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Born in Prague to Holocaust survivors, Hadassah Lieberman and her family immigrated in 1949 to the United States. She went on to earn a BA from Boston University in government and dramatics and an MA in international relations and American government from Northeastern University. She built a career devoted largely to public health that has included positions at Lehman Brothers, Pfizer, and the National Research Council. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Joe Lieberman, a US senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president with Al Gore and would go on to run for president.

In Hadassah, Lieberman pens the compelling story of her extraordinary life: from her family's experience in Eastern Europe to their move to Gardner, Massachusetts; forging her career; experiencing divorce; and, following her remarriage, her life on the national political stage. By offering insight into her identity as an immigrant, an American Jew, a working woman, and a wife, mother, and grandmother, Lieberman’s moving memoir speaks to many of the major issues of our time, from immigration to gender politics. Featuring an introduction by Joe Lieberman and an afterword by Megan McCain, it is a true American story.

A collection of rare writings and correspondence by a rabbi and diplomat active at the end of the Ottoman Empire

Rabbi, diplomat, linguist, fixer of delicate problems, Haim Nahum moved through the last years of the Ottoman world and the birth of the modern Middle East with uncommon dexterity. He left behind a rich trove of letters and writing, the best of which are collected in this volume. For contemporary readers, his story feels surprisingly current. He inhabited an age crowded with competing identities, clashing nationalisms, and endless political improvisations. In other words, he would feel perfectly at home today. 

The most intriguing feature of Nahum is not that he occupied important positions, but that he seemed constitutionally incapable of belonging to only one world. Equally at ease among statesmen, clerics, scholars, and bureaucrats, he functioned as a human connecting flight between cultures. In this fascinating biography first edited and published in French in 1990, Esther Benbassa captures this cosmopolitan figure without embalming him in reverence, allowing readers to encounter a subtle, resourceful, and occasionally elusive man whose métier was negotiation and whose natural habitat was complexity. 

This book will delight readers of Ottoman history, Jewish history, Middle Eastern affairs, diplomatic history, biography, religious studies, and Mediterranean culture. It will also appeal to polyglots, antiquarians, devotees of vanished empires, and anyone attracted to those liminal figures who stand at the crossroads of civilizations, translating not merely languages but entire ways of seeing the world.

A thorough case for a later date for of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles

In this collection of essays, Israel Finkelstein deals with key topics in Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1 and 2 Chronicles, such as the list of returnees, the construction of the city wall of Jerusalem, the adversaries of Nehemiah, the tribal genealogies, and the territorial expansion of Judah in 2 Chronicles. Finkelstein argues that the geographical and historical realities cached behind at least parts of these books fit the Hasmonean period in the late second century BCE. Seven previously published essays are supplemented by maps, updates to the archaeological material, and references to recent publications on the topics.

Features:

• Analysis of geographical chapters of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles
• Study of the Hasmonean period in the late second century BCE
• Unique arguments regarding chronology and historical background

This English translation of the second edition of Christian Frevel’s essential textbook Geschichte Israels (Kohlhammer, 2018) covers the history of Israel from its beginnings until the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE). Frevel draws on archaeological evidence, inscriptions and monuments, as well as the Bible to sketch a picture of the history of ancient Israel within the context of the southern Levant that is sometimes familiar but often fresh and unexpected. Frevel has updated the second German edition with the most recent research of archaeologists and biblical scholars, including those based in Europe. Tables of rulers, a glossary, a timeline of the ancient Near East, and resources arranged by subject make this book an accessible, essential textbook for students and scholars alike.

Exploring how Southern Jews forged identity, community, and belonging in the evolving landscape of the New South.
 
Homelands is a case study of a unique ethnic group in North America—small-town southern Jews. Both Jews and southerners, Leonard Rogoff points out, have long struggled with questions of identity and whether to retain their differences or try to assimilate into the national culture. Rogoff shows how, as immigrant Jews became small-town southerners, they constantly renegotiated their identities and reinvented their histories.

The Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish community was formed during the 1880s and 1890s, when the South was recovering from the Reconstruction era and Jews were experiencing ever-growing immigration as well as challenging the religious traditionalism of the previous 4,000 years. Durham and Chapel Hill Jews, recent arrivals from the traditional societies of eastern Europe, assimilated and secularized as they lessened their differences with other Americans. Some Jews assimilated through intermarriage and conversion, but the trajectory of the community as a whole was toward retaining their religious and ethnic differences while attempting to integrate with their neighbors.

The Durham-Chapel Hill area is uniquely suited to the study of the southern Jewish experience, Rogoff maintains, because the region is exemplary of two major trends: the national population movement southward and the rise of Jews into the professions. The Jewish peddler and storekeeper of the 1880s and the doctor and professor of the 1990s, Rogoff says, are representative figures of both Jewish upward mobility and southern progress.
 

Explore how American conditions and Jewish circumstances collided in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

In this new book award-winning author Hasia R. Diner explores the issues behind why European Jews overwhelmingly chose to move to the United States between the 1820s and 1920s. Unlike books that tend to romanticize American freedom as the force behind this period of migration or that tend to focus on Jewish contributions to America or that concentrate on how Jewish traditions of literacy and self-help made it possible for them to succeed, Diner instead focuses on aspects of American life and history that made it the preferred destination for 90 percent of European Jews.

Features:

• Examination of the realities of race, immigration, color, money, economic development, politics, and religion in America
• Exploration of an America agenda that sought out white immigrants to help stoke economic development and that valued religion as a force for morality

Jews have lived in small-town New England since the colonial era, but during the last hundred years they have been especially active contributors to the region's cultural life. Part oral history, part ethnography, and part literary portrait, How Strange It Seems tells the story of this often overlooked group, tracing its patterns of settlement, economic activity, civic involvement, and religious life since the late 1800s. 

Based on more than fifty interviews with men and women of all ages from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, it seeks to understand what is distinctive—and not so distinctive—about contemporary Jewish communities outside the larger urban centers of the Northeast. Michael Hoberman weaves the personal stories of these individuals and families into a collective narrative that offers as much folklore as history and is equal parts Jewish and Yankee. He introduces us to Hiram Adelman, a Russian immigrant peddler and potato farmer who settled in northernmost Maine because its climate was comparable to his native Siberia, and to Shmuel Simenowitz, an urban transplant who produces kosher maple syrup in southern Vermont. We also meet Suzie Laskin, who moved to the White Mountains region of New Hampshire in the 1900s and soon established a local havurah, and Bob August of Whately, Massachusetts, who once ran what may have been the world's only Christmas tree farm owned by a Jewish family. 

Each section of the book explores how small-town New England Jews have both departed from and mimicked the broader patterns of Jewish American experience, while also illustrating how they have acclimated themselves to local practices without relinquishing a strong sense of Jewish identity. Accompanying the text are photographs by Janice Sorensen that include portraits of many of the interviewees and lively glimpses of the region's present-day Jewish revival.