The Fixer


Bernard Malamud - 1966
    Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland


Jan Tomasz Gross - 2000
    In this shocking and compelling study, historian Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts as well as physical evidence into a comprehensive reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but hidden to history. Revealing wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism, Gross's investigation sheds light on how Jedwabne's Jews came to be murdered-not by faceless Nazis, but by people who knew them well.

The Book of Revelation Decoded: Your Guide to Understanding the End Times Through the Eyes of the Hebrew Prophets


K.A. Schneider - 2017
    Rabbi K. A. Schneider decodes the Book of Revelation, showing how the end-time events prophesied in the New Testament book correspond with the teachings of the Torah and the Hebrew prophets. You will discover how the Passover foreshadows the great tribulation, and what the Hebrew prophets reveal about the anti-Messiah, Armageddon, hell, the return of the Messiah, the millennial kingdom, heaven, and much more. As the world grows darker and darker, many people have a sense of impending doom. This book will teach you what to expect during the last days and how to stand firm in Christ even in the face of opposition.

Confessions of a Closet Catholic


Sarah Darer Littman - 2005
    So she's decided to give up being Jewish instead.  Eleven-year-old Justine pours her heart out to her teddy bear, "Father Ted," in a homemade closet confessional. But when Justine's beloved Bubbe suffers a stroke, Justine worries that her religious exploration is responsible. Worse, she must suddenly contemplate life without Bubbe. Ultimately, it's Bubbe's quiet understanding of Justine's search for identity that helps Justine to find faith in the most important place of all-within herself.

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition


David Nirenberg - 2013
    With deep learning and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to the history of the West. Questions of how we are Jewish and, more critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world. The thrust of this tradition construes Judaism as an opposition, a danger often from within, to be criticized, attacked, and eliminated. The intersections of these ideas with the world of power the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, the German Holocaust are well known. The ways of thought underlying these tragedies can be found at the very foundation of Western history.

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East


Michael B. Oren - 2001
    Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Michael B. Oren’s magnificent Six Days of War, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the first comprehensive account of this epoch-making event. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination


Otto Dov Kulka - 2013
    As one of the few survivors he has spent much of his life studying Nazism and the Holocaust, but always as a discipline requiring the greatest dispassion and objectivity, with his personal story set to one side. He has nevertheless remained haunted by specific memories and images, thoughts he has been unable to shake off. The extraordinary result of this is Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death - a unique and powerful experiment in how one man has tried to understand his past (and our history).

Gita Wisdom: Krishna’s Teachings on the Yoga of Love


Joshua M. Greene - 2009
    In Gita Wisdom, Joshua Greene retells this timeless text in a completely new way, revealing that it is, in essence, a heart-to-heart talk between two friends about the meaning of life. As Krishna and his friend Arjuna reminisce on a battlefield known as Kurukshetra, readers learn that the two played together as children, were close as young men, and became family when Arjuna married Krishna’s sister. In later life the men shared extraordinary adventures, including a journey to places outside the known universe. Like all great literature, the Gita explores the human condition: who we are, where we came from, and why we’re here. With a helpful glossary that lists names, terms, and places, this accessible, enlightening retelling is the perfect introduction to the Gita’s venerable wisdom.

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion


Will Eisner - 2005
    Purported to be the actual blueprints by Jewish leaders to take over the world, the Protocols, first published in 1902, have become gospel truth to international millions. Presenting a pageant of historical figures from nineteenth-century Russia to today's ideologues, including Tsar Nicholas II, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler, Will Eisner unravels and dispels one of the most devastating hoaxes of the twentieth century.

Alex's Wake: A Voyage of Betrayal and a Journey of Remembrance


Martin Goldsmith - 2014
    Louis sailed away from Hamburg, Germany, bound for Havana, Cuba. On board were more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. But an indifferent world conspired against them. After being denied landing rights in Havana, the refugees were turned away by the United States and Canada and forced to sail back to Europe, where the gathering storm of the Holocaust awaited them.Two of those refugees were Alex Goldschmidt, a sixty-year-old veteran of World War I, and his seventeen-year-old son Klaus Helmut Goldschmidt. After their trans-Atlantic voyage, they landed in France. They would spend the next three years in one French camp after another before being shipped to Auschwitz in 1942.Sixty-nine years later, Martin Goldsmith, Alex's grandson and Helmut's nephew, retraced their sad journey. Beginning in lower Saxony where Alex was born, Martin spent six weeks on the road and covered more than 5,700 miles, setting foot on the earth Alex and Helmut trod during their final days. Alex's Wake is Martin's eyewitness report.The book offers a compelling history of the voyage of the St. Louis, including testimony from those on board, a tale of espionage, and the brave resolve of Captain Gustav Schroeder. It also offers a harrowing chronicle of the vast network of camps in France, many of which were organized by the French themselves with little or no encouragement from the Germans.But Alex's Wake is also a contemporary travelogue and a heartfelt memoir of a second-generation American Jew trying to make sense of his heritage and to escape the burden of guilt and fear he long thought was his sole inheritance. Setting forth with the irrational, impossible desire to save two members of his family who were murdered ten years before he was born, Goldsmith concludes his journey by coming home to a moving symbol of remembrance at one of the scenes of the crime.

The Rabbi's Cat


Joann Sfar - 2002
    To his master’s consternation, the cat immediately begins to tell lies (the first being that he didn’t eat the parrot). The rabbi vows to educate him in the ways of the Torah, while the cat insists on studying the kabbalah and having a Bar Mitzvah. They consult the rabbi’s rabbi, who maintains that a cat can’t be Jewish — but the cat, as always, knows better.Zlabya falls in love with a dashing young rabbi from Paris, and soon master and cat, having overcome their shared self-pity and jealousy, are accompanying the newlyweds to France to meet Zlabya’s cosmopolitan in-laws. Full of drama and adventure, their trip invites countless opportunities for the rabbi and his cat to grapple with all the important — and trivial — details of life.Rich with the colors, textures, and flavors of Algeria’s Jewish community, The Rabbi’s Cat brings a lost world vibrantly to life — a time and place where Jews and Arabs coexisted — and peoples it with endearing and thoroughly human characters, and one truly unforgettable cat.

Ô Jérusalem


Larry Collins - 1972
    Collins & Lapierre weave a tapestry of shattered hopes, valor & fierce pride as the Arabs, Jews & British collide in their fight for control of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem! meticulously recreates this historic struggle. It penetrates the battle from the inside, exploring each party's interests, intentions & concessions as the city of their dreams teeters on the brink of destruction. From the Jewish fighters & their heroic commanders to the Arab chieftain whose death in battle doomed his cause along with the Mufti of Jerusalem's support for Hitler and the extermination of the Jews, but inspired a generation of Palestinians, O Jerusalem! tells the 3-dimensional story of this high-stakes, emotional conflict.

The Penitent


Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1983
    After escaping the Nazi terror, Shapiro went to America, where he became a rich businessman and a philandering husband. His search for salvation and his return to the Jewish faith is an indictment of our wicked times and a celebration of the power of religious belief.

In the Mouth of the Wolf


Rose Zar - 1983
    Her father urged her to save herself by hiding "in the mouth of the wolf"--or within the enemy itself. She managed to obtain false papers, secretly changing her identity and surviving the Holocaust as maid and nanny for a Nazi SS colonel.

Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son


Sholom Aleichem - 1894
    Through the workaday world of a rural dairyman, his grit, wit, and heart, his daughters' courtships and marriages, and the eventual menace of the pogroms, Sholem Aleichem reveals the fabric of a now-vanished world.Motl is the clear-eyed, spirited, mischievous boy who narrates Motl the Cantor's Son, a comic novel about his emigration with his family from Russia to America. It is a journey that mirrors a larger exodus, telling the story of the disintegration of traditional Jewish life and the beginning of a new chapter of Jewish history in America.