"German, Jew, Muslim, Gay offers an astonishing perspective on the history of modern Germany through the vantage point of a man with multiple identities who devoted his life to religious utopias, fought for homosexual rights, wrote gay fiction, converted from Judaism to Islam (one of the few of any faith to do so), and considered himself part of a spiritual elite that held the key to Germany's salvation. Born in Posen in 1880, the son of a Jewish industrialist, Hugo Marcus converted to Islam and chose the name Hamid; he became the most important convert in Germany while retaining his membership in the Jewish community. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, where he was in the unique position of Muslim witness to the Holocaust. The imam of his mosque gained his release and he escaped to Switzerland, where he wrote gay fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus. He died in Basel in 1966. The book challenges deeply ingrained perceptions of Muslim-Jewish relations during World War II and illuminates their interconnected histories in modern Europe. It also tells the unknown story of Marcus' orientalized Islam that, in echoing Goethe's, revitalized an essential strand of Germany's spiritual heritage"--

In Journeys & Arrivals prize-winning author Lev Raphael explores for the first time in non-fiction the gay and Jewish identities that have dominated his highly acclaimed fiction for many years. Journeys & Arrivals reveals in a collection of autobiographical and critical essays the influence these often conflicting identities of being gay and Jewish have had in his life and his writing.

"During the German occupation of the Netherlands, 1940 to 1945, all Jews were ordered to register the religion of their grandparents. The Reichskommissar appointed the young lawyer Hans Calmeyer to adjudicate "doubtful cases." Calmeyer used his assignment to save at least 3,700 Jews from deportation and death, dwarfing the number saved by Schindler's famous rescue operation."--Back cover.

Josh never conceived that Tony would end up in an arranged marriage and devoting his life to the Torah in a closed, cloistered world in which outsiders were not welcome. As Josh follows his brothers metamorphic path he grows to better understand his brother, as well as the most frightening and exotic territory for a foreign correspondent: his own family (Dani Shapiro).

"Her parents moved her from Austria to Tokyo, Japan before she started school. They were all rendered stateless when Nazi Germany and Austria stripped Jews of their citizenship. She graduated high school fluent in Japanese plus four other languages and went to college in America at age 15. Cut off from her parents by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and America's entry into World War II, she went years not knowing if they were alive. She returned to post-war Japan as an interpreter, found her parents, and wrote the fateful words that make her a storied feminist hero in that nation even today. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said about Beate Sirota Gordon, 'It is a rare life treat for a Supreme Court Justice to get to meet a framer of a Constitution. It is rarer indeed for that framer to have been a woman'"--

Navigating between the two worlds of wartime experiences in Europe and new life in Australia, this moving memoir of & a Holocaust & survivor is & imbued with an element of fiction. This deeply personal narrative travels from darkness to hope as the author loses his family at Auschwitz, spends the war in concentration camps, and ultimately emigrates to Australia with his wife, leading to an eventual restoration that remains colored by a tragic past.

From orthodoxy to chaos, a major artist wrestles with her influences.

A "memoir by a journalist about his father's attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden"--Jacket.

"To me, hard times are like hide-and-seek: where is the solution, where is the hope? We can never give up looking for these things because they are just waiting to be found." Gidon Lev, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, has lived an extraordinary life. At the age of six, he was imprisoned in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Liberated when he was ten, he lost at least 26 members of his family, including his father and grandfather. But Gidon's life is extraordinary not only because he is one of the few living survivors remaining but because of his lessons learned over nearly a century. His enduring message is of hope and opportunity - to make things better. By sharing his timeless simple belief and truths, Gidon reminds us that we have the power to incrementally improve what is in front of us and leave something better behind us. His life is a lesson of how to do it, even in the face of astonishing adversity, and Let's Make Things Better is the calling card of an indomitable spirit. 'By sharing his inspiring life story, Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev reminds us that the human spirit is larger than even the most severe and unjust trauma. Through one of history's darkest nights, he preserved his brightness and warmth ' - David Von Drehle, author of the New York Times bestseller The Book of Charlie

Memoirs of a Jew (b. Faye Lazebnik) from Lenin, Poland (now Belarus), who survived the Nazi occupation in this region, on the Polish-Soviet border. On 14 August 1942 the ghetto of Lenin was liquidated by the Nazis; the author was spared as a "specialist" (a photographer). In September 1942 she joined Soviet partisans in the Molotov brigade and served there as a photographer, nurse, and soldier. Relates the experiences of Jewish fighters amongst the Soviet partisans. Antisemitism existed among some partisans, and sometimes it cost Jews their lives. In July 1944 the area in which she fought was liberated by Soviet troops. In 1945 she returned to Poland, and in 1948 emigrated to Canada.

In this new collection of essays, contemporary historians examine the ways earlier historians have framed, written, and "made" the Jewish past. Probing the ideology and methodology of their professional predecessors, American and Israeli historians offer new perspectives on some of the central figures of twentieth-century Jewish historiography, including Gershom Scholem, S. D. Goitein, Yitzhak Baer, Elias Bickerman, and Cecil Roth, as well as the Israeli "New Historians." Through their critical examinations of the construction of the Jewish past, the contributors to this volume develop important insights into current attitudes toward the dominant canons and ideals of historical scholarship and the future of historiography. They shine new light on the formation of a historical worldview and the "making" of history.

"In a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? In his grandly entertaining debut memoir, playwright David Adjmi explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art.."--Publisher's description.

Ben Dunkelman grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Toronto. Kicked out of several schools for being a hell-raiser, he was sent off to Europe and the Middle East in the 1930s, gaining hard experience that would serve him well in the years to come. On his return he worked for the family business, but when World War Two came he lost no time in enlisting. Dunkelman describes the war from the ordinary soldier's viewpoint, without embellishment or glorification. Yet he was a hero to his men--and to his country. After the war Dunkelman returned to Canada, but in 1948 he went to war again--this time to fight for the young nation of Israel in the struggle to establish a Jewish state. Dual Allegiance is the exciting, fast-paced story a man and the passions he was willing to fight for--and if necessary, die for.

For nearly three thousand years, the black Jews of Ethiopia–known as the Falashas–maintained their faith and their identity in the face of drought, famine, and tribal war. They were indeed the lost tribe, tracing their ancestry to King Solomon and the queen of Sheba. Then in May 1991, these Ethiopian Jews staged a miraculous exodus. With Ethiopia exploding around them in brutal civil war, some fourteen thousand Falashas were safely airlifted to Jerusalem by the Israeli air force over the course of twenty-five harrowing hours. Told by the Israeli ambassador who made it happen, this spellbinding book is the story of that incredible rescue–as well as an extraordinary history of the Falashas, the remarkable people whose faith never waivered, even when confronted with enormous atrocities.

Shalvi has been a pioneer in advancing the status of women in Israel and in religious girls' education. She has been an active participant in peace dialogues and inter-religious initiatives and has been a social activist all her life. Born in Germany in 1926 to Orthodox parents, Shalvi grew up in London and studied English at Cambridge, before moving to Jerusalem in 1949 where she went on to pursue a PhD at Hebrew University, eventually teaching English Literature. In 1950, Shalvi met and married her husband, Moshe Shelkowitz (later Shalvi), who died in 2013. They had six children together. One of Shalvi's greatest accomplishments was the establishment of the Pelech School which she headed from 1975 to 1990. This experimental/ progressive religious high school for girls in Jerusalem has become a model for women's Orthodox education across the country. Shalvi was a co-founder of the Israel Women's Network, established to advance the status of women. In 2007 she was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievements in the areas of education, social welfare and human rights.

Memoirs of Cohn, born in 1929 to an Orthodox family in Pressburg (now Bratislava), recounting his Holocaust experiences. Describes anti-Jewish laws from 1939, and violent acts against Jews committed by the Hlinka Guards. In 1942 Cohn was smuggled into Hungary and eventually reached Budapest. His parents and six siblings followed, but his mother and four of the children were caught and sent to Majdanek, where they perished. Two of Cohn's sisters, Hana and Sara, remained in Hungary and survived. His father was arrested, but Cohn bribed officials in order to free him; he then left Budapest to study in a yeshiva in Pupa. After the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 he returned to Slovakia and studied in a yeshiva in Nitra. After the German invasion of Slovakia in September 1944 he returned to Pressburg and, posing as a non-Jew, helped some Jewish families. He was arrested, but escaped and joined a Slovak partisan group. After the war he became successful in business. His father, who had been in a labor camp, and his two surviving sisters returned to Pressburg after the war; in 1948 the family immigrated to the U.S.

This book's provocative treatment is a welcome contribution to an understanding of the origins of socialist and Zionist thought. This is a compact, lucid study of a notable thinker of the nineteenth century whose insight reached into the twentieth. This intellectual biography is for students of modern Jewish history and European history who have long been interested in this enigmatic figure. Avineri provides a subtle and interesting interpretation.

Confessions of a Serial Biographer is the story (or rather the stories) of a man who has mingled with celebrities since he was a teenage junior newspaper reporter. He has been involved with some of the iconic names of Hollywood and showbiz in general - people like Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck and Andre Previn, all of whom co-operated in his biographies. Then there was a wide spectrum that ranged from Morecambe and Wise to Ella Fitzgerald, to say nothing of Leonard Bernstein and Bob Hope. His most recent biography is a best-selling study of the life of Dean Martin, King of the Road. Here is an autobiography of a biographer of more than 30 books, who, while still at school, was captivated by the voice of a singer called Al Jolson. It is not just a story of smooth, friendly relations with his subjects. James Cagney sued him in the New York courts and Mr Peck tried to stop his book. Freedland won in both cases. But this is also the story of politicians like Harold Wilson, Alec Douglas Home ... and Tony Blair, to whom Michael Freedland gave some early media training. Not least of all, it is the tale of a radio programme called You Don't Have To Be Jewish, which after 23 years became the longest-running regional broadcast in Britain.