The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain is a detailed study of the events surrounding this infamous chapter in Spanish history. Based on hundreds of documents discovered, deciphered, and analyzed during decades of intensive archival research, this work focuses on the practical consequences of the expulsion both for those expelled and those remaining behind. It responds to basic questions such as: What became of property owned by Jewish individuals and communities? What became of outstanding debts between Jews and Christians? How was the edict of expulsion implemented? Who was in charge? How did they operate? What happened to those who converted to Christianity in order to remain in Spain or return to that country? The material summarized and analyzed in this study also sheds light on Jewish life in Spain preceding the expulsion. For example, Jews are shown to have been present in remote villages where they were not hitherto known to have lived, and documents detailing lawsuits between Christians related to debts left behind by Jews reveal much about business and financial relations between Jews and Christians. By focusing on the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in such detail - for example, by naming the magistrates who presided over the confiscation of Jewish communal property - Professor Beinart takes history out of the realm of abstraction and gives it concrete reality.

Thomas Mann meets Mordecai Richler in this outstanding novel of great intellect and humour that already reads like a classic. The Frumkiss family doesn't look much different from any of the others in Toronto's Bathurst Manor. Grandpa survived the Holocaust; Grandma the Second came from Poland at the age of five. Dad's a foot doctor; Mom is dead, and her mother -- Grandma Number One --died while giving birth to her in Kazakhstan. Her three kids -- the oldest is forty-two -- are as frustrated and directionless as most baby boomers with no real financial worries. One's in Toronto, there's one in the suburbs and the third lives in Israel. As far as the Frumkisses know, all that distinguishes them from anybody else is that Grandpa is a famous Yiddish writer who ended up working for the CBC. But Grandpa's death sets off a chain of events that force the Frumkisses to see how different their family is from all the others. The Frumkiss Family Business , Michael Wex's brilliant and hilarious new novel, is a family saga for the twenty-first century, a lovingly accurate portrait of middle-class Canadian life at the turn of the century and of the Toronto neighbourhood that has produced such famous Canadians as Howie Mandel and Wex himself. Imagine Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks without the stodgy Germans or The Brothers Karamazov with only one brother. Finally, a novel that does for Toronto what Mordecai Richler's books did for Montreal.

This JPS Guide chronicles the extraordinary history of American Jewry. Finkelstein tells the dramatic 350-year story of the people and events that shaped the lives of today's American Jews. Divided into six time periods, American Jewish History describes Jewish life from the time of the early settlers, to the period of massive immigration that flooded the cities, to the incredible growth of Jews in positions of influence in business, politics, and the arts. This is a story of a people who affected not only the lives of Jews in the U.S. today, but also the course of American history itself. There are over 70 black and white photographs, maps, and charts and more than 120 feature boxes and biographies throughout, as well as timelines, notes, a bibliography, and index. Finkelstein has made the saga of American Jewry much more than a compilation of historical facts. This is wonderfully stimulating journey--a worthwhile adventure for readers of all ages.

In this volume, Jules Chametzky has gathered his very personable stories and reminiscences of some of the many writers he has met or known as he writes, some fleetingly, a few more intensely over the course of his more than half a century in the business of reading, writing, and talking about literature, of teaching and editing. Not only do those writers emerge as the complicated and fascinating human beings they are, but we also come to know Jules himself, a warm and gracious storyteller. Praise for Out of Brownsville: NO STUDENT of American Jewish writing needs to be reminded that Jules Chametzky is one of its pioneers. A founding editor of the influential Massachusetts Review, he is perhaps especially noted for his study of the fiction of Abraham Cahan. He now caps a distinguished career as critic, editor, and teacher with this delightful volume of memoirs. It is astonishing to know how many of the shapers of literature in America Chametzky knew not merely as subjects met in passing but understood as artists. Readers and scholars will, of course, find their own favorites among the individual memoirs, but beyond the perceptiveness of the recollections and the shrewd assessments in them, there emerges Jules himself, warm, gracious, accepting, modest about his own achievements, which he scarcely mentions. One closes the book with a sense of regret that it has ended and with a feeling how good it was for those who met Jules and enjoyed, however briefly, his friendship. Joseph C. Landis, Editor, Yiddish-Modern Jewish Studies, Professor Emeritus of English, Queens College, CUNY WOVEN INTO these lively portraits and reminiscences of others are not only sudden illuminations of the characters portrayed and of the fleeting moments captured here, but also insights into the fragility of life, the power to create, and the strange magic of human encounters that make Jules Chametzky s memoir so touchingly social and pleasurable to read. Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University LEGENDARY EDITOR Jules Chametzky s book is autobiography at its cleanest: one s life through the eyes of others. His astute, personable dispatches are a map of Jewish intellectual trends in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture (Spanish), Amherst College ACCORDING TO the Jewish Midrash, the Book and the Sword came wrapped together, with a message: Regard what is written in the book, or be delivered to the sword. Jules Chametzky s love of books and their very human creators is expressed in this cultural memoir with affection and marvelous charm, yet there is also a tone of urgency, from a man who has dedicated his life to keeping the book open and the sword sheathed. Lawrence Bush, Editor, Jewish Currents About the Author: Jules Chametzky is Professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1958 until 2004. He was a founder of The Massachusetts Review, of which he is Editor, emeritus, after 27 years as senior co-Editor. Chametzky has published numerous articles and reviews on Jewish American and American literature in popular and academic journals. His major publications include From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan; Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers; the Penguin edition of Abraham Cahan s The Rise of David Levinsky. He co-edited Black and White in American Culture: Ten Years of The Massachusetts Review; and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. Chametzky is the father of three sons and was married for 52 years to the late poet Anne Halley.

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.

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.

The Invisible Wall is one man's quest to understand the failure of the German-Jewish relationship and to explain the character and attitudes of Germany's assimilated Jews over a three hundred-year period. He found rich and remarkable stories in the lives of six Blumenthal ancestors--all of whom happened to be major figures in German-Jewish history. Jost Liebmann, an itinerant peddler of trinkets and cheap jewels who became court jeweler to the Brandenburg nobility; Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, whose Berlin salon was the meeting place of Prussia's intellectual elite; Giacomo Meyerbeer, a celebrated composer of grand opera who dealt with the antisemitism he encountered by ceaselessly striving for success; Louis Blumenthal, a respected businessman and founder of his town's bank; Arthur Eloesser, a scholar and literary critic in the heyday of Weimar; and Ewald Blumenthal, the author's father. Once a decorated soldier in the Kaiser's elite guards, he was later a prisoner at Buchenwald. By recounting the stories of these individuals within the historical context of three centuries, Blumenthal presents a portrait of German Jews from the birth of Christianity to the eve of the Holocaust, revealing how Jews of various generations tried but failed to pierce the prejudice that separated them from other Germans.

Tells the story of how wealthy businessman Julius Rosenwald came to financially support the building of 5,300 schools in rural African-American communities that desperately needed them over the course of twenty years.

Product Description Once a notorious hippie, Sammuel Himmelhoch joins a Hassidic sect of penitents in Jerusalem and becomes a Master of the Return, guiding fellow converts to the teachings of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslay From Publishers Weekly In Mara, Reich, herself the scion of a rabbinical family, took aim at the mores of American Orthodox Jewry. Here, she casts her sly, sardonic eye upon those at the opposite end of the spectrum, so to speakIsraeli penitents. With vigor, irreverence and devastating accuracy, she limns a flock of zany zealots, intoxicated by the rarefied Hassidism of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. These cultists, former hippies who are now "high on the One Above," are at once delightfully absurd in their revival, even invention, of bizarre customs (such as the paramount pilgrimage to Rabbi Nahman's Ukranian grave to terminate "nocturnal emissions"); poignant in their misguided, miseducated search for identity and redemption; as self-indulgent in their expiation as they once were in their passions; and alarming in their patent misogyny, racism, deceit, self-righteousness and extreme messianic political agenda. In Reich's hands, plot and character development are sacrificed to an extravagant religious and social parody cum cautionary tale. The penitents remain symbolic figuresas exemplified by an elderly midwife, whose name, Shifra-Puah, evokes her righteous colleagues from the biblical book of Exodus who disobeyed the pharaonic decree to murder male newborns, and Avraham Ger, whose surname, Hebrew for convert, proclaims his adoption of Judaism. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Samuel Himmelhoch was once lighting effects man for notorious rock groups, his wife Ivriya rode horses bare-breasted in Rosh Pina, and Sora Katz was the former Pam Buck of Macon, Georgia, but now they are all members of an extreme Hassidic sect, living together in the Moslem quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Described with affection and great insight, the riotous adventures of these sincere but sometimes misguided penitents easily mix the supernatural with human events. Reich pinpoints absurdity and self-righteousness beautifully, as when Reb Lev Luria pontificates in gematria (talmudic numeric equivalents) derived from his newly donated computer. An arrestingly comtemporary treatment of Jewish spirituality and renewal. Highly recommended. Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial services for Jews who pass away in the surrounding cities. But after the Arctic misadventures that led him to Lud, he wouldn't want to live (or die) anywhere else. As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it--or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards.

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the Jewish-run tavern was often the center of leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. This unusual situation came about because the nobles who owned taverns throughout the formerly Polish lands believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably, a belief so ingrained as to endure even the rise of Hasidisms robust drinking culture. As liquor became the regions boom industry, Jewish tavernkeepers became integral to both local economies and local social life, presiding over Christian celebrations and dispensing advice, medical remedies and loans. Nevertheless, reformers and government officials, blaming Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Their efforts were particularly intense and sustained in the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous province of the Russian empire that was often treated as a laboratory for social and political change. Historians have assumed that this spelled the end of the Polish Jewish liquor trade. However, newly discovered archival sources demonstrate that many nobles helped their Jewish tavernkeepers evade fees, bans and expulsions by installing Christians as fronts for their taverns. The resulta vast underground Jewish liquor tradereflects an impressive level of local Polish-Jewish co-existence that contrasts with the more familiar story of anti-Semitism and violence. By tapping into sources that reveal the lives of everyday Jews and Christians in the Kingdom of Poland, Yankels Tavern transforms our understanding of the region during the tumultuous period of Polish uprisings and Jewish mystical revival.

The year is 1031. Karimah, a charming, headstrong Jewish nineteen-year-old has followed her heart on an adventure that will take her far from home. The story is revealed in her letters to the family she left behind in Egypt, their letters to her, and their correspondence with others as they seek to make sense of the disorder that Karimah has brought to their lives. Details of everday life from a millennium ago are now familiar to scholars through the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a synagogue storeroom full of several centuries' worth of religious manuscripts, receipts, and business correspondence. The author creates an impassioned portrayal of a time when Jews and Muslims lived together in reasonable harmony.

"The Yiddish Queen Lear. New York in the late 1930s: a once-famous Yiddish actress gives her theatre business over to her three daughters. The Yiddish Queen Lear is a story of love, infedelity, betrayal and exile, which examines the moment when Jewish East European and American cultures mix, on the eve of the Holocaust. Both a free reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear and a homage to the lost world of Yiddish theatre, The Yiddish Queen Lear is a vibrant, funny and tragic study of the clashes and connections between two very different worlds. Woman In The Moon. Set in the United States, England and Germany, between 1920 and 2001, Woman In The Moon is a dream play inspired by both the legend of Faust and the testimonies of French, Austrian and German survivors from Camp Dora. It explores the connections between the US space programme, the V1 and V2 bombers, and the slave labour in the Third Reich"--Back cover.

Full-color reproductions of 400 oil paintings of prominent Jews from various cultures, eras, and continents exhibited at the Jewish Museum, Vienna, 22 September-31 October 1999; Beth-Hatefutsoth, the Nahum Goldmann Museum of Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv, 12 May-13 August 2000; Hallisch-Frankisches Museum, Schwabisch Hall, 1 September-12 November 2000. Includes portraits of well-known politicians, scientists, writers, philosophers, artists, musicians, composers, businessmen and actors, among others, from Moses to the present.

Review An expert weaver, Stollman brings together themes of religion, science, and love into an emotional whole. -- Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2003 Stollman's weightier fictions - elegantly written and wise - returns literature to its rightful role. -- Miami Herald, March 2, 2003 Product Description A collection of short stories by the author of The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul represents his earlier works as published in such literary magazines as American Short Fiction, the Yale Review, and Tikkun and explores such themes as the impact of the past on the present and of one person on another. 12,500 first pirnting. From Library Journal A story collection from the author of two celebrated novels: The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Aryehlev Stollman is a neuroradiologist and the author of two books, The Illuminated Soul and The Far Euphrates, which is an American Library Association Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Review Recommended Book of the Year, and the winner of a Wilbur Award and Lambda Award.