"A fascinating and timely examination of how genocide can take root at the local level--turning neighbors, friends and even family members against one another--as seen through the little-known story of the Eastern European border town Buczacz during World War II"--

How could a Jew kill a Jew for religious and political reasons? Many people asked this question after an Orthodox Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itshak Rabin in 1995. But historian Michael Stanislawski couldn't forget it, and he decided to find out everything he could about an obscure and much earlier event that was uncannily similar to Rabin's murder: the 1848 killing--by an Orthodox Jew--of the Reform rabbi of Lemberg (now L'viv, Ukraine). Eventually, Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity, a prelude to twentieth-century assassinations of Jews by Jews, and a turning point in Jewish history. Based on records unavailable for decades, A Murder in Lemberg is the first book about this fascinating case. On September 6, 1848, Abraham Ber Pilpel entered the kitchen of Rabbi Abraham Kohn and his family and poured arsenic in the soup that was being prepared for their dinner. Within hours, the rabbi and his infant daughter were dead. Was Kohn's murder part of a conservative Jewish backlash to Jewish reform and liberalization in a year of European revolution? Or was he killed simply because he threatened taxes that enriched Lemberg's Orthodox leaders? Vividly recreating the dramatic story of the murder, the trial that followed, and the political and religious fallout of both, Stanislawski tries to answer these questions and others. In the process, he reveals the surprising diversity of Jewish life in mid-nineteenth-century eastern Europe. Far from being uniformly Orthodox, as is often assumed, there was a struggle between Orthodox and Reform Jews that was so intense that it might have led to murder.

This is a life, in stories, of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760), the founder of Hasidism. The Baal Shem Tov, or the Besht, as he is commonly called, led a revival in Judaism that put love and joy at the center of religious life and championed the piety of the common folk against the rabbinic establishment. He has been recognized as one of the greatest teachers in Jewish history, and much of what is alive and vibrant in Judaism today, in all denominations, derives from his inspiration. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was descended from several illustrious Hasidic dynasties, wrote: "The Baal Shem Tov brought heaven to earth. He and his disciples, the Hasidim, banished melancholy from the soul and uncovered the ineffable delight of being a Jew.">

"When we reflect on the Holocaust, we think of Auschwitz and Dachau; and when we think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, we think of Nuremberg. Not Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not the town of Kharkov (Kharkiv in Ukrainian). But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this Ukrainian city, where in a sense the Holocaust itself began. Eighteen months before the end of World War II, three Nazi officers and a Ukrainian collaborator were tried and convicted of war crimes in a Soviet court and hanged in Kharkov's public square. Revealing a lost chapter in Holocaust historiography, journalist Greg Dawson tells of his journey to this place, and the rediscovery of the forgotten trial which began the process of avenging the murder of his grandparents, great-grandparents, and tens of thousands of fellow Ukrainians consumed at the dawn of the Shoah"--Provided by publisher.

Czernowitz at 100 represents a collection based on the proceedings of a 2008 international conference convened at York University in Toronto. Each chapter looks back at a portion over a long century, one marked with the mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews across the globe, two world wars, the Holocaust, the birth of Israel, and the rise and fall of the Soviet bloc. They assess the achievements and fate of those who participated in the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference that was held at Czernowitz, now known as Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Featuring contributions from a new generation of scholars re-examining eastern European Jewish life, the successes and failures of the Yiddishist movement are examined. The contributors discuss how Yiddishism-a fascinating example of language-based nationalism-shaped the political and cultural landscape of territorially dispersed Jews across Eastern Europe and the world during the twentieth century.

It is the holiday of Purim -- a time to stage comic and entertaining plays or "Purimshpiels". But in the village of Shamgorod in 1649, this festive custom takes a tragic turn. Three itinerant actors show up at an inn to perform a Purim play for the Jewish community. The discovery that Shamgorod has suffered a pogrom and only two Jews have survived -- the innkeeper, Berish, and his daughter. Egged on by Berish, the actors agree that instead of a "Purimshpiel" they will stage a mock trial of God, indicting Him for allowing such things to happen to His children. Berish wants to be the Prosecutor; the three actors agree to be the Judges. But who will be Defense Attorney? A Stranger, who looks oddly familiar to all of them, appears and offers to take the role. Meanwhile the mob outside is planning a new assault on the inn. -- From publisher's description.

Arnold Daghani (1909-85) came from a German-speaking Jewish family in Suczawa, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Romania. His understated narrative of his experiences in the slave labour camp at Mikhailowka, south west Ukraine (1942-43), presented here in its first English book edition, provides a day-by-day account of the chilling experiences of Jewish slave labourers. It is written in a compelling style and illustrated by watercolours and drawings that Daghani made secretly in captivity and smuggled out of the camp and a Romanian ghetto. It includes an extraordinary account of the couple's escape and the shooting of over three hundred prisoners. The uniqueness of Daghani's Holocaust testimony lies in his role as an artist which led to his (and his wife's) escape from the camp and their survival. The camps in Ukraine have been under-investigated and the diary provides significant material. It was used as the basis of investigations in the 1960s into war crimes in the slave labour camps in Ukraine, helping to bring attention to the region and providing some form of recognition for those who suffered there. This richly illustrated and scrupulously edited book is distinguished from more conventional Holocaust memoirs by focusing on fundamental questions of historical testimony and the problems of representation in both words and images. Daghani's diary is contextualized on the basis of wide-ranging new historical, archival and art historical research in essays that document the artist's attempts to achieve justice and reconciliation. They locate the diary in relation to contemporary issues on migration and statelessness, genocide and trauma, self-reflection and memory. The diary is both art and document, addressing how we understand and construct history. It enables readers to engage with the Holocaust via the viewpoint of an individual, making statistics more meaningful and history less distant.

The storm of controversy over Helen Demidenko and her novel, 'The Hand that Signed the Paper,' raised huge cultural and political questions. Robert Manne, the influential historian and commentator, was a key participant in that debate. In 'The Culture of Forgetting, Manne tells the fascinating story of Demidenko's triumphal march into the honors list of Australian literature, the furious argument she provoked, and her astonishing unmasking as Helen Darville, the daughter of English immigrants. In his pursuit of the truth, Manne is driven by one inescapable question: what is the relationship between 'The Hand that Signed the Paper' and the greatest tragedy of twentieth-century Europe, the Holocaust? 'The Culture of Forgetting' is a powerful and moving book about fiction and free speech, a deeply personal response to the Demidenko puzzle, and a brilliant account of the history at the heat of the affair.

Founded in 1794 as a frontier city on the Black Sea, Odessa soon grew to be one of Russia's busiest seaports. Settlers of all nationalities went there to seek their fortune, among them Jews who came to form one of the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally fertile Jewish communities in Europe. This history of Jewish Odessa traces the rise of that community from its foundation in 1794 to the pogroms of 1881 that erupted after the assassination of Alexander II. Zipperstein emphasizes Jewish acculturation: changes in behavior, attitude, and ideology as reflected in schools, synagogues, newspapers, and other institutions of the period. The patterns set then affected the community's cultural development well into the second decade of the twentieth century. More a modern metropolis than any other Russian city with a significant Jewish population, Odessa offers a window into the diversity of Russian Jewish experience.