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Today's Jewish women, successfully availing themselves of the increased educational and occupational opportunities that feminism has encouraged, feel a new sense of self and entitlement. Yet as feminist advances have opened possibilities, they also have called into question traditional roles. The challenge to Jewish women today is to preserve the Jewish community and guarantee its survival while creating meaningful new social and spiritual models that respond to feminist enlightenment. Drawing o...

Carefully piecing together the personal letters of Alice ‘Liesel’ Schwab, Escaping Nazi Germany tells the important story of one woman’s emigration from Heilbronn to England. From the decision to leave her family and emigrate alone, to gaining her independence as a shop worker and surviving the Blitz, to the reunion with her brother and parents in England and shared grief as they learn about the fate of family members who died in the Holocaust, her story provides powerful insight into both the e...

The emotional journeys of two German Jewish refugees are reconstructed from a collection of family papers, provided by author Esther Saraga's late parents as well as extensive research from Esther herself. Berlin to London displays how it felt in the mid-20th century to be a refugee and expresses eloquently the distress and losses in exile, separation and internment. It sheds light on life in Nazi Germany, the difficulties of getting out and into the UK, and on British attitudes and policies t...

This classic study by the late John Doyle Klier is considered a seminal text in modern Jewish history by one of the foremost scholars in the field. In this, his first book, Klier offers an important analysis of Russia's early acquisition of, attitudes toward, and administration of its Jewish population. He argues that the Russian response to the Jewish Question was based less on a tradition or religious antipathy than on the failure to develop a consistent, well-articulated policy in the face of...

A unique chronicle of the hundred-year period when the Jewish people changed the world - and it changed them Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Bernhardt and Kafka. Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. But many have vanished from our collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrli...

A fearless young Swede whose efforts saved countless Hungarian Jews from certain death at the hands of Adolf Eichmann, Raoul Wallenberg was one of the true heroes to emerge during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

Hasidic Williamsburg recounts the dramatic emergence of this unique community in the face of major crises. It is the story of the loyalty of its members to their rebbes and their teachings and to the milieu they created in an old Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Based on his previous book Williamsburg: A Jewish Community in Transition, which reported the transformation of this moderately Orthodox Jewish community and its rise to prominence after the influx of numbers of refugees from N...

In the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between Jews and magnates in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, M. J. Rosman shows the influence of the Jews on economic, social, and political life in the Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian territories, and offers new perspectives on their relations with magnates. Rosman focuses on two major questions: What were the principal spheres of interaction between the Jews and the nobility? What was the significance of this interaction for both par...

These strikingly lucid and accessible essays, ranging over nearly a century of Jewish communal life, examine the ways in which immigrant Jews grappled with issues of group survival in an open and accepting American society. Ten case studies focus on Jewish strategies for maintaining a collective identity while participating fully in American society and public life. Readers will find that these essays provide a fresh, provocative, and compelling look at the fundamental question facing American J...

Since the late 1980s, one of the world's largest Jewish populations has faced a unique dilemma: at the very time it has gained unprecedented freedoms, Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry has encountered political uncertainty, economic instability, and resurgent antisemitism. Jews in the former Soviet Union have been a population teetering simultaneously on the edge of decline and revival, and have had to decide whether to take advantage of the new opportunity to revive Jewish life and rebuild Jewish co...

A gripping memoir wherein Jack and Rochelle Sutin recount their struggle to survive the Holocaust as part of a band of partisans in the forests of Poland. Told through their son Lawrence, the memoir brings to life the reality of months spent hidden in a dank underground bunker unaware of the outside world. Not just an account of stark survival, this is also the tale of an impossible love affair that has lasted more than 50 years and an eloquent reminder that history is made up of the often deepl...

Military cemeteries are one of the most prominent cultural landscapes of Israel. Their story reflects largely the main social processes that Israeli society has been undergoing since the War of Independence (1948)until today. Until the end of the 1970s, the military tombstones and their surroundings were uniform and equal, according to rules set by the State. However, since the 1980s families of the fallen soldiers started to add on the tombstone personal expressions, as well as personal objects...