Results by title
496 books match the query 'Jewish' and 99 start with t
The Marital Knot
Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648–1850Noa Shashar
Brandeis University Press, 2024
Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the activity of rabbis whose Jewish legal rulings determined the fate of agunot, literally “chained women,” who were often considered a marginal group. Who were these men and women? How did Jewish society deal with the danger of a woman’s becoming an agunah? What kind of reality was imposed on women who found themselves agunot, and what could they do to extricate themselves from their plight? How did rabbinic decisors discharge their task during this period, and what were the outcomes given the fact that the agunot were dependent on the male rabbinic establishment?
This study describes the lives of agunot, and by reexamining the halakhic activity concerning agunot in this period, proposes a new assessment of the attitude that decisors displayed toward the freeing of agunot.
The Narrow Bridge
Beyond the HolocaustIsaac Neuman, with Michael Palencia-Roth
University of Illinois Press, 2000
As a boy studying Torah, Isaac Neuman learned to seek the spiritual lessons hidden in everyday life. Likewise, in this narrative of occupation and holocaust, he uncovers a core of human decency and spiritual strength that inhumanity, starvation, and even death failed to extinguish.
Unlike many Holocaust memoirs that focus on physical suffering and endurance, The Narrow Bridge follows a spiritual journey. Neuman describes the world of Polish Jewry before and during the Holocaust, recreating the strong religious and secular personalities of his childhood and early youth in Zdunska Wola, Poland: the outcast butcher, Haskel Traskalawski; the savvy criminal-turned-entrepreneur Nochem Ellia; the trusted Dr. Lemberg, liaison to the German occupation government; and Neuman's beloved teacher, Reb Mendel. Through their stories, Neuman reveals the workings of a community tested to the limits of faith and human dignity.
With his brother Yossel, Neuman was transported to the Poznan area, first to the Yunikowo work camp in May 1941, then on to St. Martin's Cemetery camp, where they removed gold jewelry and fillings from exhumed corpses. A string of concentration camps followed, each more oppressive than the last: Fürstenfelde, Auschwitz, Fünfteichen, Gross Rosen, Mauthausen, Wels, and Ebensee. In the midst of these horrors, the brothers kept their feet on the "narrow bridge" of life by holding to their faith, their memories, and each other. In the end, only Isaac survived.
The Narrow Bridge celebrates symbolic victories of faith over brute force. The execution of Zdunska Wola's Jewish spiritual and intellectual leaders is trumped by an act of breathtaking courage and conviction. A secret Passover Seder is cobbled together from hoarded bits of wax, piecemeal prayers, and matzoh baked in delousing ovens. A dying fellow inmate gives Neuman his warm coat as they both lie freezing on the ground.
Such rituals of faith and acts of kindness, combined with boyhood memories and a sense of spiritual responsibility, sustained Neuman through the Holocaust and helped him to reconstruct his life after the war. His story is a powerful testimony to an unquenchable faith and a spirit tried by fire.
The New Jewish Diaspora
Russian-Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel, and GermanyGitelman, Zvi
Rutgers University Press, 2016
The Open Door
A Passover HaggadahRabbi Sue Levi Elwell
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2002
The Oven
An Anti-LectureIlan Stavans
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
The People's Uprising and the Fall of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 1942–June 1943
Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss
Brandeis University Press, 2026
The People’s Uprising and the Fall of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 1942–June 1943 sheds light on the lives, choices, and experiences of the tens of thousands of Jews who were not part of the underground armed resistance but nonetheless supported the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This riveting and dramatic account focuses on the final year of the Warsaw ghetto, from the Great Deportation in the summer of 1942 through the suppression of the uprising in mid-1943. Drawing on powerful contemporary testimonies, diaries, and documents—many of them previously unexplored—Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss
reveals how members of the broader Jewish population struggled to survive, maintain family and community life, and make impossible moral decisions in the face of fear, hunger, and daily violence. Looking beyond the fighters themselves, the book offers a story of devastation, but also of resilience and human dignity.
Published in association with Yad Vashem.
The Poetry of Asher Reich
Portrait of a Hebrew PoetYair Mazor
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Asher Reich’s poetry has been characterized as vivid, vibrant, passionate, and expressionistic. Dominated by themes of stormy sensuality and frank sexuality, his dramatic imagery and metaphors interweave Mishnaic, Talmudic, and Biblical references in a colorful, complex poetic texture. The beautiful simplicity of Kovner’s drawings—depicting female figures and natural landscapes—resonates throughout the book. Tender, stark, and striking, the drawings illustrate life’s fragility and grace with a subtlety and dignity that complements Reich’s sensitive style.
Presenting contemporary Hebrew poetry, modern Israeli art, and informed literary commentary in an engaging format, this book promises to delight a broad audience of readers.
The Postcolonial Jewish Question
Colonialism and the Politics of Difference in Postwar FranceMendel Kranz
University of Chicago Press, 2026
A history of how decolonization shaped Jewish political identity in late-twentieth-century France.
In The Postcolonial Jewish Question, Mendel Kranz shows how France’s colonial history fundamentally shaped contemporary debates among Jews in France about racism, discrimination, and minority politics during the late twentieth century. As the wider country confronted the legacies of the Holocaust and the decline of its colonial empire, Jewish thinkers questioned the boundaries of their own political identity and challenged prevailing paradigms of Western universalism. This book traces how prominent and lesser-known thinkers—including Albert Memmi, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Finkielkraut, and Wladimir Rabi—as well as organizations like the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française engaged with issues of oppression, nationhood, and communal identity, and the ways that colonialism and its afterlives shaped those discussions. Kranz reveals how the Jewish question itself changed shape through confrontations with postcolonial politics. In doing so, he calls for a reassessment of the parameters of the Jewish question amid colonialism’s enduring legacies in the present.
The Quiet Voices
Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990sMark K. Bauman
University of Alabama Press, 1997
These wide-ranging essays reveal the various roles played by southern rabbis in the struggle for black civil rights since Reconstruction
The study of black-Jewish relations has become a hotbed of controversy, especially with regard to the role played by Jewish leaders during the Civil Rights movement. Did these leaders play a pivotal role, or did many of them, especially in the South, succumb to societal pressure and strive to be accepted rather than risk being persecuted? If some of these leaders did choose a quieter path, were their reasons valid? And were their methods successful?
Individually, each essay offers a glimpse into both the private and public difficulties these rabbis faced in their struggle to achieve good. Collectively, the essays provide an unparalleled picture of Jewish leadership during the civil rights era.
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World
Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United StatesDaniel J. Walkowitz
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism. What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.
The Resistible Rise of Antisemitism
Exemplary Cases from Russia, Ukraine, and PolandLaura Engelstein
Brandeis University Press, 2020
Antisemitism as a political weapon did not stand unchallenged, even in Eastern Europe, where its consequences were particularly dire. In this region, Jewish leaders mobilized across national borders and in alliance with non-Jewish public figures on behalf of Jewish rights and in opposition to anti-Jewish violence. Antisemites were called to account and forced on the defensive. In Imperial and then Soviet Russia, in newly emerging Poland, and in aspiring Ukraine—notorious in the West as antisemitic hotbeds—antisemitism was sometimes a moral and political liability. These intriguing essays explore the reasons why, and they offer lessons from surprising places on how we can continue to fight antisemitism in our times.
The River of Angry Dogs
A MemoirMira Hamermesh
Pluto Press, 2004
As a young Jewish teenager Hamermesh escaped the horrors of German-occupied Poland and was spared the experience of the ghetto and the concentration camp that claimed most of her family. Mira shows how her status as a refugee has continued to influence her throughout her life. The journey led her across Europe and eventually to Palestine in 1941; her account of that region, before the establishment of Israel, provides a fascinating insight into the historical setting for today's conflict.
Having settled in London where she studied art and married, she eventually won a place at the celebrated Polish Film School in Lodz. At the height of the Cold War Mira Hamermesh commuted across the Iron Curtain – her experience of a divided Europe offers many insights into the political factors that affected people's everyday lives. Mira's theme of political conflict, so often explored in her films, is brought to life here in an intimate account that will live long in the memory.
The Road to September 1939
Polish Jews, Zionists, and the Yishuv on the Eve of World War IIJehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit
Brandeis University Press, 2018
The Safe House
A NovelChristophe Boltanski
University of Chicago Press, 2017
When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat.
That house (and its vehicular appendage) is at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan—introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother—a woman of “savage appetites”—and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself.
The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. A French-language film adaptation, La cache, was released in 2025 from director Lionel Baier. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.
The Schlemiel as Metaphor, Revised and Enlarged Edition
Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish FictionSanford Pinsker
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991
The certainty that deep down we are all schlemiels is perhaps what makes America love an inept ball team or a Woody Allen who unburdens his neurotic heart in public.
In this unique, revised history of the schlemiel, Sanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace the schlemiel from his beginnings in the Old Testament through his appearance in the nineteenth-century literature of Mendele Mocher Seforim and Sholom Aleichem to his final development as the beautiful loser in the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen. Horatio Alger might have once been a good emblem of the American sensibility, but today Woody Allen’s anxious, bespectacled punin (face) seems closer, and truer, to our national experience. His urban, end-of-the-century anxieties mirror—albeit in exaggeration—our own.
This expanded study of the schlemiel is especially relevant now, when scholarship of Yiddish and American Jewish literature is on the increase. By sketching the family tree of that durable anti-hero the schlemiel, Pinsker proves that Jewish humor is built upon the very foundations of the Jewish experience. Pinsker shows the evolution of the schlemiel from the comic butt of Yiddish jokes to a literary figure that speaks to the heart of our modern problems, and he demonstrates the way that Yiddish humor provides a sorely needed correction, a way of pulling down the vanities we all live by.
The Sephardim in the Holocaust
A Forgotten PeopleIsaac Jack Lévy with Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
University of Alabama Press, 2020
A Powerful History of Sephardic Life, Loss, and Resilience During the Holocaust
The Sephardim suffered devastation during the Holocaust, but this facet of history is poorly documented. What literature exists on the Sephardim in the Holocaust focuses on specific countries, such as Yugoslavia and Greece, or on specific cities, such as Salonika, and many of these works are not available in English.
The Sephardim in the Holocaust: A Forgotten People embraces the Sephardim of all the countries shattered by the Holocaust and pays tribute to the memory of the more than 160,000 Sephardim who perished. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt draw on a wealth of archival sources, family history (Isaac and his family were expelled from Rhodes in 1938), and more than 150 interviews conducted with survivors during research trips to Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States. Lévy follows the Sephardim from Athens, Corfu, Cos, Macedonia, Rhodes, Salonika, and the former Yugoslavia to Auschwitz.
The authors chronicle the interminable cruelty of the camps, from the initial selections to the grisly work of the Sonderkommandos inside the crematoria, detailing the distinctive challenges the Sephardim faced, with their differences in language, physical appearance, and pronunciation of Hebrew, all of which set them apart from the Ashkenazim. They document courageous Sephardic revolts, especially those by Greek Jews, which involved intricate planning, sequestering of gunpowder, and complex coordination and communication between Ashkenazi and Sephardic inmates—all done in the strictest of secrecy. And they follow a number of Sephardic survivors who took refuge in Albania with the benevolent assistance of Muslims and Christians who opened their doors to give sanctuary, and traces the fate of the approximately 430,000 Jews from Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, and Libya from 1939 through the end of the war.
The author’s intention is to include the Sephardim in the shared tragedy with the Ashkenazim and others. The result is a much needed, accessible, and viscerally moving account of the Sephardim’s unique experience of the Holocaust.
The Smell of Humans
A Memoir of the Holocaust in HungaryErno Szép
Central European University Press, 1994
The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf
Jewish Culture and Identity Between the LinesMarat Grinberg
Brandeis University Press, 2022
In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf, Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way.
The Stages of Memory
Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces BetweenJames E. Young
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Winner of the 2017 National Council on Public History Book Award
From around the world, whether for New York City's 9/11 Memorial, at exhibits devoted to the arts of Holocaust memory, or throughout Norway's memorial process for the murders at Utøya, James E. Young has been called on to help guide the grief stricken and survivors in how to mark their losses. This poignant, beautifully written collection of essays offers personal and professional considerations of what Young calls the “stages of memory,” acts of commemoration that include spontaneous memorials of flowers and candles as well as permanent structures integrated into sites of tragedy. As he traces an arc of memorial forms that spans continents and decades, Young returns to the questions that preoccupy survivors, architects, artists, and writers: How to articulate a void without filling it in? How to formalize irreparable loss without seeming to repair it?
Richly illustrated, the volume is essential reading for those engaged in the processes of public memory and commemoration and for readers concerned about how we remember terrible losses.
The Strangers We Became
Lessons in Exile from One of Iraq's Last JewsCynthia Kaplan Shamash
Brandeis University Press, 2015
The Talmud of the Land of Israel, Volume 16
Rosh HashanahJacob Neusner, General Editor
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The Tenement Saga
The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American WritersSanford Sternlicht
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Sternlicht discusses the role of women, the Yiddish Theater, secular values, the struggle between generations, street crime, politics, labor unions, and the importance of newspapers and periodicals. He documents the decline of Yiddish culture as these immigrants blended into what they called "The Golden Land."
The Terezín Album of Mariánka Zadikow
Annotated by Debórah Dwork
University of Chicago Press, 2008
An imprisoned bookbinder wrote these words in a small blank book that he had secretly crafted from pilfered materials at the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in September 1944. He presented the album to a fellow prisoner, twenty-one-year-old Marianka Zadików. Over the next several months, as the Nazis pressed forward with mass deportations from Terezín to Auschwitz, Marianka began to collect inscriptions and sketches from her fellow inmates.
Marianka Zadików’salbum, presented here in a facsimile edition, is a poignant document from the last months of the Holocaust. The words and images inscribed here—by children and grandparents, factory workers and farmhands, professionals and intellectuals, musicians and artists—reflect both joy and trepidation. They include passages of remembered verse, lovingly executed drawings, and hurried farewells on the eve of transport to Auschwitz. The great German-Jewish scholar Rabbi Leo Baeck, one of the elders of the camp, offers Marianka an inscription about Jewish self-discovery, and participants in Terezín’s now-famous musical performances fill several pages with musical annotation.
Facing-page translations render the book’s multitude of languages into English, while historical and biographical notes give details, where known, of the fates of those whose words are recorded here. An introduction by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Debórah Dwork tells the story of the Terezín camp and how Marianka and her family fared while imprisoned there.
The array of voices and the glimpses into individual lives afforded us by The Terezín Album make it an arresting reminder of the sustaining power of care, community, and hope amid darkness.
The Translated Jew
German Jewish Culture outside the MarginsLeslie Morris
Northwestern University Press, 2018
The Translated Jew brings together an eclectic set of literary and visual texts to reimagine the transnational potential for German Jewish culture in the twenty-first century. Departing from scholarship that has located the German Jewish text as an object that can be defined geographically and historically, Leslie Morris challenges national literary historiography and redraws the maps by which transnational Jewish culture and identity must be read.
Morris explores the myriad acts of translation, actual and metaphorical, through which Jewishness leaves its traces, taking as a given the always provisional nature of Jewish text and Jewish language. Although the focus is on contemporary German Jewish literary cultures, The Translated Jew also turns its attention to a number of key visual and architectural projects by American, British, and French artists and writers, including W. G. Sebald, Anne Blonstein, Hélène Cixous, Ulrike Mohr, Daniel Blaufuks, Paul Celan, Raymond Federman, and Rose Ausländer.
In thus realigning German Jewish culture with European and American Jewish culture and post-Holocaust aesthetics, this book explores the circulation of Jewishness between the United States and Europe. The insistence on the polylingualism of any single language and the multidirectionality of Jewishness are at the very center of The Translated Jew.
The Union Haggadah
Home Service for the PassoverCentral Conference of American Rabbis
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1923
A reprint of the historic Reform Haggadah originally published in 1923. In addition to the complete Passover home service, this edition includes an extensive section of essays on Passover in history, literature, and art. An important document of American Reform Jewish history. Illustrated.
The Universal Jew
Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist MomentMikhal Dekel
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.
The Unreliable Tree
PoemsMargot Kahn
Northwestern University Press, 2025
Born from a state of fragmented time, the poems in The Unreliable Tree call out the intimate feelings mothers so often fear to share. With a precise and tender eye, Margot Kahn tracks her early years of parenthood alongside the seasons of her family’s orchard. As she chronicles the changes in her marriage, her friendships, and her own shifting identity, Kahn questions the risks we take for devotion and the labors we devote to love. These poems shine a light on the patience and perseverance required to care—for homes, for people, for heritage—and ultimately question the choices we make: to hold on to others around us, and to hold on to ourselves. Compassionate, unflinching, lyric, and raw, The Unreliable Tree portrays the world of early motherhood with humility and complicated beauty.
The Upside-Down Forest
The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 2Richard Zimler
Tagus Press, 2027
When cruelty is sanctified, betrayal is rewarded as virtue, and the innocent must hide their true identities to survive, seventeen-year-old Isaaque Zarco struggles to preserve the principles he lives by and protect the people he loves in this luminous and deeply moving conclusion to The Vanished Souls duology.
As Isaaque attempts to put his life back together, mysteries and conflicts continue to haunt him, most prominently his father’s inexplicable rejection and the knowledge that his survival depends on concealing his identity and faith.
His world is shaken by a letter saying his grandmother, Flor, has been arrested. Unable to abandon the woman who guided him throughout his childhood, Isaaque crosses into Spain, entering a society ruled by fear and deception, where anonymous accusations carry the force of law and compassion itself has become an act of defiance. Flor has been transferred to a prison in Madrid. She has been physically broken by imprisonment. Isaaque learns that, under torture, she revealed the names of two of his oldest friends as secret Jews. Racing back to his home village, he embarks on a desperate attempt to help them escape before the Inquisition comes for them.
The Upside-Down Forest portrays a society in which slander is revered as truth, mercy is condemned as weakness, and persecution masquerades as justice. Giving voice to victims whose suffering has too often been erased from history, Richard Zimler explores how systems of fear corrupt not only institutions but also the bonds between family, friends, and neighbors. Ultimately, it asks what remains of our humanity when the moral order itself has been turned upside down—and whether a life shaped by love, loyalty, and compassion can still endure when survival itself demands treachery and betrayal.
The Venice Ghetto
A Memory Space that TravelsEdited by Chiara Camarda, Amanda K. Sharick, and Katharine G. Trostel
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
This interdisciplinary collection engages with questions about the history, conditions, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, including its legacy as a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed space. Contributors also consider the ghetto's influence on the figure of the Renaissance moneylender, the material culture of the ghetto archive, the urban form of North Africa's mellah and hara, and the ghetto's impact on the writings of Primo Levi and Marjorie Agosín.
In addition to the volume editors, The Venice Ghetto features a foreword from James E. Young and contributions from Shaul Bassi, Murray Baumgarten, Margaux Fitoussi, Dario Miccoli, Andrea Yaakov Lattes, Federica Ruspio, Michael Shapiro, Clive Sinclair, and Emanuela Trevisan Semi.
The Village of Vanished Souls
The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 1Richard Zimler
Tagus Press, 2027
Winner of Book of the Year in Portugal, The Village of Vanished Souls is a sweeping historical tale inspired by authentic records of the Portuguese Inquisition and the real lives of villagers whose stories have long been forgotten.
Portugal, 1671—Nine-year-old Isaaque Zarco lives a peaceful life in the remote mountain village of Castelo Rodrigo, where he helps his mother prepare meals, roams the surrounding forests with his spirited best friend Lena, and learns about nature from the village apothecary, Samuel. But his idyllic childhood is shattered when Lena and her family suddenly vanish, followed by a series of brutal murders that plunge the isolated community into fear.
When Isaaque’s formidable Castilian grandmother visits, she says what no one else dares: the Inquisition is hunting descendants of Jews who continue to secretly practice. Then she entrusts Isaaque with an even more dangerous secret—that he, too, belongs to a secret Jewish family. As she introduces him to the forbidden traditions and sacred writings of their ancestors, Isaaque’s understanding of his parents, his village, and himself is transformed forever.
As Isaaque comes of age, he is drawn into a clandestine network that helps persecuted Jews escape Portugal. Every mission carries the risk of imprisonment, torture, and death, yet this dangerous work gives Isaaque a profound sense of purpose while deepening his commitment to his heritage. When he learns that his beloved grandmother is ill, he embarks on a journey that will expose long-buried family secrets and reveal that learning to embrace his heritage is only the beginning of what will soon be asked of him.
Inspired by the names, arrest records, and testimonies preserved in Inquisitional archives, The Village of Vanished Souls recreates a little-known chapter of history with vivid historical detail and emotional depth. At once an unforgettable coming-of-age story and a moving portrait of resilience, identity, faith, and love, it gives voice to people whose courage endured despite centuries of persecution and forced silence.
The Wandering Signifier
Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American ImaginaryErin Graff Zivin
Duke University Press, 2008
In her readings of Spanish American and Brazilian fiction, Graff Zivin highlights inventions of Jewishness in which the concept is constructed as a rhetorical device. She argues that Jewishness functions as a wandering signifier that while not wholly empty, can be infused with meaning based on the demands of the textual project in question. Just as Jews in Latin America possess distinct histories relative to their European and North American counterparts, they also occupy different symbolic spaces in the cultural landscape. Graff Zivin suggests that in Latin American fiction, anxiety, desire, paranoia, attraction, and repulsion toward Jewishness are always either in tension with or representative of larger attitudes toward otherness, whether racial, sexual, religious, national, economic, or metaphysical. She concludes The Wandering Signifier with an inquiry into whether it is possible to ethically represent the other within the literary text, or whether the act of representation necessarily involves the objectification of the other.
The Wandering Womb
Essays in Search of HomeS. L. Wisenberg
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023
Even as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S. L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost of Europe dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six, she’s sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take her away, she’ll die without her asthma meds. In her late twenties, she infiltrates sorority rush at her alma mater, curious about whether she’ll get a bid now. Later in life, she makes her first and only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast biopsy (benign this time), prompting an exploration of misogyny, shame, and woman-fear in rabbinical tradition.
With wit, verve, blood, scars, and a solid dose of self-deprecation, Wisenberg wanders across the expanse of continents and combs through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. Her travels take her from Selma, Alabama, where her Eastern European Jewish ancestors once settled, to Vienna, where she tours Freud’s home and figures out what women really want, and she visits Auschwitz, which—disappointingly—leaves no emotional mark.
The Weavers of Trautenau
Jewish Female Forced Labor in the HolocaustJanine P. Holc
Brandeis University Press, 2023
Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentration camps, where they were held until liberation in 1945.
Using a fresh approach to testimony collections, Janine P. Holc reconstructs the forced labor experiences of young Jewish females, as told by the women who survived and shared their testimony. Incorporating new source material, the book carefully constructs survivors’ stories while also taking a theoretical approach, one alert to socially constructed, intersectional systems of exploitation and harm. The Weavers of Trautenau elucidates the limits and possibilities of social relations inside camps and the challenges of moral and emotional repair in the face of indescribable loss during the Holocaust.
The Year of Mourning
A Jewish JourneyRabbi Lisa D. Grant, PhD and Cantor Lisa B. Segal
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023
The Zionist Paradox
Hebrew Literature and Israeli IdentityYigal Schwartz
Brandeis University Press, 2014
These Words
Poetic Midrash on the Language of TorahAlden Solovy
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023
In These Words, liturgist Alden Solovy distills the Torah into its very essence: the individual words it contains. Echoing the midrash that the Torah has seventy faces, Solovy selects seventy of its Hebrew words that are pregnant with meaning. For each word, he delves into the etymology, translation, and usage, providing deeper insights into familiar texts. Then Solovy presents a beautiful poem—what he calls “poetic midrash”—inspired by and interpreting each word. From b’reishit (“in beginning”) to shamayim (“heavens”) to zachor (“remember”), These Words will change the way you look at the language of the Torah.
Thinking in Jewish
Jonathan Boyarin
University of Chicago Press, 1996
A fascination with this question prompted Jonathan Boyarin, one of America's most original thinkers in critical theory and Jewish ethnography, to offer the unexpected Jewish perspective on the vexed issue of identity politics presented here. Boyarin's essays explore the ways in which a Jewish—or, more particularly, Yiddish—idiom complicates the question of identity. Ranging from explorations of a Lower East Side synagogue to Fichte's and Derrida's contrasting notions of the relation between the Jews and the idea of Europe, from the Lubavitch Hasidim to accounts of self-making by Judith Butler and Charles Taylor, Thinking in Jewish will be indispensable reading for students of critical theory, cultural studies, and Jewish studies.
Third-Generation Holocaust Representation
Trauma, History, and MemoryVictoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger
Northwestern University Press, 2017
This Grateful Heart
Psalms and Prayers for a New DayAlden Solovy
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017
This Grateful Heart offers an anthology of modern day psalms and prayers to lift us up, inspire our days, and mark our milestones. Written by Jewish poet and liturgist Alden Solovy, the collection provides nearly 100 readings, spanning topics from the simple delights of daily living to the complexities of grief; from the celebration of major turning points like bar and bat mitzvah to the more solemn commemoration of lost lives and ended relationships; and from the awe-filled moments of the High Holy Days to the observance of secular holidays. For clergy, this collection offers supplementary material for use in services and life cycle rituals; for the individual, this collection can serve as a way to give voice to the joys and sorrows of everyday life.
This Happy Land
The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum CharlestonJames William Hagy
University of Alabama Press, 1993
This Joyous Soul
A New Voice for Ancient YearningsAlden Solovy
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2019
Like its predecessor, This Grateful Heart, this volume of creative liturgy opens a door into the transformative power of prayer. Structured to reflect the morning service found within Mishkan T'filah, this collection invites a deeply personal prayer experience that will strengthen our connection to Judaism and to the Reform siddur.
This Place Holds No Fear
Monika Held
Haus Publishing, 2014
In this moving novel, Monika Held draws on first-hand reports by Auschwitz survivors to paint an emotive picture of life and love governed by trauma. Throughout, Heiner’s suffering is omnipresent, and Lena’s struggle to hold her own in a relationship dominated by his past is deeply moving. His stories are horrific and disturbing, but they are a part of his identity; he cannot survive without them. And slowly, Lena learns to cherish her own past despite its apparent insignificance.
With its sensitive treatment of two people struggling to confront the Holocaust’s atrocities from very different vantage points, This Place Holds No Fear is a powerful novel of finding love after experiencing unimaginable loss.
Three Stars of Redemption
The Influential Women in the Life of Franz RosenzweigAmy Hill Shevitz
University of Alabama Press, 2026
A revelatory study of the overlooked ways that Franz Rosenzweig’s closest relationships with women shaped his philosophical legacy and reframed Jewish thought
Three Stars of Redemption: The Influential Women in the Life of Franz Rosenzweig by Amy Hill Shevitz offers a groundbreaking reexamination of Franz Rosenzweig, one of the most influential Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, through the lens of three pivotal women in his life. The book is a compelling study of the ways that Rosenzweig’s intellectual and emotional world were shaped by his mother, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, his wife, Edith Hahn Rosenzweig, and his lover Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, charting the influence those women had, by extension, on modern Jewish thought.
Rosenzweig is best known for his work of essential religious philosophy The Star of Redemption and his role in the Weimar Jewish Renaissance. Yet Shevitz reveals how the maternal, romantic, and marital relationships he maintained were not peripheral but central to his philosophical development and lived Judaism. Drawing on archival research and close readings of correspondence and historical context, Shevitz restores agency to these women, whose lives have been marginalized or misrepresented in scholarship. Adele’s bourgeois upbringing and intimate intellectual bond with her son, Edith’s independent journey into Judaism, and Margrit’s complex role as both muse and thinker are explored with nuance and depth. Shevitz challenges reductive portrayals and brings their full humanity to light. This richly contextualized study expands the understanding of Jewish cultural history, gender, and the personal dimensions of philosophical inquiry. Three Stars of Redemption is a vital contribution to Jewish studies, women’s history, and the legacy of Rosenzweig’s thought.
Three-Way Street
Jews, Germans, and the TransnationalJay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
To Come to the Land
Immigration and Settlement in 16th-Century Eretz-IsraelAbraham David, translated by Dena Ordan
University of Alabama Press, 1999
To Come to the Land makes available in English a vast body of research,
previously available only in Hebrew, on the early history of the land now
known as Israel.
Abraham David here focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled
the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th century, tracing the beginnings of
Sephardic influence in the land of Israel.
After the Ottoman Turks conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516,
the Ottoman regime, unlike their Mamluk predecessors, encouraged economic
development and settlement throughout the region. This openness to immigration
offered a solution to the crisis Iberian Jews were undergoing as a result
of their expulsion from Spain and the forced conversions in Portugal. Within
a few years of the Ottoman conquest, Jews of Spanish extraction, many of
them clustered in urban areas, dominated the Jewish communities of Eretz-Israel.
In this carefully researched study, David examines the lasting impression
made by these enterprising Jewish settlers on the commercial, social, and
intellectual life of the area under early Ottoman rule. Of particular interest
is his examination of the cities of Jerusalem and Safed and David's succinct
biographies of leading Jewish personalities throughout the region.
This first English translation of a ground-breaking Hebrew work provides
a comprehensive overview of a significant chapter in the history of Israel
and explores some of the factors that brought to it the best minds of the
age. Essential for scholars of late Medieval Jewish history, To Come to
the Land will also be an important resource for scholars of intellectual
history, as it provides background crucial to an understanding of the intellectual
flourishing of the period.
To Life
Jews Exploring NatureJoel Greenberg
Rutgers University Press, 2026
To Life explores the Jewish relationship with nature by illuminating significant Jewish thinkers who increased in important ways our understanding of various aspects of natural history. In eight compelling chapter-long biographies, naturalist Joel Greenberg demonstrates the diversity of both Jewish identity and the natural sciences.
Greenberg’s rich biographical sketches spotlight great Jewish scientists who not only made major contributions to the study of the natural world but also led rich and colorful lives: botanist and spy Aaron Aaronsohn, zoologist Libbie Henrietta Hyman, infamous ornithologist Nathan Leopold, mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz, arachnologist Herbert Levi, herpetologist Hymen Marx, public health entomologist Andrew Spielman, and ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld. These individuals manifested different aspects of Jewish identity—some observant, some secular—but all were affected in one way or another by their being Jewish.
By exploring the relationship between Jews and nature through the lives of these figures, Greenberg shares new and underrecognized aspects of Jewish and environmental history and opens new portals into the fields they studied.
Tormented Master
A Life of Rabbi Nahman of BratslavWritten by Arthur E. Green
University of Alabama Press, 1979
“If Hasidism begins in the life-enhancing spirituality of the Baal Shem Tov, it concludes in the tortuous, elitist and utterly fascinating career of Nahman of Bratslav (1722–1810) whose biography and teaching Arthur Green has set forth in his comprehensive, moving, and subtle study, Tormented Master.
“Arthur Green has managed to lead us through the thickets of the Bratslaver discourse with a grace and facility thus far unequaled in the English language literature on Hasidism. Tormented Master is a model of clarity and percipience, balancing awed respect and honor for its subject with a ruthless pursuit of documented truth. . . . Tormented Master is sufficiently open to the agonies of religion in general and the issues of modern religion in particular to make Nahman a thinker utterly relevant to our time.
“Nahman of Bratslav is unique in the history of Judaism, Green emphasizes, for having made the individual’s quest for intimacy with God the center of the religious way. He was a Kierkegaard before his time, believing in the utter abandon of the life of faith and the risk of paradoxicality. . . . He was, more than all others, the predecessor of Kafka, whose tales, like Nahman’s, have no explicit key and rankle, flush and irritate the spirit, compelling us—even in our failure to understand—to acknowledge their potency and challenge.”
—New York Times
Transmitting Jewish History
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Conversation with Sylvie Anne GoldbergYosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Sylvie Anne Goldberg
Brandeis University Press, 2021
Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) possessed a stunning range of erudition in all eras of Jewish history, as well as in world history, classical literature, and European culture. What Yerushalmi also brought to his craft was a brilliant literary style, honed by his own voracious reading from early youth and his formative undergraduate studies. This series of interviews paints a revealing portrait of this giant of history, bringing together exceptional material on Yerushalmi’s personal and intellectual journeys that not only attests to the astonishing breakthrough of the issues of Jewish history into “general history,” but also offers profound insight into being Jewish in today's world.
Tropical Zion
General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of SosúaAllen Wells
Duke University Press, 2009
Why did a dictator admit these desperate refugees when so few nations would accept those fleeing fascism? Eager to mollify international critics after his army had massacred 15,000 unarmed Haitians, Trujillo sent representatives to Évian, France, in July, 1938 for a conference on refugees from Nazism. Proposed by FDR to deflect criticism from his administration’s restrictive immigration policies, the Évian Conference proved an abject failure. The Dominican Republic was the only nation that agreed to open its doors. Obsessed with stemming the tide of Haitian migration across his nation’s border, the opportunistic Trujillo sought to “whiten” the Dominican populace, welcoming Jewish refugees who were themselves subject to racist scorn in Europe.
The Roosevelt administration sanctioned the Sosúa colony. Since the United States did not accept Jewish refugees in significant numbers, it encouraged Latin America to do so. That prodding, paired with FDR’s overriding preoccupation with fighting fascism, strengthened U.S. relations with Latin American dictatorships for decades to come. Meanwhile, as Jewish organizations worked to get Jews out of Europe, discussions about the fate of worldwide Jewry exposed fault lines between Zionists and Non-Zionists. Throughout his discussion of these broad dynamics, Wells weaves vivid narratives about the founding of Sosúa, the original settlers and their families, and the life of the unconventional beach-front colony.