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Much has been written about Anne Frank’s life, but the story of her friend Bep Voskuijl has remained untold – until now. As the youngest of the five Dutch people who hid the Frank family, Bep Voskuijl was Anne’s closest confidante during the 761 excruciating days she spent hidden in the Secret Annex. In those cramped quarters, through daily meals and deep conservations, Bep and Anne’s friendship bloomed.

The Romans, through sheer military strength, turned Judea into a client state. They forced the Jews to submit to Roman law, Roman taxation, and to countenance Roman religion. The Jews of Judea exhibited unbelievable strength in resisting assimilation into Roman Hellenistic culture. Their history of dealing with foreign overlords inspired the Jews to hold out and revolt against the Romans.

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People's Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa into multiple dimensions of the artist's life and afterlife.

Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe's Roma went largely ignored. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering.

Since Revolutionary times, Jews have served in the United States armed forces and fought bravely in America's wars. Jews first arrived in the New World in 1654, seeking religious freedom. Since the beginning of American nationhood, Jewish volunteers and conscripts fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, on both sides of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, in both World Wars, and in the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars.

A great many Jewish holidays and practices, in their earliest understanding, reflect the great innovation of Biblical religion. The Bible emphasized historical events in contrast to nature. Other ancient Near Eastern religions stressed the latter. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel noted, in the Jewish tradition, faith is memory. The observances of Jewish holidays and various Jewish practices articulate theological ideas reflective of collective Jewish memory.

The Jewish War is an extraordinary historical document in that it details a calamitous period of four years during which the Jews pitted themselves against the might of the Roman empire. It is partly a remarkable account in that its author, Flavius Josephus (c.37–c.100 CE) was himself a Jew and yet, during the course of the conflict, found himself playing a prominent role for both sides. It is further underpinned by the fact that Josephus himself was not only a participant, but also an historian and a scholar of standing.

"Judaism is often called the religion of reason. It is this, but it is also the religion of the soul. It recognises the value of that mystic insight, those indefinable intuitions which, taking up the task at the point where the mind impotently abandons it, carries us straight into the presence of the King."

As a child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl’s cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna’s Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic famiy. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died.

In 1948, Israel’s founders sought a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. The state they ultimately made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering.

One hot, humid day in July 1944, the Gestapo abducted 15-year-old Henry and his mother, forcing them onto cramped cattle cars in the Łódź Polish Ghetto. Like so many Jews before them, they had been selected to disappear–they were being sent to Auschwitz.

In this biography of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, Alberto Manguel examines the question of his universal appeal. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.

In the eighth century, a debate between Sergius the Stylite and a Jew occurred. The discussion was conveniently titled Debate against a Jew. It records arguments about the relevance of biblical texts to Christians and the Jewish people. The anti-Jewish perspectives of Sergius are not surprising. The response given by his Jewish interlocutor is, however. The Jew noted that he was surprised by the number of Christians who attended his synagogue, contributed to it, and celebrated various Jewish holidays alongside Jews.

Nakam tells the story of “the Avengers” (Nokmim), a group of young Holocaust survivors led by poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner, who undertook a mission of revenge against Germany following the crimes of the Holocaust. Motivated by both the atrocities they had endured and the realization that murderous antisemitic attacks on survivors continued long after the Nazi surrender, these fifty young men and women sought retaliation at a level commensurate with the devastation caused by the Holocaust, making clear to the world that Jewish blood would no longer be shed with impunity.

The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that listeners haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom—a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it.

This book defines and exposes modern anti-semitism. It shows how the scourge of Jew-hatred is as virulent as it ever was, and how modern anti-semites hide their hate behind the pretexts of "human rights" and "international law".

Mike Levy shines a light on the courageous deeds of twenty-two women and men who transformed the lives of the Kindertransport and other refugees. In 1938, when the Government refused to act and those around them turned a blind eye, these heroic individuals took it upon themselves to orchestrate one of the greatest lifesaving missions the world has ever seen.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

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.

Diciassette mesi nascosti sottoterra: l'avventura di quarantasei ebrei nel diario di un ragazzo che sfuggì ai nazisti. Nei primi mesi del 1943 l'ombra della liquidazione incombeva sul ghetto di Drohobycz, una cittadina polacca ai piedi dei Carpazi. Gli ebrei scampati a due anni di occupazione nazista sapevano di essere condannati e cercarono di nascondersi in attesa dell'Armata rossa. Alcuni di loro, raccolti attorno alle famiglie Mayer e Schwartz, spesero le ultime risorse per costruire un bunker sotto una villa.