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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...