Discoveries Amedeo Kaplan dreams of discovering something -- some treasure no one realizes is there until he finds it. And he would like to discover a true friend to share this with. Improbably, he finds the friend in aloof, edgy William Wilcox. And even more improbably, he finds his treasure among the memorabilia in the house of his eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Zender. But Amedeo and William find more than treasure -- they find a story that links a sketch, a young boy's life, an old man's reminiscence, and a painful secret dating back to the outrages of Nazi Germany. And they discover unexpected truths about art, friendship, history, heroism, and the mysteries of the human heart.

Zionism is driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it has infamously clashed with the rights of the Arabs in Palestine and become so controversial that deep understanding and reasoned public debate is increasingly difficult. Prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose uses her political and analytical skills to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Rose argues that Zionism colours Israel's most profound self-image. In the most provocative part of her book, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state--so often used to justify Israel's policies--needs to be rethought.

The search for the Life Diamonds--the subject of the compelling documentary produced by the History Channel. They were known as Life Diamonds--rough uncut diamonds of high quality bought by Jews in Eastern Europe to use as passports to safety. After 1939 and the Nazi blitzkrieg, after the extermination camps began belching black smoke into the skies and the railroad station at Auschwitz II-Birkenau became the busiest train station in the world, they became Death Diamonds. Blood from a Stone is the amazing story of forty of those diamonds, of their journey across continents and oceans, from the mines of South Africa to the diamond centers in Antwerp and Amsterdam, to the Jews of Eastern Europe, to the Death Camps . . . and to the two American soldiers who liberated them from the SS, finally, and buried them in a forest in Alsace on the border between France and Germany. It is the story of the curse believed to lie over the fabulous wealth of these stones, bringing death and disaster to all who touched them. It is the story of Yaron Svoray, who spent more than a decade in search of one small foxhole somewhere in a thousand square miles of forest . . . and of his unbelievable success. Blood from a Stone is a unique story, a story unlike any to come out of World War II. Blood from a Stone will more than over a dozen exclusive photos from the two-hour History Channel documentary.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has become a symbol of heroism throughout the world. A short time before the uprising began, Pawel Frenkel addressed a meeting of the Jewish Military fighters: Of course we will fight with guns in our hands, and most of us will fall. But we will live on in the lives and hearts of future generations and in the pages of their history.... We will die before our time but we are not doomed. We will be alive for as long as Jewish history lives! On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, German forces entered the Warsaw ghetto equipped with tanks, flame throwers, and machine guns. Against them stood an army of a few hundred young Jewish men and women, armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails. Who were these Jewish fighters who dared oppose the armed might of the SS troops under the command of SS General Juergen Stroop? Who commanded them in battle? What were their goals? In this groundbreaking work, Israel s former Minister of Defense, Prof. Moshe Arens, recounts a true tale of daring, courage, and sacrifice that should be accurately told out of respect for and in homage to the fighters who rose against the German attempt to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, and made a last-ditch fight for the honor of the Jewish people. The generally accepted account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is incomplete. The truth begins with the existence of not one, but two resistance organizations in the ghetto. Two young men, Mordechai Anielewicz of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), and Pawel Frenkel of the Jewish Military Organization (ZZW), rose to lead separate resistance organizations in the ghetto, which did not unite despite the desperate battle they were facing. Included is the complete text of The Stroop Report translated into English.

This important book explores the relationship between the Third Reich and animals -- as symbols, as myths, and as living creatures. From a review in Choice: "Rarely does a book contribute to two fields so significantly as this one. Sax, an independent scholar and consultant to various human rights organizations, has written the first book to explore thoroughly the Nazi cult of animals. In a way, this book reads like a mystery novel, as it uncovers some of the chief paradoxes of Nazi ideology. The Nazis promoted vegetarianism and passed the most progressive anti-cruelty laws the world has ever known. Yet they also developed a mystical technocracy that reduced morality to the crudest version of a biological struggle for survival...This book is a must for all collections in German history and in animal rights. It is a deep and profound reflection on the complex and perplexing ways that animals can shape human culture and politics." (S.H. Webb). This second, expanded edition includes a new essay on "Nazi Totemism."

In 1944, a band of Jewish guerrillas joined the Russian army in its attack on Vilna, Lithuania. The band, called the Avengers, was led by Abba Kovner. In the ghetto, Abba had built bombs, sneaking out through the city's sewer tunnels to sabotage German outposts. Abba's lieutenants were two teenage girls, Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak. After the liquidation of the ghetto, the Avengers escaped to the forest, where they fought alongside other partisan groups, and ultimately bombed Vilna in order to pave the way for its liberation.After the war, Vitka and Abba were instrumental in orchestrating the massive Jewish exodus to Israel, and Ruzka went to Palestine, where she would be the first person to bring a first-hand account of the Holocaust to Jewish leaders.The Avengers is the story of what happened to these rebels in the ghetto and in the forest, and how, fighting for the State of Israel, they moved beyond the violence of the Holocaust and made new lives.

On the night the SS rounded up the Jews of his Ukrainian ghetto, eighteen-year-old Yosel Epelbaum crawled on his hands and knees to a nearby forest. There he joined a diverse band of pro-Soviet partisans, led by a kind of warlord in the wilderness, who created a "forest republic" behind enemy lines. With his courageous comrades, Epelbaum disrupted the German war effort for almost a year and a half and saved hundreds of civilans at the same time. After the liberation. the young survivor became caught up in Europe's roaring black market. With little money or formal education, an knowing no English, he immigrated to San Francisco in 1947 and within a year opened an ice cream shop in the city's outlying, foggy Sunset District. Only a decade later Joe Pell was well on his way to becoming one of the leading real estate developers in Northern California. Taking Risks, related in a taut and vivid style, is his story--one of loss and torment but also daring, ingenuity, and uncommon resilience.

Recounts the story of a group of Jewish children growing up in the Czech town of Budejovice during World War II, who founded a newspaper to document their concerns and the problems they encountered as conditions began to grow worse.

ÔThis one of those marvelous books that not only illuminates an important chain of historical events, but provides timeless Ñ and especially timely Ñ lessons for our own age É [an] impassioned, thoughtfully argued, well-expressed book.Õ Martin Rubin, The Washington Times For almost 500 years, the Jews of Europe were kept apart, confined to ghettos or tiny villages in the countryside. Then, in one extraordinary moment in the French Revolution, the Jews of France were emancipated. Soon the ghetto gates were opened all over Europe. The era of Emancipation had begun. What happened next would change the course of history. Emancipation tells the story of how this isolated minority emerged from the ghetto and against terrible odds very quickly established themselves as shapers of history, as writers, revolutionaries, social thinkers, and artists. Their struggle to create a place for themselves in Western European life led to revolutions and nothing less than a second renaissance in Western culture. The book spans the era from the French Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century. The story is told through the lives of the people who lived through this momentous change. Some are well-known: Marx, Freud, Mahler, Proust, and Einstein; many more have been forgotten. Michael Goldfarb brings them all to life. This is an epic story, and Goldfarb tells it with the skill and eye for detail of a novelist. He brings the empathy and understanding that has marked his two decades as a reporter in public radio to making the characters come alive. It is a tale full of hope, struggle, triumph, and, waiting at the end, a great tragedy. This is a book that will have meaning for anyone interested in the struggle of immigrants and minorities to succeed. We live in a world where vast numbers are on the move, where religions and races are grinding against each other in new combinations; Emancipation is a book of history for our time.

This book tells the little-known story of why a quarter-million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labor, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground, where some 1,500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany. By 1950 a little community of 20,000 Jews remained in Germany: 8,000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two postwar Germanies. After the fall of Communism, the Jewish community was suddenly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of former Soviet Jews. Now there are some 100,000 Jews in Germany. The old, somewhat nostalgic life of the first postwar decades is being swept aside by radical forces from the Lubavitcher at one end to Reform and feminism at the other. What started in 1945 as a "remnant" community has become a dynamic new center of Jewish life.

Based on years of research conducted mostly in Arabic sources, Meir Litvak and Ester Webman track the evolution of post-World War II perceptions of the Holocaust and their parallel emergence in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust became entangled with broader anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiments. Litvak and Webman track this discourse through the work of leading intellectuals and turn to representations of the Holocaust in the media and culture of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and among the Palestinian people. Their chronological history, which spans sixty years, provides a remarkable perspective on the origins, development, and tenaciousness of anti-Holocaust belief. From Empathy to Denial is the first comprehensive investigation of Holocaust denial in the Arab world, and is based on years of painstaking historical research of mostly Arabic language sources. The authors explore how Holocaust denial emerged after the Second World War, how it paralleled the wider Arab-Israeli conflict after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and how it subsequently became entangled with broader anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiment. In particular Litvak and Webman look at the role of leading intellectuals, the media and other cultural forms in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and among the Palestinians and how their representation of the Holocaust has evolved in the last sixty years.

This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, editor of Partisan Review, and a recent recipient of the National Medal of Humanities. The book opens with Kurzweil early adolescence in Vienna during the Nazi takeover. It ends with the author finding herself in the new century. In between, she kept moving on and interrogating the world around her. The reader follows Kurzweil on her perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to Belgium, through France, Spain, and Portugal, alone with her younger brother. Her fantasies of reunion with her parents in New York kept her going but came to naught: she had not expected to fall from a wealthy childhood into the life of the working-class poor, as a millinery apprentice or a diamond cutter. Instead of entering college life, she eventually became a conventional American housewife. Unhappy and anxious, she anticipated the social changes in America, and returned to Europe with her second husband and her two children. She arrived at the beginning of the Italian miracle--its post-war revitalization. In Milan she met many Americans as an active member of its community and of the British-American club. After personal tragedy she returned to New York, and only then pursued her early intellectual ambitions. The author eventually became a professor of sociology and quickly climbed up the academic ladder. Just as she had been as a little girl, she still "wanted to know everything," beginning with her study of Italian entrepreneurs and going on to European history and French thought, to psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism. Her early writings prompted William Phillips, co-founder and editor of Partisan Review, to invite her into the elite circle of New York intellectuals. She worked alongside him, first as a reader, then as executive editor, and took over the editorship of the legendary journal during its final period. Kurzweil's journey was one of courage, and of emotional and intellectual growth. Full Circle will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians, literary and Holocaust scholars, and American studies specialists.

"In 1944, at the height of World War II, 982 European refugees found a temporary haven at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. They were men, women, and children who had spent frightening years one step ahead of Nazi pursuers and death. They spoke nineteen different languages, and, while most of the refugees were Jewish, a number were Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christians. From the time they arrived at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter on August 5 they began re-creating their lives and embarked on the road to becoming American citizens. In the history of World War II and the Holocaust, this "token" save by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Refugee Board was too little and too late for millions. But for those few who reached Oswego it was life changing. The Shelter and the Fence tells their stories"--

Jacob Lipschitz was only fourteen when he had to endure the harsh realities of World War II and the horror of the Holocaust. He lost his parents to Treblinka extermination camp, and wandered the streets of the starving Warsaw Ghetto with some friends, sneaking in and out of the guarded walls, searching for any food to support his life, eventually joining Jewish fighters underground. During this desperate time, he must elude a revengeful Nazi solidier who had a personal vendetta against him and unceasingly hunts him. Jacob told his harrowing experience to Nobel nominee Shlomo Kalo when they were university students. His intelligence and resourcefulness would help him survive, showing the astonishing strength, perseverance, and spirit that many in Jewish history have exhibited. However, Jacob's choice as a young man is unexpected and this is one of the highlights of the book. Forevermore skillfully brings to life three masterful tales of loyalty, subjugation, and strength in human history, which also include the fateful encounters between Jewish nobleman Zabir Ben Bata and Muhammad, and of Rabbi Aaron and his Polish allies who betrayed him and his community during the Cossack rebellion. Forevermore was praised by the media, recommended by Israeli Ministry of Education and also by Shimon Peres: "An original style of writing and a look at events from an interesting perspective!." Scroll up and order your copy of Forevermore today!

This is Volume I. Oral History Testimonies of American Liberators from the Archives of the Center for Holocaust Studies.

“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.