'Neighbors' - Jan Gross's Stunning account of the brutal mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors - was met with international critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States. It has also been, from the moment of its publication, the occasion of intense controversy and painful reckoning. This book captures some of the most important voices in the ensuing debate, including those of residents of Jedwabne itself as well as those of journalists, intellectuals, politicians, Catholic clergy, and historians both within and well beyond Poland's borders. Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic introduce the debate, focusing particularly on how 'Neighbors' rubbed against difficult old and new issues of Polish social memory and national identity. The editors then present a variety of Polish voices grappling with the role of the massacre and of Polish Jewish relations in Polish history. They include samples of the various strategies used by Polish Intellectuals and political elites as they have attempted to deal with their country's dark past, to overcome the legacy of the Holocaust, and to respond to Gross's book.

"This book was originally published as Al Dereckh ha-Emet: ha-Ramban ve-Yezirata shel Masoret (By Way of Truth: Nahmanides and the Creation of Tradition), Jerusalem: Shalom Hartman Institute, 2006. Nahmanides was the greatest Talmudic scholar of the thirteenth century and a distinguished kabbalist and mystic. The book is about Nahmanides's conception of Jewish Law (halakhah) and his understanding of the central features of Jewish tradition such as God, creation, revelation, history, messsianism, the reasons for the commandments, and the relation between miracle and nature. A central concern of the book is the complex relationship between Nahmanides's radical esoteric kabbalistic teachings and the legal and revealed dimensions of his thought"--

"A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remained tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." --

The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was the first major translation in Western culture. Its significance was far-reaching but largely forgotten. Without a Greek Bible, European history would have been entirely different - no Western Jewish diaspora and no Christianity. Translation and Survival is a radical new study of the ancient creators and receivers of the translations and of their impact. The Greek Bible sustained Jews who spoke Greek and made the survival of the first Jewish diaspora possible: indeed, the translators invented the term 'diaspora'. The translations were a tool for the preservation of group identity and for the expression of resistance. They devised a new kind of language: many of the words they coined are still with us. The Greek Bible translations ended up as the Christian Septuagint, taken over along with the entire heritage of Hellenistic Judaism when the Church parted from the Synagogue. Here, a brilliant creation is restored to its first owners, and to its historical context among Jews, Greeks and Christians.

The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was the first major translation in Western culture. Its significance was far-reaching but largely forgotten. Without a Greek Bible, European history would have been entirely different - no Western Jewish diaspora and no Christianity. Translation and Survival is a radical new study of the ancient creators and receivers of the translations and of their impact. The Greek Bible sustained Jews who spoke Greek and made the survivalof the first Jewish diaspora possible: indeed, the translators invented the term 'diaspora'. The translations were a tool fo

In the cauldron of Germany in the 1930s, two men from different worlds become key actors in the turbulent history of their time. Herschel Grynszpan, an undocumented Jewish adolescent living in Paris, wants to be a champion of his suffering people. Max Schmeling, a world champion boxer, becomes a reluctant symbol of the Third Reich. Their lives intertwine without touching, eventually converging in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. Dark haired, slight, and with deep-set, haunted eyes, Herschel receives a postcard from his parents--recently taken from their Hanover flat, put on a train, and dumped, with 12 thousand others, on the Polish border. Enraged, Herschel buys a gun and kills a minor German official in the German Embassy. The repercussions of this act trigger Kristallnacht, the opening curtain to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Max, as a result of his victory over the then-"invincible" Joe Louis in 1936, has become a poster boy for the Nazis. He and his movie-star wife, Anny Ondra, are feted by the regime--tea with Hitler, a passage on the airship Hindenburg--until his brutal two-minute beating in the rematch with Louis less than two years later. His story reaches a climax during Kristalnacht, where the champion performs an act of quiet heroism. Champion tells a story of tragedy and humanity as World War II unfolds. Set against a backdrop of racism, war, and displacement, it shines a light on those times as it holds a mirror to our own.

"The definitive study of 'the road to women's ordination' in Judaism." --Jonathan D. Sarna, author of The American Jewish Experience Pamela S. Nadell mines a wealth of untapped sources to bring us the first complete story of the outstanding Jewish women who passionately defended their right to equal religious participation through rabbinical ordination. These personal stories--of w omen like Ray Frank, hailed as "the girl rabbi of the golden West" at the turn of the century, and Sally Priesand, ordained in 1972 as the first woman rabbi--are woven with fascinating history and accounts of the controversies that continue in many Je wish communities today. Women Who Would Be Rabbis is a 1998 National Jewish Book Award finalist.

This is the most comprehensive, readable and up-to-date history of the Jews in the English language and is bursting with new ideas and theories. Cantor focuses on the creation of a unique Jewish identity and consciousness through 3 millennia.

Intimate, humorous, and refreshingly candid, this extraordinary work is a remarkable record—in both words and images—of Jewish life in a Polish town before World War II as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive boy. Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934, taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he has made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived." This volume presents his lively paintings woven together with a marvelous narrative created from interviews that took place over forty years between Mayer and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Together, father and daughter draw readers into a lost world—we roam the streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, witness details of daily life, and meet those who lived and worked there: the pregnant hunchback, who stood under the wedding canopy just hours before giving birth; the khayder teacher caught in bed with the drummer's wife; the cobbler's son, who was dressed in white pajamas all his life to fool the angel of death; the corpse that was shaved; and the couple who held a "black wedding" in the cemetery during a cholera epidemic. This moving collaboration—a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation—is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town. Copub: The Judah L. Magnes Museum

The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street --based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression--was named an NPR Best Book in 2015. In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Trestíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996. Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist. Helena Trestíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.

Argues that antisemitism in England has always been either disregarded, underestimated, or misunderstood. England has seen four forms of antisemitism during its history: a radical antisemitism, which ended with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290; a literary antisemitism; a quotidian antisemitism of insult and partial exclusion that has existed since the mid-17th century; and an emergent, antisemitic anti-Zionism. Various forms and motifs of antisemitism were invented in England (e.g. expulsion) and others were adapted and extended - e.g. it was in England that the blood libel arose in its canonic medieval form, and where its first literary representation appeared, written by Thomas of Monmouth. Dwells on antisemitic motifs in English literature, from the 13th century ballad "Sir Hugh, or the Jew's Daughter" to Tom Paulin's poem "Killed in Crossfire" (2001). Since the 17th century, the antisemitism has been weak and mainly verbal; antisemitic zealots have been few in number and marginal in their influence. Nonetheless, it existed and was widespread amongst the populace. Modern political antisemitism emerged in the 1860s and continued into the 20th century, when the Jews came to be perceived as a challenge to British security. Dwells on the English antisemitic mentality, as well as on antisemitic anti-Zionism. Discerns two forms of the latter: secular anti-Zionism, supported by the left and post-left; and confessional anti-Zionism, either Muslim, Jewish, or Christian conservative.

This book is a history, an indictment, a lament, and an appeal, focusing on the messianic trend in Lubavitch hasidism. It demonstrates how hasidim who affirm the dead Rebbe's messiahship have abandoned one of Judaism's core beliefs in favour of adherence to the doctrine of a second coming. At the same time, it decries the remarkable equanimity with which the standard-bearers of Orthodoxy have granted legitimacy to this development by continuing to recognize such believers as Orthodox Jews in good standing. This dramatic abandonment of the age-old Jewish resistance to a quintessentially Christian belief is a development of striking importance for the history of religions, and it is an earthquake in the history of Judaism. David Berger chronicles the unfolding of this development from a personal viewpoint. He describes the growing concern that impelled him to undertake an anti-messianist campaign-publications, correspondence, and the sponsorship of a Rabbinical Council of America resolution excluding this belief from authentic Judaism. He argues that a large number, almost certainly a substantial majority, of Lubavitch hasidim believe in the Rebbe's messiahship; a significant segment, including educators in the central institutions of the movement, maintain a theology that goes beyond posthumous messianism to the affirmation that the Rebbe is pure divinity. While many Jews see Lubavitch as a marginal phenomenon, its influence is in fact growing at a remarkable rate-to the point where its representatives are poised to dominate Orthodox religious institutions not merely in isolated outposts but in several major countries throughout the world. This book analyses the boundaries of Judaism's messianic faith and its conception of God. It assesses the threat posed by the messianists of Lubavitch and points to the consequences, ranging from undermining a fundamental argument against the Christian mission to calling into question the kosher status of many foods and ritual objects prepared under Lubavitch supervision. Finally, it proposes a strategy to protect authentic Judaism from this assault.

"A major influence on the BBC and independent television in Britain in the 1960s, as well as on CBC and the National Film Board in Canada, Sydney Newman acted as head of drama at a key period in the history of television. For the first time, his comprehensive memoirs--written in the years before his death in 1997--are being made public. Born to a poor Jewish family in the tenements of Queen Street in Toronto, Newman's artistic talent got him a job at the NFB under John Grierson. He then became one of the first producers at CBC TV before heading overseas to the U.K. where he revitalized drama programming. Harold Pinter and Alun Owen were playwrights whom Newman nurtured, and their contemporary, socially conscious plays were successful, both artistically and commercially. At the BBC, overseeing a staff of 400, he developed a science fiction show that flourishes to this day: Doctor Who. Providing further context to Newman's memoir is an in-depth biographical essay by Graeme Burk, which positions Newman's legacy in the history of television, and an afterword by one of Sydney's daughters, Deirdre Newman."--

The menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum, has traversed millennia as a living symbol of Judaism and the Jewish people. Naturally, it did not pass through the ages unaltered. The Menorah explores the cultural and intellectual history of the Western world's oldest continuously used religious symbol. This meticulously researched yet deeply personal history explains how the menorah illuminates the great changes and continuities in Jewish culture, from biblical times to modern Israel. Though the golden seven-branched menorahs of Moses and of the Jerusalem Temple are artifacts lost to history, the best known menorah image survives on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Commemorating the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the arch reliefs depict the spoils of the Temple, the menorah chief among them, as they appeared in Titus's great triumphal parade in 71 CE. Steven Fine recounts how, in 2012, his team discovered the original yellow ochre paint that colored the menorah--an event that inspired his search for the history of this rich symbol from ancient Israel through classical history, the Middle Ages, and on to our own tumultuous times. Surveying artifacts and literary sources spanning three thousand years--from the Torah and the ruins of Rome to yesterday's news--Fine presents the menorah as a source of fascination and illumination for Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and even Freemasons. A symbol for the divine, for continuity, emancipation, national liberation, and redemption, the menorah features prominently on Israel's state seal and continues to inspire and challenge in surprising ways. --

Explores the transformation in attitudes of the Left toward the Jews, Zionism, and Israel from the beginning of European socialism in the 1840s until the present (in particular in Germany and Austria). Socialist thought from its very origins was tainted with anti-Jewish stereotypes, including identification of Jews with money and exploitation, contempt for Judaism, etc. Many Jewish socialists shared these views, or even (like Marx or Victor Adler) took part in shaping them. At the same time, modern antisemitism, both in its conservative and racist form, was evolving in Europe. The socialist parties, e.g. the German Social Democrats, had difficulties in formulating their attitudes toward antisemitism. Some socialists maintained that there was a "kernel of truth" in antisemitism; others believed that it was a by-product of the crisis of capitalism and would disappear under socialism. Anti-Zionism also has a long history on the Left, stemming from the Marxist opposition to nationalism. Focuses on the attitudes on Jews and antisemitism of socialists and communists (Jewish and non-Jewish) such as August Bebel, Franz Mehring, Bernard Lazare, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Bruno Kreisky. The USSR turned to antisemitism after 1945; other communist parties followed suit. It was in the USSR that the myth of Zionist-Nazi collaboration was born; it was picked up by the Left worldwide. After 1955 the Left became increasingly anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. The peculiar, albeit paradoxical, development of antisemitism on the Left in recent years is related to the forging of an anti-Israel Marxist-Islamist alliance.

In The End of Judaism, Auschwitz survivor Hajo G. Meyer, a Dutch national of German-Jewish origin, expresses in impassioned terms his dismay at what he sees as the moral collapse of contemporary Israeli society and the worldwide Jewish community as a whole. Meyer is a member of "A Different Jewish Voice," a Dutch-based, secular Jewish movement that dares to openly criticize Israel's policies toward the Palestinians.In his observations, deeply colored by his personal experiences during the Holocaust, Meyer compares Israel's current policies with the early stages of the Nazis' persecution of the German Jews. He clearly explains that he is in no way seeking to draw a parallel between the current policies of Israel and the Nazis' endgame, which resulted in the mass murder of six million innocent people. What he is trying to do is simply point out the slippery slope that eventually led to this catastrophe, and the necessity of foreseeing the possible consequences of a policy that oppresses and marginalizes the Palestinians in their own homeland.As a result of his experiences in Auschwitz, Hajo Meyer claims to have learned one fundamental lesson: that his moral duty as a human being was to never become like his oppressors. The End of Judaism is the outcry of a dissident Jew who is not afraid of standing up to entrenched ways of thinking about history, and particularly about the Palestinian conflict which is one of the most intractable social and political problems in the world today.

The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. Stern's central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nation's defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germany's past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germany's reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today. At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einstein's German World illuminates the issues that made Germany's and Europe's past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.

In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What's Divine about Divine Law? untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition -- Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis -- struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy. Christine Hayes shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutability, while for the biblical authors, divine law was divine because it was grounded in revelation with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. Hayes describes the collision of these opposing conceptions in the Hellenistic period, and details competing attempts to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance. She shows how Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish writers, from the author of 1 Enoch to Philo of Alexandria, were engaged in a common project of bridging the gulf between classical and biblical notions of divine law, while Paul, in his letters to the early Christian church, sought to widen it. Hayes then delves into the literature of classical rabbinic Judaism to reveal how the talmudic rabbis took a third and scandalous path, insisting on a construction of divine law intentionally at odds with the Greco-Roman and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized West. A stunning achievement in intellectual history, What's Divine about Divine Law? sheds critical light on an ancient debate that would shape foundational Western thought, and that continues to inform contemporary views about the nature and purpose of law and the nature and authority of Scripture

In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What's Divine about Divine Law? untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition -- Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis -- struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy. Christine Hayes shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutability, while for the biblical authors, divine law was divine because it was grounded in revelation with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. Hayes describes the collision of these opposing conceptions in the Hellenistic period, and details competing attempts to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance. She shows how Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish writers, from the author of 1 Enoch to Philo of Alexandria, were engaged in a common project of bridging the gulf between classical and biblical notions of divine law, while Paul, in his letters to the early Christian church, sought to widen it. Hayes then delves into the literature of classical rabbinic Judaism to reveal how the talmudic rabbis took a third and scandalous path, insisting on a construction of divine law intentionally at odds with the Greco-Roman and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized West. A stunning achievement in intellectual history, What's Divine about Divine Law? sheds critical light on an ancient debate that would shape foundational Western thought, and that continues to inform contemporary views about the nature and purpose of law and the nature and authority of Scripture

"Hard to believe but true: - The Passover Seder is a Greco-Roman symposium banquet - The Talmud rabbis presented themselves as Stoic philosophers - Synagogue buildings were Roman basilicas - Hellenistic rhetoric professors educated sons of well-to-do Jews - Zeus-Helios is depicted in synagogue mosaics across ancient Israel - The Jewish courts were named after the Roman political institution, the Sanhedrin - In Israel there were synagogues where the prayers were recited in Greek. Historians have long debated the (re)birth of Judaism in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple cult by the Romans in 70 CE. What replaced that sacrificial cult was at once something new-indebted to the very culture of the Roman overlords-even as it also sought to preserve what little it could of the old Israelite religion. The Greco-Roman culture in which rabbinic Judaism grew in the first five centuries of the Common Era nurtured the development of Judaism as we still know and celebrate it today. Arguing that its transformation from a Jerusalem-centered cult to a world religion was made possible by the Roman Empire, Rabbi Burton Visotzky presents Judaism as a distinctly Roman religion. Full of fascinating detail from the daily life and culture of Jewish communities across the Hellenistic world, Aphrodite and the Rabbis will appeal to anyone interested in the development of Judaism, religion, history, art and architecture. "--