The author of such classic works as The Republican Roosevelt, V Was for Victory, and Years of Discord, John Morton Blum is one of a small group of intellectuals who for more than a quarter of a century dominated the writing of American political history. Writing now of his own career, Blum provides a behind-the-scenes look at Ivy League education and political power from the 1940s to the 1980s. Blum insightfully recounts a long and distinguished journey that began at Phillips Academy, where he first realized he could make a career of teaching and writing history. He tells how young men were socialized to the values of the Northeastern establishment in those years before World War II, and how as a non-practicing Jew he learned to overcome bigotry both at Andover and at Harvard, which then had no Jewish professors. In 1957 Blum joined the faculty of Yale University's history department, widely regarded as the nation's best, where he became both influential and popular and where his students included one future U.S. president as well as others who aspired to the office. He reveals much about the inner workings of Ivy League education and tells of controversies over the Vietnam War and the Black Panthers, his role in Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, and how he searched for common ground between reactionary faculty and radical students. More than a recounting of a singular life, Blum's story explains how political history was researched and written during the second half of the twentieth century, describing how the discipline evolved, gained ascendancy, and was challenged as historical fashions changed. It also offers revealing glimpses of such prominent academics as Kingman Brewster, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., C. Vann Woodward, and William Sloan Coffin. Over a distinguished career, Blum witnessed considerable change in elite educational institutions, where minorities and women were grossly underrepresented when he first entered academia. In a memoir brimming with insight and laced with humor, he looks back at the academy—"not a refuge from reality but an alternative reality"—as he reflects upon his intellectual journey and his contributions to the study and writing of twentieth-century American history.

Examines the personal values and philosophies of Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum in relation to the pressures and conditions under which they lived in the Nazi era. All had "strong Christian affinities." Under the challenge of terror they were "Christians by choice, Jews by decree." Each responded to her Jewishness in a distinct way: Stein felt close to the Jews; Weil had a hateful attitude toward them and tried to obliterate herself as a Jew; Frank and Hillesum both affirmed their Jewish identities. In the face of Hitler, each, in her own way, resisted.

On February 26, 1938, 17-year-old Georg Klaar took his girlfriend Lisl to his first ball at the Konzerthaus. His family was proudly Austrian; they were also Jewish, and two weeks later came the German Anschluss. This incredibly affecting account of Nazi brutality towards the Jews includes a previously unpublished post-war letter from the author's uncle to a friend who had escaped to Scotland. This moving epistle passes on the news of those who had survived and the many who had been arrested, deported, murdered, or left to die in concentration camps, and those who had been orphaned or lost their partners or children. It forms a devastating epilogue to what has been hailed as a classic of holocaust literature.

John Beckett was a rising political star. Elected as Labour's youngest M.P. in 1924, he was constantly in the news and tipped for greatness. But ten years later he was propaganda chief for Mosley's fascists, and one of Britain's three best known anti-Semites. Yet his mother, whom he loved, was a Jew. Her ancestors were Solomons, Isaacs and Jacobsons, originally from Prussia. He successfully hid his Jewish ancestry all his life - he said his mother's family were "fisher folk from the east coast." His son, the author of this book, acclaimed political biographer and journalist Francis Beckett, did not discover the truth until John Beckett had been dead for years. He left Mosley and founded the National Socialist League with William Joyce, later Lord Haw Haw, and spent the war years in prison, considered a danger to the war effort. For the rest of his life, and all of Francis Beckett's childhood, John Beckett and his family were closely watched by the security services. Their devious machinations, traced in records only recently released, damaged chiefly his young family. This is a fascinating and brutally honest account of a troubled man in turbulent times.

Czech writer Ivan Klima masterfully recounts, first, what it was like for him as a Jewish child confronting with his family the inhumanities of the Theresienstadt concentration camp situated at the edge of their hometown, Prague. Then, more fully, he painstakingly recalls what it was like for him and his countrymen after the Nazi thugs were driven out by the Soviet Army and replaced for four decades by the Communist thugs. Includes an appendix of essays on topics ranging from social history and political thinking to love and liberty.

"Jacob Neusner (born 1932) is one of the most important figures in the shaping of modern American Judaism. He was pivotal in transforming the study of Judaism from an insular project only conducted by--and of interest to--religious adherents to one which now flourishes in the secular setting of the university. He is also one of the most colorful, creative, and difficult figures in the American academy. But even those who disagree with Neusner's academic approach to ancient rabbinic texts have to engage with his pioneering methods. In this comprehensive biography, Aaron Hughes shows Neusner to be much more than a scholar of rabbinics. He is a social commentator, a post-Holocaust theologian, and was an outspoken political figure during the height of the cultural wars of the 1980s. Neusner's life reflects the story of what happened as Jews migrated to the suburbs in the late 1940s, daring to imagine new lives for themselves as they successfully integrated into the fabric of American society. It is also the story of how American Jews tried to make sense of the world in the aftermath of the extermination of European Jewry and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and how they sought to define what it meant to be an American Jew. Unlike other great American Jewish thinkers, Neusner was born in the U.S., and his Judaism was informed by an American ethos. His Judaism is open, informed by and informing the world. It is an American Judaism, one that has enabled American Jews--the freest in history--to be fully American and fully Jewish."--Publisher's description

Pauline Wengeroff, the only nineteenth-century Russian Jewish woman to publish a memoir, sets out to illuminate the "cultural history of the Jews of Russia" in the period of Jewish "enlightenment," when traditional culture began to disintegrate and Jews became modern. Wengeroff, a gifted writer and astute social observer, paints a rich portrait of both traditional and modernizing Jewish societies in an extraordinary way, focusing on women and the family and offering a gendered account (and indictment) of assimilation. In Volume 1 of Memoirs of a Grandmother, Wengeroff depicts traditional Jewish society, including the religious culture of women, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, who wished "his" Jews to be acculturated to modern Russian life.Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother offers a unique first-person window into traditionalism, modernity, and the tensions linking the two in nineteenth-century Russia. Wengeroff (1833–1916), a perceptive, highly literate social observer, tells a gripping tale of cultural transformation, situating her narrative in the experience of women and families. In Volume Two, Wengeroff claims that Jewish women were capable and desirous of adopting the best of European modernity but were also wedded to tradition, while Jewish men recklessly abandoned tradition and forced their wives to do the same. The result was not only marital and intergenerational conflict but also catastrophic cultural loss, with women's inability to transmit tradition in the home leading to larger cultural drift. Two of Wengeroff's children converted when faced with anti-Jewish educational and professional discrimination, unwilling to sacrifice secular ambitions and visions for the sake of a traditional culture they did not know. Memoirs is a tale of loss but also of significant hope, which Wengeroff situates not in her children but in a new generation of Jewish youth reclaiming Jewish memory. To them, she addresses her Memoirs, giving an "orphaned youth"―orphaned of their past and culture―a "grandmother."

Acclaim for Leo Melamed Escape to the Futures "A well-written, fascinating memoir of a remarkable man of many parts, who arrived in the United States at age 9, fleeing the Holocaust. Almost single-handedly, he transformed a minor commodity exchange into the leading futures market in the world. His influence was and remains worldwide." —Milton Friedman Senior Research Fellow Hoover Institution, Stanford University "There are only a few people who have revolutionized big portions of the business world. Warren Buffett did it in investing, Bill Gates in software. Leo Melamed, author of this book, is in that same league. He truly revolutionized futures trading in the United States, and in the world. This book tells how." —Ambassador Clayton Yeutter Past President of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Former U.S. Trade Representative "A grizzled old Merc trader once assured me that nobody ever lost by being long on Leo. Why that's so, this endlessly fascinating personal history makes clear. It shows how an immigrant boy, after surviving unimaginable horrors, drew on the 'elan, combativeness, and sophisticated conviction' learned from his equally remarkable father to build the CME and to lay the foundations of the modern, Chicago-based, financial services industry." — Merton H. Miller 1990 Nobel Laureate Emeritus Professor University of Chicago Graduate School of Business "Leo tells it all. To say there would not have been a financial futures industry without Leo is probably only a slight exaggeration!!!" — John Damgard President Futures Industry Association "Escape to the Futures tells the remarkable story of a young boy's escape from the Nazis and the impact of his life on the financial markets of the world. It also serves as yet another poignant reminder of the immeasurable losses —in the arts, sciences, professions, and everyday life—humanity suffered because of the Holocaust." — Benjamin Meed President American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors He is one of the most powerful figures in the world of finance—a visionary who pioneered the modern futures industry and launched the International Monetary Market (IMM). Yet, Leo Melamed was not born to wealth and influence. His is an extraordinary rags-to-riches tale of intelligence, drive, savvy, timing, and the overpowering force of a uniquely charismatic personality. Now the inside story of the remarkable life and career of Leo Melamed is revealed in this long-awaited autobiography. A Holocaust survivor, Leo Melamed had barely begun the first grade in 1939 when he and his parents fled their native Poland one step ahead of the oncoming Nazi juggernaut. Crossing Siberia en route to a brief stay in Japan—just months before Pearl Harbor—the family arrived in the United States to begin life anew. They settled in Chicago, where young Leo became a product of the inner city and embraced his new country and its culture. Seeking part-time employment while attending law school, Leo Melamed answered a classified ad that would change his life. Hired by what he presumed was a law firm named Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Bean, he found himself on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. "I was Alice stepping through the Looking Glass into a world of not just one Mad Hatter, but hundreds. The shouting among the traders, the movement of their bodies and hands, captivated me like nothing before . . . there was a life force on that floor that was magical and exciting, and though I didn't understand what was going on, I wanted to be a part of it." Leo Melamed became much more than just a part of it. From modest beginnings as a pork belly trader, he led the Chicago Merc for the next quarter of a century, introducing finance to an industry that was the exclusive domain of agriculture. As his reputation as a financial genius grew, so did the tales of his larger-than-life personality. In Leo Melamed: Escape to the Futures, you'll meet the man behind the legend. Written with the assistance of award-winning journalist Bob Tamarkin, this enthralling memoir deftly weaves intimate personal details with behind-the-scenes accounts of some of the most momentous financial events of our century—including Leo's role as advisor to the White House after the Hillary Rodham Clinton cattle futures trading episode. You'll read fascinating accounts of his dealings with political powerhouses like Bob Dole, Tip O'Neill, Dan Rostenkowski, and others. Offering penetrating insights into the workings of a multibillion dollar industry, this is a story that has as much to say about human nature as it does about the nature of today's markets. Hailed as both hero and tyrant, Leo Melamed is undeniably one of the most colorful and intriguing personalities of our time. This intimate, revealing personal account is not to be missed.

'In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years' War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space--a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938--today known as Kristallnacht--when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler's forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city's early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that "express the life lost, the life kept." Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family's history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.'--Publisher description.

This memoir, a young poet's tragicomic account of crossed loves and rebellions as he grows from boy to man under the vigilant eyes of the state in the Soviet Union between the 1950s and 1970s, can be approached as a bildungsroman. It is set in Tallinn, Riga and Moscow (with episodes in Uzbekistan, Moldavia, and the Ukraine) and, apart from this author's own story, deals with the experiences of young people of that period, their friendships and attempts to form erotic/romantic attachments, as well as their search for national--Baltic, Jewish, Russian--identity while being watched and sometimes interrogated by the secret police. It also includes some reconstruction of the author's family history: expulsion from Spain, the Magician of Prague, the renowned historian Simon Dubnov. The volume progresses from the demonstration of two seven-year-old boys' against Stalin and Lenin, in Tallinn, in the mid-1950s to a dramatic and doomed love affair with a woman married to an army colonel who attempts to shoot the author as the latter is about to make his final exit from the country, with the KGB on his tail, in the early 1970s. While raising a number of important historical and contemporary issues, the memoir is also an involving narrative, a visually descriptive story, varied and engrossing, involving philosophical, theological, and detective elements; popular and literary culture; countries and languages; high seriousness and undercutting irony.

A biography of the leading halakhic authority Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, born in Ciechanowiecz, Poland. He was the last rector of the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary. Ch. 5 (pp. 110-134), "Response to the New Nazi Government (1933-1934), " characterizes the early reaction of Weinberg to the Nazis as naive and apologetic. Weinberg helped the Orthodox Jews deal with problems of daily life under the Nazis (e.g. the ban on ritual slaughter). Ch. 6 (pp. 135-171), "The Nazi Era (1933-1945), " notes that Orthodox German Jews first adopted a policy of appeasement with the regime. With Jews excluded from general education and other aspects of German life, the role of the Seminary became more important. Weinberg had opposed Jewish emigration, and the "Kristallnacht" pogrom came as a tremendous shock to him; the Seminary was closed and most of the students and faculty emigrated. At the outbreak of the war he was in Warsaw, where he helped with communal affairs. As a Soviet citizen, Weinberg suffered less than others; in October 1941 he was transferred from the Warsaw ghetto to a detention camp in Wuelzburg, Germany, possibly in order to trade him for German citizens held captive in the USSR. He remained there until April 1945. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust. After the war he became head of a yeshiva in Montreux, Switzerland.

Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1927 in Borisław, Poland. Pp. 31-132 deal with the Holocaust period, based on information found in a diary she kept at the time. Wolanski survived in hiding, at first with a Christian family and then in a bunker in the forest, until the liberation.

"This memoir of a radical Jew follows Jack Nusan Porter's journey from his birth in Ukraine during the Holocaust, through the radical 60s and 70s, to the present day, and details his experiences fighting anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, xenophobia, and hate"--

Peter Fraenkel here gives a vivid account of a childhood in a middle-class, non-observant Jewish family in Nazi Germany, forced to emigrate to Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in 1939. Here the contrast could hardly be greater, from persecuted Jew, to 'enemy alien' in colonial Northern Rhodesia, to re-assimilation into the privileged colonial elite. Following education in Northern and Southern Rhodesia he worked for the Northern Rhodesian and later, Central Broadcasting Service. Here his pioneering work and support for racial equality in a deeply racist society connected with his earlier life - 'no fixed abode' but in tune with humane liberalism.

Ivan Jablonka's grandparents' lives ended long before his began: although Matès and Idesa Jablonka were his family, they were perfect strangers. When he set out to uncover their story, Jablonka had little to work with. Neither of them was the least bit famous, and they left little behind except their two orphaned children, a handful of letters, and a passport. Persecuted as communists in Poland, as refugees in France, and then as Jews under the Vichy regime, Matès and Idesa lived their short lives underground. They were overcome by the tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalinism, the mounting dangers in Europe during the 1930s, the Second World War, and the destruction of European Jews. Jablonka's challenge was, as a historian, to rigorously distance himself and yet, as family, to invest himself completely in their story. Imagined oppositions collapsed - between scholarly research and personal commitment, between established facts and the passion of the one recording them, between history and the art of storytelling. To write this book, Jablonka traveled to three continents; met the handful of survivors of his grandparents' era, their descendants, and some of his far-flung cousins; and investigated twenty different archives. And in the process, he reflected on his own family and his responsibilities to his father, the orphaned son, and to his own children and the family wounds they all inherited. A History of the Grandparents I Never Had cannot bring Matès and Idesa to life, but Jablonka succeeds in bringing them, as he soberly puts it, to light. The result is a gripping story, a profound reflection, and an absolutely extraordinary history.

Beginning with the first Jewish settler, Moses David, the important role that Windsor Jews played in the development of Ontario's south is mirrored in this 200-year chronicle. the founding pioneer families transformed their Eastern European shtetl into a North American settlement; many individuals were involved in establishing synagogues, schools, and an organized communal structure in spite of divergent religious, political, and economic interests. Modernity and the growing influences of Zionism and Conservative/Reform Judaism challenged the traditional and leftist leanings of the community's founders. From the outset, Jews were represented in city council, actively involved in communal organizations, and appointed to judicial posts. While its Jewish population was small, Windsor boasted Canada's first Jewish Cabinet members, provincially and federally, in David Croll and Herb Gray. As the new millennium approached, jews faced shrinking numbers, forcing major consolidations in order to ensure their survival.

"Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism."--

[From the flap] "Rabbi Akiba, the learned, pious hero of this classic biography, ranks in depth of intellect, breadth of sympathy, and clarity of vision with the foremost personalities in Jewish tradition.l According to Dr. Finkelstein, Akiba "dominated the whole scene of Jewish history for eighteen centuries...and possessed that colorful personality which made him the most revered, as well as the most beloved, of talmudic sages." In an awesome masterwork of scholarship, Dr. Finkelstein, one of the most eminent scholars and religious leaders of our time, has sifted through scores of scattered talmudic reference to paint a richly detailed and intimately felt portrait of this rabbinic hero. Comprehensive footnotes help guide the interested reader to specific sources."

Rekindling the Torch: The Story of Canadian Zionism begins with the long and troubled history of the Jewish people that informed the nineteenth-century idea of Zionism: the search for a homeland. After surviving anti-Semitic laws and pogroms, Jewish refugees faced not only the ultimate crime against humanity, but also the shocking indifference of the West when they were turned back from safe havens. Far from weakening the spirit, these combined tragedies strengthened their collective will. In Canada, Jewish immigrants created communities, pooled their resources, and rose to become captains of industry, among them the Bronfmans, the Batshaws, and the Hayes. They organized and actively pursued the goals of nationhood in Palestine. Richly illustrated and extensively researched, Rekindling the Torch celebrates the struggle of the Canadian Jewish people and their contributions to the state of Israel.

Born in a displaced persons' camp two years after the end of the Holocaust, Michael Gawenda spent his childhood and teenage years in a left-wing non-Zionist Jewish youth group in Melbourne. This shaped the sort of Jew he became - a secular Jew who loved the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture. Gawenda went on to become a public figure during his 40 years as a journalist, including his role as editor-in-chief of The Age - the only Jewish editor-in-chief in the newspaper's history. Throughout this time, and since, he became dismayed and pained by the growing hostility of the left to Israel and to Jews like him who were not prepared to declare themselves as anti-Zionists. This has also forced him to examine his own Jewish identity and his relationships with his Jewish friends, and to forensically examine the basis of the critiques of Israel. At a time of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, My Life as a Jew is a controversial book. It is also a vital book. It should be read by activists for Israel and Zionism, as well as for the Palestinians. It should be read by readers of all political stripes. It should be read by journalists, as it is in part about journalism and its failings. And it should also be read by people interested in the remarkable life and career of its author, Michael Gawenda.