This is the dramatic story of the rescue of Jews from Europe after World War II by North American Jewish volunteers who smashed through the British blockade and brought thousands of refugees to safe haven in Palestine through the illegal Aliyah Bet. Film director Alan Rosenthal was inspired by this book to create his documentary film Waves of Freedom, released in 2008. Packed with photos, and enhanced by the eminent historian Sir Martin Gilbert's introduction, this meticulously researched book is the definitive word on a little-known chapter of Jewish history. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Murray S. Greenfield was one of the volunteer sailors in the Aliyah Bet operations. He has served as executive director of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) and as volunteer director of the American Association for Ethiopian Jewry (AAEJ). He lives in Israel with his wife Hana.

What started out as a mutual affinity for kitschy Jewish album covers-think Neil Diamond baring his chest hair on the cover of "Hot August Night "or Barbra Streisand in hot pants on the cover of "Streisand Superman"-soon became a quest for identity, history, and culture between the grooves of LPs. Together, Roger Bennett and Josh Kun embarked on a thrilling journey, scouring the world to collect thousands of vinyl LPs from attics, garage sales, and dusty archives. Pieced together, these scratched, once-loved and now-forgotten audio gems tell a vibrant tale: the story of Jews in America. "And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl" spans the history of Jewish recorded music from the 1940s to the 1980s, weaving an account that begins with sacred songs and ends with the holy trinity of Neil, Barbra, and Barry. The LPs found here are also a love letter to forgotten moments in Jewish American pop history, celebrating well-dressed cantors singing Christmas tunes, Long Island suburbanites dancing the mambo, and Chassidic prog-rockers. The music, much of which is no longer available in any format, is brought to life through commentary from writers Aimee Bender, Etgar Keret, Michael Wex, and Shalom Auslander; performers Sandra Bernhard and Motown legend Lamont Dozier; music critics Oliver Wang and Anne Powers; and TV pioneer Norman Lear. A gateway to a forgotten kingdom of sound, the good, the bad, and the ugly of Jewish vinyl gives this aspect of Jewish culture the attention it so richly deserves.

This volume is a documented history of the Jewish people in North America from the late 16th century. It chronicles the evolving domestic, religious and political experiences of Jews in the American colonies and later the United States.

The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.

The author of such classic works as The Republican Roosevelt, V Was for Victory, and Years of Discord, John Morton Blum is one of a small group of intellectuals who for more than a quarter of a century dominated the writing of American political history. Writing now of his own career, Blum provides a behind-the-scenes look at Ivy League education and political power from the 1940s to the 1980s. Blum insightfully recounts a long and distinguished journey that began at Phillips Academy, where he first realized he could make a career of teaching and writing history. He tells how young men were socialized to the values of the Northeastern establishment in those years before World War II, and how as a non-practicing Jew he learned to overcome bigotry both at Andover and at Harvard, which then had no Jewish professors. In 1957 Blum joined the faculty of Yale University's history department, widely regarded as the nation's best, where he became both influential and popular and where his students included one future U.S. president as well as others who aspired to the office. He reveals much about the inner workings of Ivy League education and tells of controversies over the Vietnam War and the Black Panthers, his role in Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, and how he searched for common ground between reactionary faculty and radical students. More than a recounting of a singular life, Blum's story explains how political history was researched and written during the second half of the twentieth century, describing how the discipline evolved, gained ascendancy, and was challenged as historical fashions changed. It also offers revealing glimpses of such prominent academics as Kingman Brewster, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., C. Vann Woodward, and William Sloan Coffin. Over a distinguished career, Blum witnessed considerable change in elite educational institutions, where minorities and women were grossly underrepresented when he first entered academia. In a memoir brimming with insight and laced with humor, he looks back at the academy—"not a refuge from reality but an alternative reality"—as he reflects upon his intellectual journey and his contributions to the study and writing of twentieth-century American history.

"Heeding the Call: Jewish Voices in America's Civil Rights Struggle" chronicles the multifaceted role of Jewish Americans in the difficult struggle for civil rights. Their story will inspire the next generation of young Jews and African Americans to renew the legacy of cooperation which once united both groups. The struggle for equal rights in America forged a close connection between African Americans and Jews. But in recent years, that once amicable relationship has become strained. In "Heeding the Call," young people will discover how much the shared history of both groups unites rather than divides them.

"One would be hard-pressed to name a more admirable contemporary American example of the intellectual engage than Martin Duberman. Historian, playwright, memoirist, biographer, social commentator, teacher, activist and assured podium performer, Duberman is an unapologetic, uncategorizable and nonsectarian radical whose constant questioning of conventional wisdoms - even on the left - has made him one of this country's pre-eminent participants in the political and cultural wars that have riven public life."â__In These Times"A marvelous collection of a lifetime of courageous writing by a deeply moral and reflective man who has engaged the greatest struggles of our times with an unflinching nerve, a wise heart and a brilliant intellect informed at all times by compassion."â__Jonathan KozolThe lives of â__outsidersâ__ have been the focus of Martin Duberman's work as a public intellectual for the past four decades. Best known for his biography of Paul Robeson, Duberman highlights the "banding together" of the excluded in Left Out. These identity-based movementsâ__black power, gay liberation, feminismâ__have created a vital and controversial change in American consciousness in recent decades. Duberman's collected essays trace this evolution of thought to the history of dissent from abolitionism through the New Left to today's organizing.Presenting summations of Duberman's views on such matters as race, foreign policy, gender and sexuality, Left Out offers incisive analyses of the split between class-based and identity-based politics on the Left. The "godfather" of the gay studies movement, Duberman has taken many brave and prescient stands. His writing shows why he is considered a deeply moral and wise man. For the first time available in paperback, this edition, updated through 2002, includes three new essays: "The State of Gay Studies," "Queer Economic Justice," and "Jewish Radicals, Effeminacy, and the Rise of Gay Chauvinism".

Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the Depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remake American culture, but slowly suffocates his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black American musicians, only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge, and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another.

Discusses Jewish identity in America as reflected in the culture of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Self-hatred or, at least, ambivalence about oneself in the face of native American values is one theme. Ch. 5 (pp. 98-125), "To Make 'a Jew': Projecting Antisemitism in Post-War America", analyzes two novels - Arthur Miller's "Focus" and Saul Bellow's "The Victim" - that explore the psychosocial dimensions of postwar antisemitism. They raise the question whether possibilities of Jewish-Gentile relations might lead to personal and social renovation. In "Focus", a crypto-fascist antisemite who has internalized racist stereotypes finally identifies symbolically as a Jew. In "The Victim", both Jew and Gentile partially overcome their mutual stereotyping. The main Jewish protagonist also overcomes some negative aspects of his self-image.

"In 1926, Harvard athletic director Bill Bingham chose former Crimson All-American Arnold Horween as coach of the university's moribund football team. The pair instilled a fresh culture, one based on merit rather than social status, and in the virtues of honor and courage over mere winning. Yet their success challenged entrenched ideas about who belonged at Harvard and, by extension, who deserved to lay claim to the American dream. Zev Eleff tells the story of two immigrants' sons shaped by a vision of an America that rewarded any person of virtue. As a player, the Chicago-born Horween had led Harvard to its 1920 Rose Bowl victory. As a coach, he faced intractable opposition from powerful East Coast alumni because of his values and midwestern, Jewish background. Eleff traces Bingham and Horween's careers as student-athletes and their campaign to wrest control of the football program from alumni. He also looks at how Horween undermined stereotypes of Jewish masculinity and dealt with the resurgent antisemitism of the 1920s"--

"Roth examined the concept of Jewish identity years before the onset of National Socialism and looked ahead with apprehension to Germany's future. Emotionally ravaged by the whirlwind events of Weimar Germany, he dared to write about the historical schism between Eastern and Western Jews, warning of the false comforts of materialism and assimilation and urging his fellow Jews to embrace their heritage and the land of Palestine as a nascent Jewish homeland. As one of Berlin's most eminent journalists, he traveled throughout Europe and composed these essays with both an exigency and restrained contemplation that have earned him comparisons to his more celebrated contemporaries, Thomas Mann and Isaac Babel. By the mid-1930s, as anti-Semitism crested and Roth fled Germany for what he thought were safer climes in Paris, he became increasingly desperate and hobbled by alcoholism. He had tremendous difficulties securing a German publisher, and his powerful 1937 preface, written for what he hoped would be the second edition of The Wandering Jews and included here, was never published in his lifetime."-- Jacket.

One of America's most popular Jewish writers, Chaim Potok (b. 1929) is the author of such novels as The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969), The Book of Lights (1981), and Davita's Harp (1985). Each of his novels explores the tension between tradition and modernity, and the clash between Jewish culture and contemporary Western civilization, which he calls "core-to-core culture confrontation." Although primarily known as a novelist, Potok is an ordained Conservative rabbi and a world-class Judaic scholar who has also published children's books, theological discourses, biographies, and histories. Conversations with Chaim Potok presents interviews ranging from 1976 to 1999. Potok discusses the broad range of his writing and the deep influence of non-Jewish novels-in particular, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -on his work. Interviews bear witness to Potok's many other influences-Orthodox Jewish doctrine, Freudian psychoanalytical theory, Picasso's Guernica, and Jewish kabbalah mysticism. Though labeled an American Jewish writer, Potok argues that Flannery O'Connor should then be called an American Catholic writer and John Updike an American Protestant writer. "In his mind," editor Daniel Walden writes, "just as Faulkner was a writer focused on a particular place, Oxford, Mississippi, . . . so Potok's territory was a small section of New York City." Potok often explores conflict in his writings and in his interviews. Strict Jewish teachings deem fiction an artifice and therefore unnecessary, yet since the age of sixteen Potok has been driven to write novels. At the root of all of these conversations is Potok's intense interest in the turmoil between Jewish culture, religion, and tradition and what he calls "Western secular humanism." As he discusses his work, he continually includes broader issues, such as the state of Jewish literature and art, pointing out with pride and enthusiasm his belief that Jewish culture, in the twentieth century, has finally begun to have a significant role in producing and shaping the world's art and literature. Whether discussing the finer details of Talmudic textual analysis or his period of chaplaincy during the Korean War, Potok is articulate and philosophical, bringing deep consideration into what may seem small subjects. Although his novels and histories take place primarily in the recent past, the Chaim Potok that emerges from this collection is a writer deeply rooted in the tensions of the present. Daniel Walden is Professor Emeritus of American Studies, English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has written or edited several books, including On Being Jewish (1974), Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers (1984), The World of Chaim Potok (1985), and American Jewish Poets: The Roots and the Stems (1990).

"Jacob Neusner (born 1932) is one of the most important figures in the shaping of modern American Judaism. He was pivotal in transforming the study of Judaism from an insular project only conducted by--and of interest to--religious adherents to one which now flourishes in the secular setting of the university. He is also one of the most colorful, creative, and difficult figures in the American academy. But even those who disagree with Neusner's academic approach to ancient rabbinic texts have to engage with his pioneering methods. In this comprehensive biography, Aaron Hughes shows Neusner to be much more than a scholar of rabbinics. He is a social commentator, a post-Holocaust theologian, and was an outspoken political figure during the height of the cultural wars of the 1980s. Neusner's life reflects the story of what happened as Jews migrated to the suburbs in the late 1940s, daring to imagine new lives for themselves as they successfully integrated into the fabric of American society. It is also the story of how American Jews tried to make sense of the world in the aftermath of the extermination of European Jewry and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and how they sought to define what it meant to be an American Jew. Unlike other great American Jewish thinkers, Neusner was born in the U.S., and his Judaism was informed by an American ethos. His Judaism is open, informed by and informing the world. It is an American Judaism, one that has enabled American Jews--the freest in history--to be fully American and fully Jewish."--Publisher's description

Mention 1492 and most people conjure up images of three stout ships making their way west. But 1492 was the year in which the vibrant Jewish community of Spain came to an abrupt and tragic end. This book details the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal and their early immigration to the New World. European anti-Semitism followed the Jews but the newcomers persevered and made a home for themselves in the New World. Starred Review and Editor’s Choice, Booklist, NCCS/CBC Notable Children’s Trade Book and American Bookseller Pick of the Lists, 1990.

These strikingly lucid and accessible essays, ranging over nearly a century of Jewish communal life, examine the ways in which immigrant Jews grappled with issues of group survival in an open and accepting American society. Ten case studies focus on Jewish strategies for maintaining a collective identity while participating fully in American society and public life. Readers will find that these essays provide a fresh, provocative, and compelling look at the fundamental question facing American Jewry at the end of the 20th century, as at its start: how to assure Jewish survival in the benign conditions of American freedom.

"Saying No to Hate grounds readers in the history of antisemitism in America, emphasizing the strategies Jews have used to address threats and thereby preparing us to recognize, understand, and confront hatred today"--

""A Major Collection of Scholarship that Contains the most up-to-Date, Indeed Cutting-Edge Work on Gender and Jewish History by Several Generations of Top Scholars."--Atina Grossmann, the Cooper Union.

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.

Now in paperback! Taking Hold of Torah Jewish Commitment and Community in America Arnold M. Eisen A personal meditation on the meaning of Judaism today and a vision for revitalizing Jewish community and tradition in America. "Arnold M. Eisen offers a personal plea for—and a vision of—the revitalizing of American Judaism through a renewed relationship to Jewish tradition and the strengthening of Jewish communities." —Jewish Book News "...required reading for Jewish communal professionals, [Taking Hold of Torah] spells out the discontents and dreams of the baby boomers and their children who are reinventing Jewish communal life for the modern world." —Jewish Exponent "Melding autobiography with biblical exegesis, philosophical speculation and a program for Jewish educational reform, the book is an unbuttoned riff on what's ailing modern Jews." —Forward "...a personal story of a modern Jew trying to make sense of Judaism in a time when Jews can choose whether and how to be Jewish...." —The Jewish Advocate Jews, like other Americans, have both benefitted and suffered from the fraying of traditional loyalties that has come to characterize modern American culture. In each of the five chapters, Arnold M. Eisen examines a major issue or theme related to his vision for the renewal of Jewish communities—in terms of one of the five books of the Torah. What is the meaning and purpose of Jewish tradition? What is the significance of faith and covenant? What are the contemporary uses of ritual? What should a new agenda for politics in American Jewish life include? What legacy is to be left to future generations? This encouraging work is essential reading for anyone concerned with questions of Jewish faith and the future of Judaism in America. Arnold M. Eisen is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Stanford University, a frequent speaker on issues related to contemporary Jewish life before lay and scholarly audiences throughout North America, and an active participant in communal discussions concerning the future of American Judaism. His publications include The Chosen People in America (Indiana University Press) and Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community, winner of a Koret Jewish Book Award. The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies Contents: Introduction 1. Genesis: Taking on Tradition 2. Exodus: History, Faith, and Covenant 3. Leviticus: Ritual and Community 4. Numbers: Politics in the Wilderness 5. Deuteronomy: Legacies

"In 1944, at the height of World War II, 982 European refugees found a temporary haven at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. They were men, women, and children who had spent frightening years one step ahead of Nazi pursuers and death. They spoke nineteen different languages, and, while most of the refugees were Jewish, a number were Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. From the time they arrived at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter on August 5 they began re-creating their lives and embarked on the road to becoming American citizens. In the history of World War II and the Holocaust, this "token" save by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Refugee Board was too little and too late for millions. But for those few who reached Oswego it was life changing. The Shelter and the Fence tells their stories"--