The first annotated English edition of a classic early-twentieth-century Yiddish memoir that vividly describes Jewish life in a small Eastern European town.Originally published in Warsaw in 1913, this beautifully written memoir offers a panoramic description of the author's experiences growing up in Kamieniec Litewski, a Polish shtetl connected with many important events in the history of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewry. Although the way of life portrayed...

The first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern JudaismThis is the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism. The book’s unique blend of intellectual, religious, and social history offers perspectives on the movement’s leaders as well as its followers, and demonstrates that, far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, Hasidism is a product of modernity that forged its identity as a radical alter...

This is a pioneering study of the nineteenth century Hasidic movement as shown through the life of one of the most controversial and influential Hasidic leaders, Rabbi Israel Friedman of Ruzhin (1796-1850). The dramatic episodes of his life—including his involvement in the murder of Jewish informers, his imprisonment in Russia, his subsequent escape to Austria where he successfully reestablished his court—are echoed by the contradictory and highly critical opinions of his personal characte...

Hasidism, a Jewish religious movement that originated in Poland in the eighteenth century, today counts over 700,000 adherents, primarily in the U.S., Israel, and the UK. Popular and scholarly interest in Hasidic Judaism and Hasidic Jews is growing, but there is no textbook dedicated to research methods in the field, nor sources for the history of Hasidism have been properly recognized. Studying Hasidism, edited by Marcin Wodzinski, an internationally recognized historian of Hasid...

A vivid and eminently readable story of Jewish history covering 4,000 years, and including extensive illustrations and historical photographsHoward Fast, the bestselling author of Spartacus, tells the sweeping story of the Jewish people and Judaism over four millennia, from their nomadic beginnings and the rise of Moses, to the kings David and Solomon, through the Diaspora and the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust, culminating in the founding of the stat...

“This is by far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development.”―Antony Beevor, bestselling author of StalingradLaurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, he combines their never-before-seen eyewitness testimony with the latest academic research to create a uniquely accessible and aut...

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and...

A magisterial history, ranging from antiquity to the present, that reveals anti-Judaism to be a mode of thought deeply embedded in the Western tradition.There is a widespread tendency to regard anti-Judaism – whether expressed in a casual remark or implemented through pogrom or extermination campaign – as somehow exceptional: an unfortunate indicator of personal prejudice or the shocking outcome of an extremist ideology married to power.But, as David Nirenberg argues in thi...

The "remarkable" story of the grass-roots movement that freed millions of Jews from the Soviet Union ( The Plain Dealer).At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the USSR. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue.Journalist Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet gov...

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal.Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau Concentration Camp became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a state detention center for political prisoners, subject to police authority and due process. The camp began its i...

At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as...

"[An] original point of view. . . . A way of finding new meaning in . . . talking about God. It succeeds brilliantly on all counts." ― Jewish Book CouncilThe love of God is the most essential element in Judaism—but also the most confounding. In biblical and rabbinic literature, the obligation to love God appears as a formal commandment. Yet most people today think of love as a feeling. How can an emotion be commanded? How could one ever fu...