Winner of the National Jewish Book Award · New York Times Bestseller "A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information--and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?" -- Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow A complex hero. A forgotten story. The first witness to reveal the full truth of the Holocaust . . . Award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist Jonathan Freedland tells the astonishing true story of Rudolf Vrba, the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world of a truth too few were willing to hear. In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became one of the very first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and make his way to freedom--among only a tiny handful who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world--and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. Against all odds, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen--a forensically detailed report that eventually reached Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Pope. And yet too few heeded the warning that Vrba had risked everything to deliver. Though Vrba helped save two hundred thousand Jewish lives, he never stopped believing it could have been so many more. This is the story of a brilliant yet troubled man--a gifted "escape artist" who, even as a teenager, understood that the difference between truth and lies can be the difference between life and death. Rudolf Vrba deserves to take his place alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler, and Primo Levi as one of the handful of individuals whose stories define our understanding of the Holocaust.

The Fixer is the winner of the 1967 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel. Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

A New York Times Notable Book * Winner of the National Jewish Book Award * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist "A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."--Michael Chabon In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic--part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work--that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history. The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

No immortal in the history of baseball retired so young, so well, or so completely as Sandy Koufax. After compiling a remarkable record from 1962 to 1966 that saw him lead the National League in ERA all five years, win three Cy Young awards, and pitch four no-hitters including a perfect game, Koufax essentially disappeared. Save for his induction into the Hall of Fame and occasional appearances at the Dodgers training camp, Koufax has remained unavailable, unassailable, and unsullied, in the process becoming much more than just the best pitcher of his generation. He is the Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series on Yom Kippur, defining himself as a man who placed faith over fame. This act made him the standard to which Jewish parents still hold their children. Except for his autobiography (published in 1966), Koufax has resolutely avoided talking about himself. But through sheer doggedness that even Koufax came to marvel at, Jane Leavy was able to gain his trust to the point where they talked regularly over the three years Leavy reported her book. With Koufax′s blessing, Leavy interviewed nearly every one of his former teammates, opponents, and friends, and emerged with a portrait of the artist that is as thorough and stylish as was his command on the pitching mound.

Now in paperback! Winner of the 2025 IPPY Award for literary fiction. Longlisted for the National Book Award. Named a top debut novel of 2024 by Kirkus , and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist. In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra's ever loved, every place they've felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that's decided on this final act of protest. Told in lyric fragments that span both lifetimes and geography, Yr Dead is a queer, Jewish, diasporic coming of age story that questions how our historical memory shapes our political and emotional present. Visceral, propulsive, and at turns fluorescently beautiful and fluorescently tragic, Yr Dead is the electric debut novel from award-winning writer Sam Sax , one of our most dynamic and imaginative writers.

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, "The Magic Barrel," has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggleing New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic. "The Magic Barrel "is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture's most painful and unresolved issues. American culture focuses on letting go of grudges and redemption narratives instead of the perpetrator’s obligations or recompense for harmed parties. As survivor communities have pointed out, these emphases have too often only caused more harm. But Danya Ruttenberg knew there was a better model, rooted in the work of the medieval philosopher Maimonides. For Maimonides, upon whose work Ruttenberg elaborates, forgiveness is much less important than the repair work to which the person who caused harm is obligated. The word traditionally translated as repentance really means something more like return, and in this book, returning is a restoration, as much as is possible, to the victim, and, for the perpetrator of harm, a coming back, in humility and intentionality, to behaving as the person we might like to believe we are. Maimonides laid out five steps: naming and owning harm; starting to change/transformation; restitution and accepting consequences; apology; and making different choices. Applying this lens to both our personal relationships and some of the most significant and painful issues of our day, including systemic racism and the legacy of enslavement, sexual violence and harassment in the wake of #MeToo, and Native American land rights, On Repentance and Repair helps us envision a way forward. Rooted in traditional Jewish concepts while doggedly accessible and available to people from any, or no, religious background, On Repentance and Repair is a book for anyone who cares about creating a country and culture that is more whole than the one in which we live, and for anyone who has been hurt or who is struggling to take responsibility for their mistakes.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and nominee for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Book Award, these ten stories and the celebrated title novella are "beyond compare . . . [Helprin's] imagination should be protected by some intellectual equivalent of the National Park Service" (The Philadelphia Inquirer).

About the Author In addition to the Immigrants novels, Howard Fast is the author of Greenwich, Being Red, My Glorious Brothers, Time and the Riddle, and Spartacus (the basis for the acclaimed film), among many other books. He has won numerous awards for his writing, including an Emmy Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Schomburg Award for Race Relations. Born in New York in 1914, he now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Scholar and critic Ruth R. Wisse warns that the failure of liberals to stand up for Jews facing resurgent antisemitism signals the collapse of liberal democratic values. “Ruth R. Wisse is a writer of passion and precision, who has extraordinary polemical powers. All these enviable qualities are beautifully engaged in If I Am Not for Myself, an immensely impressive book on a subject of universal importance.” —Joseph Epstein, author of Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life, and recipient of the National Humanities Award “You don’t have to be Jewish to be moved and instructed by this brilliant critique of liberalisms that do not reciprocate the devotions of their adherents. Ruth R. Wisse joins literary grace to analytical rigor in a book that should generate necessary debates for a long time to come.” —Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the Institute for Religion and Public Life and First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life “The Jews have enemies, as this book urges us to recognize in its passionately felt and powerfully reasoned argument. Ruth R. Wisse mounts a resolve defense of basic Jewish rights and offers a determined challenge to all who would deny them. Her analysis of the psychological and political sources of anti-Jewish hostility is as formidable as it is provocative and deserves the most serious reflection.” —Alvin H. Rosenfeld, professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University “Wisse’s book is a timely and appropriate response to the ‘Woody Allen syndrome,’ typical of American Jews who charge Israel with betraying their own liberal legacy through its supposed suppression of Palestinian rights. What she charges in return is nothing less than the betrayal of the Jewish heritage itself by well-meaning, assimilated American Jews. Whether or not one agrees with all of her assertions, her book is mandatory reading for those who reject the platitudes of both Left and Right—which coincide in blaming Jews for the aggressions waged against them.” —Ronald Radosh, professor, and coauthor of The Rosenburg File: A Search for the Truth “This is a wonderful book, passionate, wise, and original. Wisse shows how liberalism has led the Jews into the worst betrayal of all—self-betrayal.” —Rael Jean Isaac, coauthor of The Coercive Utopians and Madness in the Streets

"A celebration of literary genius framed by 20th-century tragedy."--Richard Bernstein, New York Times Finally in paperback, this "monumental collection; gathers all of Babel's deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times ). Reviewing the work in The New Republic , James Woods wrote that this groundbreaking volume "represents a triumph of translating, editing, and publishing. Beautiful to hold, scholarly and also popularly accessible, it is an enactment of love." Considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Isaac Babel has left his mark on a generation of readers and writers. This book will stand as Babel's final, most enduring legacy. Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; A New York Times Notable Book, a and Library Journal Best Book, a Washington Post Book World Rave, a Village Voice Favorite Book of the Year.

"Winner of a Jewish National Book Award for his previous book, Walking Israel, NBC Special Correspondent Martin Fletcher uses meticulous research and his own family's history in this stunning novel. Dramatizing explosive events in London and Palestine in the years directly following World War II, The List follows the lives of Edith and Georg, Austrian refugees who are expecting their first baby in a world unfriendly to Jews. Anti-Semitism sweeps across the streets of London even as the world learns of the atrocities of the Holocaust. As Edith and Georg desperately search for surviving family members, they struggle to stay afloat in a world riddled with terrorism, assassination attempts, and fear"--

Winner of the Prix de Rome and the National Jewish Book Award, these ten stories and the title novella, "Ellis Island," exhibit tremendous range and versatility of style and technique, yet are closely unified in their beauty and in their concern with enduring and universal questions.

Equally adept at fiction (a winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and philosophy (a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius prize), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein now gives us a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind. At the center: Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, has become a surprise best seller. He's been dubbed the atheist with a soul, and his sudden celebrity has upended his life. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum-the goddess of game theory-and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. But he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his teacher Jonas Elijah Klapper, a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism, and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius, heir to the leadership of an exotic Hasidic sect. The rush of events in a single dramatic week plays out Cass's conviction that the religious impulse spills out into life at large. In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and intellectually captivating, it is a luminous and intoxicating novel.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council How should we understand the stories of the Babylonian Talmud? Where do they come from? Why are they in the Talmud? How do they relate to Talmudic law? In Talmudic Stories , Jeffrey Rubenstein deepens our appreciation for the complexity of these texts by drawing attention to the literary aspects and cultural contexts that are essential to understanding their narrative art, meanings, and importance. Focusing on six famous stories of the Babylonian Talmud and discussing many others in relation to these, Rubenstein's analysis illuminates the ways in which the rabbis used narratives to grapple with fundamental tensions of their culture. The book also features an appendix including the original Hebrew/Aramaic texts for the reader's reference.

Winner of a Jewish National Book Award and author of The List and Jacob's Oath , both of which achieved outstanding critical acclaim, NBC Special Correspondent Martin Fletcher delivers another breathtaking tale of love, war, and redemption. Tom Layne was a world-class television correspondent until his life collapsed in Sarajevo. Beaten and humiliated, he fell into a hole diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Eleven years later he returns to the Balkans to film a documentary on the man who caused his downfall: Ratko Mladic, Europe’s biggest killer since Hitler, wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. Mysterious forces have protected Mladic for a decade, preventing his arrest, and these shadowy but deadly foes swing into action against the journalist. Tom soon falls into a web of intrigue and deceit that threatens his life as well as that of the woman he loves. Drawing upon his own experiences reporting on the wars in Bosnia and Sarajevo, Martin Fletcher has written a searing love story and a painfully authentic account of a war reporter chasing down the scoop of a lifetime.

As World War II winds to a close, Europe's roads are clogged with twenty million exhausted refugees walking home. Among them are Jacob and Sarah, lonely Holocaust survivors who meet in Heidelberg. But Jacob is consumed with hatred and cannot rest until he has killed his brother's murderer, a concentration camp guard nicknamed "The Rat." Now he must choose between revenge and love, between avenging the past and building a future. Martin Fletcher, who won the National Jewish Book Award for Walking Israel, proved his chops as a novelist with The List, which was selected as the One Book, One Jewish Community title for the city of Philadelphia. Now, in Jacob's Oath , Fletcher brings us another touching novel of love, loyalty, and loss, set in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award (Holocaust Category) Winner of the Canadian Historical Association John A. Macdonald Prize Featured in The Literary Review of Canada 100: Canada's Most Important Books [This] is a story best summed up in the words of an anonymous senior Canadian official who, in the midst of a rambling, off-the-record discussion with journalists in 1945, was asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada after the war ... 'None,' he said, 'is too many.' From the Preface One of the most significant studies of Canadian history ever written, None Is Too Many conclusively lays to rest the comfortable notion that Canada has always been an accepting and welcoming society. Detailing the country's refusal to offer aid, let alone sanctuary, to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1948, it is an immensely bleak and discomfiting story - and one that was largely unknown before the book's publication. Irving Abella and Harold Troper's retelling of this episode is a harrowing read not easily forgotten: its power is such that, 'a manuscript copy helped convince Ron Atkey, Minister of Employment and Immigration in Joe Clark's government, to grant 50,000 "boat people" asylum in Canada in 1979, during the Southeast Asian refugee crisis' (Robin Roger, The Literary Review of Canada). None Is Too Many will undoubtedly continue to serve as a potent reminder of the fragility of tolerance, even in a country where it is held as one of our highest values.

2012 National Jewish Book Award Winner JEWISH JOCKS: AN UNORTHODOX HALL OF FAME is a timeless collection of biographical musings, sociological riffs about assimilation, first-person reflections, and, above all, great writing on some of the most influential and unexpected pioneers in the world of sports. Featuring work by today's preeminent writers, these essays explore significant Jewish athletes, coaches, broadcasters, trainers, and even team owners (in the finite universe of Jewish Jocks, they count!). Contributors include some of today's most celebrated writers covering a vast assortment of topics, including David Remnick on the biggest mouth in sports, Howard Cosell; Jonathan Safran Foer on the prodigious and pugnacious Bobby Fischer; Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson writing elegantly on Marty Reisman, America's greatest ping-pong player and the sport's ultimate showman. Deborah Lipstadt examines the continuing legacy of the Munich Massacre, the fortieth anniversary of which coincided with the 2012 London Olympics. Jane Leavy reveals why Sandy Koufax agreed to attend her daughter's bat mitzvah. And we learn how Don Lerman single-handedly thrust competitive eating into the public eye with three pounds of butter and 120 jalapeño peppers. These essays are supplemented by a cover design and illustrations throughout by Mark Ulriksen. From settlement houses to stadiums and everywhere in between, JEWISH JOCKS features men and women who do not always fit the standard athletic mold. Rather, they utilized talents long prized by a people of the book (and a people of commerce) to game these games to their advantage, in turn forcing the rest of the world to either copy their methods-or be left in their dust.