A diary written while Scheyer was in hiding at the convent of Labarde (Dordogne) in 1943-44; it was revised at Labarde in 1945. Scheyer (1886-1949) was born in Vienna; in August 1938 he immigrated to France.

"Part memoir, part history, part political commentary - and all Richler - This Year in Jerusalem is a personal, passionate, and quirkily comic examination of the idea of Israel-as-homeland: for Jews, for Palestinians, and, not least, for the author himself. Richler re-creates the Montreal of his adolescence - the local Zionist youth organization functioning as an escape from the zealous Hasidism of his grandfathers; the idea of emigration to Israel growing into a shimmering dream for himself and his friends. And, going to Israel to look up his old pals from St. Urbain Street, he shows us what happened to those who actually did "make aliyah"--Who settled in the cities and on the kibbutzim, survived the turmoils of war, and are faced today with the opportunities and dangers of peace with the Palestinians. He shows us, as well, the course of his own migration - away from Zionism and through the maze of his own sense of Judaism until he rediscovers his true homeland: "I owe as much to the thin gruel of my Canadian experience as I do to my Jewish provenance." Woven through his story are his fond (and not so fond) recollections of his family, his encounters in today's Israel with the kids he grew up with in Montreal a million years ago, and his most mordant observations on the state of the state of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Witty, intelligent, well reasoned, and across-the-board provocative, here is Mordecai Richler at his inimitable - and controversial - best." -- dust jacket

This special book is a compilation of essays on a remarkable but little-known story that lasted over half a century of world-renown physicist, the late Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia Kannegiser. Peierls collected a lot of prestigious awards in his lifetime, and in the beginning of WW2, he and Otto Frisch were responsible for the inception of the Anglo-American nuclear program (1940). He was also one of the key contributors in the research at Los Alamos during those turbulent times. Most previous books on Peierls have focused on his scientific research, while the contents for this volume sheds light on his private life in dramatic circumstances. The extensive contributions were not only gathered from the relatives of Genia, the couple's daughters, Landau's students, and from Russian and English archives, but they also include the unique perspectives of the author who is a professional theoretical physicist and is also fluent in Russian, his native language. So, this fascinating story of love, friendship and physics between Rudolf and Genia is being told for the first time from a surprisingly new angle through correspondence between Genia and Rudolf, memoirs and other documents, interesting and informal excerpts from Peierls' private "diary" covering the years 1979-1994 that will take the reader on a journey through communism, world war, the trials and tribulations of the loving couple with distinctly very different personalities.

Michael Stanislawski's provocative study of Max Nordau, Ephraim Moses Lilien, and Vladimir Jabotinsky reconceives the intersection of the European fin de siecle and early Zionism. Stanislawski takes up the tantalizing question of why Zionism, at a particular stage in its development, became so attractive to certain cosmopolitan intellectuals and artists. With the help of hundreds of previously unavailable documents, published and unpublished, he reconstructs the ideological journeys of writer and critic Nordau, artist Lilien, and political icon Jabotinsky. He argues against the common conception of Nordau and Jabotinsky as nineteenth-century liberals, insisting that they must be understood against the backdrop of Social Darwinism in the West and the Positivism of Russian radicalism in the fin de siecle, as well as Symbolism, Decadence, and Art Nouveau. When these men turned to Zionism, Stanislawski says, far from abandoning their aesthetic and intellectual preconceptions, they molded Zionism according to their fin de siecle cosmopolitanism. Showing how cosmopolitanism turned to nationalism in the lives and work of these crucial early Zionists, this story is a fascinating chapter in European and Russian, as well as Jewish, cultural and political history.

Son of pioneer movie producer Harry Rapf, Maurice Rapf grew up in Hollywood in that city's golden age. After moving from independent filmmaking to Warner Bros., in 1924 the senior Rapf joined Louis Mayer and became one of the founding members of MGM. Hence, movies were a huge influence in Maurice Rapf's early life. After graduating from college, Rapf worked as a screenwriter for major Hollywood studios, but, in 1947, he left Hollywood, never to work for a major studio again. On numerous occasions, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an alleged communist, although he never made a public confession or denial. As a result he was blacklisted from the industry and forced to begin a new career in the East. He eventually became a movie critic and film studies professor. Maurice Rapf knows movies and the movie business as an insider, from first-hand experience, not from books. His autobiography is the story of one person's interaction with an evolving Hollywood. Rapf witnessed the historical progression of movie production: from silents to sound, from a fun-loving frontier community to a huge and fiercely competitive industry, from an apolitical never-never land to a community very much aware of-and nervous about-its social responsibility in a period of economic depression and in a period of world peace seriously threatened by the aggression of fascism. Of interest to students and teachers of film studies, of American history, and of American popular culture, as well as anyone who loves movies.

Dual language - German original with English translations on facing pages. For much of her lifetime, and for decades after her death, Mascha Kaleko was a forgotten poet. With his publications, Andreas Nolte has played a role in changing this. To him, she personifies an all-too-typical example of a German-Jewish artist who was marginalized, intimidated, expelled into exile, and then forgotten. What adds to her obscurity is that her life's intriguing story is not well known, unless one speaks German and can read her poems, or what little has been written about her. This book provides a significant number of translated poems and biographical information from every stage of Kaleko's remarkable life in Berlin, New York, and Jerusalem to an English-speaking audience. Her story and her powerful poetry need to be heard: they shine a light on the darkest of times in the last century and remind us of the lessons that history teaches us.

"The autobiography of Martin Karplus, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2013, describes the journey from his childhood in Vienna, his escape to Switzerland in 1938 shortly after Hitler's entrance into Austria, his education in New England and California, and scientific career which took him to England, Illinois, Columbia, Strasbourg, and Harvard. The author's optimistic outlook and faith in himself made it possible for him to overcome difficulties in his research and to develop methods in several different fields of science that asked questions to teach him and others something not known before. Paralleling his efforts in science, Martin Karplus enjoyed a life-long interest in cooking, working at some of the best restaurants in France and Spain, and in photography, holding numerous exhibitions of his work around the world"--

In this beautifully written and almost compulsively readable book - in turn vindictive and joyful, painful and amusing - Mark Matousek writes of his struggle to live an enlightened life in a desacralised and brutal age ‘where God is dead and Madonna rules in crotchless leather panties'.

"Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, only to find when she came to the United States that racism was as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe. Moving first to New York and then to Washington, DC, Marione joined the burgeoning civil rights movement, protesting discrimination in housing, employment, education, and other aspects of life in the nation's capital, including the denial of voting rights. She was a volunteer in the legendary March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, and she was an organizer of an extended sit-in to support the Mississippi Freedom Party. In 1964, at the urging of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, Marione went south to Mississippi. There, she worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and taught African American youth at one of the country's controversial freedom schools. With her boldness came threats--white supremacists made ominous calls and left a blazing cross in front of her school--and an arrest and conviction. She narrowly escaped a three-month prison sentence. As a white woman and a Holocaust escapee, Marione was perhaps the most unlikely of heroes in the American civil rights movement; and yet, her core belief in the equality of all people, regardless of race or religion, did not waver and she refused to be quieted, refused to accept bigotry. This empowering, true story offers a rare up close view of the civil rights movement. It is a story of conviction and courage--a reminder of how far the rights movement has come and the progress that still needs to be made."--Page 2 of book jacket.

This book tells the story of Trinidad-born Claudia Jones, a key figure in the movement for racial justice in Britain. Exiled in 1955 from the US for her affiliation to the Communist Party, she arrived in London penniless and became active in civil rights campaigns among the capital's West Indian communities. She set up the newspaper West Indian Gazette and in 1958, following racist violence in Notting Hill, launched an annual indoor carnival to showcase Caribbean culture. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile was the first book to chart the work of this visionary and pioneer, focusing on her time in Britain. Part of the Radical Black Women series, this new edition features a preface by Black feminist researcher Lola Olufemi and an appendix compiled by Marika Sherwood.

Memoirs of Filar, a Jewish pianist born in Warsaw in 1917. Describes his youth as a child prodigy, including his early successes despite anti-Jewish discrimination. Pp. 50-115 relate his experiences in the Holocaust. At the outbreak of the war he fled to Lvov, but he returned to Warsaw after the German occupation in 1941. He entered the ghetto, where he first played with the Jewish symphony orchestra, but was soon sent for forced labor. When his parents and several of his six siblings were deported, he and his brother Joel joined a resistance group. They fought during the uprising, but were then caught and deported, first to Majdanek and then to Skarżysko-Kamienna, Buchenwald, and Schlieben. After surviving a death march, they were liberated at Nixdorf. His parents and two siblings perished in the Holocaust. After the war Filar lived in Germany; in 1950 he emigrated to the U.S., where he became a concert pianist and played in Carnegie Hall in 1952.

Josephus (A.D. 37-?100), a pro-Roman Jew closely associated with the emperor Titus, is the earliest systematic commentator on the Bible, as well as one of the foremost historians of the beginning of the Christian era. Politically, Josephus was pro-Roman, and although he had no sympathy for extreme Jewish nationalism, he was a zealous defender of Jewish religion and culture. Louis H. Feldman examines the principles that guided Josephus in his understanding of the Bible, investigating his creative contribution in the rewriting of biblical accounts. This comprehensive study evaluates Josephus as a historian and demonstrates the originality and consistency of his work as an author. The first part of Feldman's work attempts to understand Josephus's purposes and techniques in retelling the Bible. The second part reviews Josephus's treatment of twelve key biblical figures. In addition to its reevaluation of an important early historian, this unique compendium provides a mine of information on the reassessment of the most important biblical figures.