"Runner-Up for the 2005 National Jewish Book Award in History, Jewish Book Council" Mark D. Meyerson is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel. This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one...

The prevailing image of European Jews during the Holocaust is one of helpless victims. But in fact, many Jews struggled against the terrors of the Third Reich. This is the riveting history of one such group, a forest community numbering more than 1,200 Jews, that carried out the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Nechama Tec reconstructs the amazing details of how these men and women of all ages—hungry, largely unarmed,...

"From the award-winning historian of the Holocaust, the first book to move beyond Germany's singular crime to the collaboration of Europe as a whole. The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Germans, but it would not have been possible without the assistance of thousands of helpers in other countries: state officials, police, and civilians who eagerly supported the genocide. If we are to fully understand how and why the Holocaust happened, Götz Aly argues...

"Anthropologists George and Sharon Gmelch have lived among the itinerant people known as Travellers since their first fieldwork in the early 1970s. In 2011 they returned to seek out families they had known decades before--shadowed by a film crew and taking with them hundreds of old photographs that they shared with Traveller friends and acquaintances. Many of those black-and-white photos are included in this book, alongside more recent photos and...

The complex histories and memories of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis today frame Israel's future possibilities for peace.... 1948: As Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, struggle toward the new State of Israel, Arab refugees are fleeing, many under duress. Sixty years later, the memory of trauma has shaped both peoples' collective understanding of who they are. After a war, the victors write history. How was the story of the exiled Palestinians...

In the great modern narrative nonfiction tradition of Ryszard Kapuściński, Burning the Grass is a literary masterpiece of true crime based on the April 2010 murder of Eugène Terre'Blanche, the firebrand leader of the far-right AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging-the Afrikaner Resistance Movement), who espoused white Afrikaner rule even as it was ending in South Africa. It tells a universal story of small-town life where every face is familiar and...

"Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh is one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in the country, known for its tight-knit community and the profusion of multi-generational families. On October 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven Jews who were worshiping 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 memoir of life in the Iraqi capital's Jewish community is "a rare look-detailed and vivid, into a culture that is no longer extant" (Nancy E. Berg, author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq). Once upon a time, Baghdad was home to a flourishing Jewish community. More than a third of the city's people were Jews, and Jewish customs and holidays helped set the pattern of Baghdad's cultural and commercial life. On the city's streets and...

Gabi, was born Jewish but converted to Christianity in her teens. Her husband is a Lutheran minister who, on one hand is a proud Aryan, but on the other hand, the conflicted father of children who are half-Jewish. Mindful and resentful of her husbands ambivalence, Gabi is determined to make sure her children are educated, devising schemes to keep them in school even after learning that any child less than 100% Aryan will eventually be kept from completing...

In the United States, African American and Italian cultures have been intertwined for more than a hundred years. From as early as nineteenth-century African American opera star Thomas Bowers--"The Colored Mario"--all the way to hip-hop entrepreneur Puff Daddy dubbing himself "the Black Sinatra," the affinity between black and Italian cultures runs deep and wide. Once you start looking, you'll find these connections everywhere. Sinatra croons bel canto...