In this alternately humorous and horrifying memoir, a Jewish father shleps his reluctant children around Europe on a hard-charging tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in order to impress on them the profound evil of Hitler’s war against the Jews and the importance of combatting genocide. In 2017, renowned author and celebrity rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, decided to take his family on a European holiday. But instead of seeing the sights of London or Paris, he took his reluctant—and at times complaining—children on a harrowing journey though Auschwitz, Treblinka, Warsaw, and many other sites associated with Hitler’s genocidal war against the Jews. His purpose was to impress upon them the full horror of the Holocaust so they would know and remember it deep in their bones. In the process, he and his children learn a great deal about the scope and nature of the European genocide and the continuing effects of global hatred and anti-Semitism. The resulting memoir is an utterly unique blend of travelogue, memoir and history—alternately fascinating, terrifying, frustrating, humorous, and tragic. “It is my honor to contribute a foreword to his important book, in which Rabbi Shmuley Boteach details the excruciating journey he took with his wife and children in the summer of 2017 to the killing fields of Europe, a pilgrimage which every person of conscience should attempt at least once in their lifetime. It is our universal obligation to dedicate ourselves to the memory of the martyred six million, just as it is our obligation to confront and defeat genocide wherever it rises.” —From the foreword by Amb. Georgette Mosbacher

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”

Here the late Raphael Patai (1910-1996) recreates the fascinating world of Jewish seafaring from Noah's voyage through the Diaspora of late antiquity. In a work of pioneering scholarship, Patai weaves together Biblical stories, Talmudic lore, and Midrash literature to bring alive the world of these ancient mariners. As he did in his highly acclaimed book The Jewish Alchemists, Patai explores a subject that has never before been investigated by scholars. Based on nearly sixty years of research, beginning with study he undertook for his doctoral dissertation, The Children of Noah is literally Patai's first book and his last. It is a work of unsurpassed scholarship, but it is accessible to general readers as well as scholars.An abundance of evidence demonstrates the importance of the sea in the lives of Jews throughout early recorded history. Jews built ships, sailed them, fought wars in them, battled storms in them, and lost their lives to the sea. Patai begins with the story of the deluge that is found in Genesis and profiles Noah, the father of all shipbuilders and seafarers. The sea, according to Patai's interpretation, can be seen as an image of the manifestation of God's power, and he reflects on its role in legends and tales of early times. The practical importance of the sea also led to the development of practical institutions, and Patai shows how Jewish seafaring had its own culture and how it influenced the cultures of Mediterranean life as well. Of course, Jewish sailors were subject to the same rabbinical laws as Jews who never set sail, and Patai describes how they went to extreme lengths to remain in adherence, even getting special emendations of laws to allow them to tie knots and adjust rigging on the Sabbath.The Children of Noah is a capstone to an extraordinary career. Patai was both a careful scholar and a gifted storyteller, and this work is at once a vivid history of a neglected aspect of Jewish culture and a treasure trove of sources for further study. It is a stimulating and delightful book.