"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's return to memoir, a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents, published in tandem with his classic work of Holocaust literature, When Memory Comes Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedlander returns with WHEN MEMORY COMES: THE LATER YEARS, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics. Friedlander's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedlander goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others. Most importantly, this memoir led Friedlander to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"--

Even after thirty-five years, Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews remains the most comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. Yet at the time it was written, as Mr. Hilberg relates in The Politics of Memory, both the manuscript and its subject matter were refused by major publishers and university presses. When at last his monumental study was published, to extraordinary acclaim, the author found himself facing a hostile reception from those.

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is at once the story of a fascinating family and chronicle of the embattled twentieth century. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos. "--

The geographic, spiritual, and intellectual journeys of Nahum N. Glatzer (1903-1990)―prolific scholar, Brandeis University professor, and editor of the Schocken publishing house―reveal a rich cultural ambiance that no longer exists, as well as a breadth of perspective and learning that remains enviable in our time. This collection of 78 memoir entries, written as a document for his family, offers personal glimpses of Nahum Glatzer which complement his scholarship. Episodes and vignettes in chronological sequence recount the decisive events of his travels from Bodenbach to Boston and from strict Orthodoxy to a more historical, cultural, and aesthetic understanding of Judaism. Anecdotal and at times humorous accounts of some of the many outstanding personalities Glatzer knew and interacted with, including Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, two of the leading German-Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Glatzer also relates a variety of his experiences and expressions of faith, both personal and social. The events themselves become moments of religious psychology or theological insight. For Glatzer, as for Rosenzweig, the world was transformed by speech and the realities brought into existence through it. Michael Fishbane’s detailed introduction sets these memoirs, from the final decades of Glatzer’s life, in the context of his life and work. A preface by Judith Glatzer Wechsler offers personal reflections on the character of her father and his work.

In this new collection of essays, contemporary historians examine the ways earlier historians have framed, written, and "made" the Jewish past. Probing the ideology and methodology of their professional predecessors, American and Israeli historians offer new perspectives on some of the central figures of twentieth-century Jewish historiography, including Gershom Scholem, S. D. Goitein, Yitzhak Baer, Elias Bickerman, and Cecil Roth, as well as the Israeli "New Historians." Through their critical examinations of the construction of the Jewish past, the contributors to this volume develop important insights into current attitudes toward the dominant canons and ideals of historical scholarship and the future of historiography. They shine new light on the formation of a historical worldview and the "making" of history.

Jacob Rader Marcus (1896-1995), scholar, professor, and rabbi, was called the Dean of American Jewish historians by students and colleagues alike. A seminal force in the evolution of the academic study of American Jewish history, Marcus was the first to apply modern critical methodology to this field. In the course of his long life, he published more than 300 books and articles on the history of American Jews. In 1947 he founded the American Jewish Archives, which he directed for almost fifty years. A beloved teacher and mentor for several generations of Hebrew Union College (HUC) students, Dr. Marcus remains a very significant figure in the history of American Jewry during the twentieth century. Marcus, raised in West Virginia, was the child of East European immigrants. At the age of 15, he moved to Cincinnati to matriculate at HUC, America's oldest rabbinical seminary. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War I, Marcus became a member of the HUC faculty upon his rabbinical ordination in 1920. He subsequently moved to Europe to pursue doctoral studies and, upon returning to Cincinnati, Marcus taught courses in Jewish history. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Marcus realized that the i American Jewry was fast becoming the most influential Jewish community in the world. In the aftermath of the brutal destruction of European Jewry during World War II, Marcus's keen interest in the history of American Jewry burgeoned. Marcus left the pulpit for a career of scholarship and teaching, he nevertheless maintained a close connection to his students and, through them, to the American rabbinate. A mentor to generations of HUC students and graduates, Marcus was an active participant in the Central Conference of American Rabbis (the organizational arm of the American Reform rabbinate), serving as its president from 1949-1951. In this volume, Gary Philip Zola brings together a unique assortment of Marcus's most important unpublished essays, written for a more popular audience between 1916 and 1989. Read collectively, these essays bring the key themes of Marcus's work into bold relief. In the early "America: The Spiritual Center of Jewry" (1916), as in the much later "Three Hundred Years in America" (1955), Marcus calls upon American Jewry to study its heritage, arguing that this knowledge will kindle a renaissance in American Jewish life. In "Lost: Judaism in the American Expeditionary Forces, the Urgent Need for Welfare Work" (1919), he insists that the Jewish experience in America consists of a symbiotic relationship between individual Jews and the larger Jewish community. A focus on the individual in relation to the whole guided many of Marcus's essays, as did his emphasis on Jews studying their own past, strong echoes of both can be found in "New Literary Responsibilities (1941-1942) as well as works for specific occasions, such as "The Program of the American Jewish Archives" (1947) and Genesis: College Beginnings (1989). Another leitmotif linking these diverse topics is Marcus's view that American Judaism will thrive and distinguish itself as long as Jewish education and Jewish cultural life become a high priority on the Jewish communal agenda. This collection enhances our understanding of how the ideas of one of American Jewry's pioneering historians evolved, while preserving historical documents that trace the development of American Jewish life over the course of the twentieth century.