This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

At the turn of the century, American Jews and prohibitionists viewed one another with growing suspicion. Jews believed that all Americans had the right to sell and consume alcohol, while prohibitionists insisted that alcohol commerce and consumption posed a threat to the nation’s morality and security. The two groups possessed incompatible visions of what it meant to be a productive and patriotic American--and in 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made alcohol commerce illegal, Jews discovered that anti-Semitic sentiments had mixed with anti-alcohol ideology, threatening their reputation and their standing in American society.  

In Jews and Booze, Marni Davis examines American Jews’ long and complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement’s rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity--the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer--and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition’s triumph cast a pall on American Jews’ history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.  

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany.
Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness.
Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

As the old saying goes, hindsight is always 20-20; people looking back on the Holocaust and the events leading up to it often wonder why the Jews didn't flee Nazi Germany or why they put up with the prejudice and degradation inflicted upon them by the Nazis. From our perspective, 50 years later, it seems almost incredible that the victims of genocide didn't see it coming and made little effort to escape. But as Marion Kaplan makes clear in her powerful book, Between Dignity and Despair, the choices were much murkier at the time. The Jews didn't leave because Germany was their home and had been for centuries; like everyone else, they had responsibilities and commitments to family, jobs and communities that kept them there. Nor, in the early days of Hitler's regime, could the Jews of Nazi Germany have foreseen the terrible humiliations they would suffer or imagined the horror of the Final Solution.

Kaplan's sensitive narrative, supported by a host of letters, memoirs, and interviews, aims to give a balanced account of German Jewry under the Nazi regime. She convincingly shows how it was German society (indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda) that dealt the first crippling moral blow to the Jewish psyche, before any laws dictated their actions. The Jews succumbed to daily humiliations, ranging from little boys being maliciously teased for being circumcised to older Jews being treated like social pariah's by one-time friends who fell easily into the mindset of racial enmity. Hatred breeds hatred; slowly the German populace strangled the pride of the Jews, creating resentment, distrust and disharmony. Kaplan conveys a poignant, yet subtle message: the fundamental de-facto abandonment of decency and moral civility by the gentile Germans was the catalyst which allowed Nazi leadership to proceed with more aggressive policies that ultimately led to the Holocaust.

• ISBN13: 9781580234313
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In 1897, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered. He had entered the synagogue's genizah-- its repository for damaged and destroyed Jewish texts--which held nearly 300,000 individual documents, many of which were over 1,000 years old.
Considered among the most important discoveries in modern religious history, its contents contained early copies of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, early manuscripts of the Bible, and other sacred literature. The importance of the Genizah's contents rivals that of the Rosetta Stone, and by virtue of its sheer mass alone, it will continue to command our attention indefinitely.
Sacred Treasure--The Cairo Genizah is the first accessible, comprehensive account of this astounding treasure trove of documents and their discovery. It will delight readers with its fascinating adventure story--why this enormous collection was amassed, how it was discovered and the many lessons to be found in its contents. And it will show readers how Schechter's find, though still being "unpacked" today, forever transformed our knowledge of the Jewish past, Muslim history and much more.

Newly revised and updated to include new maps, this is the seventh edition of Martin Gilbert’s atlas tracing the world-wide migrations of the Jews from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Israel.

Spanning over four thousand years of history in over 140 maps, it presents a vivid picture of a fascinating people and the trials and tribulations which have haunted their story.

The themes covered include:

• prejudice and violence
• migrations and movements
• society and status
• trade and culture
• politics, government and war.

All students of history, and of Jewish history in particular will find this new edition as useful, helpful and invaluable as its six predecessors.