Fourth-grader Emily is forced to think about her Jewish heritage when the new boy, an Orthodox Jew, refuses to participate in the school Christmas celebrations.

A novel for secondary school English classes with great writing and important themes.

"You think you know your father-but what if he kept secrets until the day he died? Just hours after delivering his father's eulogy, Ken Weintraub learns that this hardworking, unassuming man spent three years in prison. Consumed by the astonishing news, Ken sets out to unravel the mystery. As he pries information from old friends, relatives, and others, he pieces together a portrait that's full of contradictions. Was his father an assassin's accomplice? A gullible victim? Or a heroic, loyal friend? Everywhere he turns, he hears stories that surprise him. Even when he thinks he knows the whole truth, there's still more to learn"--

In Washington, D.C., life inside the Goldstein home is as tumultuous as the swiftly changing times. In 1979, the Cold War is waning and the age of protest has come and gone, leaving a once radical family to face a new set of challenges. Something Red is a masterly novel that unfurls with suspense, humor, and insight. Dennis, whose government job often takes him to Moscow, struggles both to succeed in a career he doesn't quite believe in and to live up to his father's leftist legacy. Sharon, a caterer for the Washington elite, joins a cultlike group in search of the fulfillment she once felt. Happy-go-lucky Benjamin is heading off to college, there to experience an awakening of social conscience, and sixteen-year-old Vanessa finds a cure for alienation in D.C.'s hardcore music scene. As each of them follows separate trajectories of personal protest and compromise along the edge of a new decade, radical traditions long dormant in their family awaken once again, with shocking, far-reaching results. A poignant story of husbands and wives, parents and children, activists and spies,

'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing -especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

Girl Unwrapped is a girl's coming-of-age story set in 1960s Montreal about the burdens and blessings of history, the divided self, and the quest to be whole. Toni Goldblatt's awakening to taboo desire conflicts with her Holocaust-scarred parents' expectations. Yearning to reinvent herself, she flees to Israel in the wake of the 1967 war, but the Zionist dream doesn't save her; only on her return, when she discovers kindred spirits in the underground lesbian bar scene, does Toni begin to find her own path. Girl Unwrapped is a novel about love, isolation, and the search for personal truth despite the stranglehold of family.

This is a spellbinding first-person account of a 13-year-old boy's desperate struggle to survive. In it, we share side by side with the author in his terrifying passage from boy to man, in his amazing courage & determination. David Faber, caught in the horror of the Nazi barbarity of torture, murder & death camps, somehow endures. With scarcely believable tenacity, he fulfills his promise to his murdered family that he will live to tell the story of what really happened. As Dr. Aaron S. Gold, Rabbi, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, says, "It is not the usual Holocaust story. It is...a thrilling account of a mystery which unfolds in exciting drama. The reader is taken on a roller coaster ride of suspense & adventure that can leave one breathless. Interwoven...are the fascinating experiences of his brother Romek, who worked...to frustrate the Nazi desire to build an atomic bomb..." The excruciating adventures of this young man often shock us. A historic reality we'd often like to forget crashes in on us, insisting that we remember what can happen. To make sure we do, this crisply written chronicle engages our deepest feelings on virtually every page.

Rendered into English from the original Dutch, these brief stories are told from the point of view of the children who are their narrators. through their innocent eyes the reader sees the events that occurred in Amsterdam, Westerbork and finally, bergen-belsen, where some 105,000 dutch jews perished during the holocaust. grade: 07-09.

This fierce memoir is both elegiac and indicting. Marcel Liebman's account of his childhood in Brussels under the Nazi occupation explores the emergence of his class-consciousness against a background of resistance and collaboration. He documents the internal class war that has long been hidden from historyhow the Nazi persecution exploited class distinctions within the Jewish community, and how certain Jewish notables collaborated in a systematic program of denunciation and deportation against immigrant Jews who lacked the privileges of wealth and citizenship. An eminent anti-Zionist and Marxist, Liebman tells the story of his family's struggle to survive in the face of persecution, terror and constant evasion, an existence observed with acuity, humor and lyricism.

This novel depicts a Jewish family living on St. Mark's Place before the Lower East Side became the East Village. Papa Kossoff is a character defeated by his status as clerk in his younger brother's grocery store; he is adored by his daughter Ruth and loathed by his son Martin--for excellent reasons. The focus of the activity is young Ruth, an earnest, humorless girl, who finds a way out of St. Mark's Place and Hunter College by taking a job as mother's helper with a rich family. Ruth and her law-student neighbor have been a twosome for years, but they have a little misunderstanding; when the smoke clears, she is married to her kindly employer, who has thoughtfully divorced his wife. Now Ruth has wealth, two step-children, two of her own, and one on the way by a third party. But she isn't happy.

Benjamin Disraeli, (1804 - 1881) was a British Conservative politician, writer and aristocrat who twice served as Prime Minister. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the glory and power of the British Empire. He is as of 2014 the only British Prime Minister of Jewish birth.

The Kaiser's Germany is the setting of Sybille Bedford's first and best-known novel, in which two families -- one from solid, upholstered Jewish Berlin, the other from the somnolent, agrarian Catholic South -- become comically, tragically, irrevocably intertwined. "Each family," writes the author, "stood confident of being able to go on with what was theirs, while in fact they were playthings, often victims, of the now united Germany and what was brewing therein." Did the monstrous thing that followed have its foundation in families such as these? "Writing about them made me think so. Hence the title."

An epic novel of Christians and Jews in the plague years -- the Black Death of 1349. The story takes place in the monastery of Bodmin, in the misty moors of Cornwall and on the continent where Will's wife, Miriam, goes in search of her Jewish ancestors. She is a female picaresque heroine through whose eyes the devastation of the Black Death on the continent is witnessed.

A tight, captivating story of a naive child's encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell After the sudden death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors, young Leon Rozental--intellectually precocious and possessing a disarming candor--is hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, a large building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work. One day after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet officer with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. Through encounters between a naive boy and a paranoid tyrant, Robert Littell creates in Comrade Koba a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing his human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible character--and not unlike Holden Caulfield, whom he admits to identifying with--caught in the spider's web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.

Product Description Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation examines the emergence, implementation, and representation of industrial killing, an inherent and crucial component of modernity whose most extreme manifestation was the Holocaust.The mechanized, impersonal, and sustained mass destruction of human beings, organized and legitimized by states, scientists, jurists, and intellectuals, is rooted in the industrial slaughterhouse of the Great War. In Murder in Our Midst, Omer Bartov argues that the Nazi death factories are best understood in the context of modern warfare, beginning with the First World War. He shows how the way we understand ourselves reflects the ambivalent effects of the Holocaust on our perceptions of war and violence, history and memory, progress and barbarism.Analyzing a wide array of historical texts, works of fiction, films, and museums, Bartov leads the reader from ancient myths of heroism to the trenches of the Western Front, from Thomas Mann's romantic vision of war to Primo Levi's stark depictions of genocide, from colonial war museums to the visual art of the Holocaust. These representations of killing share some of the same important features. They attempt to form coherent images from horrific events, to draw didactic lessons from them, and to use them for political ends. About the Author Omer Bartov is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

In this book, the world's foremost scholar of Kabbalah explores the understanding of erotic love in Jewish mystical thought. Encompassing Jewish mystical literatures from those of late antiquity to works of Polish Hasidism, Moshe Idel highlights the diversity of Kabbalistic views on eros and distinguishes between the major forms of eroticism. The author traces the main developments of a religious formula that reflects the union between a masculine divine attribute and a feminine divine attribute, and he asks why such an "erotic formula" was incorporated into the Jewish prayer book. Idel shows how Kabbalistic literature was influenced not only by rabbinic literature but also by Greek thought that helped introduce a wider understanding of eros. Addressing topics ranging from cosmic eros and androgyneity to the affinity between C. J. Jung and Kabbalah to feminist thought, Idel's deeply learned study will be of consuming interest to scholars of religion, Judaism, and feminism.

The first in a series of highly praised books about a poor, Jewish family living in the Bronx in the 1940’s. Amy moves into a new neighborhood, and learns to choose the right kind of friends, and the consequences of lying.

Product Description Set in the magnificent culture of the Middle East more than four thousand years ago, Lilah is a rich and emotionally resonant story of faith, love, and courage. Living in exile, Lilah is in love with Antinoes, a Persian warrior. They have known each other since they were children, and Antinoes dearly wants to make Lilah his wife. Yet Lilah does not feel she can marry without the blessing of her brother, Ezra. She and Ezra are close, and Lilah knows her brother well—he does not want his sister to have a husband outside their faith. Ezra is a scholar of the laws of Moses, and Lilah believes it is her brother’s destiny to lead the Jewish people back to the Promised Land. While Antinoes pressures her to accept his proposal, Lilah realizes that before she can consider her own happiness, it is her duty to help her brother accomplish the seemingly impossible task that is before him. Putting herself in grave danger, and with the help of Antinoes, Lilah wins Ezra an audience with Artaxerxes II, the King of Kings, who grants permission to lead the exiles on their journey back to the Promised Land. After a hazardous trip across the desert, Lilah, Ezra, and the thousands who join them arrive in Jerusalem. But the hardship of rebuilding the Temple takes its toll, and the religious enthusiasm of some turns to extremism. Ezra, listening to the zealots, orders all non-Jewish wives and their children banished from Jerusalem. Lilah, whose love for Antinoes has never wavered, is horrified by this command. She knows she must now choose between her brother and her conscience, which tells her that the time has come to defy him. Lilah is a timeless story of one woman’s stand against intolerance; it will linger in the reader’s mind long after the last page has been turned. From Publishers Weekly In his final installment of the Canaan Trilogy ( Sarah; Zipporah), Halter ambitiously tackles portions of the complicated biblical book of Ezra, which centers on the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and calls Israel to ethnic and religious purity. In the Persian town of Susa, the beautiful Lilah dreams of marrying her Persian lover and childhood sweetheart, Antinoes. However, her beloved brother Ezra, who has immersed himself in studying the laws of God, refuses to approve of their union since Antinoes is not a Jew. As the story unfolds, with scenes full of rich detail, Lilah becomes the unlikely instrument of gaining royal approval for the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the holy city. However, once there, Ezra orders all non-Jewish wives and children driven away in what is surely one of the most heart-wrenching episodes directly from scripture. A horrified Lilah repudiates her brother and leaves with them. As the cast-off women wander unprotected outside the city, rape, murder and mayhem ensue. (It's confusing that Lilah narrates one violent scene, but readers are unsure how she survives it.) As in Sarah and Zipporah, there is plenty of highly charged sexuality and some imaginative storytelling. Unfortunately, as with its predecessors, the story trails off, and the ending is unsatisfactory. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From AudioFile Ellen Reilly brings the story of Lilah, sister of Ezra, the biblical prophet, to life. Perhaps not many are familiar with the story of Ezra, which takes place more than four thousand years ago during a sad time in Israel's history. Lilah is torn between her love for her brother, Ezra, and her love for a Persian warrior. She must choose, and her choice will bring far-reaching consequences. All the emotion and turmoil in the story are made real by the talented Ellen Reilly. One can easily feel the heartache, passion, and drama of this book. Fascinating and well worth a listen. N.L. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine About the Author Mar

"For years, Matthew Greene and Daniel Rosen have enjoyed a quiet domestic life together in Northampton, Massachusetts. Opposites in many ways, they have grown together and made their relationship work. But when they learn that Daniel's twin brother and sister-in-law have been killed in a bombing in Jerusalem, their lives are suddenly, utterly transformed. In dealing with their families and the need to make a decision about who will raise the deceased couple's two children, both Matthew and Daniel are confronted with challenges that strike at the very heart of their relationship. What is Matthew's place in an extended family that does not completely accept him or the commitment he and Daniel have made? How do Daniel's questions about his identity as a Jewish man affect his life as a gay American? Tensions only intensify when they learn that the deceased parents wanted Matthew and Daniel to adopt the children--six-year-old Gal, and baby Noam. The impact this instant new family has on Matthew, Daniel, and their relationship is subtle and heartbreaking, yet not without glimmers of hope. They must learn to reinvent and redefine their bond in profound, sometimes painful ways. What kind of parents can these two men really be? How does a family become strong enough to stay together and endure? And are there limits to honesty or commitment--or love?"--