The book of Genesis tells us that God made a covenant with Abraham, promising him a glorious posterity on the condition that he and all his male descendents must be circumcised. For thousands of years thereafter, the distinctive practice of circumcision served to set the Jews apart from their neighbors. The apostle Paul rejected it as a worthless practice, emblematic of Judaism's fixation on physical matters. Christian theologians followed his lead, arguing that whereas Christians sought spiritual fulfillment, Jews remained mired in such pointless concerns as diet and circumcision. As time went on, Europeans developed folklore about malicious Jews who performed sacrificial murders of Christian children and delighted in genital mutilation. But Jews held unwaveringly to the belief that being a Jewish male meant being physically circumcised and to this day even most non-observant Jews continue to follow this practice. In this book, Leonard B. Glick offers a history of Jewish and Christian beliefs about circumcision from its ancient origins to the current controversy. By the turn of the century, more and more physicians in America and England--but not, interestingly, in continental Europe--were performing the procedure routinely. Glick shows that Jewish American physicians were and continue to be especially vocal and influential champions of the practice which, he notes, serves to erase the visible difference between Jewish and gentile males. Informed medical opinion is now unanimous that circumcision confers no benefit and the practice has declined. In Jewish circles it is virtually taboo to question circumcision, but Glick does not flinch from asking whether this procedure should continue to be the defining feature of modern Jewish identity.

"An eminent historian recounts the Nazi rise to power from his unique perspective as a young Jewish boy in Munich, living with Adolf Hitler as his neighbor. Watching events unfold from his window, Edgar bore witness to the Night of the Long Knives, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht. Jews were arrested; his father was imprisoned at Dachau. In 1939 Edgar was sent on his own to England, where he would make a new life, a career, have a family, and strive to forget the nightmare of his past--a past that came rushing back when he decided, at the age of eighty-eight, to tell the story of his buried childhood and his infamous neighbor"--Provided by publisher.

As Irene's Pappi fights to save his family during the Holocaust, Irene's childhood is lost. Play is restricted. Family and friends disappear. Finally, with the Dutch police at their door comes the reality that Irene's father has not moved his family far enough from Hitler's Germany. By January 1945, the family is struggling to survive a death camp. Irene tends her ailing parents, cares for starving kids, and even helps bring clothes to her Amsterdam neighbor Anne Frank, before her family is offered a singular chance for freedom...providing the Nazi doctor says they are healthy enough. After two weeks of heart-lifting miracles and heart-breaking tragedies, Irene arrives in the Algerian desert to journey into redemption and womanhood, without her parents or brother. Irene's first person memoir, Shores Beyond Shores, is an account of how the heart keeps its common humanity in the most inhumane and turbulent of times. Irene's hard-earned lessons are a timeless inspiration. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Following publication of an article on the Holocaust on April 13, 2018, Irene wrote a letter to the Editor which was published April 17, 2018 in The New York Times: Holocaust Survivors 'Have Voices That Matter' April 17, 2018 Re "Getting Facts Wrong on the Holocaust" (news article, April 13): More than four decades passed before I could break the silence about my traumatic experiences during the Holocaust. It is a formidable challenge for survivors to speak and for others to listen. The number of survivors is dwindling; they are getting quite old and their memories are fading. Yet it is ever more important that the signs of authoritarian regimes and how they evolved are brought into the consciousness of youths and adults, as warning signals of what must be prevented from happening again. Survivors, when able, have the responsibility to bear witness and provide evidence so that the six million Jews who were murdered are not forgotten, so that perpetrators are not pardoned for their crimes, and so that deniers don't have a leg to stand on. While the voices of the victims have been silenced forever, we the survivors have voices that matter. After four decades of not speaking, I realized that silence was no longer an option. I told my stories to my children and grandchildren as well as to many students in many schools over a 30-year period. Schools and other organizations should take advantage of every opportunity to engage survivors to tell their stories. IRENE BUTTER, ANN ARBOR, MICH. The writer survived two concentration camps, Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. She recently published her memoir, "Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope."

The author discusses the issue of "inherited guilt" as he interviews the children and grandchildren of former Nazis.

In Grimm Legacies, esteemed literary scholar Jack Zipes explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. Zipes reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world-the fairy tale.Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. Zipes looks at the transformation of the Grimms' tales into children's literature, the Americanization of the tales, the "Grimm" aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales' utopian impulses. He shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. Zipes concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism.With erudition and verve, Grimm Legacies examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today's storytelling world.

A charming and undeniably powerful debut novel set in Berlin, "This Must Be the Place" chronicles the friendship between a fading actor and a young married American woman who are both learning to live with the past.

Relates the life story of Josef Mengele and quotes from the testimonies of twin children who were the victims of his sadistic pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz. They speak about the complicated psychological problems which they confronted after the war, and which caused their silence in the 1950s-70s. In 1984 the organization of surviving twins, CANDLES, was established, which organized a trip to Auschwitz in 1985 and publicized their reminiscences.

"This powerful, meticulously researched novel is a moving tale of one girl's struggle against a world in turmoil. In 1930s Berlin, choked by the tightening of Hitler's fist, the Klein family are gradually losing everything that is precious to them. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Rosa, slips out of Germany on a Kindertransport train to begin a new life in England. Charged with the task of securing a safe passage for her family, she vows that she will not rest until they are safe. But as war breaks out and she loses contact with her parents, Rosa finds herself wondering if there are some vows that can't be kept ...A sweeping tale of love and loss, with the poignant story of the Kindertransport at its heart, this is an exceptional accomplishment from one of Britain's bravest and most vibrant young writers."

[A] searing memoir. . . . An enduring, indeed universal, story. Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe Summoned with her mother to Gestapo headquarters in 1943, fourteen-year-old Cordelia Edvardson was given a terrible choice: to acknowledge her secret Jewish heritage and suffer the consequences or to see her mother charged with treason. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is the true story of the love between this mother and daughter, and a piercing example of the tragedies wrought by Nazi Germany. "A lacerating, beautifully translated memoir." Publishers Weekly , starred review "Mesmerizing. . . . [Has] the concise unreality of a horrifying fairy tale." Thomas Frick, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Behind [Edvardson's] deceptively simple prose is a complex and tragic story." Judith Bolton-Fasman, Newsday "Cordelia Edvardson's defiant tone challenges us to eschew simplified encounters with the literature and experiences of Holocaust survivors." Paul H. Hamburg, Jewish Book World "To see the horrors of the Holocaust through a child's eye is to experience hell. Cordelia Edvardson's astonishing story captures, with a terrifying reality, a child's response to the myriad atrocities of the Nazis and their murderous regime. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is compelling, horrifying, poetic in its intensity." Deborah Peifer, Bay Area Reporter

Golo Mann, noted German historian and the third of Thomas Mann's children, tells the story of his childhood and youth ; the narrative spans the years from his birth in 1909 to 1933.

Haunted by his parents’ horrific suffering and traumatic losses under Nazi rule, Lev Raphael grew up loathing everything German. Those feelings shaped his Jewish identity, his life, and his career. While researching his mother’s war years after her death, he discovers a distant relative living in the very city where she had worked in a slave labor camp, found freedom, and met his father. Soon after, Raphael is launched on book tours in Germany and, in the process, redefines himself as someone unafraid to face the past and let it go. Bookmarks , “Top Ten Nonfiction Titles of 2009”

"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.

Coming generations will ask themselves how it was possible that millions of people, victims of an artificially induced enthusiasm, could be moved to do the very things which led to their own ruin. The answer could be given in hundreds of thousands of words, but, if it were expressed in one word alone, that word would be: Goebbels. Curt Riess, a Jewish Berliner who fled Germany upon Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933, considered Goebbels to be 'the most outstanding man of the Nazi regime, not even barring Hitler himself.' Without Goebbels' genius for organization and propaganda, Nazism could never have amassed the support it needed to gain and keep power in Germany. From provincial obscurity, Goebbels scurried through the Nazi ranks to become one of the most dominant and trusted members of Hitler's inner circle. His career was marked by formidable powers of administration, his ruthless hatred of the Jews, his resourcefulness in promoting Nazi ideals, and his inflexible devotion to the Führer, asserted in his final morbid gesture of propaganda: the sacrifice of his wife, six children, and himself in Hitler's bunker in 1945. Riess' biography was first published in 1949 and benefitted greatly from the discovery of Goebbels' diaries in 1946. It explores the many fascinating and pertinent aspects of Goebbels' character: the insecurities brought on by his diminutive stature; his rejection by his family; his consuming jealousy of his rivals; and his obsession with sex. It remains a compelling and authoritative biography of the man whose manipulative genius steered the German nation to ruin.

Based on surveys carried out in 1990 in five areas of England and in five matching areas of Germany.

Examines what life was like for children - German, Polish, and Jewish - under Nazi rule, based mainly on the diaries and memoirs of 14 persons, five of them Jews: Yehuda Bacon, Janina Dawidowicz (Janina David), Thomas Geve, Dawid Sierakowiak, Miriam Wattenberg (Mary Berg). Pt. 2 (pp. 103-227), "The Race War", focuses on the experiences of the Jewish children, especially in the ghettos of Łódź and Warsaw, and includes the experiences of Bacon in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Provides examples of how the games of all these children reflected life and death around them.

A Past Without Shadow examines 50 years of German children's books in which the darkest horrors of the Third Reich have routinely remained hidden. The horrors of the Third Reich are systematically screened and filtered, allowing the darker, bleaker parts of history to escape illumination. Here Zohar Shavit explores 345 German books for children describing the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and finds a shocking distortion of the past: a recurrent narrative which suggests that the Germans themselves had no hand in the suffering inflicted on the Jews. These books, Shavit argues, have created the false historical lesson that the real victims of Hitler's crimes were the German people themselves. First published to great acclaim in Hebrew and now available in English, this book is a wake-up call for anyone concerned about German children's literature and its responsibility to past and future.

This book brings together significant articles and excerpts on psychoanalytic technique written by Freud's contemporaries-- analysts who provided some of the most important contributions to their field.

Oskar, a survivor of the Holocaust, is a man of little faith. Despite his inability to find answers, he persists in asking questions that all human beings have a right to ask. He encounters diverse characters, such as Bella, a New York prostitute, mystic Martin Buber, and an anti-Semitic high school teacher on the Canadian prairies. Strong language.

"Mild and sensitive Richard Hieck endured a quietly difficult childhood in Germany. Raised in humble circumstances, Richard was profoundly influenced by his withdrawn mother and by his father, an enigma whose devotion centered not on his five children but on his mysterious career. From his father, Richard inherited an interest in the night sky, learning to love the constellations and to take comfort in the strength of Orion and the warm radiance of Venus. Richard's shadowy, elusive father also influenced him to pursue studies in mathematics, a field offering Richard the discipline he had craved as a child." "Published in 1933, The Unknown Quantity is Hermann Broch's study of the underlying chaos - and, finally, the impossibility - of life within a society whose values are in decay. As Richard seeks to reconcile the conflicting demands of love and science, of passion and reason, societal and family values begin to undermine him and those in orbit around him." --Book Jacket.