Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Jewish

For the first time, Etty Hillesum's diary and letters appear together to give us the fullest possible portrait of this extraordinary woman in the midst of World War II. In the darkest years of Nazi occupation and genocide, Etty Hillesum remained a celebrant of life whose lucid intelligence, sympathy, and almost impossible gallantry were themselves a form of inner resistance. The adult counterpart to Anne Frank, Hillesum testifies to the possibility of awareness and compassion in the face of the most devastating challenge to one's humanity. She died at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of...

In Taking Root, Latin American women of Jewish descent, from Mexico to Uruguay, recall their coming of age with Sabbath candles and Hebrew prayers, Ladino songs and merengue music, Queen Esther and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Jewish immigrant families searched for a new home and identity in predominantly Catholic societies. The essays included here examine the religious, economic, social, and political choices these families have made and continue to make as they forge Jewish identities in the New World.

Marjorie Agosin has gathered...

Just before the end of the Holocaust, Dr. Josef Mengele made "the last selection." Goldie Szachter Kalib, then a 13-year old Jewish girl from Bodzentyn, Poland, and her mother were part of that selection. In The Last Selection: A Child's Journey through the Holocaust, Goldie describes her life during World War II. She includes accounts about her charming childhood in Bodzentyn, Poland, her experiences hiding with a Polish Christian family, her time in the slave camp and then Auschwitz, life in the gas chamber, her experiences in Bergen-Belsen, and finally liberation. Portions of The Last...

One of America's most popular Jewish writers, Chaim Potok (b. 1929) is the author of such novels as The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969), The Book of Lights (1981), and Davita's Harp (1985). Each of his novels explores the tension between tradition and modernity, and the clash between Jewish culture and contemporary Western civilization, which he calls -core-to-core culture confrontation.-

Although primarily known as a novelist, Potok is an ordained Conservative rabbi and a world-class Judaic scholar who has also published children's books, theological...

Judah L. Magnes (1877a "1948) was an American Reform rabbi, Jewish community leader, and active pacifist during World War I. In the 1920s he moved to British Mandatory Palestine, where he helped found and served as first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, he emerged as the leading advocate for the binational plan for Palestine. In these varied roles, he actively participated in the major transformations in American Jewish life and the Zionist movement during the first half of the twentieth century.

Kotzin tells the story of how Magnes,...

Holocaust survivor stories need to be kept alive. Every year, survivors with unique testimonies are passing away. Soon, we will no longer be able to hear first-hand from the people who survived the Holocaust. Books and video testimonials will be the only ways to get to know their moving stories. Joseph Schupack has fulfilled a vow to those who did not survive: to write his Holocaust memoirs and offer a unique perspective on the lessons of the Holocaust for future...