When Britain was compelled to introduce conscription in 1916, the question arose of what to do with its 'friendly aliens'-its 30,000 Russian-Jewish refugees of military age. The Tsar didn't want them back to serve in his army, and they had no desire to help his war effort. But when sections of the British press commented that as asylum seekers they should show gratitude and join up, a campaign with strong anti-Semitic overtones took off and became Parliamentary business. Then the Tsar was overthrown, and by the summer of 1917 the question was settled with the new regime: Russian Jews of military age had to choose either to join the British Army or to return to Russia to serve there. MI5 and Special Branch kept watch on the Communist Club in the West End, where Russian revolutionaries agitated tailors, cobblers and cabinet-makers who agonised over what to do. Many ended up in the British Army or were exempted for war work, but nearly 4,000 chose to go back to Russia-for a variety of reasons. Arriving there via the Arctic within weeks and days of the Bolshevik revolution, they found a vacuum of authority, which soon turned into the chaos and dangers of civil war. How they fared and how they struggled to return to their families in Britain is the story of War or Revolution. With the help of personal documents, official British and Russian archives, and interviews of survivors and their families, the author illuminates an unknown corner of the First World War and sets it against the background of the period.

"In Justice behind the Iron Curtain, Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin examine Poland's role in prosecuting Nazi German criminals during the first decade and a half of the postwar era. Finder and Prusin contend that the Polish trials of Nazi war criminals were a pragmatic political response to postwar Polish society and Poles' cravings for vengeance against German Nazis. Although characterized by numerous inconsistencies, Poland's prosecutions of Nazis exhibited a fair degree of due process and resembled similar proceedings in Western democratic counties. The authors examine reactions to the trials among Poles and Jews. Although Polish-Jewish relations were uneasy in the wake of the extremely brutal German wartime occupation of Poland, postwar Polish prosecutions of German Nazis placed emphasis on the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. Justice behind the Iron Curtain is the first work to approach communist Poland's judicial postwar confrontation with the legacy of the Nazi occupation"--Publisher's description

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

New forms of Jewish philosophic inquiry in response to the Holocaust, the American Jewish experience, and the establishment of the State of Israel, present a necessity for a clear and comprehensive framework in which contemporary Jewish thought may be studied. This is what William E. Kaufman has done in "Contemporary Jewish Philosophies". Examining the present parameters of Jewish thought – Existentialism, naturalism, supernaturalism, and transnaturalism – he formulates the criteria for dealing with modern Jewish thinking. He traces the effects of this new philosophic vocabulary through the writings of such established luminaries as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Leo Baeck, and Mordecai Kaplan as well as seeking the sources of the thought of such contemporary figures as Emil Fackenheim, Jacob Agus, Arthur Cohen, Eugene Borowitz, Richard Rubenstein, and Abraham Joshua Heschel in the traditional roots of covenant, salvation, and transcendence. Dr. Kaufman deals in depth with the age-old questions: What conception of God can I accept? What is the relation of God to the universe? How shall we concieve the relation of man to God? But he goes further still. What is salvation in light of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel? Can we find an analogue in the past to the situation of Jews today? Probing these questions, along with the primary concerns of Jewish philosophy, he illumines and enlivens the complex dialogues which from the basis of Jewish philosophic thought. Each philosopher is analyzed and critiqued, utilizing a a uniform criteria which focuses the key concerns and commentaries of each in relation to the entire realm of Jewish thought today. "Contemporary Jewish Philosophies" in essential not only to the student of philosophy but to the reader who is seriously concerned with confronting today's problems with today's sensibility. --

Peter Fraenkel here gives a vivid account of a childhood in a middle-class, non-observant Jewish family in Nazi Germany, forced to emigrate to Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in 1939. Here the contrast could hardly be greater, from persecuted Jew, to 'enemy alien' in colonial Northern Rhodesia, to re-assimilation into the privileged colonial elite. Following education in Northern and Southern Rhodesia he worked for the Northern Rhodesian and later, Central Broadcasting Service. Here his pioneering work and support for racial equality in a deeply racist society connected with his earlier life - 'no fixed abode' but in tune with humane liberalism.

Yemen was ruled in the 20th century by imams from the extremist Zaydi Muslim sect. The Jews suffered from legal restrictions and persecutions. In 1910 the victorious Imam Yahya reinstated the "sharia" as the legal code in place of the Turkish civil code, and promulgated the law which imposed on the Jews the status of dhimmi in its most rigid form. In 1922, the reintroduction of forced conversion of Jewish orphans to Islam initiated a Jewish campaign to smuggle many of them to Aden. In the same year, the Imam Yahya virtually banned Jewish emigration from Yemen. Popular hatred of Jews was intense. The UN decision on the partition of Palestine in 1947 engendered a blood libel in San'a and anti-Jewish riots (aggravated by a civil war in Yemen), as well as pogroms in neighboring Aden and Shaykh Othman in which ca. 100 Jews were murdered. In 1948-50 most of the Jews left Yemen.

In the Fall of 1992, Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, won England's prestigious Evening Standard award as the season's Best Play. By the Spring of 1993, Millennium had come to Broadway and won its highest honor, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the distinguished Pulitzer Prize for drama as well. Through its epic theatrical panorama of the intimate and political dynamics that arise when individuals, histories, and cultures intersect, Millennium captured the imagination and the conscience of all who saw it. Its ability to deeply move the audience in personal, communal, and political ways was admirably (and astoundingly) matched by the subsequent production of the play's second part, Perestroika, which brought Kushner yet another Evening Standard award and Tony Award for Best Play (1994). Tony Kushner has, almost overnight, become the premier American male playwright to "represent" the 1990s, as David Mamet and August Wilson dominated critical attention in the 1980s. The phenomenally positive response to Angels in America was matched by the equally enthusiastic reception of its young, politically engaged playwright, who impressed journalists and scholars with his eloquent intellect, wit, and moral convictions. Kushner spoke for a younger generation of American artists and activists whose art is intimately connected to social vision and "revolutionary" possibilities in the public and private sectors. His role as a generational (read "national," "liberal," "socialist," "Jewish," "queer") spokesman has provided him with a public platform from which to address concerns that lie at the center of national debate. In a short time Kushner has capturedand retained a nation's fascination, and his opinions are widely sought out on a wide range of topics. And, most often, the platform from which Kushner expresses his ideas is the personal interview, in which he boldly confronts Americans to rethink, even to reinvent, themselves as the Millennium approaches. Tony Kushner in Conversation is the first book to compile Kushner's most significant interviews of the past decade, tracing his career from its early years to his maturing artistic and political visions. The collection includes pieces that first appeared in an amazingly broad range of periodicals as well as interviews not previously published, such as his appearance on PBS on The Charlie Rose Show. In addition to Angels in America, Tony Kushner is author of Slavs! and is currently finishing work on Henry Box Brown, scheduled to have its world premiere at the Royal National Theatre in the summer of 1997. Robert Vorlicky is Associate Professor of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Green Crescent over Nazareth is the story of the cultural and political struggle between Christians and Muslims, and of the rapid Islamization of Nazareth - the birthplace of Christianity - ironically, under the rule of the Jewish State of Israel. Until the creation of Israel in 1948, Christians formed the majority in the township of Nazareth. However, as Muslim refugees fled adjoining villages for the safety of the city during Israel's War of Independence, the demographic balance began to shift. The higher birthrate among the less educated and poorer Muslim population and the rapid exodus of outnumbered and frustrated Christians quickened the pace of change.By the year 2000, Christians had been reduced to a mere 30 per cent of the city's population of 60,000.

"A breathtaking historical novel that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm from 1907 through the 1930s, a period of great human suffering and destruction and also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old word still mattered, and yet when art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style. Set in a time when many men in the upper classes in Europe were gay, but could not be so publicly, Jews Queers Germans revolves around three men: Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II's closest friend, who becomes the subject of a notorious 1907 trial for homosexuality; Magnus Hirschfeld, a famed, Jewish sexologist who gives testimony at the trial; and Count Harry Kessler, a leading proponent of modernism, and the keeper of a famous set of diaries which lay out in intimate detail the major social, artistic and political events of the day and allude as well to his own homosexuality. The central theme here is the gay life of a very upper crust intellectual milieu that had a real impact on the major political upheavals that would shape the modern world forever after"--

Henryk Grossman is best-known as a Marxist economist but he also wrote valuable political texts as a leader of the revolutionary organisation of Jewish workers in the Polish province of Austria, before the First World War, as a member of the Communist Workers Party of Poland, during the early 1920s, and as a Marxist academic during the early 1930s. These writings dealt with the political situation, tactics and strategy of Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, the initial reception of Marxism in Poland and then substantial entries on left wing movements, organisations and individuals in a multi-volume reference work.

"A Conservative Movement insider's guide to the evolution of Conservative Jewish thought and practice over the last half century, offering insight into the diverse (and occasionally contentious) thought processes behind the movement's most important laws, policies, and documents"--

Deals extensively with the "Jewish question" in postwar Europe. The vanquishing of Nazism in 1945 did not put an end to antisemitism: the late 1940s saw anti-Jewish outbursts in various countries, and the treatment of the Jewish DPs also contained an element of antisemitism. Although Jews are disappearing in Europe, "the Jewish question" has not gone away. It has persisted in different national and ideological contexts, both in the USSR and its satellites (Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.) and in liberal Western Europe. The establishment of the State of Israel added new motives for the "Jewish problem", and in the 1970s-80s it exposed Jews in the diaspora to "anti-Zionist" terrorism. The political upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989-91 fueled antisemitism and caused the mass emigration of Jews from these countries. Discusses, also, the impact of the Holocaust on postwar Jewish consciousness and on attitudes toward Jews, as well as efforts of the Christian Churches to improve their stance toward the Jews.

In the English-speaking world, it is generally believed that there are very few Jews living and thriving in Germany. Yet, there has been an unlikely postwar history 1945-2001 that has been somewhat repressed in North America and the United Kingdom. While most people are well-informed about the Holocaust and the consequences that this tragic event has had for the world, very few people know that there has been a steady increase in the population of Jews in Germany since 1945 and that there is a flourishing 'Jewish' culture, certainly a relatively strong Jewish presence, in Germany today. Does this development mean that Jews are playing a significant role in German social life? Does this mean that the great German-Jewish relationship, often referred to as a kind of symbiosis, has re-emerged despite the odds against it? The sixteen essays in this book written by the leading critics in the field cover the fascinating changes that have been made in German society since 1945 in the Jewish communities, literature, theater, film, architecture, and other areas of interest including an examination of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Austria. For anyone interested in reading about the unpredictable transformations in German-Jewish relations since 1945, Unlikely History will provide information and insights into a history that needs to be told to bring about greater understanding of Jews and Germans in contemporary Germany.

The book is divided into three sections. The Ffirst provides a general historical overview for the Jewish thought that follows. The second summarizes the variety of basic kinds of popular, positive Jewish commitment in the twentieth century. The third and major section summarizes the basic thought of those modern Jewish philosophers whose thought is technically the best and/or the most influential in Jewish intellectual circles.

Zwi was born in Mexico in 1928 but spent most of her life in South Africa. She moved to Australia in 1988. Her family came from Zhager, a small town on the Lithuanian-Latvian border, where over 3,000 Jews were massacred on 2 October 1941 by members of the Lithuanian Militia, and lie in a mass grave in Naryshkin Park, formerly the heart of the shtetl. Zwi recounts her quest to discover the fate of her father's family, that perished in the Holocaust, and that of her uncle Leib Yoffe, a communist idealist. Includes interviews and her own observations based on trips to Zhager (Zagare in Lithuanian) in 1991 and 1993.

Provides a systematic examination of process themes in Jewish theology. After tracing process motifs in the writings of contemporary Jewish thinkers, the text analyzes process theology as a form of postmodernism, discussing the tensions between it and more orthodox theologies.

Not only do "modern" Jewish languages like Yiddish and Hebrew have their own Jewish writers, but every major Western tongue?from German and Russian to English and Portuguese?does as well. These writers are often at the crossroad between the two traditions: their Jewish one and their own national one. Is there such a thing as a modern Jewish literary tradition, one navigating across linguistic and national lines? If so, how should one define it? Ilan Stavans is uniquely qualified to answer these questions and to comment on the power and challenges of cultural margins and literary crossings. He has been at the forefront of an appreciation of the Jewish literary tradition that is less asphyxiating, more global. His reflections on Jewish Latin America have won him the nickname "pathfinder." This incomparable volume showcases Stavans's most insightful and provocative?and at times controversial?observations on transnational Jewish culture and literature. Stavans explores the problems and prospects of representing Jewish experiences through such media as Holocaust memoirs and Jewish museums; astutely comments on well-known intellectual figures, including Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Primo Levi, Harold Bloom, and Walter Benjamin; engages in memorable conversations with Norman Manea, Joseph Brodsky, and Ariel Dorfman; and offers compelling glimpses of revelatory moments in his own life.

Focusing on the cultural invention of Zionism, Michael Berkowitz explores how and why the Jewish nationalist movement was embraced by assimilated Jews of Western Europe before World War I. He pays special attention to the symbolism, artistic representations, and mythology that attracted European Jews to Zionism, which coexisted equally with the nationalisms of their home countries. The book was originally published in 1993.