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Canine Pioneer
The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel
Edited by Susan Martha Kahn
Brandeis University Press, 2022
An insightful look at the life and legacy of a pioneer cynologist between Europe and Israel.
 
Rudolphina Menzel (née Waltuch, 1891–1973), was a Viennese-born, Jewish scientist whose pioneering research on canine psychology, development, and behavior fundamentally shaped the ways dogs came to be trained, cared for, and understood. Between the two world wars, Menzel was known throughout Europe as one of the foremost breeders and trainers of police dogs and served as a sought-after consultant at Kummersdorf, the German military dog training institute in Berlin. She was also a fervent Zionist who was responsible for inventing the canine infrastructure in what came to be the State of Israel and for training hundreds of dogs to protect Jewish lives and property in pre-state Palestine. Teaching Jews to like dogs and training dogs to serve Jews became Menzel’s unique kind of Zionist mission. Detailed and insightful, Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel brings to light an important piece of history.
 
 
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Cataclysms
A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge
Dan Diner, Translated by William Templer with Joel Golb
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
Cataclysms is a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop.
     Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis, Cataclysms chronicles twentieth century history as a “universal civil war” between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West.
    Diner’s interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and “ethnic cleansing,” situating the Holocaust at the core of the century’s predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.
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Catalog of the Bernice and Henry Tumen Collection of Jewish Ceremonial Objects in the Harvard College Library and the Harvard Semitic Museum
Violet Gilboa
Harvard University Press
This volume features photographic reproductions of 166 Jewish ceremonial objects including wine cups; beakers; Sabbath lamps; candlesticks; spice boxes; Hanukkah lamps; Torah pointers; crowns, shields, and finials; plates for the Passover Seder and other occasions; charity boxes; Esther scrolls; containers for the etrog fruit used on Sukkot; marriage rings; amulets; and others.
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Chaim Weizmann
A Biography
Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani
Brandeis University Press, 2024
A magisterial biography of Israel’s first president.
 
In Chaim Weizmann: A Biography, Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani show how Weizmann, a leader of the World Zionist Organization who became the first president of Israel, advocated for a Jewish state by gaining the support of influential politicians and statesmen as well as Jews around the world. Beginning with his childhood in Belorussia and concluding with his tenure as president, Reinharz and Golani describe how a Russian Jew, who immigrated to the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, was able to advance the goals of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Organization. Weizmann is also shown as a man of human foibles—his infatuations, political machinations, and elitism—as well as a man of admirable qualities—intelligence, wit, charisma, and dedication.
 
Weizmann, who came to the UK to work as a biochemist, was in regular communication with British political figures, including prime ministers Arthur James Balfour, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and Ramsay MacDonald. He also met presidents of the United States from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman. His success in earning the support of British political figures helped lead to the Balfour Declaration, which advocated for a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine.

As the authors show in this authoritative account of Weizmann’s life, Weizmann was guided by the belief that “Zion shall be redeemed in justice,” a phrase that recurs often in his writings.
 
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Checkbook Zionism
Philanthropy and Power in the Israel-Diaspora Relationship
Eric Fleisch
Rutgers University Press, 2024
American Jews donate approximately $2.5 billion to Israel each year. Behind all that money and influence lies a power-sharing dynamic that has left an indelible mark on the relationship between Israeli and American Jews and on the direction of Israeli society to this day. Checkbook Zionism investigates how both parties have managed their interests, emotions, and attitudes about the important yet at times tense collaboration between them.

By delving into the history of American Jews’ philanthropic giving to Israelis, Fleisch assesses the core nature of power sharing between both sides of the Jewish diaspora to the United States through in-depth contemporary case studies of the relationship between sixteen non-governmental organizations and their American Jewish donors. Field observation, document analysis, and interviews with leaders, activists, and select donors alike serve a critical role here, as Fleisch assesses whether these contemporary philanthropic associations repeat classic dynamics of power-sharing or whether they represent a marked departure from the Checkbook Zionism of old. The result is a new paradigm for evaluating power sharing that can be applied to future considerations of development in the Israel-Diaspora relationship. 
 
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Children and Play in the Holocaust
Games among the Shadows
George Eisen
University of Massachusetts Press, 1990
Occasionally an accident of research produces a book more engaging than the one the historian originally intended. While sifting through material for his Ph.D. dissertation, which dealt with an entirely different topic, Eisen came across a diary from the Vilna ghetto written by Zelig Kalmanovitch. His tone was sober, but not entirely so. The passage that caught Eisen's eye concerned a playground erected around 1942 and the author's inner conflict surrounded the coexistence of games and sports and mass murder in the ghetto.
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A Children's Haggadah
Rabbi Howard Bogot
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1996
This unique Haggadah, designed especially for young people, is a delightful asset for any seder table: at home, in religious schools or at community centers.  Through special foods, prayers and songs, children come to a personalized understanding of the miraculous event that is the Exodus.  The beautiful, original illustrations render the text a meaningful work of art for all those who read it.  This 8-1/2” x 11” volume includes art on every page and a vibrant accordion fold-out of the seder plate.
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The Choosing
A Rabbi's Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days
Myers, Andrea
Rutgers University Press, 2011

A young Lutheran girl grows up on Long Island, New York. She aspires to be a doctor, and is on the fast track to marriage and the conventional happily-ever-after. But, as the Yiddish saying goes, "Man plans, and God laughs." Meet Andrea Myers, whose coming-of-age at Brandeis, conversion to Judaism, and awakening sexual identity make for a rich and well-timed life in the rabbinate.

In The Choosing, Myers fuses heartwarming anecdotes with rabbinic insights and generous dollops of humor to describe what it means to survive and flourish on your own terms. Portioned around the cycle of the Jewish year, with stories connected to each of the holidays, Myers draws on her unique path to the rabbinate--leaving behind her Christian upbringing, coming out as a lesbian, discovering Judaism in college, moving to Israel, converting, and returning to New York to become a rabbi, partner, and parent.

Myers relates tales of new beginnings, of reinventing oneself, and finding oneself. Whether it's a Sicilian grandmother attempting to bake hamantaschen on Purim for her Jewish granddaughter, or an American in Jerusalem saving a chicken from slaughter during a Rosh Hashanah ritual, Myers keeps readers entertained as she reflects that spirituality, goodness, and morality can and do take many forms. Readers will enthusiastically embrace stories of doors closing and windows opening, of family and community, of integration and transformation. These captivating narratives will resonate and, in the author's words, "reach across coasts, continents, and generations."

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City Scriptures
Modern Jewish Writing
Murray Baumgarten
Harvard University Press, 1982

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.

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Coalfield Jews
An Appalachian History
Deborah R. Weiner
University of Illinois Press, 2006

The stories of vibrant eastern European Jewish communities in the Appalachian coalfields

Coalfield Jews explores the intersection of two simultaneous historic events: central Appalachia’s transformative coal boom (1880s-1920), and the mass migration of eastern European Jews to America. Traveling to southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia to investigate the coal boom’s opportunities, some Jewish immigrants found success as retailers and established numerous small but flourishing Jewish communities.

Deborah R. Weiner’s Coalfield Jews provides the first extended study of Jews in Appalachia, exploring where they settled, how they made their place within a surprisingly receptive dominant culture, how they competed with coal company stores, interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors, and maintained a strong Jewish identity deep in the heart of the Appalachian mountains. To tell this story, Weiner draws on a wide range of primary sources in social, cultural, religious, labor, economic, and regional history.  She also includes moving personal statements, from oral histories as well as archival sources, to create a holistic portrayal of Jewish life that will challenge commonly held views of Appalachia as well as the American Jewish experience.

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Collected Memories
Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony
Christopher R. Browning
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
    Christopher R. Browning addresses some of the most heated controversies that have arisen from the use of postwar testimony: Hannah Arendt’s uncritical acceptance of Adolf Eichmann’s self-portrayal in Jerusalem; the conviction of Ivan Demjanuk (accused of being Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible") on the basis of survivor testimony and its subsequent reversal by the Israeli Supreme Court; the debate in Poland sparked by Jan Gross’s use of both survivor and communist courtroom testimony in his book Neighbors; and the conflict between Browning himself and Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, regarding methodology and interpretation in the use of pre-trial testimony.
    Despite these controversies and challenges, Browning delineates the ways in which the critical use of such problematic sources can provide telling evidence for writing Holocaust history. He examines and discusses two starkly different sets of "collected memories"—the voluminous testimonies of notorious Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann and the testimonies of 175 survivors of an obscure complex of factory slave labor camps in the Polish town of Starachowice.
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Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany
Christian S. Davis
University of Michigan Press, 2012

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.

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Commentary In American Life
edited by Murray Friedman
Temple University Press, 2005
Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 as a monthly journal of "significant thought and opinion, Jewish affairs and contemporary issues," Commentary magazine has through the years had a far-reaching impact on American politics and culture. Commentary in American Life traces this influence over time, especially in creating the neoconservative movement. The authors of each chapter also consider the ways the magazine shaped and reflected major cultural and literary trends in the United States. The end result offers a full accounting of one of the most important journals of American political thought, providing insight into the development of American collective politics and culture over the last six decades.
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Committed to Memory
Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust
Oren Baruch Stier
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
How is contemporary public consciousness of the Holocaust shaped and communicated? How is commitment to its memory expressed and engendered? This book offers a close and critical analysis of a range of cultural activities that mediate the Holocaust for a public increasingly distant from the events of World War II. Oren Baruch Stier argues that the manner in which those events are committed to memory, coupled with the fervent dedication to memory exhibited by many people and institutions, produces distinct memorial mediations of the Shoah.

Stier discusses how these memorializations emerge, paying attention to the ways cultural memory is embodied individually, institutionally, and technologically. He defines and examines four modes of mediation: iconic, videotestimonial, museological, and ritual-ceremonial. In each context, he analyzes how Holocaust memory is inscribed, framed, displayed, and performed through a variety of media in a range of settings. Topics include the use of Holocaust-era railway cars, Art Spiegelman's Maus volumes, novels by Emily Prager, Martin Amis, and Elie Wiesel, and a CD-ROM that incorporates excerpts from Holocaust survivor testimonies. Institutions examined range from Washington's U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to Los Angeles's Museum of Tolerance, from Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies to the Visual History Foundation created by Steven Spielberg, to the international teen pilgrimage that is the March of the Living.

In the end, Committed to Memory asks what role forgetting can and does play in the memorial landscape, demonstrating how critical attention to our memorial investments, and to the mechanics and media of memory's construction and transmission, can uncover what is both gained and lost in these commitments.
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The Conflagration of Community
Fiction before and after Auschwitz
J. Hillis Miller
University of Chicago Press, 2011

“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.

Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness—with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.
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Confronting the Nation
Jewish and Western Nationalism
George L. Mosse
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
Confronting the Nation brings together twelve of celebrated historian George L. Mosse’s most important essays to explore competing forms of European nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mosse coins the term “civic religion” to describe how nationalism, especially in Germany and France, simultaneously inspired and disciplined the populace through the use of rituals and symbols. The definition of citizenship shaped by this nationalism, however, frequently excluded Jews, who were stereotyped as outsiders who sought to undermine the national community. With keen attention to liberal forms of nationalism, Mosse examines the clash of aspirational visions of an inclusive nation against cultural registers of nativist political ideologies. 

Mosse considers a broad range of topics, from Nazi book burnings to Americans’ search for unifying national symbols during the Great Depression, exploring how the development of particular modes of art, architecture, and mass movements served nationalist agendas by dictating who was included in the image of the nation. These essays retain their significance today in their examination of the cultural and social implications of contemporary nationalism. A new critical introduction by Shulamit Volkov, professor emerita of history at Tel Aviv University, situates Mosse’s analysis within its historiographical context.
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Continental Divide
Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
Peter E. Gordon
Harvard University Press, 2010

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.

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A Convert’s Tale
Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy
Tamar Herzig
Harvard University Press, 2019

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.

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A Corner of the Tapestry
A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s–1990s
Carolyn LeMaster
University of Arkansas Press, 1994
One of the most comprehensive studies ever done on a state’s Jewish community, A Corner of the Tapestry is the story—untold until now—of the Jews who helped to settle Arkansas and who stayed and flourished to become a significant part of the state’s history and culture. LeMaster has spent much of the past sixteen years compiling and writing this saga. Data for the book have been collected in part from the American Jewish Archives, American Jewish Historical Society, the stones in Arkansas’s Jewish cemeteries, more than fifteen hundred articles and obituaries from journals and newspapers, personal letters from hundreds of present and former Jewish Arkansans, congregational histories, census and court records, and some four hundred oral interviews conducted in a hundred cities and towns in Arkansas. This meticulous work chronicles the lives and genealogy of not only the highly visible and successful Jews who settled in Arkansas, but also those who comprised the warp and woof of society. It is a decidedly significant contribution to Arkansas history as well as to the wider study of Jews in the nation.
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The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940
Gershom Scholem
Harvard University Press, 1992
The legendary correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem bears indispensable witness to the inner lives of two remarkable and enigmatic personalities. Benjamin, acknowledged today as on of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem’s emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin’s death in 1940.
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Cosella Wayne
Or, Will and Destiny
Cora Wilburn, edited and introduced by Jonathan D. Sarna
University of Alabama Press, 2019
The first novel written and published in English by an American Jewish woman
 
Published serially in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light in 1860, Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny is the first coming-of-age novel, written and published in English by an American Jewish woman, to depict Jews in the United States and transforms what we know about the history of early American Jewish literature. The novel never appeared in book form, went unmentioned in Jewish newspapers of the day, and studies of nineteenth-century American Jewish literature ignore it com­pletely. Yet the novel anticipates many central themes of American Jewish writing: intermar­riage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the nature of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will.
 
The narrative recounts a relationship be­tween an abusive Jewish father and the re­bellious daughter he molested as well as that daughter’s struggle to find a place in the com­plex social fabric of nineteenth-century Amer­ica. It is also unique in portraying such themes as an unmarried Jewish woman’s descent into poverty, her forlorn years as a starving or­phaned seamstress, her apostasy and return to Judaism, and her quest to be both Jewish and a spiritualist at one and the same time.
 
Jonathan Sarna, who introduces the volume, discovered Cosella Wayne while pursuing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition is supplemented with selections from Cora Wilburn’s recently rediscovered diary, which are reprinted in the appendix. Together, these materials help to situate Cosella Wayne within the life and times of one of nineteenth-century American Jewry’s least known and yet most prolific female authors.
 
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Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle
Problems of Aristotle’s Physics in Jewish and Arabic Philosophy
Harry Austryn Wolfson
Harvard University Press
Hesdai Crescas was a true representative of the interpretation of the Arabic and Hebrew philosophic traditions. This volume reprints Harry Austryn Wolfson’s now classic study of Crescas’ Or Adonai, a historical and critical investigation of the main problems of Aristotle’s Physics and De Caelo.
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Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation
A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880–1955
Sandra McGee Deutsch
Duke University Press, 2010
In Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation, Sandra McGee Deutsch brings to light the powerful presence and influence of Jewish women in Argentina. The country has the largest Jewish community in Latin America and the third largest in the Western Hemisphere as a result of large-scale migration of Jewish people from European and Mediterranean countries from the 1880s through the Second World War. During this period, Argentina experienced multiple waves of political and cultural change, including liberalism, nacionalismo, and Peronism. Although Argentine liberalism stressed universal secular education, immigration, and individual mobility and freedom, women were denied basic citizenship rights, and sometimes Jews were cast as outsiders, especially during the era of right-wing nacionalismo. Deutsch’s research fills a gap by revealing the ways that Argentine Jewish women negotiated their own plural identities and in the process participated in and contributed to Argentina’s liberal project to create a more just society.

Drawing on extensive archival research and original oral histories, Deutsch tells the stories of individual women, relating their sentiments and experiences as both insiders and outsiders to state formation, transnationalism, and cultural, political, ethnic, and gender borders in Argentine history. As agricultural pioneers and film stars, human rights activists and teachers, mothers and doctors, Argentine Jewish women led wide-ranging and multifaceted lives. Their community involvement—including building libraries and secular schools, and opposing global fascism in the 1930s and 1940s—directly contributed to the cultural and political lifeblood of a changing Argentina. Despite their marginalization as members of an ethnic minority and as women, Argentine Jewish women formed communal bonds, carved out their own place in society, and ultimately shaped Argentina’s changing pluralistic culture through their creativity and work.

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The Curators
A Novel
Maggie Nye
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Violence haunts 1915 Atlanta and so does the golem a group of girls creates

A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.
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