamics of U.S.-Israeli military and political relations in 1948, the critical year for Israel’s struggle for independence. Indeed, Chasing the Shadow is a valuable read for those interested in Middle East history, Jewish military history, and a fascinating character whose story is told in an engaging, informative, and insightful narrative. 

With majestic sweep and sparkling detail, this magnificent volume brings to life the great and ancient drama of the world's holiest city on the eve of a new millennium. Some three thousand years ago King David captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites and made the city his capital. There Solomon built the Temple and the Jewish people found their spiritual center. From its glory under the House of David to its emergence a thousand years later as the birthplace of Christianity, from its destruction by the Romans to its conquest by the forces of Islam and its Crusader and Ottoman periods, Jerusalem has been endlessly revered and warred over, passionately celebrated and desecrated. Mining the rich evidence of this remarkable history, the world-renowned authors gathered here conjure the Holy City as it has appeared in antique Hebrew texts; in the testimony of Jewish and Christian pilgrims and in art; in medieval Islamic literature and in western nineteenth-century accounts; in maps and mosaics and architecture through the ages.

Here is Jerusalem in its physical splendor, the sun rising over the Mount of Olives to touch the golden crown of the Dome of the Rock and warm the crenelated walls of the Old City, with its foundations from the days of the Hasmoneans and Herod the Great, its seven gates and Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Muslim quarters marked out by the Roman decumanus and the Byzantine cardo. Above the Ramban Synagogue, established by Nachmanides in 1267, looms the minaret of the fifteenth-century Sidi Umar Mosque. Nearby are the foundations and apses of the Crusader Church of St. Mary of the German Knights, which in turn abuts the underground Herodian Quarter, with its fresco-covered walls, mosaic floors, and opulent baths. Remnants of the Nea Church erected by Justinian in 543 and of the Ayyubid tower from the thirteenth century stand within the Garden of Redemption, a memorial to the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis.

Amid these marvels of geography and architecture, the authors evoke Jerusalem's spiritual history, the events and legends that have made the city the touching point between the divine and the earthly for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. They trace Jerusalem's fortunes as the City of David, as the site of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, as the "Furthest Shrine" from which the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. Writing from an enlightening variety of backgrounds and perspectives, the authors share a depth of feeling for their subject that imparts a warmth and immediacy to their depiction of the city in all its historic grandeur and religious complexity. An Armenian Jerusalemite once wrote that in the Holy City each person carries a mirror, but each holds it in only one direction. This book brings all these reflections together to create a living picture of Jerusalem not only in history but also in the hearts of those who call it home and those who revere it as a Holy City.

This richly suggestive book examines the common bonds of thought and shared manner of expression that unite Jewish writers working in America, Eastern Europe, and Israel. Murray Baumgarten shows how Jewish traditions are reflected in the themes and narrative style of a diverse group of writers, including Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Sholom Aleichen, Isaac Babel, and S.Y. Agnon.

Baumgarten finds in these writers a distinctive and symbolic use of the urban scene arid style of life—whether the city is Brooklyn, Chicago, Vienna, Warsaw, Odessa, or Jerusalem. He examines the pariah stance, and the different kinds of tension between freedom from communal ties and the pull of traditional culture. He demonstrates how Yiddish can flavor and inflect the syntax, how scripture can permeate the thinking and narrative devices, in writers of various nationalities.

Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany examines the relationship between the colonial and antisemitic movements of modern Germany from 1871 to 1918, examining the complicated ways in which German antisemitism and colonialism fed off of and into each other in the decades before the First World War. Author Christian S. Davis studies the significant involvement with and investment in German colonialism by the major antisemitic political parties and extra-parliamentary organizations of the day, while also investigating the prominent participation in the colonial movement of Jews and Germans of Jewish descent and their tense relationship with procolonial antisemites.

Working from the premise that the rise and propagation of racial antisemitism in late-nineteenth-century Germany cannot be separated from the context of colonial empire, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany is the first work to study the dynamic and evolving interrelationship of the colonial and antisemitic movements of the Kaiserreich era. It shows how individuals and organizations who originated what would later become the ideological core of National Socialism---racial antisemitism---both influenced and perceived the development of a German colonial empire predicated on racial subjugation. It also examines how colonialism affected the contemporaneous German antisemitic movement, dividing it over whether participation in the nationalist project of empire building could furnish patriotic credentials to even Germans of Jewish descent. The book builds upon the recent upsurge of interest among historians of modern Germany in the domestic impact and character of German colonialism, and on the continuing fascination with the racialization of the German sense of self that became so important to German history in the twentieth century.

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.

In the spring of 1929, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer met for a public conversation in Davos, Switzerland. They were arguably the most important thinkers in Europe, and their exchange touched upon the most urgent questions in the history of philosophy: What is human finitude? What is objectivity? What is culture? What is truth?

Over the last eighty years the Davos encounter has acquired an allegorical significance, as if it marked an ultimate and irreparable rupture in twentieth-century Continental thought. Here, in a reconstruction at once historical and philosophical, Peter Gordon reexamines the conversation, its origins and its aftermath, resuscitating an event that has become entombed in its own mythology. Through a close and painstaking analysis, Gordon dissects the exchange itself to reveal that it was at core a philosophical disagreement over what it means to be human.

But Gordon also shows how the life and work of these two philosophers remained closely intertwined. Their disagreement can be understood only if we appreciate their common point of departure as thinkers of the German interwar crisis, an era of rebellion that touched all of the major philosophical movements of the day—life-philosophy, philosophical anthropology, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and existentialism. As Gordon explains, the Davos debate would continue to both inspire and provoke well after the two men had gone their separate ways. It remains, even today, a touchstone of philosophical memory.

This clear, riveting book will be of great interest not only to philosophers and to historians of philosophy but also to anyone interested in the great intellectual ferment of Europe’s interwar years.

An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources, of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance who, charged with a scandalous crime, renounced his faith and converted to Catholicism.

In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy’s ruling elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was sentenced to die but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole “de’ Fedeli” (“One of the Faithful”). With the help of powerful patrons like Duchess Eleonora of Aragon and Duke Ercole d’Este, his namesake, Ercole lived as a practicing Catholic for three more decades. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church.

A Convert’s Tale explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was born and raised; the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly hallmarks; and Ercole’s relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig also examines homosexuality in Renaissance Italy, the response of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole’s story we see how precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates’ former coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new faith.