Jewish Studies

1. JewishStudies

3. A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture • Shachar M. Pinsker • Finalist, 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, presented by the Jewish Book Council A fascinating glimpse into the world of the coffeehouse and its role in shaping modern Jewish culture Unlike the synagogue, the house of study, the community center, or the Jewish deli, the café is rarely considered a Jewish space. Yet, coffeehouses profoundly influenced the creation of modern Jewish culture from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. With roots stemming from the Ottoman Empire, the coffeehouse and its drinks gained increasing popularity in Europe. The “otherness,” and the mix of the national and transnational characteristics of the coffeehouse perhaps explains why many of these cafés were owned by Jews, why Jews became their most devoted habitués, and how cafés acquired associations with Jewishness. Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar M. Pinsker argues that cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City and Tel Aviv. A Rich Brew explores the Jewish culture created in these social spaces, drawing on a vivid collection of newspaper articles, memoirs, archival documents, photographs, caricatures, and artwork, as well as stories, novels, and poems in many languages set in cafés. Pinsker shows how Jewish modernity was born in the café, nourished, and sent out into the world by way of print, politics, literature, art, and theater. What was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse touched thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern culture that redefined what it meant to be a Jew in the world. • 1

4. Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando • Nicholas Chare, Dominic Williams • The Sonderkommando—the “special squad” of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau—comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented—by themselves and by others—both during and after the Holocaust. • 2

5. Dem Holocaust entkommen: Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion, 1939–1946 • Markus Nesselrodt • Über 230.000 polnische Juden überlebten den Zweiten Weltkrieg im Inneren der Sowjetunion. Viele waren der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung durch rechtzeitige Flucht auf sowjetisches Territorium entkommen. Andere wurden gegen ihren Willen von der sowjetischen Geheimpolizei in das Landesinnere der UdSSR verschleppt, wo sie in abgelegenen Siedlungen unter schwierigen Lebensbedingungen Zwangsarbeit verrichteten. Die Mehrheit der polnischen Juden hatte sich allerdings im Rahmen der Evakuierung sowjetischer Staatsbürger 1941–1942 aus den Frontgebieten in den Süden der UdSSR durchgeschlagen. Dort hielten sich die meisten polnisch-jüdischen Exilanten bis zur Rückkehr nach Polen im Jahre 1946 auf. Die Studie untersucht Erfahrungen polnischer Juden im Zeitraum von 1939 bis 1946. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf den Jahren in den zentralasiatischen Sowjetrepubliken, wo hunderttausende polnische Juden täglich um ihr Überleben als Fremde in einem von Krieg, Armut und politischem Terror gezeichneten Land kämpfen mussten. Ihre Geschichte an der »Peripherie des Holocaust« (Yehuda Bauer) erweitert den Horizont jüdischer Erfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg um die Erlebnisse im sowjetischen Exil. • 3

6. Being Jewish in 21st Century Central Europe • Haim Fireberg, Olaf Glöckner, Marcela Zoufalá • Die Reihe Europäisch-Jüdische Studien repräsentiert die international vernetzte Kompetenz des »Moses Mendelssohn Zentrums für europäisch-jüdische Studien« (MMZ). Der interdisziplinäre Charakter der Reihe, die in Kooperation mit dem Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg herausgegeben wird, zielt insbesondere auf geschichts-, geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Ansätze sowie auf intellektuelle, politische, literarische und religiöse Grundfragen, die jüdisches Leben und Denken in der Vergangenheit beeinflusst haben und noch heute inspirieren. Mit ihren Publikationen weiß sich das MMZ der über 250jährigen Tradition der von Moses Mendelssohn begründeten Jüdischen Aufklärung und der Wissenschaft des Judentums verpflichtet. In den BEITRÄGEN werden exzellente Monographien und Sammelbände zum gesamten Themenspektrum Jüdischer Studien veröffentlicht. Die Reihe ist peer-reviewed. • 4

7. Life and Love in Nazi Prague: Letters from an Occupied City • Marie Bader • Prague, 1940-1942. The Nazi-occupied city is locked in a reign of terror under Reinhard Heydrich. The Jewish community experience increasing levels of persecution, as rumours start to swirl of deportation and an unknown, but widely feared, fate. Amidst the chaos and devastation, Marie Bader, a widow age 56, has found love again with a widower, her cousin Ernst Löwy. Ernst has fled to Greece and the two correspond in a series of deeply heartfelt letters which provide a unique perspective on this period of heightening tension and anguish for the Jewish community. The letters paint a vivid, moving and often dramatic picture of Jewish life in occupied Prague, the way Nazi persecution affected Marie, her increasingly strained family relationships, as well as the effect on the wider Jewish community whilst Heydrich, one of the key architects and executioners of the Holocaust and Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, established the Theresienstadt ghetto and began to organize the deportation of Jews. Through this deeply personal and moving account, the realities of Jewish life in Heydrich's Prague are dramatically revealed. • 5

8. German Railroads, Jewish Souls: The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution • Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes • Renowned Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg considered the German railway system that delivered European Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe to be not only an essential component of the “machinery of destruction” but also emblematic of the amoral bureaucracy that helped to implement the Jewish genocide. German Railroads, Jewish Souls centers around Hilberg’s seminal essay of the same name, a landmark study of German railways in the Nazi era long unavailable in English. Supplemented with additional writings from Hilberg, primary source materials, and historical commentary from leading scholars Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes, this is a rich and accessible introduction to a topic in Holocaust history that remains understudied even today. • 6

9. A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg's Journal • Kadya Molodovsky • Rivke Zilberg, a 20-year-old Jewish woman, arrives in New York shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, her home country. Struggling to learn a new language and cope with a different way of life in the United States, Rivke finds herself keeping a journal about the challenges and opportunities of this new land. In her attempt to find a new life as a Jewish immigrant in the US, Rivke shares the stories of losing her mother to a bombing in Lublin, jilting a fiancé who has made his way to Palestine, and a flirtatious relationship with an American "allrightnik." In this fictionalized journal originally published in Yiddish, author Kadya Molodovsy provides keen insight into the day-to-day activities of the large immigrant Jewish community of New York. By depicting one woman's struggles as a Jewish refugee in the US during WWII, Molodovsky points readers to the social, political, and cultural tensions of that time and place. • 9

10. Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli • Ted Merwin • 7

11. Typically Jewish • Nancy Kalikow Maxwell • Is laughter essential to Jewish identity? Do Jews possess special radar for recognizing members of the tribe? Since Jews live longer and make love more often, why don’t more people join the tribe? “More deli than deity” writer Nancy Kalikow Maxwell poses many such questions in eight chapters—“Worrying,” “Kvelling,” “Dying,” “Noshing,” “Laughing,” “Detecting,” “Dwelling,” and “Joining”—exploring what it means to be “typically Jewish.” While unearthing answers from rabbis, researchers, and her assembled Jury on Jewishness (Jewish friends she roped into conversation), she—and we—make a variety of discoveries. For example:   Jews worry about continuity, even though Rabbi Mordechai of Lechovitz prohibited even that: “All worrying is forbidden, except to worry that one is worried.”   Kvell-worthy fact: About 75 percent of American Jews give to charity versus 63 percent of Americans as a whole.   Since reciting Kaddish brought secular Jews to synagogue, the rabbis, aware of their captive audience, moved the prayer to the end of the service.   Who’s Jewish? About a quarter of Nobel Prize winners, an estimated 80 percent of comedians at one point, and the winner of Nazi Germany’s Most Perfect Aryan Child Contest.   Readers will enjoy learning about how Jews feel, think, act, love, and live. They’ll also schmooze as they use the book’s “Typically Jewish, Atypically Fun” discussion guide.   • 8

12. One Night, One Hanukkah Night • Aidel Backman • One night, one light One shining Hanukkah light In the great silver menorah The same menorah that shone in Bubby and Zaidy’s house so long ago now glistens in a modern home. Children sing Hanukkah songs, make latkes, and act out historic scenes. For each night there is a new form of celebration as a new candle is added to the great silver menorah.  Aidel Backman has written and illustrated a lively, full-color treasure. In this warm book, Hanukkah traditions pass from one generation to the next, from an Eastern European shtetl to America. This colorful work looks at the many ways families can celebrate this joyous holiday. Young children will most likely ask their adult friends to reread this rhythmical text at least every night of Hanukkah and probably long after the eight days are over.   • 10

13. The Land of Truth: Talmud Tales, Timeless Teachings • Jeffrey L. Rubenstein • Making the rich narrative world of Talmud tales fully accessible to modern readers, renowned Talmud scholar Jeffrey L. Rubenstein turns his spotlight on both famous and little-known stories, analyzing the tales in their original contexts, exploring their cultural meanings and literary artistry, and illuminating their relevance. Delving into both rabbinic life (the academy, master-disciple relationships) and Jewish life under Roman and Persian rule (persecution, taxation, marketplaces), Rubenstein explains how storytellers used irony, wordplay, figurative language, and other art forms to communicate their intended messages. Each close reading demonstrates the story’s continuing relevance through the generations into modernity. For example, the story “Showdown in Court,” a confrontation between King Yannai and the Rabbinic judges, provides insights into controversial struggles in U.S. history to balance governmental power; the story of Honi’s seventy-year sleep becomes a window into the indignities of aging. Through the prism of Talmud tales, Rubenstein also offers timeless insights into suffering, beauty, disgust, heroism, humor, love, sex, truth, and falsehood. By connecting twenty-first-century readers to past generations, The Land of Truth  helps to bridge the divide between modern Jews and the traditional narrative worlds of their ancestors.   • 11

14. At Wit's End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke • Louis Kaplan • Scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the 20th century At Wit’ s End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically-charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust. The first in-depth study to explore the Jewish joke as a crucial rhetorical figure in larger cultural debates in Germany, author Louis Kaplan presents an engrossing and lucid work of scholarship that examines how “ der jü dische Witz ” (referring to both Jewish wit and jokes) was utilized differently in a number of texts, from the Weimar Republic to the rise of National Socialism, and how it was reintroduced into the public sphere after the Holocaust with the controversial publication of Salcia Landmann’s collection of Jewish jokes in the reparations era ( Wiedergutmachung ). Kaplan reviews the claims made about the Jewish joke and its provocative laughter by notable writers from a variety of ideological perspectives, demonstrating how their reflections on this complex cultural trope enables a better understanding of German-Jewish intercultural relations and their eventual breakdown in the Third Reich. He also illustrates how self-critical and self-ironic Jewish Witz maintained a fraught and ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism. In reviewing this critical and traumatic moment in modern German-Jewish history through the deadly discourse on the Jewish joke, At Wit’ s End includes chapters on the virulent Austrian anti-Semitic racial theorist, Arthur Trebitsch, the Nazi racial propagandist, Siegfried Kadner, the German Marxist cultural historian, Eduard Fuchs, the Jewish diasporic historian, Erich Kahler, and the Jewish cabaret impresario, Kurt Robitschek, among others. Shedding new light on anti-Semitism and on the Jewish question leading up to the Holocaust, At Wit’ s End provides readers with a unique perspective by which to gain important insights about this crucial historical period that reverberates into the present day, when potentially offensive humor coupled with a toxic political climate and xenophobia can have deadly consequences. • 12

15. Beyond Jewish Identity • Jon A. Levisohn, Ari Y. Kelman • This volume, while not the first to explore and critique the concept of Jewish identity, makes two important interventions into contemporary understandings of American Jewish life. It is the first collection to critically examine the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish identity. Insofar as Jewish identity has become the most popular way to talk about the desired outcome of Jewish education, a critical assessment of the relationship between education and identity is both useful and necessary. It is useful because the reification of identity has, we believe, hampered much educational creativity in the rather single-minded pursuit of this goal. It is necessary because the nearly ubiquitous employment of the term obscures a whole set of significant questions about what Jewish education is and ought to be for in the first place. Second, this volume offers responses that are not merely synonymous replacements for "identity." With a selection of more critical essays, we hope that we can begin to expand, rather than replace, the array of ideas that the term "identity" is so often used to represent. As scholars of Jewish education, the authors of this book hope their work contributes to any number of new conversations about the relationship between Jewish education and Jewish life. The intention here is to move from critical inquiry (in Part I of the volume) to suggestive possibilities (Part II). The true measure of this effort, of course, lies in the hands of the readers, those who will advance our understanding of the complexities of American Jewish education and life—beyond Jewish identity. • 14

16. Perfect Goodness and the God of the Jews: A Contemporary Jewish Theology • Jerome (Yehuda) Gellman • The notion that the God of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, "the God of the Jews," is perfectly good is challenged by apparently immoral acts—by contemporary standards—of that God, as well as by the classic problem of evil.In this book, Jerome Gellman provides ways to question and overcome these challenges, addresses the faithful who are tested by these two problems, and aims to lighten the challenges for them while preserving God's perfect goodness. He recommends replacing a God of the Jews with a different God, a "Jewish God," one in whom many traditional Jews have come to believe. Gellman also offers the traditional believer a possible theodicy explaining much evil.The book is at once analytic in style and Hasidic in broad orientation. • 15

17. The Seventh Heaven: Travels Through Jewish Latin America • Ilan Stavans • Ilan Stavans is one of the best known and most prolific Latino academics working today. In preparation for writing Seventh Heaven , Stavans spent five years traveling through Latin America in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region. The roots of these communities date back to the expedition of Columbus. Stavans visits Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, and he talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to ""Indian Jews"" in central Mexico, and to neo-Nazis in Patagonia. He also visits Spain, to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest, habitat of ""secret Jews,"" and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial ""seventh heaven,"" which, according to the Talmud, is the closest layer to the divine in which the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. • 16

18. The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust • Mark L. Smith • The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust identifies the Yiddish historians who created a distinctively Jewish approach to writing Holocaust history in the early years following World War II. Author Mark L. Smith explains that these scholars survived the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe, yet they have not previously been recognized as a specific group who were united by a common research agenda and a commitment to sharing their work with the worldwide community of Yiddish-speaking survivors. These Yiddish historians studied the history of the Holocaust from the perspective of its Jewish victims, focusing on the internal aspects of daily life in the ghettos and camps under Nazi occupation and stressing the importance of relying on Jewish sources and the urgency of collecting survivor testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and memoirs. With an aim to dispel the accusations of cowardice and passivity that arose against the Jewish victims of Nazism, these historians created both a vigorous defense and also a daring offense. They understood that most of those who survived did so because they had engaged in a daily struggle against conditions imposed by the Nazis to hasten their deaths. The redemption of Jewish honor through this recognition is the most innovative contribution by the Yiddish historians. It is the area in which they most influenced the research agendas of nearly all subsequent scholars while also disturbing certain accepted truths, including the beliefs that the earliest Holocaust research focused on the Nazi perpetrators, that research on the victims commenced only in the early 1960s, and that Holocaust study developed as an academic discipline separate from Jewish history. Now, with writings in Yiddish journals and books in Europe, Israel, and North and South America having been recovered, listed, and given careful discussion, former ideas must yield before the Yiddish historians' published works. The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust is an eye-opening monograph that will appeal to Holocaust and Jewish studies scholars, students, and general readers. • 17

19. Next Year in Jerusalem: Exile and Return in Jewish History • Leonard J. Greenspoon • Next Year in Jerusalem recognizes that Jews have often experienced or imaged periods of exile andreturn in their long tradition. The fourteen papers in this collection examine this phenomenon from different approaches, genres, and media. They cover the period from biblical times through today. Among the exiles highlighted are the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), the exile after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (70 CE), and the years after the Crusaders (tenth century CE). Events of return include the aftermath of the Babylonian Exile (fifth century BCE), the centuries after theTemple’s destruction (first and second CE), and the years of the establishment of the modern State of Israel (1948 CE). In each instance authors pay close attention to the historical settings, the literature created by Jews and others, and the theological explanations offered (typically, this was seen as divine punishment or reward for Israel’s behavior). The entire volume is written authoritativelyand accessibly. • 18

20. A New Hasidism: Branches • Arthur Green, Ariel Evan Mayse • You are invited to enter the new-old pathway of Neo-Hasidism—a movement that uplifts key elements of Hasidism’s Jewish revival of two centuries ago to reexamine the meaning of existence, see everything anew, and bring the world as it is and as it can be closer together. This volume brings this discussion into the twenty-first century, highlighting Neo-Hasidic approaches to key issues of our time. Eighteen contributions by leading Neo-Hasidic thinkers open with the credos of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Green. Or Rose wrestles with reinterpreting the rebbes ’ harsh teachings concerning non-Jews. Ebn Leader assesses the perils of trusting one’s whole being to a single personality: can Neo-Hasidism endure as a living tradition without a rebbe ? Shaul Magid candidly calibrates Shlomo Carlebach: how “the singing rabbi” transformed him and why Magid eventually walked away. Other contributors engage questions such as: How might women enter this hitherto gendered sphere created by and for men? How can we honor and draw nourishment from other religions’ teachings? Can the rebbes’ radiant wisdom guide those who struggle with self-diminishment to reclaim wholeness? Together these intellectually honest and spiritually robust conversations inspire us to grapple anew with Judaism’s legacy and future.                • 19

21. A New Hasidism: Roots • Arthur Green, Ariel Evan Mayse • Neo-Hasidism applies the Hasidic masters’ spiritual insights—of God’s presence everywhere, of seeking the magnificent within the everyday, in doing all things with love and joy, uplifting all of life to become a vehicle of God’s service—to contemporary Judaism, as practiced by men and women who do not live within the strictly bounded world of the Hasidic community.  This first-ever anthology of Neo-Hasidic philosophy brings together the writings of its progenitors: five great twentieth-century European and American Jewish thinkers—Hillel Zeitlin, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Shlomo Carlebach, and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—plus a young Arthur Green. The thinkers reflect on the inner life of the individual and their dreams of creating a Neo-Hasidic spiritual community. The editors’ introductions and notes analyze each thinker’s contributions to Neo-Hasidic thought and influence on the movement. Zeitlin and Buber initiated a renewal of Hasidism for the modern world; Heschel’s work is quietly infused with Neo-Hasidic thought; Carlebach and Schachter-Shalomi re-created Neo-Hasidism for American Jews in the 1960s; and Green is the first American-born Jewish thinker fully identified with the movement. Previously unpublished materials by Carlebach and Schachter-Shalomi include an interview with Schachter-Shalomi about his decision to leave Chabad-Lubavitch and embark on his own Neo-Hasidic path. • 20

22. The Jewish Bible: A Material History • David Stern • In The Jewish Bible: A Material History , David Stern explores the Jewish Bible as a material object—the Bibles that Jews have actually held in their hands—from its beginnings in the Ancient Near Eastern world through to the Middle Ages to the present moment. Drawing on the most recent scholarship on the history of the book, Stern shows how the Bible has been not only a medium for transmitting its text—the word of God—but a physical object with a meaning of its own. That meaning has changed, as the material shape of the Bible has changed, from scroll to codex, and from manuscript to printed book. By tracing the material form of the Torah, Stern demonstrates how the process of these transformations echo the cultural, political, intellectual, religious, and geographic changes of the Jewish community. With tremendous historical range and breadth, this book offers a fresh approach to understanding the Bible’s place and significance in Jewish culture. • 22

23. Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading • Leona Toker • Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others including Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprun illuminate the discussion. Toker’s twofold analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as how each text documents the writer’s experience. She provides insight into how fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony, how references to events might have become obscure owing to the passage of time and the cultural diversity of readers, and how these references form new meaning in the text. Toker is well-known as a skillful interpreter of gulag literature, and this text presents new thinking about how gulag literature and Holocaust literature enable a better understanding about testimony in the face of evil. • 21

24. Rabbi Marcus Jastrow and His Vision for the Reform of Judaism: A Study in the History of Judaism in the Nineteenth Century • Michal Galas • Rabbi Marcus Jastrow (1829-1903) was one of the most important figures of nineteenth-century Judaism, but is often neglected. This volume presents his life and his views on the reform of Judaism in the context of the changes and developments of Judaism in his lifetime. It covers his early life and his career in Europe as a preacher and rabbi in Warsaw, Mannheim, and Worms, and then discusses his activities in the United States, where he served as rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, as well as his work on his famous dictionary. Jastrow was deeply involved in the important religious and scholarly initiatives of American Jewry: he took part in the emergence of Reform as well as Conservative Judaism, being involved in major controversies and polemics regarding them, and had a great impact on the creation of Jewish scholarship and Judaic studies in America. • 24

25. The Kosher Capones: A History of Chicago's Jewish Gangsters • Joe Kraus • The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago's Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin "Zuckie the Bookie" Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate's "Jewish wing." These two men linked the early Jewish gangsters of the neighborhoods of Maxwell Street and Lawndale to the notorious Chicago Outfit that emerged from Al Capone's criminal confederation. Focusing on the murder of Zuckerman by Patrick, Kraus introduces us to the different models of organized crime they represented, a raft of largely forgotten Jewish gangsters, and the changing nature of Chicago's political corruption. Hard-to-believe anecdotes of corrupt politicians, seasoned killers, and in-over-their-heads criminal operators spotlight the magnitude and importance of Jewish gangsters to the story of Windy City mob rule. With an eye for the dramatic, The Kosher Capones takes us deep inside a hidden society and offers glimpses of the men who ran the Jewish criminal community in Chicago for more than sixty years. • 25

26. The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust • Grzegorz Niziolek • Grzegorz Niziolek’s The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust is a pioneering analysis of the impact and legacy of the Holocaust on Polish theatre and society from 1945 to the present. It reveals the role of theatre as a crucial medium of collective memory – and collective forgetting – of the trauma of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis on Polish soil. The period gave rise to two of the most radical and influential theatrical ideas during work on productions that addressed the subject of the Holocaust – Grotowski’s Poor Theatre and Kantor’s Theatre of Death - but the author examines a deeper impact in the role that theatre played in the processes of collective disavowal to being a witness to others’ suffering. In the first part, the author examines six decades of Polish theatre shaped by the perspective of the Holocaust in which its presence is variously visible or displaced. Particular attention is paid to the various types of distortion and the effect of ‘wrong seeing’ enacted in the theatre, as well as the traces of affective reception: shock, heightened empathy, indifference. Inpart two, Niziolek examines a range theatrical events, including productions by Leon Schiller, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Ondrej Spišák. He considers how these productions confronted the experience of bearing witness and were profoundly shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust. The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust reveals how - by testifying about society’s experience of the Holocaust - theatre has been the setting for fundamental processes taking place within Polish culture as it confronts suppressed traumatic wartime experiences and a collective identity shaped by the past. • 27

27. Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies, 1942–1947 • Rachel Feldhay Brenner • In this pathbreaking study of responses to the Holocaust in wartime and postwar Polish literature, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores seven writers' compulsive need to share their traumatic experience of witness with the world. The Holocaust put the ideological convictions of Kornel Filipowicz, Józef Mackiewicz, Tadeusz Borowski, Zofia Kossak, Leopold Buczkowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Stefan Otwinowski to the ultimate test. Tragically, witnessing the horror of the Holocaust implied complicity with the perpetrator and produced an existential crisis that these writers, who were all exempted from the genocide thanks to their non-Jewish identities, struggled to resolve in literary form. Poland and the Holocaust: Literary Testimonies, 1942–1947 is a particularly timely book in view of the continuing debates about the attitudes of Poles toward the Jews during the war. The literary voices from the past that Brenner examines posit questions that are as pertinent now as they were then. And so, while this book speaks to readers who are interested in literary responses to the Holocaust, it also illuminates the universal issue of the responsibility of witnesses toward the victims of any atrocity. • 28

28. In Enemy Land: The Jews of Kielce and the Region, 1939-1946 • Sara Bender • This book offers a study of the Jewish community in Kielce and its environs during World War II and the Holocaust: it is the first of its kind in providing a comprehensive account of Kielce’s Jews and their history as victims under the German occupation. The book focuses in particular on Jewish-Polish relations in the Kielce region; the deportation of the Jews of Kielce and its surrounding areas to the Treblinka death camp; the difficulties faced by those attempting to help and save them; and daily life in the Small Ghetto from September 1942 until late May 1943. • 43

29. New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands • Antony Polonsky, Hanna Węgrzynek, Andrzej Żbikowski • This volume is made up of essays first presented as papers at the conference held in May 2015 at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. It is divided into two sections. The first deals with museological questions—the voices of the curators, comments on the POLIN museum exhibitions and projects, and discussions on Jewish museums and education. The second examines the current state of the historiography of the Jews on the Polish lands from the first Jewish settlement to the present day.Making use of the leading scholars in the field from Poland, Eastern and Western Europe, North America, and Israel, the volume provides a definitive overview of the history and culture of one of the most important communities in the long history of the Jewish people. • 13

30. Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance • Daniel P. Reynolds • The uneasy link between tourism and collective memory at Holocaust museums and memorials Each year, millions of people visit Holocaust memorials and museums, with the number of tourists steadily on the rise. What lies behind the phenomenon of "Holocaust tourism" and what role do its participants play in shaping how we remember and think about the Holocaust? In Postcards from Auschwitz, Daniel P. Reynolds argues that tourism to former concentration camps, ghettos, and other places associated with the Nazi genocide of European Jewry has become an increasingly vital component in the evolving collective remembrance of the Holocaust. Responding to the tendency to dismiss tourism as commercial, superficial, or voyeuristic, Reynolds insists that we take a closer look at a phenomenon that has global reach, takes many forms, and serves many interests. The book focuses on some of the most prominent sites of mass murder in Europe, and then expands outward to more recent memorial museums. Reynolds provides a historically-informed account of the different forces that have shaped Holocaust tourism since 1945, including Cold War politics, the sudden emergence of the "memory boom" beginning in the 1980s, and the awareness that eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are passing away. Based on his on-site explorations, the contributions from researchers in Holocaust studies and tourism studies, and the observations of tourists themselves, this book reveals how tourism is an important part of efforts to understand and remember the Holocaust, an event that continues to challenge ideals about humanity and our capacity to learn from the past. • 33

31. Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture • Mariusz Kalczewiak • An examination of the social and cultural repercussions of Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s. Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, following the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews seeking safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. Just Between 1918 and 1939, sixty thousand Polish Jews established new homes in Argentina. They formed a strong ethnic community that quickly embraced Argentine culture while still maintaining their unique Jewish-Polish character. This mass migration caused a transfer of cultural, social, and political contents in both Poland and Argentina, forever shaping the cultural landscape of both lands. In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture , Mariusz Kalczewiak has constructed a multifaceted and in-depth narrative that sheds light on marginalized aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies and Polish Jewish Studies. Based on archival research, Yiddish travelogues on Argentina, and the Yiddish and Spanish-language press, this study recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina. Most studies on mass migration fail to acknowledge the role of the country of origin, but this innovative work approaches Jewish migration to Argentina as a continuous process that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken as a whole, Polacos in Argentina enlightens the heterogeneous and complex issue of immigrant commitments, belongings, and expectations. Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina serves as a case study of how ethnicity evolves and transforms among migrants and their children, and the dynamics that emerge between putting down roots in a new country and maintaining commitments to the country of origin. • 50

32. Witnessing the Holocaust: Six Literary Testimonies • Judith M. Hughes • Witnessing the Holocaust presents the autobiographical writings, including diaries and autobiographical fiction, of six Holocaust survivors who lived through and chronicled the Nazi genocide. Drawing extensively on the works of Victor Klemperer, Ruth Kluger, Michal Glowinski, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész and Béla Zsolt, this books conveys, with vivid detail, the persecution of the Jews from the beginning of the Third Reich until its very end. It gives us a sense both of what the Holocaust meant to the wider community swept up in the horrors and what it was like for the individual to weather one of the most shocking events in history. Survivors and witnesses disappear, and history, not memory, becomes the instrument for recalling the past. Judith M. Hughes secures a place for narratives by those who experienced the Holocaust in person. This compelling text is a vital read for all students of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. • 29

33. My Journey Home: Life After the Holocaust • Zsuzsanna Ozsvath • In the spring of 1944, nearly 500,000 Jews were deported from the Hungarian countryside and killed in Auschwitz. In Budapest, only 150,000 Jews survived both the German occupation and dictatorship of the Hungarian National Socialists, who took power in October 1944. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth’s family belonged among the survivors. This memoir begins with the the author’s childhood during the Holocaust in Hungary. It captures life after the war’s end in Communist-ruled Hungary and continues with her and her husband’s flight to Germany and eventually the United States. Ozsváth’s poignant story of survival, friendship, and love provides readers with a rare glimpse of an extraordinary journey. • 23

34. Miracle Child: The Journey of a Young Holocaust Survivor • Anita Epstein • This memoir is about a Jewish baby born in the Krakow ghetto in November 1942, three years after Hitler conquered Poland, and, remarkably, escaping death—one of a mere one half of one percent of Jewish children in Poland who survived during the Nazi era. Her life was saved because her parents hid her with a Catholic family. Just as remarkably, her mother, still alive after suffering terribly through four of Hitler’s camps, traveled for weeks back to Poland and found her again. The book also depicts the author’s postwar challenges in Germany and America. • 30

35. The Seven: A Family Holocaust Story • Ellen G. Friedman • A literary memoir of exile and survival in Soviet prison camps during the Holocaust. Most Polish Jews who survived the Second World War did not go to concentration camps, but were banished by Stalin to the remote prison settlements and Gulags of the Soviet Union. Less than ten percent of Polish Jews came out of the war alive—the largest population of East European Jews who endured—for whom Soviet exile was the main chance for survival. Ellen G. Friedman’s The Seven, A Family HolocaustStory is an account of this displacement. Friedman always knew that she was born to Polish-Jewish parents on the run from Hitler, but her family did not describe themselves as Holocaust survivors since that label seemed only to apply only to those who came out of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms. The title of the book comes from the closeness that set seven individuals apart from the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the Gulags of the USSR. The Seven—a name given to them by their fellow refugees—were Polish Jews from Warsaw, most of them related. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story brings together the very different perspectives of the survivors and others who came to be linked to them, providing a glimpse into the repercussions of the Holocaust in one extended family who survived because they were loyal to one another, lucky, and endlessly enterprising. Interwoven into the survivors’ accounts of their experiences before, during, and after the war are their own and the author’s reflections on the themes of exile, memory, love, and resentment. Based on primary interviews and told in a blending of past and present experiences, Friedman gives a new voice to Holocaust memory—one that is sure to resonate with today’s exiles and refugees. Those with an interest in World War II memoir and genocide studies will welcome this unique perspective. • 32

36. The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution • Waitman Wade Beorn • Waitman Wade Beorn’s The Holocaust in Eastern Europe provides a comprehensive history of the Holocaust in the region that was the central location of the event itself while including material often overlooked in general Holocaust history texts. First introducing Jewish life as it was lived before the Nazis in Eastern Europe, the book chronologically surveys the development of Nazi policies in the area over the period from 1939 to 1945. This book provides an overview of both the German imagination and obsession with the East and its impact on the Nazi genocidal project there. It also covers the important period of Soviet occupation and its effects on the unfolding of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This text also treats in detail other themes such as ghettoization, the Final Solution, rescue, collaboration, resistance, and many others. Throughout, Beorn includes detailed examples of the similarities and differences of the nature of the Holocaust in various regions, in the words of perpetrators, witnesses, collaborators, and victims/survivors. Beorn also illustrates the complex nature of the Holocaust by discussing the difficult subjects of collaboration, sexual violence, the use of slave labour, treatment of Soviet POWs, profiteering and others within a larger narrative framework. He also explores key topics like Jewish resistance, Jewish councils, memory, and explanations for perpetration, collaboration, and rescue. The book includes images and maps to orient the reader to the topic area. This important book explains the brutality and complexity of the Holocaust in the East for all students of the Holocaust and 20th-century Eastern European history. • 31

37. Auschwitz Testimonies: 1945–1986 • Primo Levi, Leonardo De Benedetti • 34

38. Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz • Shlomo Venezia • 1

39. Auschwitz: The Practice of Extinction • Nicholas Terry • 'Here there is no why', Primo Levi was once told by an SS guard at Auschwitz. The history of Auschwitz-Birkenau is well known; what remains less clear is how the single greatest instance of mass murder in human history should be understood. Drawing on a wide variety of new sources including hitherto unknown documents and testimonies, Nicholas Terry describes and analyses the process of mass murder at Auschwitz. Chronicling the evolution of the practice of extinction, this book shows how contingency and improvisation marked out the genocidal course of the 'Final Solution' at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Using the perspectives of both the SS perpetrators as well as the camp inmates forced to participate in the design, construction and operation of the gas chambers and crematoria, the book asks fresh questions about the motivation, meanings and significance of extermination, and the roles of deception and secrecy in making mass murder possible. • 35

40. After Auschwitz: A Love Story • Brenda Webster • Two emotionally fraught and complex themes collide in this powerful, moving novel: Alzheimer’s disease and the psychological aftermath for survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The story chronicles the intellectual decline of Renzo, a once-brilliant Roman writer and filmmaker. Aware that he is slipping ever deeper into the haze of Alzheimer’s, Renzo keeps a journal in which he grapples with his complicated marriage to Hannah, an Auschwitz survivor who later chronicled that experience. As he writes about his own failing grip on reality, he reflects as well on how painful it will be for Hannah to lose another loved one. Author Brenda Webster brings her considerable knowledge of Jewish and Italian history to bear in creating a fully-realized story, by turns poignant and humorous, about an enduring love that makes pain bearable. Her brilliant use of an unreliable narrator features highly lyrical passages that elucidate for the reader both Renzo’s sophisticated anguish and his childlike wonder as his rich memories of the artistic and intellectual currents of the 20th century and his own creative life begin to fade. • 37

41. People in Auschwitz • Hermann Langbein • Hermann Langbein was allowed to know and see extraordinary things forbidden to other Auschwitz inmates. Interned at Auschwitz in 1942 and classified as a non-Jewish political prisoner, he was assigned as clerk to the chief SS physician of the extermination camp complex, which gave him access to documents, conversations, and actions that would have remained unknown to history were it not for his witness and his subsequent research. Also a member of the Auschwitz resistance, Langbein sometimes found himself in a position to influence events, though at his peril. People in Auschwitz is very different from other works on the most infamous of Nazi annihilation centers. Langbein's account is a scrupulously scholarly achievement intertwining his own experiences with quotations from other inmates, SS guards and administrators, civilian industry and military personnel, and official documents. Whether his recounting deals with captors or inmates, Langbein analyzes the events and their context objectively, in an unemotional style, rendering a narrative that is unique in the history of the Holocaust. This monumental book helps us comprehend what has so tenaciously challenged understanding. • 36

42. The Legend of Safed: Life and Fantasy in the City of Kabbalah • Eli Yassif • In 1908, Solomon Schechter-discoverer of the Cairo Geniza and one of the founders of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America-published his groundbreaking essay on the city of Safed (Tzfat) during the sixteenth century. In the essay, Schechter pointed out the exceptional cultural achievements (religious law, moral teaching, hermeneutics, poetry, geography) of this small city in the upper Galilee but did not yet see the importance of including the foundation on which all of these fields began-the legends that were developed, told, and spread in Safed during this period. In The Legend of Safed: Life and Fantasy in the City of Kabbalah , author Eli Yassif utilizes ""new historicism"" methodology in order to use the non-canonical materials-legends and myths, visions, dreams, rumors, everyday dialogues-to present these legends in their historical and cultural context and use them to better understand the culture of Safed. This approach considers the literary text not as a reflection of reality, but a part of reality itself-taking sides in the debates and decisions of humans and serving as a major tool for understanding society and human mentality. Divided into seven chapters, The Legend of Safed begins with an explanation of how the myth of Safed was founded on the general belief that during this ""golden age"" (1570-1620), Safed was an idyllic location in which complete peace and understanding existed between the diverse groups of people who migrated to the city. Yassif goes on to analyze thematic characteristics of the legends, including spatial elements, the function of dreams, mysticism, sexual sins, and omniscience. The book concludes with a discussion of the tension between fantasy (Safed is a sacred city built on morality, religious thought, and well-being for all) and reality (every person is full of weaknesses and flaws) and how that is the basis for understanding the vitality of Safed myth and its immense impact on the future of Jewish life and culture. The Legend of Safed is intended for students, scholars, and general readers of medieval and early modern Jewish studies, Hebrew literature, and folklore. • 38

43. Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era • Meron Medzini • Even before Japan joined Nazi Germany in the Axis Alliance, its leaders clarified to the Nazi regime that the attitude of the Japanese government and people to the Jews was totally different than that of the official German position and that it had no intention of taking measures against the Jews that could be seen as racially motivated. During World War II some 40,000 Jews found themselves under Japanese occupation in Manchuria, China and countries of South East Asia. Virtually all of them survived the war, unlike their brethren in Europe. This book traces the evolution of Japan's policy towards the Jews from the beginning of the 20th century, the existence of anti-Semitism in Japan, and why Japan ignored repeated Nazi demands to become involved in the ""final solution. • 39

44. Kibbutz: Utopia and Politics: The Life and Times of Meir Yaari, 1897–1987 • Aviva Halamish • Meir Yaari (1897-1987) was the leader of Hashomer Hatza’ir, a movement which took an active part in shaping the history of the Jewish people in the crucial decades of the twentieth century. Its Kibbutzim had a leading role in matters of aliyah, settlement, and defense in mandatory Palestine and then independent Israel, and its members were among the organizers of Jewish resistance and revolt during the Holocaust. This biography discusses pivotal issues in the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, such as the friction between Zionism and socialism, the Arab question, the absorption of new immigrants, and generation gaps and conflicts. The book blends individual and collective perspectives and never loses sight of the tension between ideology and reality. • 40

45. Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 (Volume I): Rebellion Launched, 1945-1946 • Monty Noam Penkower • Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine and in the Arab states, including how the Palestine quagmire became a pawn in inter-Arab feuds; British and American responses both official and public; the role of Holocaust survivors; the context of the Cold War; and the saga as it unfolded in the corridors of the United Nations. Joining extensive archival research to a lucid prose, the two volumes offer a riveting conclusion to his Palestine in Turmoil and Decision on Palestine Deferred . • 42

46. Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 (Volume II): Into the International Arena, 1947-1948 • Monty Noam Penkower • Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine and in the Arab states, including how the Palestine quagmire became a pawn in inter-Arab feuds; British and American responses both official and public; the role of Holocaust survivors; the context of the Cold War; and the saga as it unfolded in the corridors of the United Nations. Joining extensive archival research to a lucid prose, the two volumes offer a riveting conclusion to his Palestine in Turmoil and Decision on Palestine Deferred . • 41

47. Finding Edith: Surviving the Holocaust in Plain Sight • Edith Mayer Cord • Finding Edith: Surviving the Holocaust in Plain Sight is the coming-of-age story of a young Jewish girl chased in Europe during World War II. Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe. Edith was hunted in Western Europe and Vichy France, where she was hidden in plain sight, constantly afraid of discovery and denunciation. Forced to keep every thought to herself, Edith developed an intense inner life. After spending years running and eventually hiding alone, she was smuggled into Switzerland. Deprived of schooling, Edith worked at various jobs until the end of the war when she was able to rejoin her mother, who had managed to survive in France. After the war, the truth about the deathcamps and the mass murder on an industrial scale became fully known. Edith faced the trauma of Germany's depravity, the murder of her father and older brother in Auschwitz, her mother's irrational behavior, and the extreme poverty of the post-war years. She had to make a living but also desperately wanted to catch up on her education. What followed were seven years of struggle, intense study, and hard work until finally, against considerable odds, Edith earned the baccalauréat in 1949 and the licence ès lettres from the University of Toulouse in 1952 before coming to the United States. In America, Edith started at the bottom like all immigrants and eventually became a professor and later a financial advisor and broker. Since her retirement, Edith dedicates her time to publicly speaking about her experiences and the lessons from her life. • 44

48. Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana • Lawrence N. Powell • This powerful book tells the story of Anne Skorecki Levy, a Holocaust survivor who transformed the horrors of her childhood into a passionate mission to defeat the political menace of reputed neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The first book to connect the prewar and wartime experiences of Jewish survivors to the lives they subsequently made for themselves in the United States, Troubled Memory is also a dramatic testament to how the experiences of survivors as new Americans spurred their willingness to bear witness. Perhaps the only family to survive the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto as a group, the Skoreckis evaded deportation to Treblinka by posing as Aryans. The family eventually made their way to New Orleans, where they became part of a vibrant Jewish community. Lawrence Powell traces their dramatic odyssey and explores the events that eventually triggered Anne Skorecki Levy's brave decision to honor the suffering of the past by confronting the recurring specter of racist hatred. • 46

49. The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets • Kevin Haworth • Best known for her Eisner Award–winning graphic novels, Exit Wounds and The Property , Rutu Modan's richly colored compositions invite readers into complex Israeli society, opening up a world too often defined only by news headlines. Her strong female protagonists stick out in a comics scene still too dominated by men, as she combines a mystery novelist's plotting with a memoirist's insights into psychology and trauma. The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets conducts a close reading of her work and examines her role in creating a comics arts scene in Israel. Drawing upon archival research, Kevin Haworth traces the history of Israeli comics from its beginning as 1930s cheap children's stories, through the counterculture movement of the 1970s, to the burst of creativity that began in the 1990s and continues full force today. Based on new interviews with Modan (b. 1966) and other comics artists, Haworth indicates the key role of Actus Tragicus, the collective that changed Israeli comics forever and launched her career. Haworth shows how Modan's work grew from experimental mini-comics to critically acclaimed graphic novels, delving into the creative process behind Exit Wounds and The Property . He analyzes how the recurring themes of family secrets and absence weave through her stories, and how she adapts the famous clear line illustration style to her morally complex tales. Though still relatively young, Modan has produced a remarkably varied oeuvre. Identifying influences from the United States and Europe, Haworth illustrates how Modan's work is global in its appeal, even as it forms a core of the thriving Israeli cultural scene. • 45

50. Jewish Edinburgh: A History, 1880–1950 • M.D. Gilfillan • This first full-length history of the Jews of Edinburgh chronicles their immigration to Scotland’s capital city from Russia during the 1880s in the wake of Tsarist persecution, and examines their reception by native Scots. Smaller than its Glasgow counterpart, the Jewish community in Edinburgh took on greater national significance in part due to the career of “Scotland’s Rabbi,” Dr. Salis Daiches of the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation. The community would also contribute Scotland’s first Jewish member of parliament, as well as the first Jewish president of the Scottish Football League. • 47