Category: Jewish History

November 26, 2014

Yiddishkeit by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle *** (of 4)

Even the title of the book isn’t really translatable, encompassing as it does more than a language. Yiddishkeit is a people, it’s culture, and an...

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April 25, 2014

Hitler’s Furies by Wendy Lower *** (of 4)

Contemporary research on Nazi war crimes suggests most Nazis were Ordinary Men. Neither crazed nor fanatical killers, Christopher Browning’s landmark book in 1992 discovered that most...

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March 19, 2014

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris *** (of 4)

Robert Harris makes his living fictionalizing famous historical events (see Pompeii). In this case, it is the end of the nineteenth century, and the French...

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March 9, 2014

In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh *** (of 4)

Ghosh recounts the life of a Medieval Jewish trader, Ben Yiyu, who transported goods by ship from India to Egypt. Evidence of his trader emerge...

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May 14, 2013

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography ** (of 4)

In the 1940s a Bedouin searching caves above the western shore of the Dead Sea discovered urns with scrolls inside. He knew right away they...

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February 5, 2012

Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English ** (of 4) by Natasha Solomons

Mr. Rosenblum and his wife Sadie arrive in England as German refugees in 1937. Mr. Rosenblum wants so desperately to assimilate that he keeps lists...

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August 15, 2011

Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole ** (of 4)

All the critics have raved about this recounting of a collection of a thousand years of written documents crammed in a synagogue vault in Cairo,...

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July 2, 2011

The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt *** (of 4)

In 2001 Deborah Lipstadt was brought to trial in Britain for libeling by David Irving in Britain after she described him as a Holocaust denier. ...

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February 25, 2011

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley ** (of 4)

After briefly summarizing the anti-Semitic atmosphere under which Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused, convicted, and imprisoned for treason by France military and political authorities, Begley...

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October 18, 2010

City of Thieves by David Benioff **** (of 4)

Lev Benioff, a 15-year-old Russian, Jewish kid and Kolya, a deserter from the Russian Army with an overactive libido and terrible constipation, find themselves trapped...

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