Fighting Back is the story of Stan Andrews, an assimilated American Jew and World War II veteran who became one of the first fighter pilots in the history of the Israeli Air Force. In 1948, Stan Andrews left a comfortable postwar life in Los Angeles to travel to the war-torn Middle East, where a four-front Arab invasion threatened to destroy the newly-declared State of Israel. There he joined the Israeli Air Force and became one of its first fighter pilots. Andrews was an unexpected volunteer...
The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (Jews in Eastern Europe)
by Alyssa Quint
Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (ne Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden's work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • At 95, the legendary Mel Brooks continues to set the standard for comedy across television, film, and the stage. Now he shares his story for the first time in “a wonderful addition to a seminal career” (San Francisco Chronicle), “infused with nostalgia and his signature hilarity” (Parade). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: New York Post • “Laugh-out-loud hilarious and always fascinating, from the great Mel Brooks. What else do you expect from the man who knew Jesus...
"A master class in how to be a person." --Joanna Rakoff, bestselling author of My Salinger Year "Astonishing...one of the most moving memoirs I've read." --Caroline Leavitt, best-selling author of With or Without You and Days of Wonder. In Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Dreams, and Broken Genes, Jessica Fein takes readers on a powerful journey through the profound joys and heart-wrenching challenges of love and loss. At the tender age of five, Jessica's daughter Dalia is diagnosed with a...
Bitter Tears I Shed for Thee chronicles the remarkable stories of a handful of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and their impact on the history of this country during the American Civil War and the push westward. Author Mel Young, the firstborn grandson of Jewish immigrants, offers touching profiles of these extraordinary immigrants, along with personal recollections of his own family and his experiences as a first-generation American. Bitter Tears I Shed For Thee explores the forgotte...
A new portrait of Betty Friedan, the author and activist acclaimed as the mother of second-wave feminism Finalist, 2024 National Book Critics Circle Awards in Biography • A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick “A lucid portrait of Friedan as a bold yet flawed advocate for women’s equality.”—Publishers Weekly The feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan (1921–2006), pathbreaking author of The Feminine Mystique, was powerful and polarizing. In this biography, the first in more than twenty...
Winner of Best of Los Angeles Award "Best Holocaust Book - 2021" “A must-read that hopefully will be adapted for the screen. Greene lets Wilzig’s effervescent spirit shine through, and his story will appear to a wide variety of readers.” - Library Journal Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with hi...
Taking Up The Torch – English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multi–Cultural Commitments
by Edward Timms
This is an unusual narrative in that it successfully combines subjectivity -- how an English person was led by a sequence of educational developments, personal encounters and historical constraints to become the founder of the German-Jewish Centre at the University of Sussex; and objectivity -- a book that introduces English and American readers to an important and evolving field of historical and cultural studies through intellectual autobiography. It documents the formative experiences of a sc...
Engrossing autobiography of a remarkable woman born into the assimilated Jewish upper-class in pre-World War II Austria. After a hair-raising escape from the Nazis, she came penniless to the United States. Beginning as a dress finisher, her varied career took her to Hollywood, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, the American consulates in Budapest, Hungary and Alexandria, Egypt, and the United Nations in Argentina. She eventually settled in the Washington, DC suburbs where she worked for 20 years f...
Sharona Ben-Tov Muir discovered after the death of her father, inventor and New Age guru Itzhak Bentov, that he had created Israel’s first rocket. A secret group of scientists working in a rooftop shed, the “Science Corps,” of which he was a part, invented weapons during Israel’s war of independence and later developed Israel’s nuclear resources and other major scientific projects. Bentov, however, settled in Boston and made his fortune with such medical inventions as a cardiac catheter, which h...
Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children-and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt-Ariella Aïsha Azoulay examines the disruption of Jewish Muslim life in Algeria and broadly in the Maghreb and the Middle East by two colonial projects: French rule and the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which provoked the departure of Jews from these areas. Jewelry making was a profession that marked th...
Glikl – Memoirs 1691–1719
by Glikl Glikl, Chava Turniansky, and Sara Friedman
“My dear children, I write this for you in case your dear children or grandchildren come to you one of these days, knowing nothing of their family. For this reason I have set this down for you here in brief, so that you might know what kind of people you come from.” These words from the memoirs Glikl bas Leib wrote in Yiddish between 1691 and 1719 shed light on the life of a devout and worldly woman. Writing initially to seek solace in the long nights of her widowhood, Glikl continued to record...
Diary of a Young Girl (PREMIUM PAPERBACK, PENGUIN INDIA)
by Anne Frank
In the summer of 1942, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank found herself hiding with her family in the cramped attic of an old office building in Amsterdam. Outside, Jews all over Europe were being thrown into concentration camps. Exiled from the outside world, the Frankfurt family battled hunger, boredom, confinement, and the ever-looming threat of discovery and death. As the second World War continued to rage, Anne turned to her diary and documented everything. The diary was accidentally discovered...
Recognized in his own time and also today as a leading scholar of the origins and development of the Septuagint and its sources, Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891) was a vituperative German nationalist and an antisemite whose writings inspired the National Socialist (Nazi) ideology. An influential and controversial public thinker, he invoked an authentic Germanness that encompassed religion and a national ethos to counter the threat posed by the Jews and liberalism. His appeals to a "secret Germany" ev...
Amy Ephron weaves together the most insightful, profound, and just plain funny stories of her life to form a tapestry of a woman's experiences from childhood through young adulthood, marriage, divorce (and remarriage), and everything in between--an evocative and often piercing look at modern life.--From publisher description.
