New Beginnings is the sequel to Eric Koch's landmark work The Golden Years: Glenn Gould, Marshall McLuhan, Lester B. Pearson, Rene Levesque & John G. Diefenbaker published by Mosaic Press in 2013. Once again, Koch is inventing a new literary form that is special and astonishing, crafting five intimate stories of six fascinating and important figures in Canadian history.

A poignant memoir of lives cleaved by war, Otto and Daria is the first-hand account of Eric Koch, a man who once was called Otto. As a Jewish refugee from WWII Germany, Otto first left his country for England, and later arrived in Canada, where he was for a time imprisoned in a camp. The counterpoint to Otto's recollections are the letters from his long-distance love interest, Daria Hambourg, a London girl of bohemian temperament, unusual literary talents and a distinguished, but ...

A French woman's heartrending account of her survival in a WWII Nazi concentration camp—and a tribute to her father who died there.A runaway bestseller in France, But You Did Not Come Back has already been the subject of a French media storm and hailed as an important new addition to the library of books dealing with the Holocaust. It is the profoundly moving and poetic memoir by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, who at the age of fifteen was arrested in occupied F...

“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create.” — Minneapolis Star TribuneIn June, 1942, Anne Frank received a diary for her thirteenth birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. For two years, she described life in hiding in vivid, unforgettable detail and grappled with the unfolding events of W...

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...

“Excuse me, are you Jewish?” With these words, the relentlessly cheerful, ideologically driven emissaries of Chabad-Lubavitch approach perfect strangers on street corners throughout the world in their ongoing efforts to persuade their fellow Jews to live religiously observant lives. In The Rebbe’s Army, award-winning journalist Sue Fishkoff gives us the first behind-the-scenes look at this small Brooklyn-based group of Hasidim and the extraordinary lengths to which they take their mission ...

A major history of the shtetl's golden ageThe shtetl was home to two-thirds of East Europe's Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it has long been one of the most neglected and misunderstood chapters of the Jewish experience. This book provides the first grassroots social, economic, and cultural history of the shtetl. Challenging popular misconceptions of the shtetl as an isolated, ramshackle Jewish village stricken by poverty and pogroms, Yohanan P...

A compelling history of the early modern Jewish experienceEarly Modern Jewry boldly offers a new history of the early modern Jewish experience. From Krakow and Venice to Amsterdam and Smyrna, David Ruderman examines the historical and cultural factors unique to Jewish communities throughout Europe, and how these distinctions played out amidst the rest of society. Looking at how Jewish settlements in the early modern period were linked to one another in fas...

Although difficult to imagine, sixty years ago the Holocaust had practically no visibility in examinations of the Second World War. Yet today it is understood to be not only one of the defining moments of the twentieth century but also a touchstone in a quest for directions on how to avoid such catastrophes.In Lessons of the Holocaust, the distinguished historian Michael R. Marrus challenges the notion that there are definitive lessons to be deduced from the destruction of...

For nearly half a century, the greater Lawndale area was the vibrant, spirited center of Jewish life in Chicago. It contained almost 40 percent of the city's entire Jewish population with over 70 synagogues and numerous active Jewish organizations and institutions, such as the Jewish People's Institute, the Hebrew Theological College, and Mount Sinai Hospital. Its residents included "King of Swing" Benny Goodman, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, journalists Irv Kupcinet and Meyer Levin, ...

Volume XXI of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry marks sixty years since the end of the Second World War and forty years since the Second Vatican Council's efforts to revamp Church relations with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History offers a collection of new scholarship on the nature of the Jewish-Catholic encounter between 1945 and 2005, with an emphasis on how this relationship has emerged from the shado...

The cradle of Jewish life in Philadelphia began with the establishment of the first synagogue, Mikveh Israel, in 1740. With the influx of many German Jews in the 1840s, the community expanded above Spring Garden Street into the Northern Liberties neighborhood. Urban settlement of Philadelphia's Jewish population during the last quarter of the nineteenth century shifted to North Broad Street when the economy improved for the city's residents after the Civil War. North Broad Street soon boas...