Jewish History

Born in Zakroczym, Poland in 1927, Holocaust survivor Joe Engel was taken by the Nazis at fourteen and never saw his parents again. Now ninety years old, Joe is the embodiment of living history and spends his retirement years ensuring the Holocaust is never forgotten. With the assistance of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s film and photographic archives, filmmaker Ron Small has successfully weaved Joe’s incredible storytelling into a riveting audiobook presentation that is both historic and contemporary.

Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives.

A shocking act of terror brings the Middle East to the point of explosion. As the resulting political conflict threatens to erupt, a young Jewish American lawyer joins the defense team of an arrested but possibly innocent Palestinian. Soon the lawyer's father, a famed criminal attorney, must win the Palestinian's case or risk losing his daughter forever. To do so, he must take into account the tormented history of the Holy Land from every possible angle.

A young Jewish pianist at Auschwitz, desperate to save her family, is chosen to play at the camp commandant's house. How could she know she would fall in love with the wrong boy?

Subsequent to the attack on the USS Cole in October of 2000, British intelligence reports pinpointed bin Laden's location in a safe house outside of Abyan, Yemen. A top secret project, code named Perfect Justice, was carried out by a team of highly-trained CIA operatives, two male and two female, in a commando-style raid. It was to be a Black operation, one that would be conducted in absolute secrecy under the cover of official deniability.

The Kaddish has long been considered to be a special prayer for the dead. It isn't. Those who recite the prayer faithfully for 52 Friday nights after the death of a loved one may wonder why there is no place for the name of the deceased in the prayer. This book contains much new information on the Kaddish, including how it was created during the Crusades as an homage to God.

In the eighth century, a debate between Sergius the Stylite and a Jew occurred. The discussion was conveniently titled Debate against a Jew. It records arguments about the relevance of biblical texts to Christians and the Jewish people. The anti-Jewish perspectives of Sergius are not surprising. The response given by his Jewish interlocutor is, however. The Jew noted that he was surprised by the number of Christians who attended his synagogue, contributed to it, and celebrated various Jewish holidays alongside Jews.

On June 6, 1944, Werner T. Angress parachuted down from a C-47 into German-occupied France with the 82nd Airborne Division. Nine days later, he was captured behind enemy lines and, concealing his identity as a German-born Jew, became a prisoner of war. Eventually, he was freed by US forces, rejoined the fight, and participated in the liberation of a concentration camp. Although he was an American soldier, less than 10 years before he had been an enthusiastically patriotic German-Jewish boy. Rejected and threatened by the Nazi regime, the Angress family fled....

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people - from the colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to labor organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity.

As studio bosses, directors, and actors, Jews have been heavily involved in film history and vitally involved in all aspects of film production. Yet Jewish characters have been represented onscreen in stereotypical and disturbing ways, while Jews have also helped to produce some of the most troubling stereotypes of people of color in Hollywood film history. In Hollywood's Chosen People, leading scholars consider the complex relationship between Jews and the film industry.

From April 1942 to March 1944, Hélène Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal that is both an intensely moving, intimate, harrowing, appalling document and a text of astonishing literary maturity. With her colleagues, she plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish. Eventually, there comes the time when all Jews are required to wear a yellow star.

The Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE is arguably the most important event in Jewish history. First, it was the central battle in the First Jewish-Roman war. Second, the failure of the siege on the Jewish side resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, a disaster that would eventually prove both permanent and catastrophic, since it was never rebuilt. Third, it permanently altered the diaspora of Judaism in the ancient world.

In Superman Is Jewish? Harry Brod reveals the links between Jews and superheroes in a penetrating investigation of iconic comic book figures. He describes how the role of each hero reflects the evolution of the Jewish place in American culture - an alien in a foreign land, like Superman; a figure plagued by guilt for not having saved his family, like Spider-Man; outsiders persecuted for being different (X-Men); a nice, smart guy afraid people won't like him when he's angry (the Hulk).

The ancient Israelites emerged from Mount Sinai onto the hilly plains of Canaan and established a civilization that endured for hundreds of years. Even when the Israelites fell to incursions from foreign invaders and were subjected to torture and exile, they held fast to their belief system. They emerged from the Babylonian captivity as the people of Yehud. With the aid of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid Empire, they rebuilt their sacred temple and got back on their feet.

A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: Its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire.

My Race is the memoir of a gifted Jewish athlete growing up under the apartheid system of South Africa. As both an outsider excluded from the conservative Christian mainstream and an insider who reaped many of the benefits of a society founded on white supremacy, South African track star Lorraine Lotzof Abramson had a unique vantage point on the apartheid experience.

"Wisdom in the Shadows" is a captivating exploration of the lives and ideas of the most influential medieval Jewish philosophers. From Saadia Gaon to Hasdai Crescas, this book takes listeners on a journey through the intellectual landscape of the Middle Ages, a time when Jewish thinkers grappled with profound questions about God, the universe, and the human soul.

Gilbert Michlin's sober text thoroughly documents the story of a Jewish immigrant family in France during the war years. Known as the country of enlightenment and human rights, France drew many Jews from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, including Michlin's parents, who fled the harsh conditions of Poland in the mid-1920s. Michlin's memoir evokes the golden years of his family's life in prewar Paris, where he was born, but also reflects on the difficulties of being Jewish in France.

Many westerners have never even heard of the Siege of Masada, and those who have may simply know it as an obscure reference to a minor battle fought in a remote location of the Roman world. By contrast, virtually all Israeli school children know the story of Masada as a premier example of nationalistic pride. The heroic story of a small band of fighters facing incalculable odds has many elements that are reminiscent of both the Battle of Thermopylae and the Battle of the Alamo.

There was not any one entity more central to the Yahwistic Judean religion during the monarchy than the temple of Solomon. It symbolized the presence of YHWH in the nation, as well as his enduring protection of the nation and the Davidic royal throne. Judean worshippers directed their prayers toward the Solomonic temple, and eventually, the Judean prophets and theologians declared that this was the only legitimate location where priests could perform sacrifices and other religious rites for YHWH.