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From the Publisher: A Short History of the Jews is the story of the Jewish people told in a sweeping and powerful historical narrative. Michael Brenner chronicles the Jewish experience from Biblical times to today, tracing what is at heart a drama of migration and change, yet one that is also deeply rooted in tradition. He surveys the latest scholarly perspectives in Jewish history, making this short history the most learned yet broadly accessible...
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"Some people seek. Jews question. And to answer their questions comes The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, a bible of Judaism that, in its deeply knowing and highly entertaining way, reflects the diverse and at times irascible tribe who identify as Jewish, or Jewish, or, in the case of future converts and/or spouses, Jewcurious. Here is a popcultural guide to all the many, many aspects and delights of "being Jewish," created by the hosts of the most popular...
3) The postcard
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"Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. Luminous and gripping to the very last page, it is an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life. January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front,...
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"Mikolaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction--a book that has been widely praised by critics and was shortlisted for Poland's top literary prize--Grynberg recrafts those histories into little jewels, fictionalized short stories with the ring of truth. Both biting and knowing, I'd Like to Say Sorry, but There's No One to Say Sorry To takes...
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"Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis never told a lie. When the Nazi's invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading to "new homes" where they are promised jobs and safety. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy goes to the station platform every day and reassures the...
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"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...
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Two thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children - the last holdouts of the revolt against Rome following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple - reportedly took their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman army. This dramatic event, which took place on top of Masada, a barren and windswept mountain overlooking the Dead Sea, spawned a powerful story of Jewish resistance that came to symbolize the embattled...
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What is exile? What is diaspora? What is Zionism? Jewish identity today has been shaped by prior generations' answers to these questions, and the future of Jewish life will depend on how we respond to them in our own time. In The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, celebrated rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid offers an essential contribution to this intergenerational process, inviting us to rethink our current moment through religious and political...
13) Kissing kosher
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"Avital Cohen isn't wearing underpants--woefully, for unsexy reasons. Chronic pelvic pain has forced her to sideline her photography dreams and her love life. It's all she can do to manage her family's kosher bakery, Best Babka in Brooklyn, without collapsing. She needs hired help. And distractingly handsome Ethan Lippmann seems the perfect fit. Except Ethan isn't there to work--he's undercover, at the behest of his ironfisted grandfather. Though...
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A little girl describes the short, harsh days of winter in Alaska and her efforts to keep a moose from destroying trees and the swing in her back yard, which she finally succeeds in doing with the help of a Hanukkah treat. Includes facts about Hanukkah and the aurora borealis.
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The idea for this book came to Larry Tye as he traveled overseas as a reporter for the Boston Globe. In each city he visited he was intrigued by a reawakening of practice and spirit of the long repressed Jewish community. And the more communities he saw close-up, the clearer it became to him that the Jewish world was being reshaped and revitalized in ways that were not reflected in what he was reading about the disappearing diaspora and the vanishing...
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Rooted in Bonert’s personal experience growing up in a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family in South Africa before WWII, this novel will grab readers everywhere with the story of the struggling refugees in a new country, the horror they escaped from, and the guilt about those left behind, with secrets not revealed until the very end. Isaac turns 20 in 1938, starts work as an apprentice panel-beater (auto-body restorer) in Johannesburg (though he would...
17) Going bicoastal
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Told in alternating timelines, Jewish seventeen-year-old Natalya spends one summer in New York with her dad, trying to muster the courage to talk to her girl crush, and the other in Los Angeles with her estranged mom, going for a guy she never saw coming.
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"In Bad Jews, Emily Tamkin examines the last 100 years of American Jewish politics, culture, identities, and arguments. Drawing on over 150 interviews, she tracks the evolution of Jewishness throughout American history, and explores many of the evolving and conflicting Jewish positions on assimilation; race; Zionism and Israel; affluence and poverty, philanthropy, finance, politics; and social justice. From this complex and nuanced history, Tamkin...
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Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from...
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