Alternate Channels explores the fight for lesbian and gay visibility on 20th-century American television, as gay activists faced off with powerful, often vicious "traditional values" crusaders, with TV executives caught in the crossfire.It documents countless programs, characters, and political skirmishes, examining lesbian and gay portrayals and the few pioneering depictions of bisexual and trans people.The first edition was a semifinalist for what is now the Ston...

Sholem Aleichem—that iconic, versatile Yiddish writer—explores Passover themes in these three short stories, newly translated into English:“An Early Passover” is a satiric tale of a Hasidic refugee from Eastern Europe who suddenly finds himself living among middle-class Reform Jews in 1908 Germany, and must find a way to earn a living there.“A Village Passover” explores the idyllic friendship between a little Jewish boy and a little Christian boy in the Ukrainian countrysid...

The author of these charming stories grew up in a Yiddish-speaking village in 1830s France. His tales evoke the people and folkways of a rural Jewish world that was vanishing quickly.In these stories, you'll meet Salomon, Yedele and their loved ones. You'll share their joys, losses, courtships and holiday celebrations. You'll also meet traditional Alsatian storytellers who recount Yiddish folk tales of ghosts and sorcery, and of "wonder rabbis" who could banish demons and lift curs...

With letters and photos from Jews in early-1900s Turkey, Morocco, Palestine, Austria and RomaniaIn 1903, four centuries after Spain expelled the Jews, a Spanish senator launched a campaign to have his country reopen relations with their descendants, the Sephardic Jews, and to let them know they could return to Spain if they wished. To promote the campaign, Senator Ángel Pulido wrote the classic book Sephardic Jews and the Spanish Language, now available in...

WITH MORE THAN 50 VINTAGE PHOTOS AND ILLUSTRATIONSFrom the 1880s to 1920s, more than 2 million Jews immigrated to the United States. Most were fleeing poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. As the U.S. Jewish population swelled from 250,000 to 4 million, they built new identities and strong communities.French political writer Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu toured the eastern U.S. in 1904 to see how the refugees were doing. “I had already visited most of t...

In April 1912, Prague artists, writers, and intellectuals often gathered nightly at the Café Louvre, an intellectual center where music was played and high-level discussions were held. Many of the attendees were German-speaking Jews, such as Franz Kafka and his faithful friend Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Oskar Kraus, Franz Werfel, the mathematician Georg Pick, and a new arrival to the city, thirty-six-year-old Albert Einstein. Is it possible that Kafka and Einstein met and exchanged ideas? Di...

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER and winner of the International Literature Prize. At once an exquisite love story and a coming-of-age novel, an allegory for the state of Israel and for the biblical tale from which it draws its title, Judas is one of Amos Oz’s most powerful novels.Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, howe...

Rabbi Menahem Mendl was a Hassidic master renowned for his wisdom throughout Europe. The spiritual leader of the Jews in a small stetl called Kotzk in a corner of Poland, he was nevertheless so famous that he was he was referred to far and wide as the Kotzker. His wise sayings—about human nature, how to live, and the world of the spirit—were repeated and passed around, and, though he kept no records, they have been savored and preserved through the years. This beautifully produced collecti...

A new translation from the French by Marion Wiesel. Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Nig...

"...an important personal and historic document... Gracefully written... a triumph of the human spirit... a universal message."-- Prof. Emeritus Michael Kerestesi, Wayne State UniversityMore than a Holocaust survivor memoir. More than just a harrowing tale of survival and hope. What makes this story special is its unique three-dimensional depth. A retired Rabbi and educator, the author masterfully weaves personal memoir into historical context, with a deep appreciation for J...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Jonathan Safran Foer's debut—"a funny, moving...deeply felt novel about the dangers of confronting the past and the redemption that comes with laughing at it, even when that seems all but impossible." (Time)With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out on a quest into his family history to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis....

A New York Times Best Seller!Remember Us is a look back at the lost world of the shtetl: a wise Zayde offering prophetic and profound words to his grandson, the rich experience of Shabbos, and the treasure of a loving family. All this is torn apart with the arrival of the Holocaust, beginning a crucible fraught with twists and turns so unpredictable and surprising that they defy any attempt to find reason within them.From work camps to the...