How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.

Surveys Holocaust denial activities and publications around the world, with a separate chapter on the United States (pp. 10-24), referring to the penetration of Holocaust denial propaganda in American universities and in the media. Focuses on concrete ways of refuting specific claims made by the deniers. The four appendices (pp. 100-152) include propagandistic material published by Bradley R. Smith (from the Institute for Historical Review), a transcript of a TV talk show on Holocaust denial (30 April 1992), a list of Holocaust-denying books and pamphlets (only author and title given), and articles from the "Journal of Historical Review."

"Austerity Baby might best be described as an "oblique memoir". Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word."--Publisher's description.

The world of ten-year-old Jacob and his younger brother Solly falls apart when they are orphaned and pitched into a Sydney children's home, where other refugee Jewish children are gathering as Hitler rises to power in Europe.

Praise for Nazi Gold "A compelling book on one of the greatest robberies of all time." --Rabbi Marvin Heir, dean, Simon Wesenthal Center "Nazi Gold [is] a compelling, outraged, carefully researched book. . . Tom Bower, one of the finest investigative journalists in the English-speaking world over the past generation. . .is the ideal chronicler for this story. Over the past 20 years he has built up a track record second to none in documenting crimes and conspiracies that the Nazis and their collaborators were able to cover up or escape from in the decades after 1945. . .Riveting, outstanding." --Martin Sieff, Washington Times "Nazi Gold is an important book that uncovers much new material." --Saul Friendlunder, author of Nazi Germany and the Jews "Compelling reading." --Chicago Jewish Star "[A] sensational expose. . .Impressively revealing." --Dade Jewish Star Some Revelations form Nazi Gold In 1942 thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing a Nazi roundup of Jews in occupied France crossed the border into Switzerland seeking asylum but where forcibly pushed back to the waiting Gestapo by the Swiss police. Virtually all of them were immediately shipped to concentration camps. During the war thousands of Swiss willingly worked undercover for the German secret service and the Nazis. The Swiss accepted for deposit without question gold bullion looted by German from the treasuries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, and Holland'countries they had conquered. The Swedes and the Portuguese, also neutrals, refused to accept the looted gold.

This book tells the little-known story of why a quarter-million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labor, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground, where some 1,500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany. By 1950 a little community of 20,000 Jews remained in Germany: 8,000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two postwar Germanies. After the fall of Communism, the Jewish community was suddenly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of former Soviet Jews. Now there are some 100,000 Jews in Germany. The old, somewhat nostalgic life of the first postwar decades is being swept aside by radical forces from the Lubavitcher at one end to Reform and feminism at the other. What started in 1945 as a "remnant" community has become a dynamic new center of Jewish life.

In 1961, Beat writer Seymour Krim set Greenwich Village on its ear with a slim volume of essays that featured an unleashed voice, a brash title, and a foreword by Norman Mailer. James Baldwin called Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer an "extraordinary volume." Saul Bellow published an excerpt in his journal The Noble Savage, and Mailer saluted Krim’s jazzy prose with its "shifts and shatterings of mood." Despite such praise and critical attention, Krim’s work is excluded from most Beat anthologies and is little known outside literary circles. With Missing a Beat, a collection of eighteen essays by Krim published between 1957 and 1989, Cohen introduces this influential writer to a new generation. In the Village Voice, New York Magazine, New York Times, and elsewhere, Krim pioneered a new style of subjective and personal reporting to write about the postwar American scene from a Jewish angle. Aggressively unacademic, Krim’s journalism displays the "rapid, nervous, breathless tempo" that Irving Howe called a hallmark of Jewish literature. Krim outlived his early literary fame, but he produced an impressive body of work and was a tremendous prose stylist. Missing a Beat resurrects an American original, finding Krim a new literary home among such celebrated writers as Norman Mailer, David Mamet, and Saul Bellow.

Uncovers the powerful effects of 20th-century Jewish women's social and political activism on contemporary American life Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, Women's Studies Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace explores the social and political activism of American Jewish women from 1890 to the beginnings of World War II. Written in an engaging style, the book demonstrates that no history of the birth control, suffrage, or peace movements in the United States is complete without analyzing the impact of Jewish women's presence. The volume is based on years of extensive primary source research in more than a dozen archives and among hundreds of primary sources, many of which have previously never been seen. Voluminous personal papers and institutional records paint a vivid picture of a world in which both middle-class and working-class American Jewish women were consistently and publicly engaged in all the major issues of their day and worked closely with their non-Jewish counterparts on behalf of activist causes. This extraordinarily well-researched volume makes a unique contribution to the study of modern women's history, modern Jewish history, and the history of American social movements.

"In this new history, French author Georges Bensoussan retells the story of what life was like for Jews in the Arab world since 1850. During the early years of this time, it was widely believed that Jewish life in Arab lands was peaceful. Jews were protected by law and suffered much less violence, persecution, and inequality. Bensoussan takes on this myth and looks back over the history of Jewish-Arab relations in Arab countries. He finds that there is little truth to the myth and forwards a nuanced history of interrelationship that is not only diverse, but deals with local differences in cultural, religious, and political practice. Bensoussan divides the work into sections that cover 1850 to the end of WWI, from 1919 to the eve of WWII and then from WWII to the establishment of Israel and the Arab Wars. A new afterword brings the history of Jewish and Arab relations into the present day. Bensoussan has determined that the history of Jews in Arab countries is a history of slowly disintegrating relationships, increasing tension, violence, and persecution"--

"Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. It's my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill-at-ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round. In Mother's Boy, Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy he traces the life that brought him there. Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician. Grappling always with his family's history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus." --

Michael Stanislawski's provocative study of Max Nordau, Ephraim Moses Lilien, and Vladimir Jabotinsky reconceives the intersection of the European fin de siecle and early Zionism. Stanislawski takes up the tantalizing question of why Zionism, at a particular stage in its development, became so attractive to certain cosmopolitan intellectuals and artists. With the help of hundreds of previously unavailable documents, published and unpublished, he reconstructs the ideological journeys of writer and critic Nordau, artist Lilien, and political icon Jabotinsky. He argues against the common conception of Nordau and Jabotinsky as nineteenth-century liberals, insisting that they must be understood against the backdrop of Social Darwinism in the West and the Positivism of Russian radicalism in the fin de siecle, as well as Symbolism, Decadence, and Art Nouveau. When these men turned to Zionism, Stanislawski says, far from abandoning their aesthetic and intellectual preconceptions, they molded Zionism according to their fin de siecle cosmopolitanism. Showing how cosmopolitanism turned to nationalism in the lives and work of these crucial early Zionists, this story is a fascinating chapter in European and Russian, as well as Jewish, cultural and political history.

Chs. 7 and 8 (pp. 79-110) discuss how the Holocaust has changed Jewish thought, especially on ethics and theology. In keeping with the principle of historicism of Judaism, contends that the Holocaust generated a set of new imperatives, including the importance of Jewish existence as a response to the Holocaust. Regards Rabbi Ephraim Oshry from Kovno as the first halakhic authority who began to alter Jewish ethics in the period of the Holocaust. Divides contemporary Jewish thinkers between those who recognize that the Holocaust was a unique event, and hence justify amendments in Jewish ethics and theology (e.g. Emil Fackenheim), and those who do not recognize it (e.g. Eliezer Berkovits); an intermediate attitude is held by Irving Greenberg.

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history. Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood. Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States. Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

"From the Nuremberg Trials to contemporary human rights, Jews have long played prominent roles in the making of international law. But the actual ties between Jewish heritage and legal thought remain a subject of mystery and conjecture even among specialists. This volume of biographical studies takes a unique interdisciplinary approach, pairing historians and legal scholars to explore how their Jewish identities and experiences shaped their legal thought and activism. Using newly-discovered sources and sophisticated interpretative methods, this book offers an alternative history of twentieth-century international legal profession - and a new model to the emerging field of international legal biography"--

" For Solo Violin is a gracefully written, elegiac memoir of childhood."— The Los Angeles Times "An eloquent tribute to [and] a moving account of those who, despite the cruelty of so many around them, found ways to rejoice and trust in the kindness of a few. One is instantly reminded of Life Is Beautiful ."—André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt In an extraordinary literary debut, Aldo Zargani reconstructs the lost world of his Jewish childhood during the perilous years 1938–45 when he and his family fled from Fascists and Nazis in northern Italy. His haunting memoir acquires a cinematic intensity as he crosscuts from the blood-red stone spires of Basel, where his father failed to find refuge for his family in 1939, to fiery scenes of the Allied bombing of Turin in 1942, to the freezing winter of 1943–44, which Zargani and his brother spent hidden in a Catholic boarding school deep in the countryside. For Solo Violin is filled with colorful portraits of Italian aristocrats and peasants, priests and soldiers, teachers and students, informers and partisans. At its heart is Zargani's vivid depiction of his father, a concert violinist forced to give up his career when the Fascists came to power. In this time of persecution, the Zargani family survived through their own resourcefulness and through the efforts of the many Italians who came to their aid, from the young doctor who helped them escape from Turin to the shepherd who supplied them with milk during the last year of the war, when they lived among the partisans in a remote Piedmont valley. Looking back over a distance of fifty years, Zargani rediscovers the enchantment of childhood shining in "fable-like constellations" even amidst the inferno of war. Lullabies and school games, fairy tales and family jokes are interwoven with the events of terror and oppression. Lyrical, humorous, tender, and wise, For Solo Violin is a testament to resilience and hope during the darkest period in human history. "A broad panorama of Italian-Jewish history in [the last] century. Elegant in its style and, however tragic, also rich with understatement, irony, and wit, For Solo Violin counts among the great, enduring works of art."— Focus Magazine , Germany "A tragic, deeply engaging, delicious book—yes delicious, too. (Reading it makes you smile.) It's a miracle…It makes one think of the wit of Kafka!"— L'Espresso , Italy "Zargani depicts a wealth of sad, despairing, but often also incredibly funny episodes…But vibrating along with the humor is always the sense of threat, and behind it opens the abyss of terror."— Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Switzerland

A groundbreaking interpretation of the intellectual origins of the United Nations No Enchanted Palace traces the origins and early development of the United Nations, one of the most influential yet perhaps least understood organizations active in the world today. Acclaimed historian Mark Mazower forces us to set aside the popular myth that the UN miraculously rose from the ashes of World War II as the guardian of a new and peaceful global order, offering instead a strikingly original interpretation of the UN's ideological roots, early history, and changing role in world affairs. Mazower brings the founding of the UN brilliantly to life. He shows how the UN's creators envisioned a world organization that would protect the interests of empire, yet how this imperial vision was decisively reshaped by the postwar reaffirmation of national sovereignty and the unanticipated rise of India and other former colonial powers. This is a story told through the clash of personalities, such as South African statesman Jan Smuts, who saw in the UN a means to protect the old imperial and racial order; Raphael Lemkin and Joseph Schechtman, Jewish intellectuals at odds over how the UN should combat genocide and other atrocities; and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, who helped transform the UN from an instrument of empire into a forum for ending it. A much-needed historical reappraisal of the early development of this vital world institution, No Enchanted Palace reveals how the UN outgrew its origins and has exhibited an extraordinary flexibility that has enabled it to endure to the present day.

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem "We were both small nations whose existence could never be taken for granted," Václav Havel said of the Czechs and the Jews of Israel in 1990, and indeed, the complex and intimate link between the fortunes of these two peoples is unique in European history. This book by one of the world's leading authorities on the history of Czech and Slovak Jewry during the Nazi period is the first to thoroughly document this singular relationship and to trace its impact on the fate of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust. Livia Rothkirchen provides a detailed and comprehensive history of how Nazi rule in the Czech lands was shaped as much by local culture and circumstances as by military policy. The extraordinary nature of the Czech Jews' experience emerges in chapters on the role of the Jewish minority in Czech life; the crises of the Munich agreement and the German occupation; the reaction of the local population to the persecution of the Jews; the policies of the London-based government in exile; the question of Jewish resistance; and the Theresienstadt ghetto. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia is based on a wealth of primary documents, many uncovered only after the 1989 November revolution, and includes an epilogue on the post-1945 period.

The compelling autobiography of Israel's preeminent photojournalist, illustrated with his most memorable images. Today, photojournalist David Rubinger stands at the peak of his profession: a winner of the Israel Prize for services to the media and a fixture on the masthead of Time, he is the only photographer whose work is on permanent display at the Knesset, Israel’s legislature. In this fascinating volume, he reports his own story, which in many ways reflects the history of Israel that he has recorded so faithfully with his camera. Born in Vienna in 1924, he emigrated to British Palestine in 1939 and developed a passion for photography while serving in the British army’s Jewish Brigade. After fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, he became a professional news photographer, reporting on each of his young nation’s subsequent wars from the front lines, at first for the Israeli media and later as a correspondent for Time-Life. He photographed all of Israel’s leaders, many of whom have allowed him a remarkable degree of access to their lives; Ariel Sharon said, “I trust Rubinger even though I know he doesn’t vote for me.” But Rubinger has not confined his reporting to war and politics; by photographing the successive waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe, the Arab world, Russia, and Ethiopia, he has also created a valuable record of Israel’s transformation from a country of six hundred thousand to one of seven million. In recounting his eventful career, Rubinger proves himself a gifted raconteur, sharing anecdotes of the many leading personalities he has photographed and telling the stories behind his most famous pictures, many of which are reproduced here at full-page size. Also illustrated are a selection of Rubinger’s never-before-published personal photographs, which provide vivid behind-the-scenes glimpses into the fast-paced and sometimes daring work of a photojournalist. Both a personal account of one man’s life with the camera and a visual document of the birth of a nation, Israel through My Lens is an essential book for anyone with an interest in Israeli history or the art of photojournalism.

The many thousands of Jews from German-speaking lands who came to the United States throughout the nineteenth century played a major part in laying the foundations of the Jewish community in America. The author considers these immigrants a branch of German Jewry, compelled to seek overseas the political and civil rights denied them at home. In this volume of the Ellis Island Series, the fascinating story of this mass immigration of mostly poor, enterprising, young people is told in vivid detail. Drawing on rare letters, diaries, memoirs, period newspapers, journals, and other firsthand accounts, Barkai traces the process of family-oriented chain migration, resettlement, and acculturation, exploring as well the group's relations with the Jewish community in Germany and with German and Jewish immigrants in the New World. Often starting out as peddlers and storekeepers, the immigrants moved back and forth from East Coast towns and cities to settlements in the South, Midwest, and Far West, helping to expand the American frontier and to develop cities such as Cincinnati St. Louis, Milwaukee, and San Francisco. The narrative chronicles their experiences in the goldfields of California, on Indian reservations, and during the Civil War, in which German-Jewish soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies struggled against bigotry to assert their civil rights. These engaging personal narratives are woven into an account of the formative role played by German-Jewish immigrants in establishing the institutional framework of the American-Jewish community. Their influential network of mutual aid and philanthropic organizations would be challenged, at the turn of the century, by the great mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe. The author's presentation of the dramatic encounter between these two groups sheds new light not only on this critical period in American-Jewish history but also on the dynamics of cultural change in a pluralist society.