検索キーワード： 歴史

During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond—from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City—carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews.

The year was 1391. Spring was about to turn into summer. By the end of the summer, 80 Jewish communities in Castile and Aragon were torn by violence. A third of the Jewish community had been murdered. Perhaps another third of the Jewish community had converted. Only a third of the Jewish population remained intact. While their conversions had initially been met with a grand celebration by their Christian neighbors, those Jews who had yielded to baptism to rescue their lives and those of their families eventually proved a thorn in the side of the church. Could they be trusted?

In ways visible and invisible to their fellow recruits and conscripts, the experience of Jews was distinct from that of other soldiers who served in Lincoln's armies. Adam D. Mendelsohn draws for the first time upon the vast database of verified listings of Jewish soldiers serving in the Civil War collected by The Shapell Roster, as well as letters, diaries, and newspapers, to examine the collective experience of Jewish soldiers and to recover their voices and stories.

In the Bible Elijah is a zealous prophet, attacking idolatry and injustice, championing God. He performs miracles, restoring life and calling down fire. When his earthly life ends, he vanishes in a whirlwind, carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot. Was this a spectacular death, or did Elijah escape death entirely? The latter view prevailed. Though residing in heaven, Elijah revisits earth—to help, rescue, enlighten, and eventually herald the Messiah.

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish-language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it.

Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews” are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. In this provocative book, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

El misticismo judío es una poderosa expresión dentro de la tradición judía. Arraigado en la antigüedad y velado por el misterio hasta hace muy poco, el misticismo judío ha irrumpido en el mundo moderno con formas tan iluminadoras como desconcertantes.

In this radical new perspective on Hitler's so-called 'Final Solution', Martin Davidson shows that the terrible fate of Europe's Jews was not one Nazi policy amongst many, but the central preoccupation of the regime, the purpose towards which so many of its resources and energies were directed—the one which they were most determined to achieve and of which they were most chillingly proud. It is the exploration of the mindset from which it sprang that is the central concern of Mobilising Hate.

Judy Weissenberg is the mischievous and lively youngest child growing up in a large family in Debrecen, Hungary. But as the Nazis rise to power in Europe and anti-Jewish laws tear her family and community apart, Judy’s joyful youth becomes marred by fear and the hushed whispers of the adults around her. Then, in 1944, Germany occupies Hungary and Judy’s world is shattered.

Narrow escapes and bold decisions define the life of teenager Morris Schnitzer. Fleeing from Nazi Germany before the onset of World War II, Morris ends up in the Netherlands only to watch the country be invaded by the Nazis. With his father’s warning to never set foot in a concentration camp echoing in his mind, Morris resolves to fight—and survive.

In the 1960s and 1970s, complaints about a "Jewish literary mafia" were everywhere. Although a conspiracy of Jews colluding to control publishing in the United States never actually existed, such accusations reflected a genuine transformation from an industry notorious for excluding Jews to one in which they arguably had become the most influential figures. Josh Lambert examines the dynamics between Jewish editors and Jewish writers; how Jewish women exposed the misogyny they faced; and how children of literary parents have struggled with and benefited from their inheritances.

The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is technically over 70 years old and counting but has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. With so much time and history, the Middle East peace process has become laden with unique, politically sensitive concepts like the right of return, contiguous borders, secure borders, demilitarized zones, and security requirements, with players like the Quartet, Palestinian Authority, Fatah, Hamas, the Arab League and Israel.

Jason Sommer's father, Jay, is ninety-eight years old and losing his memory. More than seventy years after arriving in New York from WWII-torn Europe, he is forgetting the stories that defined his life, the life of his family, and the lives of millions of Jews who were affected by Nazi terror. Observing this loss, Jason vividly recalls the trip to Eastern Europe the two took together in 2001.

Helmi’s Shadow tells the sweeping true story of two Russian Jewish refugees, a mother (Rachel Koskin) and her daughter (Helmi). With determination and courage, they survived decades of hardship in the hidden corners of war-torn Asia and then journeyed across the Pacific at the end of the Second World War to become United States citizens after seeking safe harbor in the unlikely western desert town of Reno, Nevada. This compelling narrative is also a memoir, told lovingly by Helmi’s son, David, of growing up under the wings of these strong women in an unusual American family.

Less than a century ago, the Second World War took the lives of more than fifty million people; more than six million of them were systematically exterminated through crimes of such enormity that a new name to describe the horror was coined: the Holocaust. Yet amid such darkness, there were glimmers of light—courageous individuals who risked everything to save those hunted by the Nazis.

A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.

A few years ago Linda Kinstler discovered that a man fifty years dead—a former Nazi who belonged to the same killing unit as her grandfather—was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation in Latvia. The proceedings threatened to pardon his crimes. They put on the line hard-won facts about the Holocaust at the precise moment that the last living survivors—the last legal witnesses—were dying.

Avvalendosi di tecnologie all'avanguardia, nuovi documenti e sofisticate tecniche investigative, un team internazionale ha fatto luce su uno dei grandi misteri irrisolti della Seconda guerra mondiale. Più di trenta milioni di persone in tutto il mondo hanno letto il Diario di Anne Frank, la tredicenne ebrea che affidò alle pagine di tre quaderni la storia dei due anni trascorsi nascosta con la famiglia e altre quattro persone nella casa segreta ricavata nel retro di un edificio di Amsterdam, fino a quando i nazisti non li arrestarono.

In 1942, in Kaunas, Lithuania, the occupying German forces decreed that any pregnant Jewish woman would be summarily executed. On August 26, 1942, a Jewish woman realized she was pregnant and approached her rabbi, Ephraim Oshry, seeking advice. He determined that an abortion was necessary to save her life. The situation was something no woman or rabbi should have to face. But the scenario was real, and Rabbi Ephraim Oshry ruled based on Jewish law.

El día que Dezi Barsilai murió, su nieto Marcos Alvo hizo una promesa: reconstruir su inspiradora historia y divulgarla. Esa mujer que nació en la Salónica en 1925 y que perdió a su familia durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, había logrado construir una nueva vida en Chile, donde vivió por décadas sin querer recordar ni menos hablar de los terribles hechos ocurridos en su juventud y que incluyeron su paso por Aüschwitz. De Grecia a los territorios polacos ocupados por los nazis, y de ahí al barrio de Patronato, este es un relato que revisa sus experiencias.