Recommendations based on "The Hundred Years War on Palestine"

The “mesmerizing and inspirational” (Judy Batalion) true story of two Holocaust survivors who fell in love in Auschwitz, only to be separated upon liberation and lead remarkable lives apart following the war—and then find each other again more than 70 years later. Zippi Spitzer and David Wisnia were captivated by each other from the moment they first exchanged glances across the work floor. It was the beginning of a love story that could have happened anywhere. Except for one difference: this romance was unfolding in history’s most notorious death camp, between two young prisoners whose budding intimacy risked dooming them if they were caught. Incredibly, David and Zippi survived for years beneath the ash-choked skies of Auschwitz. Under the protection of their fellow inmates, their romance grew and deepened, even as their brushes with death mounted and David’s luck in particular seemed close to running out. As the war’s end finally approached and the time came for them to leave the camp, David and Zippi made plans to meet again. But neither of them could imagine how long their reunion would take or how many lives they would live in the interim. They had no inkling, either, of the betrayals that would await them along the way. But David did suspect that Zippi harbored a secret—one that could explain the mystery of his survival all those years ago. An unbelievable tale of romance, sacrifice, loss, and resilience, Lovers in Auschwitz is a saga of two young people who found themselves trapped inside a waking nightmare of the Nazis’ creation, yet who nevertheless discovered a love that sustained them through history’s darkest hour.

An intimate look at Elie Wiesel, author of the seminal Holocaust memoir Night and recipient of the Nobel Peace PrizeFinalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Biography category“An indispensable touchstone.”—Julia M. Klein, ForwardAs an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage? Drawing on Wiesel’s prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question.Berger explores Wiesel’s Hasidic childhood in Sighet, his postwar years spent rebuilding his life from the ashes in France, his transformation into a Parisian intellectual, his failed attempts at romance, his years scraping together a living in America as a journalist, his decision to marry and have a child, his emergence as a spokesperson for Holocaust survivors and persecuted peoples throughout the world, his lifelong devotion to the state of Israel, and his difficult final years. Through this penetrating portrait we come to know intimately the man the Norwegian Nobel Committee called “a messenger to mankind.”

Attempting to break the agonizing impasse between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israeli commentator and award-winning author of  Like Dreamers   directly addresses his Palestinian neighbors in this taut and provocative book, empathizing with Palestinian suffering and longing for reconciliation as he explores how the conflict looks through Israeli eyes. I call you "neighbor" because I don' t know your name, or anything personal about you. Given our circumstances, "neighbor" might be too casual a word to describe our relationship. We are intruders into each other' s dream, violators of each other' s sense of home. We are incarnations of each other' s worst historical nightmares. Neighbors? Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor   is one Israeli' s powerful attempt to reach beyond the wall that separates Israelis and Palestinians and into the hearts of "the enemy. " In a series of letters, Yossi Klein Halevi explains what motivated him to leave his native New York in his twenties and move to Israel to participate in the drama of the renewal of a Jewish homeland, which he is committed to see succeed as a morally responsible, democratic state in the Middle East. This is the first attempt by an Israeli author to directly address his Palestinian neighbors and describe how the conflict appears through Israeli eyes. Halevi untangles the ideological and emotional knot that has defined the conflict for nearly a century. In lyrical, evocative language, he unravels the complex strands of faith, pride, anger and anguish he feels as a Jew living in Israel, using history and personal experience as his guide. Halevi' s letters speak not only to his Palestinian neighbor, but to all concerned global citizens, helping us understand the painful choices confronting Israelis and Palestinians that will ultimately help determine the fate of the region.  

As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl’s words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author.

This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later.In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life--Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker“Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERIn his travels through Israel and Gaza, #1 International Bestselling author Douglas Murray has seen the best and the worst humanity has to offer, and he has no trouble choosing a side.Murray is not Jewish and before October 7, he had never lived in Israel. However, he objects to being lied to, and Israel has been on the receiving end of the biggest, deepest, longest lies in history. Israel's commitment to fundamental Western values—capitalism, individual rights, democracy, and reason—has made it a beacon of progress in a region dominated by authoritarianism and extremism. Israel’s principles vividly contrast with the ideology of Hamas, which openly proclaims its love of death over life. With incisive moral clarity, On Democracies and Death Cults exposes how the campus left and international establishment confuse this conflict by:Calling on Israel for restraint and proportionality, while Hamas commits genocide.Slandering Israelis as white colonialists, while only a third of Israelis are Jews of European ancestry.Framing the conflict as oppressor vs. oppressed, when it is really between a thriving multi-ethnic democracy and a death cult bent on its annihilation. Drawing from intensive on-the-ground reporting in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, Douglas Murray places the latest violence in its proper historical context. He takes readers on a harrowing journey through the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, piecing together the exclusive accounts from victims, survivors, and even the terrorists responsible for the atrocities. If left unchecked, misplaced sympathy could embolden forces that seek to undermine not only Israel, but all of Western civilization.

A Holocaust historian, archivist, and history blogger adds a new dimension to the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II, shining a long overdue spotlight on five young, Polish Jewish women--champions who helped lead the resistance, sabotage the Nazis, and aid Jews in hiding across occupied Poland and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of the most storied events of the Holocaust, yet previous accounts of have almost entirely focused on its male participants. In The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto, Holocaust historian Elizabeth Hyman introduces five young, courageous Polish Jewish women--known as "the girls" by the leadership of the resistance and "bandits" by their Nazi oppressors--who were central to the Jewish resistance as fighters, commanders, couriers, and smugglers. They include: Zivia Lubetkin, the most senior female member of the Jewish Fighting Organization Command Staff in Warsaw and a reluctant legend in her own time, who was immortalized by her code name, "Celina" Vladka Meed, who smuggled dynamite into and illegal literature out of the Warsaw Ghetto in preparation for the uprising Dr. Idina "Inka" Blady-Schweiger, a young medical student who became a reluctant angel of mercy Tema Schneiderman, a tall, beautiful and fearless young woman who volunteered for smuggling and rescue missions across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe Tossia Altman, a heroic courier with a poetic soul, who helped bring arms into the Warsaw Ghetto, fought in the Uprising, and ferried communiques to the outside world Interspersed with the stories of other Jewish women who resisted, The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto rescues these women from the shadows of time, bringing to light their resilience, bravery, and cunning in the face of unspeakable hardship--inspiring stories of courage, daring, and resistance that must never be forgotten.

Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger, world experts on the study of terror and security, propose a theory of violence that contextualizes not only recent acts of terror but also instances of terrorism that stretch back centuries. Beginning with ancient Palestine and its encounters with Jewish terrorism, the authors analyze the social, political, and cultural factors that sponsor extreme violence, proving religious terrorism is not the fault of one faith, but flourishes within any counterculture that adheres to a totalistic ideology. When a totalistic community perceives an external threat, the connectivity of the group and the rhetoric of its leaders bolster the collective mindset of members, who respond with violence. In ancient times, the Jewish sicarii of Judea carried out stealth assassinations against their Roman occupiers. In the mid-twentieth century, to facilitate their independence, Jewish groups committed acts of terror against British soldiers and the Arab population in Palestine. More recently, Yigal Amir, a member of a Jewish terrorist cell, assassinated Yitzhak Rabin to express his opposition to the Oslo Peace Accords. Conducting interviews with former Jewish terrorists, political and spiritual leaders, and law-enforcement officials, and culling information from rare documents and surveys of terrorist networks, Pedahzur and Perliger construct an extensive portrait of terrorist aggression, while also describing the conditions behind the modern rise of zealotry.

How do American Jews identify as both Jewish and American? American Post-Judaism argues that Zionism and the Holocaust, two anchors of contemporary American Jewish identity, will no longer be centers of identity formation for future generations of American Jews. Shaul Magid articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness. He discusses pragmatism and spirituality, monotheism and post-monotheism, Jesus, Jewish law, sainthood and self-realization, and the meaning of the Holocaust for those who have never known survivors. Magid presents Jewish Renewal as a movement that takes this radical cultural transition seriously in its strivings for a new era in Jewish thought and practice.