Dear Mr. Dickens By Nancy Churnin

In Eliza Davis's day, Charles Dickens was the most celebrated living writer in England. But some of his books reflected a prejudice that was all too common at the time: prejudice against Jewish people. Eliza was Jewish, and her heart hurt to see a Jewish character in Oliver Twist portrayed as ugly and selfish. She wanted to speak out about how unfair that was, even if it meant speaking out against the great man himself. So she wrote a letter to Charles Dickens. What happened next is history.

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Tia Fortuna's New Home by Ruth Behar

A poignant multicultural ode to family and what it means to create a home as one girl helps her Tía move away from her beloved Miami apartment.

When Estrella’s Tía Fortuna has to say goodbye to her longtime Miami apartment building, The Seaway, to move to an assisted living community, Estrella spends the day with her. Tía explains the significance of her most important possessions from both her Cuban and Jewish culture, as they learn to say goodbye together and explore a new beginning for Tía.

By Chance Alone: The Young Readers' Edition: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz by Kathy Kacer

The moving, award-winning Canada Reads book from Holocaust survivor Max Eisen, now adapted for young readers

Tibor “Max” Eisen was born in Czechoslovakia into an Orthodox Jewish family. He lived in a compound with his parents, his two younger brothers, his baby sister, his paternal grandparents and his uncle and aunt. Life was far from perfect, but it was relatively peaceful.

But in the spring of 1944—the morning after the family’s Passover Seder—officers forcibly removed Eisen and his family from their home. They, and thousands of other Jewish people, were brought to a brickyard and later loaded onto crowded cattle cars bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Fifteen-year-old Max lost his entire family, but he survived the selection process and went on to endure back-breaking slave labour and the infamous Death March in January 1945.

Max eventually survived his painful ordeal. And he knew he had to keep the very last promise he made to his father: to tell the world what happened at Auschwitz. By Chance Alone is the result of this promise.

The Assignment by Liza Wiemer

When pop­u­lar high school teacher Mr. Bart­ley assigns a con­tro­ver­sial project ask­ing his stu­dents to debate the pros and cons of Hitler’s Final Solu­tion, with half the class defend­ing the Nazi point of view, the town erupts in con­fu­sion and shock. Seniors Logan and Cade can­not accept Mr. Bart­ley’s con­tention that the debate is a legit­i­mate edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence despite his argu­ment that it is impor­tant to exam­ine all sides of an issue, any issue. The Holo­caust, they feel, is not debat­able; there sim­ply aren’t two jus­ti­fi­able points of view to dis­cuss when the mur­der­ous Nazi regime is the sub­ject at hand.

The Button Box by Bridget Hodder and Fawzia Gilani-Williams

After Jewish fifth-grader Ava and her Muslim best friend Nadeem are called hateful names at school, Ava's Granny Buena rummages in her closet and pulls out a glittering crystal button box. It's packed with buttons that generations of Ava's Sephardic ancestors have cherished. With the help of Granny's mysterious cat Sheba, Ava and Nadeem discover that a button from the button box will take them back in time. Suddenly, they are in ancient Morocco, where Nadeem's ancestor, Prince Abdur Rahman, is running for his life. Can Ava and Nadeem help the prince escape to Spain and fulfill his destiny, creating a legendary Golden Age for Muslims, Jews and Christians?

Ella and Noah Celebrate Passover (Sticker Activity Book)

Children will enjoy learning all about Passover with this beautifully illustrated sticker activity book. Bring Passover scenes to life with over 120 stickers, coloring, matching, mazes and more. Help with Passover cleaning, join the family for the Passover Seder, find the Afikoman and tell the stories of the ten plagues and the Exodus from Egypt.

Ella and Noah Celebrate Shabbat (Sticker Activity Book)

Concealed by Esther Amini

Exploring the roots of her father's deep silences and explosive temper, her mother's flamboyance and flights from home, and her own sense of indebtedness to her Iranian-born brothers, Amini uncovers the story of her parents' early years in Mashhad, Iran's holiest Muslim city; the little-known history of Mashhad's underground Jews; the incident that steeled her mother's resolve to leave; and her parents' arduous journey to the U.S., where they faced a new threat to their traditions: the threat of freedom. Determined to protect his daughter from corruption, Amini's father prohibits talk, books, education, and pushes an early Persian marriage instead. Can she resist? Should she? Focused intently on what she stands to gain, Amini comes to see what she also stands to lose: a family and community bound by food, celebrations, sibling escapades, and unexpected acts of devotion by parents to whom she feels invisible.

In this poignant, funny, entertaining, and uplifting memoir, Amini documents with keen eye, quick wit, and warm heart how family members build, buoy, wound, and save one another across generations; how lives are shaped by the demands and burdens of loyalty and legacy; and how she rose to the challenge of deciding what to keep and what to discard.

Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer

What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy? And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity? Can we envision a world that sees impossible creatures?

In 1958, amongst the children born with spina bifida is Riva Lehrer. At the time, most such children are not expected to survive. Her parents and doctors are determined to “fix” her, sending the message over and over again that she is broken. That she will never have a job, a romantic relationship, or an independent life. Enduring countless medical interventions, Riva tries her best to be a good girl and a good patient in the quest to be cured.

By Chance Alone by Max Eisen

An award-winning, internationally bestselling Holocaust memoir in the tradition of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz

In the spring of 1944, gendarmes forcibly removed Tibor “Max” Eisen and his family from their home, brought them to a brickyard and eventually loaded them onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At fifteen years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and was inducted into the camp as a slave laborer.

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb

funny, warm, and brilliantly original memoir in which a grandmother speaks to her granddaughter from beyond the grave, telling, with candor and irresistible humor, stories from both their lives--of kinship, loyalty, tenacity, and love.
Bess Kalb--whip-smart, Twitter-famous TV comedy writer and regular New Yorker "Daily Shouts" columnist--has saved every voicemail message her grandmother, Bobby Bell, ever left her. The two were best friends and confidantes. Bobby doted on her granddaughter; Bess adored Bobby. In 2017, nearly ninety, Bobby died.

In this moving, wildly imaginative memoir, Bobby Bell is still speaking to Bess, her inimitable voice in Bess's head, bristling with the loving friction between one headstrong woman and the granddaughter who grew up to be an equal force of nature. Bobby gives Bess critical advice (on career and romance; lipstick and hair). And she relates the history that made her who she is, beginning with her mother's escape from the pogroms of Belarus in the 1880s to the cramped Brooklyn apartment where Bobby was born; and Bobby's own marriage to a successful businessman, which made possible the educations that helped her children and grandchildren flourish.

But from the time Bess was born, Bobby bestowed a unique flavor of love upon her granddaughter: tea at the Plaza; new dresses at Bloomingdales; and above all, her nobody-will-tell-you-this-but-me truths, full of devotion and well meaning, even when they hurt.

This unusual love story celebrates the very special bond that can skip a generation and hold iron-clad. Told through documents, photographs, and verbatim dialogues between two remarkable women, it is an unforgettable account of survival and family; of women's lives across different generations; of gratitude and grief--all rolled into one hilarious, poetic, page-turning book.

The Lost Café Schindler by Meriel Schindler

An extraordinary memoir of a Jewish family spanning two world wars and its flight from Nazi-occupied Austria. Meriel Schindler spent her adult life trying to keep her father, Kurt, at bay. But when he died in 2017, he left behind piles of Nazi-era documents related to her family’s fate in Innsbruck, Austria, and a treasure trove of family albums reaching back to before World War I. Meriel was forced to confront not only their fractured relationship, but also the truth behind their family history. The Lost Café Schindler re-creates the journey of an extraordinary family, whose relatives included the Jewish doctor who treated Hitler’s mother when she was dying of breast cancer; the Kafka family; and Alma Schindler, the wife of Gustav Mahler. The narrative centers around the Café Schindler, the social hub of Innsbruck. Famous for its pastries, home-distilled liquors, live entertainment, and hospitality, the restaurant attracted Austrians from all walks of life. But as conditions became untenable for Jews in Austria during the Nazi era, the Schindlers were forced to leave, and their café was expropriated.

I Am a Victor: The Mordechai Ronen Story by Mordechai Ronen with Steve Paikin

A man’s journey of triumph over unspeakable evil and the powerful impact of the choice to survive against all odds.

Mordechai Ronen was born in a peaceful town in 1930s Hungary. By the time he turned eleven years old, the world had gone mad. He became one of the millions of Jews to be shipped to a Nazi death camp. How he survived that ordeal and what followed is the incredible story told in these pages.

That Mordechai is alive today is nothing short of a miracle. His is an incredible story of triumph and unwavering determination to survive, which is what he did against all odds in the Nazi death camps. The journey that began in the Holocaust carried Ronen through the establishment of Israel, immigration to Canada, and finally to an emotional return to Auschwitz, this time as a guest of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who called that moment one of the most extraordinary he had seen in his four decades in politics.

Martin's Story: An Orphan's Triumphant Journey

Mordechai Beck­er, an orphan of the Holo­caust and a proud Israeli, was born and grew up dur­ing the most momen­tous peri­od of mod­ern Jew­ish his­to­ry, the near destruc­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple and the rebirth of the State of Israel.

In a par­al­lel true sto­ry, he vivid­ly recalls the near extinc­tion of his own fam­i­ly and the even­tu­al tri­umph of his human will to sur­vive and thrive.

Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany by Hans J. Massaquoi

This is a story of the unexpected. In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir -- an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer's spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door -- or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi's account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

Once A Girl, Always a Boy: A family memoir of a transgender journey by Jo Ivester

My son Jere­my is trans­gen­der. Thir­ty years ago, we wel­comed him into the world as what we thought was our daugh­ter. As a child, how­ev­er, he pre­ferred the toys and games our soci­ety views as mas­cu­line. He kept his hair short and wore boys’ cloth­ing. We called him a tomboy. That’s what he called himself.

In his twen­ties, Jere­my had surgery to remove his breasts and began tak­ing hor­mones to low­er his voice and give him a beard. My book, Once a Girl, Always a Boy, is the sto­ry of Jeremy’s dif­fi­cult yet joy­ful jour­ney. It is told from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives. Those of the sib­lings who strug­gled to under­stand the broth­er they saw as a sis­ter, and of the par­ents who joined him in the bat­tle against dis­crim­i­na­tion, begin­ning the day his father announced to sev­en hun­dred atten­dees at an ADL din­ner that he has a trans­gen­der son, that he is proud of him, and that he loves him. This is a sto­ry of accep­tance in a world not quite ready to accept.

Hidden Recipes: A Holocaust Memoir by Eva Moreimi

Before the Sec­ond World War, Ica and Ernő each lived a com­fort­able life in Czecho­slo­va­kia. Their lives were shat­tered by Nazi cru­el­ty, prej­u­dice, and dev­as­ta­tion. Hid­den Recipes tells the sto­ry of their will and deter­mi­na­tion, and their strug­gles to sur­vive. By shar­ing sto­ries about their lives when food was abun­dant before the war, Ica secret­ly wrote down hun­dreds of recipes that she and her fel­low inmates shared. Iron­i­cal­ly, many of the delec­table recipes were writ­ten on the reverse sides of papers that car­ried infor­ma­tion about ammu­ni­tion that was man­u­fac­tured and used to anni­hi­late the Jews dur­ing the Holo­caust. Ernő spent sev­er­al years in var­i­ous Hun­gar­i­an forced labor units, where he was required to per­form stren­u­ous man­u­al labor. He coura­geous­ly escaped with the help of right­eous peo­ple, which saved his life. Hid­den Recipes is a sto­ry of endurance, the will to sur­vive, courage, faith, and find­ing joy and hap­pi­ness again.

The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont

A luminous new memoir from the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller After Long Silence, The Escape Artist has been lauded by New York Times bestselling author Mary Karr as “beautifully written, honest, and psychologically astute. A must-read.”

In the tradition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and George Hodgman’s Bettyville, Fremont writes with wit and candor about growing up in a household held together by a powerful glue: secrets. Her parents, profoundly affected by their memories of the Holocaust, pass on to both Helen and her older sister a zealous determination to protect themselves from what they see as danger from the outside world.

Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father

Ben­jamin jumped. A Pol­ish Jew escapes from a train car­ry­ing his fam­i­ly to Tre­blin­ka. It’s around this mirac­u­lous act of sur­vival that his daughter’s mem­oir of a lost father cir­cles. One of three of a vast War­saw fam­i­ly to live through the Holo­caust, Ben Wich­tel made a new life in Cana­da only to lose every­thing a sec­ond time. Diana Wich­tel was 13 when her moth­er took the chil­dren to her Catholic fam­i­ly in New Zealand. Her father was to fol­low. She nev­er saw him again. Her quest, decades lat­er, to unrav­el her family’s secrets and silences took her across the world — Poland, Ger­many, Cana­da, Israel — as she pieced togeth­er frag­ments of infor­ma­tion about the fate of her fam­i­ly at the hands of the Nazis and made shat­ter­ing dis­cov­er­ies about her father’s final years. Cling­ing to hope and humor, the book is also about the pow­er of love, the insis­tence of mem­o­ry and the trans­mis­sion of the lega­cy of the Holo­caust down the gen­er­a­tions. They tried to erase him but Ben­jamin jumped. This is his story.

Call Me Phaedra: The Life and Times of Movement Lawyer Fay Stender by Lise Pearlman

Call Me Phae­dra: The Life and Times of Move­ment Lawyer Fay Sten­der chron­i­cles the extra­or­di­nary life of a Jew­ish activist dur­ing the McCarthy Era, the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, Free Speech Era, the rise of black pow­er, and the Women’s Rights Move­ment. A child prodi­gy at the piano, Fay quick­ly became the cen­ter of atten­tion in her extend­ed Bay Area fam­i­ly of Ortho­dox and Reform Jews. Her immi­grant Pol­ish grand­fa­ther taught her by exam­ple the Bib­li­cal injunc­tion to help the needy. Fay strug­gled with her Jew­ish iden­ti­ty through­out her life, aban­don­ing reli­gion in col­lege, and return­ing to its solace in her late forties.

Rad­i­cal­ized in col­lege, she became a rare female crim­i­nal defense lawyer and ground-break­ing pris­on­ers’ rights advo­cate, most famous for rep­re­sent­ing black mil­i­tants Huey New­ton and George Jack­son. Her work won her inter­na­tion­al acclaim as a top Move­ment lawyer but pro­pelled her to a trag­ic end. At her funer­al, she was hailed as a true men­sch, com­pelled to act on a strong sense of right and wrong in an era of white-male monop­oly power.

The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadesky

n con­nect­ed essays, The Mem­o­ry Eaters uses nos­tal­gia and Kadet­sky’s per­son­al Jew­ish and French-Cana­di­an fam­i­ly back­ground to explore epi­ge­net­ics, grief, what a name and an iden­ti­ty mean in the con­text of fam­i­ly and inher­i­tance, her own trau­mat­ic assault, yoga, Bud­dhism, and more. Cov­er­ing her bat­tles with her moth­er’s Alzheimer’s — a for­mer Puc­ci and run­way mod­el — her sis­ter’s addic­tion, and fam­i­ly secrets with radi­ant insights and gor­geous writ­ing, Kadet­sky answers the ques­tion inher­ent in this mem­oir: Can we remake the past using the wis­dom of the present? Her nuanced essays explore the com­pli­cat­ed con­tra­dic­tions inher­ent to mem­o­ry, how mem­o­ry holds us cap­tive to our famil­ial wounds, while at the same time help­ing us pre­serve the sto­ries, and pres­ences, of those we love. The author’s pre­cise eye for detail, the lush­ness of her prose, her relent­less and unflinch­ing deter­mi­na­tion to com­pre­hend a fam­i­ly’s incal­cu­la­ble mys­ter­ies, shape a vivid­ly unfor­get­table mem­oir of long­ing and discovery.

End­pa­pers: A Fam­i­ly Sto­ry of Books, War, Escape, and Home by Alexan­der Wolff

A sweeping portrait of the turmoil of the twentieth century and the legacy of immigration, as seen through the German-American family of the celebrated book publisher Kurt Wolff A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed “perhaps the twentieth century’s most discriminating publisher” by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Kurt Wolff was born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, whose ancestors included converts to Christianity, among them Baron Moritz von Haber, whose desire to demand satisfaction in a duel sparked off bloody antisemitic riots. Always bookish, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. Fleeing Germany in 1933, a day after the Reichstag fire, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, sought refuge in France, Italy, and ultimately New York, where in a small Greenwich Village apartment they founded Pantheon Books. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt’s taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck, and the story of a half-brother Niko never knew. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.

Tasha by Bri­an Morton

In the spir­it of Fierce Attach­ments, Bet­tyville, and The End of Your Life Book Club, acclaimed nov­el­ist Bri­an Mor­ton deliv­ers a mov­ing, dark­ly fun­ny mem­oir of his mother’s vibrant life and the many ways in which their tight, tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship was refash­ioned in her twi­light years. Tasha Mor­ton is a force of nature: a bril­liant edu­ca­tor who’s left her mark on gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents — and also a whirl­wind of a moth­er, intru­sive, chaot­ic, oppres­sive­ly devot­ed, and irre­press­ible. For decades, her son Bri­an has kept her at a self-pro­tec­tive dis­tance, but when her health begins to fail, he knows it’s time to assume respon­si­bil­i­ty for her care. Even so, he’s not pre­pared for what awaits him, as her refusal to accept her own fragili­ty leads to a series of epic out­bursts and alter­ca­tions that are some­times fright­en­ing, some­times wild­ly com­ic, and some­times both. Clear-eyed, lov­ing, and brim­ming with dark humor, Tasha is an explo­ration of what sons learn from their moth­ers, a stark look at the impos­si­ble task of car­ing for an elder­ly par­ent in a coun­try whose unof­fi­cial mot­to is ​“you’re on your own,” and a med­i­ta­tion on the treach­er­ous busi­ness at the heart of every fam­i­ly — the busi­ness of try­ing to hon­or our­selves with­out for­sak­ing our par­ents, and our par­ents with­out for­sak­ing our­selves. Above all, Tasha is a vivid and sur­pris­ing por­trait of an unfor­get­table woman.

Lost & Found: A Memoir by Kathryn Schulz

Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz's father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering—a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.

My City of Dreams by Lisa Gruenberg

Lisa Gru­en­berg first start­ed writ­ing when her elder­ly father, a Vien­nese Holo­caust sur­vivor, began hav­ing flash­backs and night­mares about the past. She wrote in the voice of her father’s sis­ter, Mia, who dis­ap­peared into Ger­many in 1941 and whose name her father would not say out loud until a year before his death. Her father always spoke about his city in the most joy­ous way. By the time she inquired more deeply, he was unable to reli­ably remem­ber the past. After his death, she trans­lat­ed fam­i­ly let­ters and trav­eled to Vien­na and Ger­many to explore his lost land­scape. She inter­wove her present-day sto­ry with Mia’s and her father’s, link­ing them with pho­tographs, pri­ma­ry-source doc­u­ments, let­ters, her father’s writ­ing, and the joy­ful tales he told her long ago. This is a Holo­caust tale, but it is also very much the mod­ern-day sto­ry of the rela­tion­ship between one daugh­ter and her father, about how trau­ma trav­els down through the gen­er­a­tions, and about how we find mean­ing in our lives.

Becoming Ordinary A Youth Born of the Holocaust, What I Kept, What I Let Go... by Michael Fox

What is a Jew? A Jew is someone who argues with God whether he believes in Him or not.

The war was over long ago, but the Holocaust still lived in his family. It was the subtext of his life, the trauma that held him captive. His father the poet’s song about his birth haunted him from early on.

Becom­ing Eve by Abby Stein

The powerful coming-of-age story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman

Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews.

But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life.

Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be?

Clipped: A mom invents a way to hold her life togeth­er just as the world falls apart by Adri­enne Alitowski

Clipped is a quirky mem­oir about a Jew­ish (new) moth­er whose des­per­a­tion to get her baby to sleep cat­a­pult­ed her into becom­ing an inven­tor and busi­ness own­er — just before the world fell apart in 2008. Hav­ing been raised with the Jew­ish val­ue of tik­vah, hope, Ali­tows­ki knew that impos­si­ble odds were noth­ing new and she had what it took to push past every obsta­cle. Alitowski’s jour­ney includ­ed the help of inter­est­ing char­ac­ters along the way, like the Ortho­dox Jew­ish importers who con­nect­ed her to a Chi­nese fac­to­ry. As a full-time moth­er and entre­pre­neur, Ali­tows­ki rolled out blanky­clip® to retail­ers across the coun­try, includ­ing the Buy­Buy­Ba­by nation­al chain. LA Par­ent Expect­ing and Kids Today made blanky­clip a ​“Top Pick’’. All that fab­u­lous glo­ry aside, Adri­enne also learned what it’s like to fly halfway around the
world to a Chi­nese fac­to­ry and to be preg­nant, throw­ing up on the street before an investor meet­ing. She stuck to her vision and found gold in the muck. Ali­tows­ki has inscribed all her deeds in a book filled with humor and humility.

Ophelia by Norman Bacal

Tal Neil­son does not believe his father Ger­i’s mys­te­ri­ous death was an acci­dent. Ger­i’s voice in his head is con­vinced it was per­fect­ly plot­ted mur­der. Geri may have built a drug empire, but he is sur­round­ed by a wife he no longer loves, a busi­ness part­ner he can­not trust, and a drug addict­ed son. Tal must decide whether he is pre­pared to fight for his lega­cy. When Tal turns to his lover, Ophe­lia, for sup­port, he has no idea that she car­ries a fam­i­ly secret. A duty to pro­tect Tal, even if it means risk­ing her life.

Born to serve. Trained by the Israeli mil­i­tary to kill. Ophe­lia.

One stormy night off the coast of Den­mark, six­ty years ear­li­er, binds two fam­i­lies for­ev­er and dri­ves their obses­sions.

A mod­ern-day Ham­let set in Man­hat­tan, with twists and turns galore, to the very last page.

The End of Her

Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City-based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn't just a family legend-it made headlines across Canada in 1913-but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her, Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing another: his mother's decline from Alzheimer's. Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dramatic detail the life and death of his immigrant great-grandmother in Winnipeg, and his mother's downward spiral. In the process, he discovers an extended family that has been scattered across thousands of miles for a hundred years. "Journalist Hoffman (Hard and two other novels) makes his nonfiction debut with a riveting account of his dual efforts to care for his aging mother and crack a century-old unsolved murder...Hoffman makes the details of his dogged research vivid...and his conclusions about the murder are convincing. Meanwhile, he movingly recounts his mother's increasing memory loss and overall decline. This is a unique addition to the cold case subgenre, and a powerful mix of true crime and family memoir." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy by Martin Indyk

More than twen­ty years have elapsed since the Unit­ed States last bro­kered a peace agree­ment between the Israelis and Pales­tini­ans. In that time, three pres­i­dents have tried and failed. Mar­tin Indyk — a for­mer Unit­ed States ambas­sador to Israel and spe­cial envoy for the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian nego­ti­a­tions in 2013 — has expe­ri­enced these polit­i­cal frus­tra­tions and dis­ap­point­ments first­hand. Now, in an attempt to under­stand the arc of Amer­i­can diplo­mat­ic influ­ence in the Mid­dle East, he returns to the ori­gins of Amer­i­can-led peace efforts and to the man who cre­at­ed the Mid­dle East peace process — Hen­ry Kissinger. Based on new­ly avail­able doc­u­ments from Amer­i­can and Israeli archives, exten­sive inter­views with Kissinger, and Indyk’s own inter­ac­tions with some of the main play­ers, the author takes read­ers inside the nego­ti­a­tions. Indyk’s account is that of a his­to­ri­an por­ing over the records of these events, as well as an inside play­er seek­ing to glean lessons for Mid­dle East peace­mak­ing. He makes clear that under­stand­ing Kissinger’s design for Mid­dle East peace­mak­ing is key to com­pre­hend­ing how — and how not— to make peace.

Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighbourhood by Mark Oppenheimer

A piercing portrait of the struggles and triumphs of one of America's renowned Jewish neighborhoods in the wake of unspeakable tragedy that highlights the hopes, fears, and tensions all Americans must confront on the road to healing.

Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in the country, known for its tight-knit community and the profusion of multigenerational families. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill--the most deadly anti-Semitic attack in American history.

Many neighborhoods would be understandably subsumed by despair and recrimination after such an event, but not this one. Mark Oppenheimer poignantly shifts the focus away from the criminal and his crime, and instead presents the historic, spirited community at the center of this heartbreak. He speaks with residents and nonresidents, Jews and gentiles, survivors and witnesses, teenagers and seniors, activists and historians.

Together, these stories provide a kaleidoscopic and nuanced account of collective grief, love, support, and revival. But Oppenheimer also details the difficult dialogue and messy confrontations that Squirrel Hill had to face in the process of healing, and that are a necessary part of true growth and understanding in any community. He has reverently captured the vibrancy and caring that still characterize Squirrel Hill, and it is this phenomenal resilience that can provide inspiration to any place burdened with discrimination and hate.

People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.

Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture―and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks―Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.

Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life―trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study―to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past―making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

Under the Radar by David Eisenstadt with Alan L.Simons

A his­to­ry book about 30 notable Cana­di­an Jew­ish Musi­cians. Eisenstadt’s enter­tain­ing approach is based on these cri­te­ria (Cana­di­an, not nec­es­sar­i­ly Cana­di­an-born — Jew­ish, all gen­res and gen­ders, alive or dead. Writ­ten from an his­toric, not music cri­tique per­spec­tive. Many will evoke — ​“I didn’t know that” or ​“Have you considered…”?

My Promised Land by Avi Shavit

Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive?

Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France by James McAuley

n the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps.

In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin de siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d’Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.

Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews byDavid L. Bernstein

In May 2021, amid another conflict with Iran-backed Hamas, Israel took a beating in both the mainstream press and social media. Notwithstanding the rocket fire aimed at its citizens, the Jewish state was portrayed as the oppressor and the Hamas government in Gaza as the oppressed. While Israel has always been subject to excessive scrutiny, this time was different. What had changed in the ideological environment? A veteran leader of Jewish advocacy organizations and a self-described liberal who has broken with the far left over the adoption of woke ideology, David L. Bernstein traces the growth of woke ideology in his life and career from a remote academic study to an international post-colonialist movement, then a faddish campus ideology, morphing into corporate diversity programs to a dominant ideology in mainstream institutions, including many Jewish organizations. Bernstein shows how core ideological tenets—such as privilege, equity, whiteness, and the oppressor/oppressed binary—can be and are weaponized against Jews.

What’s more, surveys tell us that Americans are self-censoring at record rates. Jewish institutions, long known for their robust deliberative processes and open discourse, have not been spared. Many have uncharacteristically dodged controversial issues and have simply fallen in line. He warns that, unabated, the ideology will disenfranchise the American Jewish community and sap Jewish pride. He puts forward a strategy for restoring liberal values and countering political extremism and antisemitism, focusing on rebuilding the political center strategy.

Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad's Fake Diving Resort by Raffi Berg

In the early 1980s on a remote part of the Sudanese coast, a new luxury holiday resort opened for business. Catering for divers, it attracted guests from around the world. Little did the holidaymakers know that the staff were undercover spies, working for the Mossad - the Israeli secret service.

Providing a front for covert night-time activities, the holiday village allowed the agents to carry out an operation unlike any seen before. What began with one cryptic message pleading for help, turned into the secret evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews who had been languishing in refugee camps, and the spiriting of them to Israel.

Written in collaboration with operatives involved in the mission, endorsed as the definitive account and including an afterword from the commander who went on to become the head of the Mossad, this is the complete, never-before-heard, gripping tale of a top-secret and often hazardous operation.

From Jerusalem to Delhi, through Persia by Susan Adelman

Why are Jews so attracted to India, to Hinduism, and to Buddhism in the United States as well as Israel? They travel there by the thousands, attracted by the exoticism of course, but, Adelman believes, also drawn by an atavistic connection, dating back to the great Persian empires that extended from the land of Israel to the Indian subcontinent, linking the religions, myths, legends, literature, customs, even languages over the centuries. Influenced by her own profoundly mystical experiences, Adelman provides the history, explains the religions, shows the common origins, and gives astonishing examples of parallel symbolism

Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps by Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni

ach summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, this book explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today. Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture.

The Upstander: How Surviving the Holocaust Sparked Max Glauben's Mission to Dismantle Hate by Jori Epstein

Part biog­ra­phy, part trib­ute, and all heart, Jori Epstein’s book recounts the sto­ry of Holo­caust sur­vivor Max Glauben. Epstein fol­lows Max from his child­hood in pre-war Poland to his call­ing as a sea­soned octo­ge­nar­i­an edu­ca­tor in Texas, jux­ta­pos­ing the ter­rors he expe­ri­enced as a youth with his quest to thrive and devel­op mean­ing from his past.

Read­ers who are famil­iar with sur­vivor nar­ra­tives will appre­ci­ate Epstein’s rel­a­tive­ly sparse descrip­tion of the hor­rors Glauben endured. She main­tains the focus on his spe­cif­ic jour­ney, first as a young teen in the War­saw Ghet­to and then as a pris­on­er in sev­er­al con­cen­tra­tion camps. Because of his family’s news­pa­per, Glauben’s sto­ry pro­vides a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to under­stand how infor­ma­tion spread in Warsaw’s Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, up to and includ­ing the Ghet­to upris­ing. Epstein bal­ances the need to explain how Glauben, a boy with exact­ly the right car­pen­try skills at a par­tic­u­lar moment, man­ages to sur­vive with the impor­tance of giv­ing enough detail and con­text to allow read­ers to under­stand how his sto­ry is con­nect­ed to the greater his­tor­i­cal events that shape it.

Anoth­er ele­ment that stands out is how Epstein’s descrip­tion of Glauben’s emer­gence as a Holo­caust edu­ca­tor reflects the devel­op­ment of the broad­er field of Holo­caust edu­ca­tion. In learn­ing about how Glauben began to talk to his fam­i­ly, espe­cial­ly his grand­chil­dren, and to younger gen­er­a­tions of Jews about the Holo­caust, read­ers can trace the time­line and oppor­tu­ni­ties that devel­oped for sur­vivors to share their sto­ries. Epstein effec­tive­ly illus­trates Glauben’s nar­ra­tive and why it is so impor­tant for it to be doc­u­ment­ed. Her abil­i­ty to cap­ture the dis­tinct voic­es of Glauben as he talks about his moti­va­tions for doing this work, and the voic­es of his fam­i­ly, the stu­dents, teach­ers, and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers who lis­ten to him make this sec­tion of the book espe­cial­ly engag­ing and relatable.

Epstein’s straight­for­ward writ­ing style makes this book eas­i­ly acces­si­ble to old­er high school stu­dents and intro­duc­to­ry col­lege cours­es about the Holo­caust. As Jew­ish edu­ca­tors and com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers face their inher­i­tance of sur­vivor accounts and mon­u­ments, a close read­ing of Epstein’s work is an ele­gant way for them to explore how they will hon­or and safe­guard these lega­cies. This book stands as a tes­ta­ment to the courage and char­ac­ter of Max Glauben, hon­or­ing the mem­o­ry of his fam­i­ly and his hope for a bet­ter world for future generations.

Every Day The River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena by Jordan Salama

An Amer­i­can writer of Argen­tine, Syr­i­an, and Iraqi Jew­ish descent, Jor­dan Sala­ma tells the sto­ry of the Río Mag­dale­na, near­ly one thou­sand miles long, the heart of Colom­bia. This is Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s ter­ri­to­ry — rumor has it Macon­do was part­ly inspired by the port town of Mom­pox — as much as that of the Mid­dle East­ern immi­grants who run fab­ric stores by its banks.

Fol­low­ing the riv­er from its source high in the Andes to its mouth on the Caribbean coast, jour­ney­ing by boat, bus, and impro­vised moto­ba­lin­era, Sala­ma writes against stereo­type and toward the rich lives of those he meets. Among them are a canoe builder, biol­o­gists who study inva­sive hip­popota­mus­es, a Queens trans­plant man­ag­ing a fail­ing hotel, a jew­el­er prac­tic­ing the art of sil­ver fil­i­gree, and a trav­el­ing librar­i­an whose don­keys, Alfa and Beto, haul books to rur­al chil­dren. Joy, mourn­ing, and humor come togeth­er in this aston­ish­ing debut, about a coun­try too often seen as only a site of war, and a tale of live­ly adven­ture

Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna

Before Bil­ly Wilder became the screen­writer and direc­tor of icon­ic films like Sun­set Boule­vard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a free­lance reporter, first in Vien­na and then in Weimar Berlin. Bil­ly Wilder on Assign­ment brings togeth­er more than fifty arti­cles, trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time, that Wilder (then known as ​“Bil­lie”) pub­lished in mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers between Sep­tem­ber 1925 and Novem­ber 1930. From a humor­ous account of Wilder’s stint as a hired danc­ing com­pan­ion in a posh Berlin hotel and his dis­patch­es from the inter­na­tion­al film scene, to his astute pro­files of writ­ers, per­form­ers, and polit­i­cal fig­ures, the col­lec­tion offers fresh insights into the cre­ative mind of one of Hol­ly­wood’s most revered writer-directors.

All Stirred Up: Suf­frage Cook­books Food and the Bat­tle for Wom­en’s Right to Vote

In hon­or of the cen­te­nary of the 19th amend­ment, a delec­table new book that reveals a new side to the his­to­ry of the suf­frage move­ment. We all like­ly con­jure up a sim­i­lar image of the women’s suf­frage move­ment: pick­et signs, red car­na­tions, mil­i­tant march­es through the streets. But was it only these ral­lies that gained women the expo­sure and pow­er that led them to the vote? Ever-coura­geous and cre­ative suf­frag­ists also car­ried their rad­i­cal mes­sage into America’s homes wrapped in food wis­dom through cook­books, which ingen­u­ous­ly pack­aged polit­i­cal strat­e­gy into already exis­tent social com­mu­ni­ties. These cook­books gave suf­frag­ists a chance to reach out to women on their own terms in non­threat­en­ing and acces­si­ble ways. Cook­ing togeth­er, feed­ing peo­ple, and using social sit­u­a­tions to put peo­ple at ease were pio­neer­ing grass­roots tac­tics that lever­aged the domes­tic knowl­edge these women already had, feed­ing spoon­fuls of suf­frage to com­mu­ni­ties through unex­pect­ed and unas­sum­ing chan­nels. Filled with charm and wit and actu­al his­toric recipes (“mix the crust with tact and vel­vet gloves using no sar­casm espe­cial­ly with the upper crust”) that evoke the spir­it­ed fla­vor of fem­i­nism and food move­ments, All Stirred Up reac­ti­vates the taste of an era and car­ries us back through time to when women enfran­chised them­selves through the sub­ver­sive and savvy pow­er of the palate.

The Transformaive Daf by Rabbi Daniel Friedman

Bring­ing the Tal­mud to life: This book makes the wis­dom of our Sages acces­si­ble, mean­ing­ful, and inspi­ra­tional to all, irre­spec­tive of back­ground or pri­or knowl­edge. Designed to com­ple­ment the inter­na­tion­al Daf Yomi study sched­ule, the book caters to those who have been learn­ing Daf Yomi for years and are look­ing for inspi­ra­tion and mean­ing for their lives, as well as those who sim­ply would like a peek inside the Tal­mud and a beginner’s entry point to join the glob­al Daf Yomi movement.

Touched with Fire: Mor­ris B. Abram and the Bat­tle against Racial and Reli­gious Discrimination by David E. Lowe

Morris B. Abram (1918–2000) emerged from humble origins in a rural South Georgia town to become one of the leading civil rights lawyers in the United States during the 1950s. While unmasking the Ku Klux Klan and serving as a key intermediary for the release of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from prison on the eve of the 1960 presidential election, Abram carried out a successful fourteen-year battle to end the discriminatory voting system in his home state, which had entrenched racial segregation. The result was the historic “one man, one vote” ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963.

Code Name Madeleine: A Sufi Spy in Nazi-Occu­pied Paris by Arthur J. Magida

Code Name Madeleine tells the cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ry of the valiant Noor Inay­at Khan, daugh­ter of an Indi­an Sufi mys­tic and unlike­ly World War II hero­ine. Care­ful­ly dis­tilled from dozens of inter­views, new­ly dis­cov­ered man­u­scripts, offi­cial doc­u­ments, and per­son­al let­ters, Code Name Madeleine is a deeply researched his­to­ry and a thrilling trib­ute to Noor Inay­at Khan. Noor’s ideals were ground­ed in Sufis’ equiv­a­lent of tikkun olam – chival­ry that upheld self­less­ness, jus­tice, and duty ​“as sacred as reli­gion.” Raised in the 1920s near Paris, Noor was a musi­cian and writer, ded­i­cat­ed to her fam­i­ly’s spir­i­tu­al val­ues of har­mo­ny and tol­er­ance. She did not seem des­tined for wartime hero­ism, but Ger­many’s treat­ment of Jews con­vinced her to aban­don Gand­hi’s paci­fism. Noor joined the British Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Exec­u­tive and trained in espi­onage, sab­o­tage, and recon­nais­sance. For cru­cial months of the war, Noor was the only radio oper­a­tor in Paris send­ing crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion to Lon­don, sig­nif­i­cant­ly aid­ing the suc­cess of the Allied land­ing on D‑Day. Code-named Madeleine, she became a high-val­ue tar­get for the Gestapo. Noor was even­tu­al­ly cap­tured and exe­cut­ed at Dachau a few months before the end of the war.

Faster: How a Jew­ish Dri­ver, an Amer­i­can Heiress, and a Leg­endary Car Beat Hitler’s Best by Neal Bas­comb

They were the unlikeliest of heroes. Rene Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teams—and fastest cars—by the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage. Charles Weiffenbach, head of the down-on-its-luck automaker Delahaye, was desperately trying to save his company as the world teetered toward the brink. And Lucy Schell, the adventurous daughter of an American multi-millionaire, yearned to reclaim the glory of her rally-driving days.

As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, these three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix. Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day—but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, Faster chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during history’s darkest hour.

High Risk: Sto­ries of Preg­nan­cy, Birth, and the Unexpected by Chavi Eve Karkowsky

A doctor’s rev­e­la­to­ry account of preg­nan­cy and the com­plex­i­ty of repro­duc­tive life — and every­thing we lose when we don’t speak hon­est­ly about women’s health. A time­ly and unflinch­ing account by a promi­nent New York physi­cian work­ing in mater­nal-fetal med­i­cine — the branch of med­i­cine that con­cerns high-risk preg­nan­cies. Whether offer­ing insight into the rise in home births, the toll of nau­sea on expec­tant moth­ers, or the chal­lenges each trimester pos­es, Karkowsky offers an hon­est but reas­sur­ing peek into all that preg­nan­cy, labor, and birth can entail. With his­tor­i­cal insight and jour­nal­is­tic verve, Karkowsky unpacks what is involved for women, for a fam­i­ly, and for us as a soci­ety; and explores what’s at risk when these aspects of med­i­cine remain cloud­ed in mys­tery and misinformation.

The Water­gate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Jus­tice Against a Crim­i­nal President by Jill Wine-Banks

Obstruc­tion of jus­tice, the specter of impeach­ment, sex­ism at work, and shock­ing rev­e­la­tions: Jill Wine-Banks takes us inside her tri­al by fire as a Water­gate prosecutor.

It was a time, much like today, when Amer­i­cans feared for the future of their democ­ra­cy, and women stood up for equal treat­ment. At the cross­roads of the Water­gate scan­dal and the wom­en’s move­ment was a young lawyer named Jill Wine Vol­ner (as she was then known), bare­ly thir­ty years old and the only woman on the team that pros­e­cut­ed the high­est-rank­ing White House offi­cials. Called ​“the mini-skirt­ed lawyer” by the press, she fought to receive the respect accord­ed her male coun­ter­parts and pre­vailed. At once a cau­tion­ary tale and an inspi­ra­tion for those who believe in the pow­er of jus­tice and the rule of law, The Water­gate Girl is a rev­e­la­tion about our coun­try, our pol­i­tics, and who we are as a society.

Fam­i­ly Papers: A Sephardic Jour­ney Through the Twen­ti­eth Century by Sarah Abre­vaya Stein

For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.

In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.

With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

Jalan-Jalan: A Jour­ney of Wan­der­lust and Motherhood by Mar­go Weinstein

Can you com­bine wan­der­lust and motherhood?

For decades, Mar­go Wein­stein escaped her demand­ing legal prac­tice by kayak­ing, white­wa­ter raing, trekking, and climb­ing in remote regions. When she had a son and found her­self in the kid­die pool on a Dis­ney cruise. Search­ing for a new path, a jalan-jalan, that could accom­mo­date moth­er­hood and sat­is­fy her wan­der­lust, she dragged her son to the oth­er side of the world, mov­ing first to Shang­hai and then to Bali. Adven­ture seek­ers and arm­chair trav­el­ers will rel­ish Weinstein’s exploits as she bat­tled baboons in her hotel room in Zim­bab­we, and sur­faced under a cap­sized raft bar­rel­ing through Class V rapids in Pakistan.

Par­ents will appre­ci­ate her efforts to explore the world with a kid in tow and her ex-pat life in a vil­la with a scor­pi­on in her son’s out­door show­er, and dai­ly Hin­du offer­ings cer­e­mo­ni­al­ly placed next to the infin­i­ty pool and Wi-Fi router. Told with intel­li­gence, humor, spir­it, and a Jew­ish-Amer­i­can woman’s per­spec­tive, Jalan-Jalan will inspire you to find your path and take the trip of a lifetime.

Trou­bled: The Failed Promise of Amer­i­ca’s Behav­ioral Treat­ment Programs by Kenneth R. Rosen

Acclaimed jour­nal­ist Ken­neth R. Rosen knows first­hand the bru­tal emo­tion­al, phys­i­cal, and sex­u­al abuse car­ried out at these pro­grams. He lived it. In Trou­bled, Rosen unspools the sto­ries of four grad­u­ates on their own scarred jour­neys through the pro­grams into adult­hood. Based on three years of report­ing and more than one hun­dred inter­views with oth­er clients, their par­ents, psy­chol­o­gists, and health-care pro­fes­sion­als, Trou­bled com­bines har­row­ing sto­ry­telling with inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism to expose the dis­turb­ing truth about the mas­sive­ly prof­itable, some­times fatal, gross­ly unchecked redi­rec­tion industry.

Candies from Heaven by Gil Hovav

In his native Israel, Gil Hov­av is beloved as a spe­cial nation­al cul­tur­al trea­sure. Now, final­ly, with this deft trans­la­tion of his utter­ly charm­ing sto­ry col­lec­tion that comes laced with 21 mouth­wa­ter­ing recipes, Eng­lish-speak­ing read­ers will be able to appre­ci­ate why. Hov­av is a mas­ter­ful sto­ry­teller, a born racon­teur. An unfor­get­table gallery of col­or­ful uncles, aunts, and oth­er fam­i­ly mem­ber — with food woven through as a lemo­tif — makes these auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal accounts of grow­ing up in Jerusalem in the 60s and 70s read like short sto­ries in the great tra­di­tion of Sholem Ale­ichem: tales told with great wis­dom, ten­der­ness, insight, and wit as tart as a bowl of Yemenite pick­les. And who wouldn’t sali­vate over Hovav’s fam­i­ly recipes for sweet sour chor­ba toma­to soup or his Aunt Levana’s egg­plant and feta bourekas? Dig in, dear read­ers, plea­sure is served.

Liv­ing in Heav­en Cop­ing with Hell byClif­ford Sobin

Writ­ten in a con­ver­sa­tion­al style, Liv­ing in Heav­en, Cop­ing with Hell is a com­pelling nar­ra­tive that answers why Israelis live along Israel’s north­ern bor­ders and illu­mi­nates the chal­lenges they face. By inti­mate­ly pro­fil­ing many of its cur­rent res­i­dents and explain­ing how select­ed com­mu­ni­ties in the region took root, Sobin skill­ful­ly weaves inter­views with his­tor­i­cal fact to high­light the region’s hero­ic past and chal­leng­ing future. It is required read­ing for any­one vis­it­ing the region or wish­ing to under­stand Israel’s pre­car­i­ous bor­ders with Lebanon and Syr­ia, the peo­ple who dare to live there, their impor­tance to Israel, and how it all came to be!

Jew Vs Jew: The Struggle For The Soul Of American Jewry by Samuel G. Freedman

At a time when American Jews should feel more secure and cohesive than ever, civil war is tearing apart their community. Congregations, neighborhoods, even families are taking sides in battles about Jewish identity and Jewish authenticity. The conflict pits fundamentalist against secularist, denomination against denomination, even liberal against conservative within each branch of Jewry.

Jew vs. Jew tells the story of how American Jewry has increasingly -- and perhaps terminally -- broken apart in the last forty years.

Jew vs. Jew stretches in time from 1960 to 2000. It travels the country from Florida to New England, from Los Angeles to the Catskills in New York, from Cleveland to Denver, and it also crosses the ocean to Israel to show how tensions within the Jewish state inflame those among American Jews. The flash-points range from conversion standards to the role of women, from the peace process in Israel to the sexual climate on an Ivy League campus. But behind them all, as Samuel Freedman writes, lie common causes. First, far from unifying American Jews, Israel now divides them on both political and religious grounds. Second, neither America nor the larger world presents Jews with a single enemy against whom to coalesce. Third, and most important, nothing in the Jewish history of persecution, oppression, and exile prepared the Chosen People for the challenge posed by America, the challenge of being absorbed into a tolerant and diverse nation, being accepted so thoroughly that the intermarriage rate tops 50 percent.

Jew vs. Jew introduces readers to memorable places and characters. Freedman describes one of the final summers at a Labor Zionist camp in the Catskills whose brand of secular Jewishness is becoming obsolete because Zionism succeeded in creating Israel. He tells the story of Orthodox and Reform Jews in a Cleveland suburb who are fighting about the construction of several synagogues -- and, on a deeper level, about whether unity or pluralism ought to be the goal of Jewish life. He portrays a Florida Jew so violently opposed to the Oslo peace accords that he planted a bomb in a synagogue where Shimon Peres was speaking. He tells about a Los Angeles congregation that spent three years debating whether or not to honor the Biblical matriarchs in its liturgy.We come to know the Long Island neighbors who cannot tolerate sharing even a property line because their versions of Jewish identity are so irreconcilably different.

Jew vs. Jew is a work of vigorous reporting, lucid writing, and intellectual curiosity. And even as it chronicles an embittered and polarized community, it refuses to take sides or pass judgment. Instead, with compassion and acuity, Jew vs. Jew bears witness.

The Betray­al of the Duchess: The Scan­dal That Unmade the Bour­bon Monar­chy and Made France Modern by Mau­rice Samuels

The year was 1832 and the French roy­al fam­i­ly was in exile, dri­ven out by yet anoth­er rev­o­lu­tion. From a drafty Scot­tish cas­tle, the duchesse de Berry — the moth­er of the eleven-year-old heir to the throne — hatched a plot to restore the Bour­bon dynasty. For months, she com­mand­ed a gueril­la army and evad­ed cap­ture by dis­guis­ing her­self as a man. But soon she was betrayed by her trust­ed advi­sor, Simon Deutz, the son of France’s Chief Rab­bi. The betray­al became a cause célèbre for Bour­bon loy­al­ists and ignit­ed a firestorm of hate against France’s Jews. By blam­ing an entire peo­ple for the actions of a sin­gle man, the duchess’s sup­port­ers set the terms for the cen­tu­ry of anti­semitism that fol­lowed. Brim­ming with intrigue and lush detail, The Betray­al of the Duchess is the riv­et­ing sto­ry of a high-spir­it­ed woman, the charm­ing but volatile young man who dou­ble-crossed her, and the birth of one of the mod­ern world’s most dead­ly forms of hatred.

No Past Tense: Love and Sur­vival in the Shad­ow of the Holocaust by D. Z. Stone

No Past Tense: Love and Sur­vival in the Shad­ow of the Holo­caust is the biog­ra­phy of Kati and Willi Sal­cer, two Czech Jews who as teenagers sur­vived Auschwitz and Mau­thausen, respec­tive­ly. The Sal­cers nev­er told their son Ron they had been in con­cen­tra­tion camps. Want­i­ng to know what hap­pened to them, Ron enlist­ed D. Z. Stone, a jour­nal­ist trained in cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gy. Based on 100 hours of inter­views con­duct­ed in 1999, No Past Tense cov­ers the Sal­cers’ entire lives, from child­hoods in Czecho­slo­va­kia to lib­er­a­tion and the return home, and from pre-State Israel to New York City. It is one of the few, if any, biogra­phies cov­er­ing the entire lives of sur­vivors. The book not only tells the per­son­al sto­ry of sur­vival but also touch­es on impor­tant cur­rents in World War II and post­war Jew­ish his­to­ry, reveal­ing sig­nif­i­cant ten­sions, polit­i­cal real­i­ties, con­tra­dic­tions, and chal­lenges. With a unique nar­ra­tive struc­ture, No Past Tense weaves in the Sal­cers’ real-time voic­es as if they are watch­ing a doc­u­men­tary about them­selves, a struc­ture that pro­vides a dis­tinc­tive ​“whole-life” view of the Holocaust.

The Extra­or­di­nary UnOr­di­nary You: Fol­low Your Own Path, Dis­cov­er Your Own Journey by Simone Knego

Every­one has a sto­ry, and in The Extra­or­di­nary UnOr­di­nary You, Simone Knego takes you inside her unique jour­ney and the extra­or­di­nary moments which have shaped her life and defined her mis­sion. Simone dis­cuss­es the Jew­ish val­ues that guide her life’s choic­es, her jour­ney of adopt­ing three of her six chil­dren, her climb of Mount Kil­i­man­jaro, and all of the fun­ny, scary, and inspir­ing sto­ries that came along the way. She’s real­ized the small choic­es she makes every day to do good actu­al­ly have the pow­er to inspire oth­ers. Shar­ing the lessons she’s learned from life’s ups, downs, and laugh-out-loud moments, you’ll be inspired to dis­cov­er your own jour­ney, and to go out into the world and be the good. The world is wait­ing for the Extra­or­di­nary UnOr­di­nary You, and you already have every­thing you need to get start­ed, sim­ply by being you.

Lev­el Up: Rise Above the Hid­den Forces Hold­ing Your Busi­ness Back by Stacey Abrams, Lara Hodgson With Heather Cabot

A must-read guide for small busi­ness own­ers nav­i­gat­ing a crit­i­cal turn­ing point: when you either lev­el up or give up.

It’s nev­er been eas­i­er to start a busi­ness – and it’s nev­er been hard­er to scale it. Half of new busi­ness­es in Amer­i­ca don’t make it past five years.

Stacey Abrams and Lara Hodg­son want to help today’s entre­pre­neurs beat the odds by reveal­ing the unseen teth­ers that keep small busi­ness­es from grow­ing and thriving.

Draw­ing on first­hand expe­ri­ence start­ing and scal­ing mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies over near­ly two decades, Now® co-founders Abrams and Hodg­son crys­tal­lize their hard-won advice into a sin­gle how-to, got-to guide for small busi­ness owners.

In Lev­el Up, they share intense behind-the-scenes sto­ries of build­ing their own busi­ness­es, as well as action­able, get-it-done prin­ci­ples for founders look­ing to pro­pel their ven­tures forward.

Mazel Tov: The Sto­ry of My Extra­or­di­nary Friend­ship with an Ortho­dox Jew­ish Family by J.S. Mar­got

When 20-year-old stu­dent J. S. Mar­got took a tutor­ing job, lit­tle did she know it would open up an entire world.

In the fam­i­ly’s Ortho­dox Jew­ish house­hold she would encounter end­less rules – ​‘nev­er come on a Fri­day, nev­er shake hands with a man’ – and quirks she had not seen before: tiny tubes on the door­posts, sep­a­rate fridges for meat and dairy prod­ucts. Her ini­tial response was puz­zle­ment and occa­sion­al­ly anger, but as she taught the chil­dren and fierce­ly debat­ed with the fam­i­ly, she also began to learn from them.

Mazel Tov is a heart­warm­ing, provoca­tive, and dis­arm­ing­ly hon­est mem­oir of clash­ing cul­tures and unusu­al friend­ships, and of how, where adults build walls, some­times only chil­dren can dis­solve them.

The Con­flict over the Con­flict: The Israel/​Palestine Cam­pus Debate by Ken­neth S. Stern

The Con­flict over the Con­flict chron­i­cles one of the most divi­sive and tox­ic issues on today’s col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es: Israel and Pales­tine. Some pro-Pales­tine stu­dents call sup­port­ers of Israel’s right to exist racist, and dis­rupt their events. Some pro-Israel stu­dents label pro-Pales­tine stu­dents ter­ror­ists, and the Jews among them trai­tors. Law­suits are filed. Leg­is­la­tion is pro­posed. Fac­ul­ty mem­bers are black­list­ed and receive death threats. Aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom is com­pro­mised and the entire aca­d­e­m­ic enter­prise is threat­ened. How did we get here, and what can be done? In this pas­sion­ate book, Ken­neth S. Stern exam­ines attempts from each side to cen­sor the oth­er at a time when some say stu­dents are being quar­an­tined from, rather than chal­lenged to wres­tle with, dif­fi­cult ideas. He unique­ly frames the exam­i­na­tion: our abil­i­ty to think ratio­nal­ly is inhib­it­ed when our iden­ti­ty is fierce­ly con­nect­ed to an issue of per­ceived social injus­tice. Accord­ing to Stern, the cam­pus is the best place to probe this con­flict and our intense views about it. The Con­flict over the Con­flict shows how this is possible.

Mod­ern Man­hood: Con­ver­sa­tions About the Com­pli­cat­ed World of Being a Good Man Today by Cleo Stiller

Emmy and Peabody Award – nom­i­nat­ed jour­nal­ist Cleo Stiller’s fun(ny) and infor­ma­tive col­lec­tion of advice and per­spec­tives about what it means to be a good guy in the era of #MeToo. In Mod­ern Man­hood, reporter Cleo Stiller sheds light on all the gray areas out there, using con­ver­sa­tions that real men and women are hav­ing with their friends, their dates, their fam­i­ly, and them­selves. Free of judg­ment preach­ing and sug­ar­coat­ing, Mod­ern Man­hood is engag­ing and provoca­tive, and ulti­mate­ly a great resource for gain­ing a deep­er under­stand­ing of what it means to gen­uine­ly be a good man today.

Com­mit­ted: Dis­patch­es from a Psy­chi­a­trist in Training by Adam Stern

Adam Stern recounts his four-year psy­chi­a­try res­i­den­cy at Har­vard Med­ical School in his heart-felt mem­oir, Com­mit­ted: Dis­patch­es from a Psy­chi­a­trist in Train­ing.

The mem­oir brings read­ers along as he and his fel­low doc­tors round on psy­chi­atric wards, grap­ple with impos­tor syn­drome, nav­i­gate their per­son­al lives, and expe­ri­ence love and loss.

With com­pas­sion­ate por­traits of his psy­chi­a­try patients and hon­est rumi­na­tions on the phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al toll of a med­ical res­i­den­cy, Adam pulls back the cur­tain on what it’s like to be a doc­tor tasked with heal­ing the mind. Can­did, some­times raw, and always enter­tain­ing, this mem­oir cel­e­brates human con­nec­tion through the eyes of a new doctor.

Don't Worry, Just Cook: Delicious, Timeless Recipes for Comfort and Connection

The Wake Up Call

By Israel Ellis

The Interpreter by A.J. Sidransky

Kurt Berlin is a young Amer­i­can sol­dier serv­ing in the Philip­pines dur­ing World War II. A refugee from Nazi-occu­pied Aus­tria, he is flu­ent in Ger­man. When the OSS recruits him to work as an inter­preter for Amer­i­cans inter­ro­gat­ing Nazi war crim­i­nals, he reluc­tant­ly accepts and goes to Brus­sels. In the course of his assign­ment, Kurt dis­cov­ers that the SS offi­cer being inter­ro­gat­ed is respon­si­ble for the ter­ror and mis­ery that his fam­i­ly suf­fered dur­ing their escape. He also real­izes that the man may have infor­ma­tion about a young girl that he loved and left behind. His desire for infor­ma­tion and the dis­cov­ery that the Amer­i­cans inter­view­ing the Nazis may be inter­est­ed in more than war crimes offer a moral dilemma.

Based on sto­ries from the author’s fam­i­ly, this excit­ing and per­son­al nov­el gives read­ers a glimpse into the lives of Jew­ish fam­i­lies forced to aban­don their hap­py, com­fort­able lives when the Nazis came to pow­er. Kurt’s par­ents sent him to Brus­sels on a Kinder­trans­port, and return­ing to that city brings back mem­o­ries of his expe­ri­ences. When he is not inter­view­ing war crim­i­nals, he tries to find friends and rel­a­tives who may have sur­vived the war. His efforts will have read­ers turn­ing pages, eager to find out where his search will take him. His­tor­i­cal fic­tion fans and those inter­est­ed in World War II and sur­vivor sto­ries will enjoy this. Book clubs will also find much to dis­cuss, giv­en the moral and eth­i­cal ques­tions raised. The Inter­preter is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed for pub­lic and syn­a­gogue libraries as well as per­son­al collections.

Half Notes From Berlin by B.V. Glants

Fif­teen-year-old Hans attends school in Berlin and sings in the city’s pres­ti­gious Youth Choir. His placid world changes when his his­to­ry teacher appears in class in a brown shirt, yells ​“Heil, Hitler!” and pro­ceeds to teach the stu­dents Nazi pro­pa­gan­da. Han­s’s friends join the Hitler Youth and begin mer­ci­less­ly taunt­ing Rebec­ca, a defi­ant Jew­ish stu­dent with whom Hans is in love. When Hans learns his moth­er’s fam­i­ly has kept its own her­itage a secret, and that he is half-Jew­ish, he’s thrust between two worlds, fac­ing great dan­ger and ter­ri­ble choices.

Night of the Assassins by Howard Blum

It’s 1943 and the three Allied lead­ers — Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, Win­ston Churchill, and Joseph Stal­in — are meet­ing for the first time at a top-secret con­fer­ence in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meet­ing and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide. Although the war is undoubt­ed­ly lost, the Ger­mans believe that per­haps a new set of Allied lead­ers might be will­ing to make a more rea­son­able peace in its after­math. And so a plan is devised — code name Oper­a­tion Long Jump — to assas­si­nate FDR, Churchill, and Stal­in. A hand-picked team of Nazi com­man­dos is assem­bled, trained, and armed with spe­cial weapons and para­chut­ed into Iran. They have six days to com­plete the dar­ing assign­ment before the states­men will return home. With no mar­gin for error, Mike Reil­ly, the head of FDR’s Secret Ser­vice detail — a man who describes him­self as ​“an Irish cop with more mus­cle than brains” — must over­come his sus­pi­cions to work with a Sovi­et agent from the NKVD (the pre­cur­sor to the KGB) to save the three most pow­er­ful men in the world.

Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death" by David G. Marwell

David Mar­well demythol­o­gizes Men­gele, metic­u­lous­ly doc­u­ment­ing how an ambi­tious researcher could become a faith­ful ser­vant to the Nazi geno­cide. As a grad­u­ate stu­dent, Men­gele was already drawn to new the­o­ries about how racial dif­fer­ences were demon­stra­ble through sci­ence and anthro­pol­o­gy. Those crack­pot the­o­ries, of course, became an arti­cle of faith for the Nazi Par­ty and the basis for its cam­paign of genocide.

The Unfath­omable Ascent: How Hitler Came to Power by Peter Ross Range

The chill­ing and lit­tle-known sto­ry of Adolf Hitler’s eight-year march to the pin­na­cle of Ger­man politics.

Coco at the Ritz by Gioia Diliberto

A riveting and prismatic novel of the eternally enigmatic Coco Chanel in the aftermath of World War II.

Though her name is synonymous with elegance and chic, the iconic Coco Chanel had a complicated dark side, and in late August 1944, as World War II drew to a close, she was arrested and interrogated on charges of treason to France.

Many of the facts are lost to history, partly through Chanel's own obfuscation, but this much is known: the charges grew out of her war-time romance with a German spy, and one morning two soldiers from the French Forces of the Interior—the loose band of Resistance fighters, soldiers and private citizens who took up arms in the wake of the Liberation of Paris—led Chanel from her suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris to an undisclosed location for questioning.

What transpired during her interrogation, who was present, and why she was set free when so many other women who’d been involved with German men (willingly or otherwise) had their heads shaved or were imprisoned, remains a mystery.

In this brilliantly insightful and compulsively readable novel from the author of I am Madame X, Gioia Diliberto explores the motivations of this complex woman and portrays the gripping battle of wits that could have been her interrogation. Was Chanel truly a collaborator?

X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II by Leah Garrett

June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes—their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad.


Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp—the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time, X Troop tells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis.

The Postmistress of Paris: A Novel by Meg Waite Clayton

Wealthy, beautiful Naneé was born with a spirit of adventure. For her, learning to fly is freedom. When German tanks roll across the border and into Paris, this woman with an adorable dog and a generous heart joins the resistance. Known as the Postmistress because she delivers information to those in hiding, Naneé uses her charms and skill to house the hunted and deliver them to safety.

Photographer Edouard Moss has escaped Germany with his young daughter only to be interned in a French labor camp. His life collides with Nanée’s in this sweeping tale of romance and danger set in a world aflame with personal and political passion.

Inspired by the real life Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who worked with American journalist Varian Fry to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of France, The Postmistress of Paris is the haunting story of an indomitable woman whose strength, bravery, and love is a beacon of hope in a time of terror.

The Passenger: A Novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz Translated by Philip Boehm

Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train.

And then another. And another . . . until his flight becomes a frantic odyssey across Germany, as he searches first for information, then for help, and finally for escape. His travels bring him face-to-face with waiters and conductors, officials and fellow outcasts, seductive women and vicious thieves, a few of whom disapprove of the regime while the rest embrace it wholeheartedly.

Clinging to his existence as it was just days before, Silbermann refuses to believe what is happening even as he is beset by opportunists, betrayed by associates, and bereft of family, friends, and fortune. As his world collapses around him, he is forced to concede that his nightmare is all too real.

Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control.

Florence Adler Swims Forever

Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to “America’s Playground” and move into the small apartment above their bakery. Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home. Now Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams. Esther only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond her control: there’s Fannie’s risky pregnancy—not to mention her always-scheming husband, Isaac—and the fact that the handsome heir of a hotel notorious for its anti-Semitic policies, seems to be in love with Florence. When tragedy strikes,

The Unanswered Letter by Faris Cassell

In 1939, as the Nazis closed in, Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to an American stranger who happened to share his last name. He and his wife, Viennese Jews, had found escape routes for their daughters. But now their money, connections, and emotional energy were nearly exhausted. Alfred begged the American recipient of the letter, “You are surely informed about the situation of all Jews in Central Europe.... By pure chance I got your address.... My daughter and her husband will go... to America.... Help us to follow our children.... It is our last and only hope....”

After languishing in a California attic for decades, Alfred’s letter ended up in the hands of Faris Cassell, a journalist who couldn’t rest until she discovered the ending of the story. Traveling across the United States as well as to Austria, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and Israel, she uncovered an extraordinary story of heart-wrenching loss and unforgettable love that endures to this day.

Did the Bergers’ desperate letter find a response? Did they—and their daughters—survive? Did they leave living descendants?

You will find the answers here.

A story that will move any reader, The Unanswered Letter is a poignant reminder that love and hope never die.

The Last Letter by Karen Baum Gordon

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich. In The Last A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust , Gordon explores not only her father’s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents—two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family’s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy’s mother and Karen’s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed. Part of the Legacies of War series, The Last Letter is a captivating family memoir that spans events from the 1930s and Hitler’s rise to power, through World War II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. In recreating the fatal journeys of her grandparents and tracing her father’s efforts to save them an ocean away in America, Gordon discovers the forgotten fragments of her family’s history and a vivid sense of her own Jewish identity. By inviting readers along on this journey, Gordon manages to honor victim and survivor alike and shows subsequent generations—now many years after the tragic events of World War II—what it means to remember.

Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend by Joshua M. Greene

Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis, a service that earned him a visa to America. On arrival, he made three to never go hungry again, to support the Jewish people, and to speak out against injustice. He earned his first dollar shoveling snow after a fierce blizzard. His next job was laboring in toxic sweatshops. From these humble beginnings, he became President, Chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and grew a full-service commercial bank to more than $4 billion in assets.

Siggi’s ascent from the darkest of yesterdays to the brightest of tomorrows holds sway over the imagination in this riveting narrative of grit, cunning, luck, and the determination to live life to the fullest.

The Naz­i’s Grand­daugh­ter: How I Dis­cov­ered My Grand­fa­ther Was a War Criminal by Sil­via Foti

Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community.

But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.”

The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family.

A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.

Schindler's List by Thomas Kenealey

An “extraordinary” (New York Review of Books) novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of The Book of Science and Antiquities and The Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden—Schindler’s Jews—to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil. “Astounding…in this case the truth is far more powerful than anything the imagination could invent” (Newsweek).

Embrac­ing Auschwitz: Forg­ing a Vibrant Life-Affirm­ing Judaism that Takes the Holo­caust Seriously by Joshua Ham­mer­man

The Judaism of Sinai and the Judaism of Auschwitz are merg­ing, result­ing in new visions of Judaism that are only begin­ning to take shape. Each of the chap­ters of this book out­lines an aspect of this work in progress, this ​“Torah of Auschwitz,” as we see how the ways of Sinai are being recast, the old wells redug, as Judaism is now being inter­pret­ed anew through the prism of this epochal event. Any new expres­sion of Judaism to emerge must place the Holo­caust expe­ri­ence direct­ly at its core or it will not be authen­tic. But just as it can­not ignore the abyss, any mod­ern expres­sion of Judaism must also affirm joy, beau­ty, and moral ground­ing or it will not sur­vive. Jew­ish revi­tal­iza­tion will be assured when grand­chil­dren of sur­vivors and oth­ers of their gen­er­a­tion can begin to take the dark­ness of the Shoah and turn it into song, absorb­ing the absur­di­ty of a silent God while lov­ing life nonetheless.

Fateless by Imre Kertesz

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jew­ish sec­tion of Budapest and with­out any par­tic­u­lar mal­ice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not under­stand the rea­son for his fate. He doesn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly think of him­self as Jew­ish. And his fel­low pris­on­ers, who decry his lack of Yid­dish, keep telling him, ​“You are no Jew.” In the low­est cir­cle of the Holo­caust, Georg remains an outsider.

Imre Kertesz’s unblink­ing nov­el refue­ses to mit­i­gate the strange­ness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dog­mat­ic insis­tence on mak­ing sense of what he wit­ness­es – or pre­tend­ing that what he wit­ness­es makes sense. Haunt­ing, evoca­tive, and all the more hor­ri­fy­ing for its rig­or­ous avoid­ance of sen­ti­ment, Fate­less­ness is a mas­ter­piece in the tra­di­tions of Pri­mo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands

A tale of Nazi lives, mass mur­der, love, cold war espi­onage, a mys­te­ri­ous death in the Vat­i­can – and ​“the Rat­line,” the Nazi escape route to Per­on’s Argenti­na. Baron Otto von Wáchter, Aus­tri­an lawyer, hus­band, father, high Nazi offi­cial, senior SS offi­cer, for­mer gov­er­nor of Gali­cia dur­ing the war, cre­ator and over­seer of the Krakow ghet­to, indict­ed after as a war crim­i­nal for the mass mur­der of more than 100,000 Poles, hunt­ed by the Sovi­ets, the Amer­i­cans, the British, by Simon Wiesen­thal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948.

Philippe Sands pieces togeth­er, in riv­et­ing detail, Wáchter’s extra­or­di­nary, shock­ing story.

Theresienstadt: The Town the Nazis Gave to the Jews by Vera Schiff

The author captures her struggle as a teenager trying to save her family against all odds in the notorious concentration camp of Theresienstadt during the Second World War.

War Criminal on Trial - Rauca of Kaunas by Sol Littman

This reprint of the 1983 book by the Canadian investigative reporter Sol Littman is a fascinating and disturbing account that is composed of two intriguing parts. First, Littman describes life within and the final "liquidation" of the Kovno ghetto (Kaunas, Lithuania) during World War II, giving the reader a vivid description of what it must have been like to try to survive that horrendous environment. Then he describes the search, hunt and extradition proceedings of Helmut Rauca, one of the main Nazi perpetrators in the murders of the Jews of the Kovno ghetto. Littman raised difficult questions about the role played by the Canadian Government in allowing Rauca and other suspected war criminals to find safe havens within its borders. This book is well worth reading.

The Note Through the Wire: The Incred­i­ble True Sto­ry of a Pris­on­er of War and a Resis­tance Heroine by Doug Gold

In this true love story that defies all odds, Josefine Lobnik, a Yugoslav partisan heroine, and Bruce Murray, a New Zealand soldier, discover love in the midst of a brutal war.

In the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe, two people meet fleetingly in a chance encounter. One an underground resistance fighter, a bold young woman determined to vanquish the enemy occupiers; the other a prisoner of war, a man longing to escape the confines of the camp so he can battle again. A crumpled note passes between these two strangers, slipped through the wire of the compound, and sets them on a course that will change their lives forever.

Woven through their tales of great bravery, daring escapes, betrayal, torture, and retaliation is their remarkable love story that survived against all odds. This is an extraordinary account of two ordinary people who found love during the unimaginable hardships of Hitler’s barbaric regime as told by their son-in-law Doug Gold, who decided to tell their story from the moment he heard about their remarkable tale of bravery, resilience, and resistance.

9/12: The Epic Battle Of The Ground Zero Responders by William H. Groner and Tom Teicholz

9/12 is the saga of the epic nine-year legal battle William H. Groner waged against the City of New York and its contractors on behalf of more than ten thousand first responders who became ill as a result of working on the Ground Zero cleanup. These first responders, such as AT&T Disaster Relief head Gary Acker, New York Police Department detectives Candiace Baker, Thomas Ryan, and Mindy Hersh, rushed to Ground Zero and remained to work on the rescue and recovery mission, which lasted for the next nine months. Their selfless bravery and humanity were rewarded with horrible health issues resulting from the toxic stew of chemicals present in the dust and debris that government officials such as Mayor Rudy Giuliani and EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman had assured them was safe. William H. Groner, a lead attorney in the mass tort litigation, fought for their illnesses to be acknowledged and for them to receive validation and closure, as well as compensation—an eventual aggregate award of more than $800 million.

As detailed in 9/12, the battle for the ground zero responders was waged not only in the courtroom but also in the press, in medical and scientific research centers, and among politicians at the local, state, and federal levels, as well as in the halls of Congress to pass the Zadroga Health and Compensation Act. 9/12 weaves together Groner’s firsthand account with glimpses into the first responders’ lives as they try to understand and overcome their illnesses. The result is an intimate look into their battles—physical, mental, and legal—that will leave you cheering for these heroes who, in spite of everything, would do it all again.

Told by Groner and award-winning journalist Tom Teicholz, 9/12 is the story of the brave public servants who showed up when their country needed them most, their fight for redress, and their victory in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.

Lovers in Auschwitz

Roundabout by Elaine Durbach

Nothing in Sally's life has worked out as she intended.

When her beloved Felix dies suddenly, she feels he has betrayed her too. But as she goes through his possessions, in the seaside cottage outside Cape Town where they finally found happiness, each discovery unlocks more questions. And each day brings new answers -- about their love and what pushed them apart, and how she can build a fulfilling life for herself.

Evening by Nessa Rapoport

In her 30s, Eve is summoned home by her distraught family to mourn the premature death of her sister, Tam—a return that becomes an unexpected encounter with the past. Eve bears the burden of a secret: Two weeks before Tam died, Eve and Tam argued so vehemently that they did not speak again. Her sister was famous, acclaimed for her career as a TV journalist and her devoted marriage. But Tam, too, had a secret, revealed the day after the funeral, one that inverts the story Eve has told herself since their childhood. In the aftermath, Eve is forced to revise her version of her fractured family, her sister’s accomplishments and vaunted marriage, and her own impeded ambition in work and love.

Day by day as the family sits shiva, the stories unfold, illuminating the past to shape the present. Evening explores the dissonant love between sisters, the body in longing, the pride we take in sustaining our illusions, and the redemption that is possible only when they are dispelled.

Invisible Threat by Robert L. Hirsch

Dr. Alan Mazer graduated from Harvard Medical School at the age of twenty and started curing rare diseases by age twenty-five. He grew into one of America’s most brilliant scientists, so no one could have foreseen his true intentions.

Now a radicalized Muslim, Mazer uses his genius to isolate viruses that attack the nervous system. One “vaccine” kills instead of protecting, stealing the lives of children. In particular, Mazer targets Israelis and Americans in an effort to bring down Western society.

Now, skilled Mossad agents, the Joint Terrorist Task Force, and an immunologist from a biotechnology company work together to fight against jihad. They rush to stop Mazer and his team of terrorists, even as unlimited funds roll in from across the globe supporting Mazer’s cause. This team must find this man and stop him before the virus and others spread indiscriminately.

Nermina's Chance by Dina Greenberg

War sears its imprint on the human spirit in infinite ways.

After her family is murdered and her body ravaged by Serbian soldiers, Nermina Beganovic's only chance of survival is to flee her Bosnian homeland during the Balkan War, circa 1992.
Nermina's Chance by Dina Greenberg reimagines the essence of family and plumbs the depths of a mother's ardent connection to her daughter.

Big Time: Stories by Jen Spyra

Big Time is a laugh-out-loud short sto­ry col­lec­tion that, in the words of Van­i­ty Fair, ​“dials its mod­ern sub­jects up to 11…and then blows up the amp.” The sto­ries fea­ture Aabride so des­per­ate to get in shape for her wed­ding that she enrolls in a new kind of work­out pro­gram that promis­es the moon but costs more than she bar­gained for. A snow­man who, on the wish of a child, comes to life in a decid­ed­ly less savory way than the child­hood clas­sic. And in the title sto­ry, a time-hop­ping 1940s star­let tries to claw her way to the top in mod­ern-day Hol­ly­wood, despite being ridicu­lous­ly unwoke.

In this uproar­i­ous, addic­tive debut, Jen Spyra takes a cul­ture that seems almost beyond par­o­dy and holds it up to a fun­house mir­ror, immers­ing the read­er in a world of pre­his­toric influ­encers, wood­land crea­tures plagued by mil­len­ni­al neu­roses, and an all-out birth­day bash deter­mined to be the most lav­ish cel­e­bra­tion of all time, by any means necessary.

The Long Corner by Alexander Maksik

A bold novel about ambition, grief, creativity, beauty, and existential emptiness that retraces the arc of American life and culture in the first decades of the 21st century.

It is early 2017 in New York City, Donald Trump is President, and Solomon Fields, a young Jewish journalist-turned-advertising hack, finds himself disillusioned by the hollowness and conformity of American life and language. Once brimming with dreams and ideals instilled in him by his eternally bohemian grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust who has dedicated her life to passion and pleasure, Sol now finds the senseless jargon he produces at work seeping into all aspects of the world around him—and most disturbingly, into the art that his beloved grandmother taught him to revere.

A personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, an artists’ colony on a tropical island, whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more Light comes to resemble Trump himself, and the games he plays with Sol become more dangerous. Slowly lines begin to blur—between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness—until Sol finds that he must question everything: his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.

The Last Green Valley Mark T. Sullivan

In late March 1944, as Stal­in’s forces push into Ukraine, young Emil and Ade­line Mar­tel must make a ter­ri­ble deci­sion: Do they wait for the Sovi­et bear’s intru­sion and and risk being sent to Siberia? Or do they reluc­tant­ly fol­low the wolves mur­der­ous Nazi offi­cers who have pledged to pro­tect ​“pure-blood” Ger­mans? The Mar­tels are one of many fam­i­lies of Ger­man her­itage whose ances­tors have farmed in Ukraine for more than a cen­tu­ry. But after already liv­ing under Stalin’s hor­ri­fy­ing regime, Emil and Ade­line decide they must run in retreat from their land with the wolves they despise to escape the Sovi­ets and go in search of free­dom. Caught between two war­ring forces and over­com­ing hor­rif­ic tri­als to pur­sue their hope of immi­grat­ing to the West, the Mar­tels’ sto­ry is a bru­tal, com­plex, and ulti­mate­ly tri­umphant tale that illu­mi­nates the extra­or­di­nary pow­er of love, faith, and one family’s incred­i­ble will to sur­vive and see their dreams realized.

The Light After The War by Anita Abriel

Inspired by an incred­i­ble true sto­ry of two Jew­ish friends who sur­vived the Holo­caust, this sweep­ing nov­el of love and friend­ship spans World War II from Budapest to Aus­tria and the post­war years from Naples to Cara­cas, per­fect for fans of The Ger­man Girl and We Were the Lucky Ones.

Little Pieces of Me by Alison Hammer

When a DNA test reveals a long-buried secret, a woman must look to the past to under­stand her moth­er and her­self. Fol­low­ing her acclaimed debut nov­el, You and Me and Us, Ali­son Ham­mer offers a deeply mov­ing sto­ry of fam­i­ly, iden­ti­ty, rela­tion­ships, and Jew­ish culture.

The Plagues of Pharoah by David Shaw

Ancient Egypt is a powerful and prosperous land filled with proud, modern, and pious people. Their Pharaoh is a descendent of the gods; touched by immortality and incapable of doing wrong. His people love, worship, and fear him as they do the god Ra who appears to them daily as the sun and whose departure they serenade at dusk every evening.

Hannu is one of Pharaoh’s highest and favorite ministers, exalted as the Second Vizier in Egypt. He worships the Pharaoh, his god-king, who rules Egypt in prosperity and peace; their enemies defeated and those wily Hebrews enslaved. Hannu knows that the Hebrews must suffer to keep Egypt a great empire; they are a difficult people to trust, smart and slippery. From his exalted position, Hannu assists Pharaoh’s overseers who use the Hebrews to build great cities and monuments to Pharaoh and the many gods that help keep Egypt safe and fed. Hannu also assists Pharaoh’s priests and magicians, helping them cater to Egypt’s numerous gods as well as the generals who enforce Pharaoh’s divine love.

The Curious Spell of Madam Genova by J.G. Schwartz

His­tor­i­cal Judaism is steeped in mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion that con­cerns the use of mag­ic. It was long con­sid­ered per­mit­ted white mag­ic by its prac­ti­tion­ers. In effect, what is con­sid­ered prac­ti­cal Kab­bal­ah is an agglom­er­a­tion of all the mag­i­cal prac­tices that devel­oped in Judaism from the Tal­mu­dic peri­od down through the Mid­dle Ages.

J.G. Schwartz’s heart­warm­ing tale, The Curi­ous Spell of Madam Gen­o­va, begins in New York City, in the 1920’s, when clair­voy­ant extra­or­di­naire, Jen­ny Gen­o­va, casts a spell upon two pock­et watch­es. The spells goes ter­ri­bly awry. The nov­el fol­lows the jour­ney of the watch­es as they pass from own­er to own­er, result­ing in amaz­ing luck, and in hor­rif­ic tragedy, for some of the most famous indi­vid­u­als of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. Charles Lind­bergh, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Oba­ma, among oth­ers, are some whose lives become inter­con­nect­ed, and their fates inter­twined with a touch of mag­ic.

A Jew­ish audi­ence will be enter­tained with the mag­ic sewn through­out the nov­el, and will empathize with top­ics includ­ing anti­semitism, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, and issues of domes­tic violence.

Two Jews Three Shuls by Sandra Tankoos

Two Jews=Three Shuls takes place in a Con­ser­v­a­tive syn­a­gogue. The Rab­bi is mur­dered and, on that lev­el, the nov­el is a mur­der mys­tery. The pro­tag­o­nist is a Holo­caust sur­vivor, a female lawyer who is pres­i­dent of the syn­a­gogue. Con­se­quent­ly, wom­en’s place in Judaism is inte­gral to the plot. Mys­ti­cism and the Holo­caust are also incor­po­rat­ed into the sto­ry. The book is endorsed by sev­er­al Rab­bis who are well known with­in the Movement.

A Play For The End Of The World by Jai Chakrabarti

A dazzling debut novel--set in early 1970's New York and rural India--the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of the Second World War, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance.

New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.

Travelling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government--the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.

An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

American Wasteland Stories by Alexander Shalom Joseph

Alexan­der Shalom Joseph’s Amer­i­can Waste­land is a col­lec­tion of sto­ries about the con­tem­po­rary day-to-day in Amer­i­ca. It is said in the Tal­mud that one job of cer­tain Jews is to jus­ti­fy the exis­tence of human­i­ty to God; in this col­lec­tion, Joseph attempts to do just this with his sto­ries, which speak to the every­day mun­dane and the vast rich­ness in both mean­ing and mean­ing­less­ness that abound all around us. In one sto­ry a recent divorcee tries to find mean­ing on the Fourth of July but ends up stuck in traf­fic. In anoth­er, a sub­ur­ban man unhap­py with his life becomes obsessed with wash­ing his car at a twen­ty-four-hour car wash in his neigh­bor­hood. In anoth­er, a young woman rec­ol­lects her child­hood with a sin­gle moth­er and how they used to paint their nails and eat break­fast togeth­er. In yet anoth­er, a sin­gle per­son suf­fers through a din­ner par­ty at which they are the fifth wheel. These sto­ries, vivid in detail, por­tray a stag­nant land full of long­ing. They present a por­trait of a coun­try full of mil­lions of lost peo­ple, try­ing to make sense of a world which can seem both crush­ing and light at the same time.

The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner

oland, 1941. After the Jews in their town are rounded up, Roza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, spend day and night hidden in a farmer's barn. Forbidden from making a sound, only the yellow bird from her mother's stories can sing the melodies Shira composes in her head.

Roza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Roza must face an impossible choice: whether to keep her daughter close by her side, or give her the chance to survive by letting her go . . .

The Yellow Bird Sings is a powerfully gripping and deeply moving novel about the unbreakable bond between parent and child and the triumph of humanity and hope in even the darkest circumstances.

That's Not a Thing by Jacqueline Friedland

Mered­ith Alt­man’s engage­ment to Wes­ley Lat­ner end­ed in spec­tac­u­lar dis­as­ter — one that shat­tered her com­plete­ly. Years have passed since then, and now she’s about to mar­ry Aaron Rapp, a for­mer Ivy League foot­ball play­er and baby-sav­ing doc­tor. As they cel­e­brate their engage­ment at a new TriBeCa hotspot, Mered­ith is stunned to find the restau­rant own­er is none oth­er than Wes­ley, the man she is still secret­ly try­ing to for­get. When Mered­ith learns that Wes­ley has been diag­nosed with ALS, her feel­ings about their past become all the more con­fus­ing. As she spends more time with Wes­ley and is pulled fur­ther under his spell, she dis­cov­ers what kind of man her new fiancé real­ly is — and what kind of woman she wants to be.

A Bend in the Stars: A Novel by Rachel Baren­baum

In Russia, in the summer of 1914, as war with Germany looms and the Czar's army tightens its grip on the local Jewish community, Miri Abramov and her brilliant physicist brother, Vanya, are facing an impossible decision. Since their parents drowned fleeing to America, Miri and Vanya have been raised by their babushka, a famous matchmaker who has taught them to protect themselves at all costs: to fight, to kill if necessary, and always to have an escape plan. But now, with fierce, headstrong Miri on the verge of becoming one of Russia's only female surgeons, and Vanya hoping to solve the final puzzles of Einstein's elusive theory of relativity, can they bear to leave the homeland that has given them so much?




Before they have time to make their choice, war is declared and Vanya goes missing, along with Miri's fiancé. Miri braves the firing squad to go looking for them both. As the eclipse that will change history darkens skies across Russia, not only the safety of Miri's own family but the future of science itself hangs in the balance.




Grounded in real history -- and inspired by the solar eclipse of 1914 -- A Bend in the Stars offers a heart-stopping account of modern science's greatest race amidst the chaos of World War I, and a love story as epic as the railways crossing Russia.

Trav­els with Sushi in the Land of the Mind by Eduard Shyfrin

Aaron & Stel­la spend sum­mers at their grand­par­ents, play­ing on the beach dur­ing the day & eat­ing sushi at night. One evening, the chil­dren try some spe­cial sushi which trans­ports them to an alter­nate uni­verse, The Land of the Mind, a place tra­di­tion­al­ly gov­erned by math & quan­tum physics, which is being tak­en over by evil and chaos.

The chil­dren are tasked with res­cu­ing the Book of Under­stand­ing, con­tain­ing rules on liv­ing a good life. While pre­serv­ing uni­ver­sal rel­e­vance, the nov­el is imbued with Jew­ish val­ues, a metaphor for the Peo­ple of the Book. Cho­sen because of their rela­tion­ship to the Gold­en Ratio (Phi), the chil­dren trav­el on a Phi-Fly­er & are guid­ed by a wise raven. The chil­dren must learn how to nav­i­gate the infi­nite dimen­sions of quan­tum physics to save the Land of the Mind from falling into chaos. This chil­dren’s nov­el intro­duces chil­dren to quan­tum physics and clas­sic moral­i­ty through an adven­ture in anoth­er uni­verse. Doing for quan­tum mechan­ics what Alice in Won­der­land did for math­e­mat­ics, it’s a cel­e­bra­tion of the pow­er of words and the role of sci­ence, exquis­ite­ly illustrated.

The Auschwitz Detective by Jonathan Dun­sky

The sixth novel, The Auschwitz Detective, is a prequel that takes place in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944. Dunsky has also written a standalone crime thriller called The Payback Girl, in addition to publishing a number of short stories, in various genres. He resides in Israel with his wife and two sons.

Send for Me: A Novel by Lau­ren Fox

Based on the author’s own family letters, Send for Me tells the story of Annelise, a young woman in prewar Germany. Growing up working at her parents’ popular bakery, she's always imagined a future full of delicious possibilities. Despite rumors that anti-Jewish sentiment is on the rise, Annelise and her parents can’t quite believe that it will affect them; they’re hardly religious. But as she falls in love, marries, and gives birth to her daughter, the dangers grow closer. Soon Annelise and her husband are given the chance to leave for America, but they must go without her parents, whose future and safety are uncertain.

Two generations later in a small Midwestern city, Annelise’s granddaughter, Clare, is a young woman newly in love. But when she stumbles upon a trove of the letters her great-grandmother wrote from Germany after Annelise's departure, she sees the history of her family’s sacrifices in a new light, leading her to question whether she can still honor the past while planning for her future.

Alex in Deutschland by Roger Neu­maier

Alex Schwarz is a sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion Holo­caust sur­vivor haunt­ed by the night­mare that was Nazi Ger­many. In 1939, Alex Schwarz’s father escaped the Third Reich and came to the Unit­ed States. But Alex’s grand­par­ents and uncle per­ished in Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps. Now, in the 1960s, Alex wants to under­stand and escape from the dark shad­ow his father’s grief and fears have cast over his youth.

Then hap­pen­stance gives Alex a gift — or is it a bur­den? Alex learns he can see into the past. How will Alex and his girl­friend Lucy, a Sovi­et émi­gré, make use of this new and extra­or­di­nary capability?

Alex in Deutsch­land tells its tale using adven­ture, cru­el­ty, won­der and sad­ness from the nine­teen-thir­ties, for­ties, fifties and six­ties. Under­ly­ing it all, the book wres­tles with the psy­che of Hitler while address­ing the ques­tion: What is fascism?

Love is a Rebel­lious Bird by Elayne Kas­son

This tale of a six­ty-year love affair exam­ines the age-old ques­tion of why we love the peo­ple we do. A beau­ti­ful, charis­mat­ic and wild­ly suc­cess­ful man is adored by a woman. Even as chil­dren grow­ing up togeth­er in Chicago’s Jew­ish north side neigh­bor­hoods, attend­ing Jew­ish youth groups and sum­mer camps, he held the pow­er. Nev­er mar­ried to each oth­er, but bound through­out their lives by tragedy and friend­ship, Elliot defined the terms of their rela­tion­ship, until final­ly, in old age, the pow­er shifts. Look­ing at the roles of beau­ty, insan­i­ty, mag­ic, deceit, con­so­la­tion, sen­so­ry ful­fill­ment, and, final­ly, being seen, Judith Sher­man explores why she loved Elliot Pine — a rela­tion­ship that impinged on every oth­er in her life. In old age, after mar­riages to oth­ers, chil­dren, moves to oppo­site coasts, Judith reflects on how the pat­tern estab­lished in sixth grade was one that per­sist­ed their whole lives: a rela­tion­ship that was a cock­tail mix of rival­ry and loy­al­ty — shak­en with a strong dose of resent­ment and passion.

Judas by Amos Oz

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, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets.

At once an exquisite love story and coming-of-age novel, an allegory for the state of Israel and for the biblical tale from which it draws its title,Judas is Amos Oz's most powerful novel in decades.

The Book of Israela by Rena Blu­men­thal

Jerusalem, 2002: the height of the sec­ond intifa­da. Kobi Bena­mi is a mid­dle-aged psy­chol­o­gist whose life is in sham­bles. His wife has thrown him out for casu­al phi­lan­der­ing; his daugh­ter won’t speak to him; and he may lose his job due to indif­fer­ent work habits. At this des­per­ate junc­ture, Kobi gets a new patient, Israela, whose sto­ry is full of uncan­ny Bib­li­cal ref­er­ences, and whose pow­er­ful enig­mat­ic hus­band Y may or may not exist. Israela hasn’t seen Y in months, but she is being stalked by his prophet-like emis­saries, span­ning the spec­trum of Israeli soci­ety — Ortho­dox to sec­u­lar, right-wing set­tlers to left-wing urban elites — unit­ed only in their harsh con­dem­na­tion of Israel, a fierce devo­tion to Y, and con­nec­tion to The Out­stretched Arm, a sin­is­ter orga­ni­za­tion pur­port­ed to be run by Y. As Kobi becomes ensnared in a sur­re­al encounter with anthro­po­mor­phized ancient Israel, and pre­oc­cu­pied with ques­tions about the nature and exis­tence of Y, he is forced to con­front his dys­func­tion­al life pat­terns, his family’s trag­ic past, and the end­less war that rages around him.

Newark Min­ute­men: A True 1930’s Leg­end About a Box­er Who Tries to Save a Nation’s Soul With­out Los­ing His Own by Leslie K. Barry

Newark Min­ute­men, a 1930s fic­tion­al­ized true sto­ry about Jew­ish Amer­i­can box­ers backed by the FBI and Mafia who fight Amer­i­can Nazis when no one else will, fol­lows the for­bid­den love affair between Jew­ish box­er Yael New­man and Amer­i­can Nazi Krista Brecht. The Nazi par­ty is on the rise, led by the charis­mat­ic and dan­ger­ous Führer Fritz Kuhn, the self-styled Amer­i­can Hitler. Tens of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans have joined a cam­paign of rabid nation­al­ism and anti­semitism that puts Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy on tri­al. While the Par­ty is plan­ning their biggest expan­sion ever, one that will posi­tion them at the fore­front of US pol­i­tics, a young Jew­ish box­er fights for a mili­tia formed by the FBI and run by promi­nent Jew­ish gang­sters. Since wit­ness­ing his father’s mur­der as a boy, Yael swears vengeance tem­pered by jus­tice against the Amer­i­can Führer’s cru­sade for a Fas­cist Amer­i­ca nour­ished by the Third Reich. He infil­trates the Par­ty dis­guised as a Storm Troop­er in an attempt to bring them down. Along the way, he falls in love with the daugh­ter of the ene­my. For­bid­den love, spies, and assas­si­na­tion com­pli­cate the jour­ney. Most arrest­ing, we hear 1930 echoes of Amer­i­can Führer’s Nurem­berg-like cry on President’s Day, 1939 at Madi­son Square Gar­den that calls for all Ger­man Amer­i­cans to rise up and ​“Make Amer­i­ca Great.” Based on a true sto­ry, this is one man’s mis­sion to save a nation’s soul with­out los­ing his own.

The Secret Stealers

Anna Cavanaugh is a rest­less young wid­ow and bril­liant French teacher at a pri­vate school in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Every­thing changes when she’s recruit­ed into the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices by fam­i­ly friend and leg­endary WWI hero Major Gen­er­al William Dono­van.

Dono­van has faith in her, and in all his ​“glo­ri­ous ama­teurs” who are becom­ing Anna’s fast friends: Mag­gie, Anna’s down-to-earth men­tor; Irene, who’s strug­gling to find sup­port from her hus­band for her clan­des­tine life; and Julia, a cheer­ful OSS liai­son. But the more Anna learns about the orga­ni­za­tion’s secret mis­sions, the more she longs to be sta­tioned abroad. Then comes the oppor­tu­ni­ty: go under­cov­er as a spy in the French Resis­tance to help steal crit­i­cal intel­li­gence that could ulti­mate­ly turn the tide of the war.

Dis­patched behind ene­my lines and in con­stant dan­ger, Anna is filled with adren­a­line, pas­sion, and fear. She’s dri­ven to make a dif­fer­ence‚ for her coun­try and for her­self. What­ev­er the risk, she’s will­ing to take it to help lib­er­ate France from the shad­ows of occu­pa­tion and to free her­self from the shad­ows of her for­mer life.

And The Bridge is Love by David Biro

Every week for 20 years, three friends meet in a leafy enclo­sure under the Ver­raz­zano Bridge: Ger­tie, a feisty Nor­we­gian divorcee and for­mer ath­lete; Maria, a fam­i­ly-obsessed Ital­ian Amer­i­can wid­ow; and Corin­na, a book-lov­ing, hash-smok­ing eccen­tric. Togeth­er they sit and watch the sea as the ships — and the last years of their lives – sail by. On the eve of Gertie’s eight­i­eth birth­day, they real­ize time is run­ning out. Ger­tie decides she wants to trav­el the world. Maria secret­ly plots to reunite Ger­tie and Corin­na with their estranged fam­i­lies. And Corin­na falls in love.

As the women strike out in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, a series of events unfolds that threat­ens to destroy the most pre­cious thing of all: their friend­ship. Heart­felt and humor­ous, And the Bridge is Love invites read­ers to trav­el along­side these dynam­ic women in this inspir­ing nov­el about love, fam­i­ly and forgiveness.

The Shadow of the Black Flame by Misha Sauceda

Girona, Catalun­ya. 1491. Maya Bonafeu, a young woman of nine­teen years, infu­ri­ates Count Vil­lalo­bos’s young son when she unknow­ing­ly wields unnat­ur­al pow­ers toward him. The Count ban­ish­es Maya and she trav­els to Girona to study with her uncle Asach, the only per­son who can teach her about her spe­cial abil­i­ties. Asach is hes­i­tant to teach his niece because he knows this is a fam­i­ly lega­cy and it only pass­es through the male lin­eage. Soon though, he real­izes he was wrong and sees the mag­ni­tude of her nat­ur­al tal­ents. Yes, she does pos­sess their fam­i­ly gift — the celes­tial pow­ers of the Hebrew let­ters. In time, Maya meets Rafael Ceti, a mys­te­ri­ous inter­preter, who acts as a liai­son between the Span­ish Inquisi­tor and the Cata­lan city offi­cials. Rafael must strad­dle two worlds dur­ing this per­ilous time, know­ing he is vul­ner­a­ble as a con­ver­so — a Jew who con­vert­ed to Catholi­cism. Togeth­er, Maya and Rafael jour­ney through the polit­i­cal maze of the Inqui­si­tion and their own per­son­al strug­gles to under­stand her mys­ti­cal gift.

Refusenik: poems by Lynn Mel­nick

In this sear­ing new vol­ume, Lynn Mel­nick dives head-first through con­cen­tric waves of per­son­al and gen­er­a­tional trau­ma with her trade­mark fear less­ness. Evinc­ing a com­plex mind shaped by the late 20th century’s mis­placed pri­or­i­ties, Refusenik inter­ro­gates misog­y­ny and anti­semitism across time and a shift­ing glob­al land­scape — from a foot­ball field in Los Ange­les to a Russ­ian shtetl to a beloved daughter’s Brook­lyn bed­room. Var­i­ous­ly unrav­el­ing and allow­ing for intri­cate tan­gles of anger, nos­tal­gia and love, these agile poems fur­row deep­er into the ter­rain of Melnick’s much-cel­e­brat­ed ear­li­er titles, arriv­ing at a pro­found and pres­sured under­stand­ing of what it means to be a con­tem­po­rary American.