In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles--both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women's lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women's studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives.

The book marks the first time that Herzl's career, personality and the influences upon him-both preceding his Zionist involvement and following it- have been examined in such a comprehensive manner, rather than focusing exclusively on his role as founder of the Zionist movement.

Modern-day Israel, and the Jewish community, are strongly influenced by the memory and horrors of Hitler and the Holocaust. Burg argues that the Jewish nation has been traumatized and has lost the ability to trust itself, its neighbors or the world around it. He shows that this is one of the causes for the growing nationalism and violence that are plaguing Israeli society and reverberating through Jewish communities worldwide. Burg uses his own family history--his parents were Holocaust survivors--to inform his innovative views on what the Jewish people need to do to move on and eventually live in peace with their Arab neighbors and feel comfortable in the world at large. Thought-provoking, compelling, and original, this book is bound to spark a heated debate around the world.

A biography of the American poet, activist for humane causes, and friend to immigrants, who wrote the words now inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

"Emma Lazarus's most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable life has remained a mystery until now. She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her-a feminist, a Zionist, and an internationally famous Jewish American writer before thse categories even existed. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity. Born into a wealthy Sephardic family in 1849, Lazarus published her first volume of verse at seventeen and gained entree into New York's elite literary circles. Although she once referred to her family as "outlaw" Jews, she felt a deep attachment to Jewish history and peoplehood. Her compassion for the downtrodden Jews of Eastern Europe-refugees whose lives had little in common with her own-helped redefine the meaning of America itself. In this groundbreaking biography, Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus's place in history as a poet, an activist, and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today-a world that she helped to invent."--Publisher's website. A portrait of the iconoclastic poet and activist whose words are are set on the Statue of Liberty follows the complex life and times of Emma Lazarus, from her early literary success, to her roles as a feminist, Zionist, and renowned Jewish-American writer.

A biography of Mantello, born in 1901 to the Orthodox Jewish family of Mandl in Transylvania. As a businessman, he became honorary consul of El Salvador for several East European countries; in 1942-45 he served as first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva. With the approval of the consul general, Mantello provided thousands of Jews in Hungary and Transylvania with protective papers. In addition, during 1941-44 he gathered information on the Nazi Final Solution, including operations at Auschwitz. In 1944, using this data, he initiated two press campaigns in Switzerland which alerted that country and the entire world to the Nazi genocide of Jews. The first press campaign forced Horthy to stop the deportations. Dwells, also, on the activities of Florin Manoliu, a Romanian businessman who helped Mantello. During the war, Mantello was arrested several times by Swiss authorities on superficial pretexts. After an inquiry into his wartime activities in the 1950s, Mantello was forgotten and recalled only shortly before his death in 1992.

The Year That Keeps Returning is Goldstein's astonishing historical memoir of that fateful year--when the Ustasha, the pro-fascist nationalists, were brought to power in Croatia by the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia. On April 10, when the German troops marched into Zagreb, the Croatian capital, they were greeted as liberators by the Croats. Three days later, Ante Pavelić, the future leader of the Independent State of Croatia, returned from exile in Italy and Goldstein's father, the proprietor of a leftist bookstore in Karlovac--a beautiful old city fifty miles from the capital--was arrested along with other local Serbs, communists, and Yugoslav sympathizers. Goldstein was only thirteen years old, and he would never see his father again. More than fifty years later, Goldstein seeks to piece together the facts of his father's last days. The moving narrative threads stories of family, friends, and other ordinary people who lived through those dark times together with personal memories and an impressive depth of carefully researched historic details. The other central figure in Goldstein's heartrending tale is his mother--a strong, resourceful woman who understands how to act decisively in a time of terror in order to keep her family alive.

For many Jews in the 19th-20th centuries, socialism and communism were seen as paths to their social and political emancipation as human beings, a way to flee from social ostracism. Examines the lives and works of ten Jews who were socialist leaders, from Marx to Trotsky. Regarding antisemitism, it was generally seen as an evil aspect of capitalism, a special case of bourgeois racism. Assimilation of the Jews was a prerequisite of the socialist revolution. Jewish socialists adopted not only the universalism of their non-Jewish revolutionary contemporaries, but also their anti-Jewish stereotypes. Jewish self-hatred was common amongst them and affected their socialist views. In their antisemitism, Marx and Lassalle surpassed some of their non-Jewish fellow socialists. The rise of political antisemitism in the 20th century, the Dreyfus Affair, brutal pogroms, and Nazism made some of the Jewish socialists (e.g. Bernstein, Lazare) revise their views and speak out against antisemitism, but did not affect others (e.g. Luxemburg, Adler).

A history of the Holocaust in Greece and of Jewish participation in Greek partisan warfare during World War II, based largely on personal accounts of survivors. Describes the development of events that ended with the deportations of Jews to death camps, from the German zone of occupation (which included Salonika), the Bulgarian zone, and the Italian zone (which included Athens). Although the Allies already knew about the death camps, nobody warned the Greek Jews. Many Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians, and others sympathized with Jews and attempted to help them, but very few survivors owe their lives to Christian rescuers. The best way to survive was to join the resistance. Pp. 127-326 contain excerpts from memoirs of Jewish survivors, including some who survived Auschwitz and other camps, and resistance fighters. Pp. 329-402 contain Matsas' memoirs. He was born in 1930 in Ioannina and survived the war hiding in a mountain village with his parents and sister.

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

"First published in 1992 to widespread acclaim, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust is a landmark addition to the sacred memory of the Holocaust. Featuring photographic portraits, archival materials and interviews, it was the first book (and exhibition) by Houston-born photographer GAY BLOCK; the exhibition has been seen in over fifty venues in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Block spent more than three years traveling in eight countries, accompanied by author Malka Drucker, documenting testimonies from more than 100 rescuers--people who risked their lives to rescue Jewish victims from the Holocaust. The stories range from those who saved one life to those who worked in the resistance and saved thousands, always with the threat of death and torture if they were discovered. This new edition features a complete redesign and new foreword by scholar of Jewish American art Samantha Baskind."--

An autobiography of Lagnado's early years as an immigrant from Cairo to Brooklyn, reflecting on her own mother's story as she makes her own choices.

Born in 1940, Lillian Faderman was the only child of an uneducated and unmarried immigrant Jewish woman. Her mother, whose family perished in the Holocaust, was racked by guilt at having come to America and left them behind; she suffered recurrent psychotic episodes. Her only escape from the brutal labor of her sweatshop job was her fiercely loved daughter, Lilly, whose poignant dream throughout an impoverished childhood was to become a movie star and "rescue" her mother. Lilly grew up to become Lil, outwardly tough, inwardly innocent, hungry for love and success. A beautiful young woman who was learning that her deepest erotic and emotional connections were to women, she found herself in a dangerous but seductive lesbian underworld of addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful and to redeem her mother's suffering, she entered the University of California at Berkeley and worked her way through college as a burlesque stripper. A brilliant student, she ultimately achieved a Ph. D. At last she became Lillian, the woman who in time became a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer, and a charismatic, groundbreaking scholar of gay and lesbian studies. Told with wrenching immediacy and great power, this is an extraordinary memoir: the nakedly honest -- and very American -- story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.

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.

Rare Book

"In 1938, just before they were killed by the Nazis, Frieda and Siegmund Westerfeld sent their twelve-year-old daughter, Edith, to live with relatives in America. Edith escaped the death camps but was left profoundly adrift, cut off from the culture of her homeland ... her entire identity. For decades she shut away her memories, unable even to sing a German lullaby to her children, until she realized that the void of the past was consuming her and her family. Then, with her daughter Fern, Edith returned to Germany."--Jacket.

Presents a very detailed account, including the English and European context, of the Lopez Affair, involving Dr. Roderigo Lopez, who gained wealth via international trade and became physician to Queen Elizabeth I. At the same time, he was a spy, with multiple masters, in England and abroad. His downfall and execution on the false charge of attempted regicide stemmed from political rivalry in England. His high status was related to the advantages, such as widespread contacts, that stemmed from his Converso background. Contemporary stereotyped attitudes toward Jews were reflected in Marlowe's "Jew of Malta" and Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."