Download or read book Pogrom Kishinev and the Tilt of History written by Steven J. Zipperstein and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (History) Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and the East Hampton Star Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize Separating historical fact from fantasy, an acclaimed historian retells the story of Kishinev, a riot that transformed the course of twentieth-century Jewish history. So shattering were the aftereffects of Kishinev, the rampage that broke out in late-Tsarist Russia in April 1903, that one historian remarked that it was “nothing less than a prototype for the Holocaust itself.” In three days of violence, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or wounded, while more than 1,000 Jewish-owned houses and stores were ransacked and destroyed. Recounted in lurid detail by newspapers throughout the Western world, and covered sensationally by America’s Hearst press, the pre-Easter attacks seized the imagination of an international public, quickly becoming the prototype for what would become known as a “pogrom,” and providing the impetus for efforts as varied as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the NAACP. Using new evidence culled from Russia, Israel, and Europe, distinguished historian Steven J. Zipperstein’s wide-ranging book brings historical insight and clarity to a much-misunderstood event that would do so much to transform twentieth-century Jewish life and beyond.

Download or read book In the Midst of Civilized Europe written by Jeffrey Veidlinger and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Pogroms written by John Doyle Klier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-12 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished scholars of Russian Jewish history reflect on the pogroms in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia.

Download or read book Tears Over Russia written by Lisa Brahin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping saga of a family and community fighting for survival against the ravages of history. Set between events depicted in Fiddler on the Roof and Schindler’s List, Lisa Brahin’s Tears over Russia brings to life a piece of Jewish history that has never before been told. Between 1917 and 1921, twenty years before the Holocaust began, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish pogroms across the Ukraine. Lisa grew up transfixed by her grandmother Channa’s stories about her family being forced to flee their hometown of Stavishche, as armies and bandit groups raided village after village, killing Jewish residents. Channa described a perilous three-year journey through Russia and Romania, led at first by a gallant American who had snuck into the Ukraine to save his immediate family and ended up leading an exodus of nearly eighty to safety. With almost no published sources to validate her grandmother’s tales, Lisa embarked on her incredible journey to tell Channa’s story, forging connections with archivists around the world to find elusive documents to fill in the gaps of what happened in Stavishche. She also tapped into connections closer to home, gathering testimonies from her grandmother’s relatives, childhood friends and neighbors. The result is a moving historical family narrative that speaks to universal human themes—the resilience and hope of ordinary people surviving the ravages of history and human cruelty. With the growing passage of time, it is unlikely that we will see another family saga emerge so richly detailing this forgotten time period. Tears Over Russia eloquently proves that true life is sometimes more compelling than fiction.

Download or read book An Unchosen People written by Kenneth B. Moss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionist account of interwar EuropeÕs largest Jewish community that upends histories of Jewish agency to rediscover reckonings with nationalismÕs pathologies, diasporaÕs fragility, ZionismÕs promises, and the necessity of choice. What did the future hold for interwar EuropeÕs largest Jewish community, the font of global Jewish hopes? When intrepid analysts asked these questions on the cusp of the 1930s, they discovered a Polish Jewry reckoning with Òno tomorrow.Ó Assailed by antisemitism and witnessing liberalismÕs collapse, some Polish Jews looked past progressive hopes or religious certainties to investigate what the nation-state was becoming, what powers minority communities really possessed, and where a future might be foundÑand for whom. The story of modern Jewry is often told as one of creativity and contestation. Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a late Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalismÕs terrible potencies, ZionismÕs promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish JewryÕs most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselvesÑin Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Focusing not on ideals but on a search for realism, Moss recasts the history of modern Jewish political thought. Where much scholarship seeks Jewish agency over a collective future, An Unchosen People recovers a darker tradition characterized by painful tradeoffs amid a harrowing political reality, making Polish Jewry a paradigmatic example of the minority experience endemic to the nation-state.

Download or read book Rescue the Surviving Souls written by Adam Teller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The mid-seventeenth century witnessed an enormous wave of Jewish refugees and forced migrants from the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who spread across the Jewish communities of Europe and Asia. A series of wars that hit the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth-the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648; the Muscovite invasion that begin in 1654; and the Swedish incursion from 1655 to 1660-all together forced many Jews out of their homes. Though not the direct targets of the combatants, within a short time many were deeply involved in the conflicts, some becoming victims of violence and some becoming arms-bearing participants. But most became refugees and forced migrants. These refugees posed a huge social, economic and ethical challenge to the Jewish world. In an unprecedented manner, the Jewish centers around Europe answered this challenge and, both individually and jointly, organized relief for the Polish-Lithuanian Jews in all the different places they now found themselves. The need for concerted action on behalf of the Polish Jewish refugees strengthened ties between communities across Europe, and significantly increased the range of communal co-operation. The book moves through the three different environments the refugees found themselves in. The first part looks at the refugees who remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, probing the local and regional policies of relief that would eventually prove so successful in helping them overcome the traumas of their past. The second examines the Jews who were brought to the slave markets of Constantinople, and then redeemed there by newly developed philanthropic systems that had raised the money to do so. The third examines the fate of the Jews who fled to Central and Western Europe, examining tensions that developed within the local Jewish populations between the need to help the refugees and a basic antipathy born of cultural difference. In each case, a web of inter-communal connections was created to help support the refugees-bringing different parts of the Jewish world into an extraordinary level of purposeful contact, and paving the way for similar organization in the future. As a result, the seventeenth century communities set in motion processes of change that would eventually be refashioned into the globalized Jewish world we know today"--

Download or read book Easter in Kishinev written by Edward H. Judge and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1995-02 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judge's book is the best to date on the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. In seven gracefully written chapters, the author lays out the background of the Jewish question in Russia, profiles the city of Kishinev, narrates the events leading up to and included in the pogrom, and analyzes its causes and effects. -Choice A detailed re-examination of the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1903. -East European Jewish Affairs In February of 1903, in a town in the southwestern part of the Russian empire, a peasant stumbled upon the corpse of 14-year old Mikhail Rybachenko, bruised and covered with stab wounds, in a garden. The murder immediately fueled wild rumors that he had been killed by local Jews in need of his Christian blood to prepare their matzah bread. Panic rumors, grounded in sinister superstitions of Jewish sorcery and ritual murder, quickly spread to nearby towns. By April, they had hit Kishinev -- a growing metropolis of 100,000 inhabitants rife with the unrest of rapid expansion, ethnic rivalry, revolutionary agitation, and anti-Semitism -- with full force. The resulting massacre left dozens dead, and hundreds wounded, maimed, widowed, orphaned or homeless. This is the story of Kishinev. In this extensively researched book, Edward Judge examines these anti-Jewish riots, detailing their background, cause, and aftermath. He traces the evolution of the riots, analyzing the broader impact of imperial policies, urbanization, nationalism, population growth, and revolutionary activism upon the Jewish situation in Russia. Recounting the activities and attitudes of anti- semitic agitators and Kishinev officials, the book examines the spiral of violence, the inaction of the authorities in the wake of the pogrom, the storm of indignation that followed the pogrom, and the efforts of tsarist officials to counter subsequent negative publicity. EASTER IN KISHINEV also portrays the investigation of the disorders and the trials of the rioters and carefully considers the question of government responsibility for the outbreak of the pogrom.

Download or read book Family Papers written by Sarah Abrevaya Stein and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the best books of 2019 by The Economist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A National Jewish Book Award finalist. "A superb and touching book about the frailty of ties that hold together places and people." --The New York Times Book Review An award-winning historian shares the true story of a frayed and diasporic Sephardic Jewish family preserved in thousands of letters For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree. In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers. With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

Download or read book Promise Me You ll Shoot Yourself written by Florian Huber and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best History Book of 2019 by The Times (UK) The astounding true story of how thousands of ordinary Germans, overcome by shame, guilt, and fear, killed themselves after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II. By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death -- for themselves and for their children. "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" recounts this little-known mass event. Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, historian Florian Huber traces the euphoria of many ordinary Germans as Hitler restored national pride; their indifference as the Führer's political enemies, Jews, and other minorities began to suffer; and the descent into despair as the war took its terrible toll, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Above all, he investigates how suicide became a contagious epidemic as the country collapsed. Drawing on eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" presents a riveting portrait of a nation in crisis, and sheds light on a dramatic yet largely unknown episode of postwar Germany.

Download or read book A Complicated Jew written by Hillel Halkin and published by Wicked Son. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hillel Halkin is widely admired for his works of literary criticism, biography, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as for his celebrated achievements as a translator. Born and raised in New York City, he has lived most of his life in Israel. His complex sensibility, deeply rooted in Jewish literature and history no less than in his own personal experience, illuminates everything it touches. In A Complicated Jew, Halkin assembles a selection of essays that form, if not a conventional memoir, a haunting and intimate record of a profoundly Jewish life that defies categorization. It is a banquet for the mind. “Hillel Halkin is a master storyteller and a brilliant cultural critic, and in A Complicated Jew he combines both talents to take his readers on an intellectual thrill ride through his encounters with Jewish thought, art, and life. I envy him his lifetime of adventures and am grateful to him for sharing them with all of us.” Dara Horn, novelist and author of Eternal Life and People Love Dead Jews “I have been reading Hillel Halkin for well on to half a century, always deriving pleasure from his stately prose, intellectual profit from his deep learning, and inspiration from his integrity. I am pleased to think of him as my contemporary.” Joseph Epstein, author of Life Sentences: Literary Essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool and Fabulous Small Jews, and former editor of The American Scholar. “Hillel Halkin himself has always been even more interesting to me than his highly interesting subjects, and here he gives us full access to his adventurous mind, the dazzling range of his learning, and his passionate spirit. More than a collection of essays, this book charts the intellectual journey of one of our most original Jewish writers.” Ruth Wisse, Professor emeritus of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and author of If Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Jews and Power, and No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. “Even when Hillel Halkin exasperates, there is no voice on the contemporary Jewish scene more intellectually alert or lucid. The work of a cultural critic of rare breadth, this keenly personal, fiercely argued volume is as trenchant of tour of Jewry’s dilemmas of the last half-century as any I know.” Steven J. Zipperstein, Professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University and author of Imagining Russian Jewry and Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History.

Download or read book Odessa Genius and Death in a City of Dreams written by Charles King and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of a National Jewish Book Award "Fascinating.…A humane and tragic survey of a great and tragic subject." —Jan Morris, Literary Review From Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist renegade Vladimir Jabotinsky and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, an astonishing cast of geniuses helped shape Odessa, a legendary haven of cosmopolitan freedom on the Black Sea. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and offering the first detailed account of the destruction of the city's Jewish community during the Second World War, Charles King's Odessa is both history and elegy—a vivid chronicle of a multicultural city and its remarkable resilience over the past two centuries.

Download or read book Where the Jews Aren t written by Masha Gessen and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)

Download or read book The Nature of Blood written by Caryl Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II . . . her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood . . . the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips' eloquent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the centuries.

Download or read book Europe Against the Jews 1880 1945 written by Götz Aly and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning historian of the Holocaust, the first book to move beyond Germany’s singular crime to the collaboration of Europe as a whole. The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Germans, but it would not have been possible without the assistance of thousands of helpers in other countries: state officials, police, and civilians who eagerly supported the genocide. If we are to fully understand how and why the Holocaust happened, Götz Aly argues in this groundbreaking study, we must examine its prehistory throughout Europe. We must look at countries as far-flung as Romania and France, Russia and Greece, where, decades before the Nazis came to power, a deadly combination of envy, competition, nationalism, and social upheaval fueled a surge of anti-Semitism, creating the preconditions for the deportations and murder to come. In the late nineteenth century, new opportunities for education and social advancement were opening up, and Jewish minorities took particular advantage of them, leading to widespread resentment. At the same time, newly created nation-states, especially in the east, were striving for ethnic homogeneity and national renewal, goals which they saw as inextricably linked. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unpublished sources, Aly traces the sequence of events that made persecution of Jews an increasingly acceptable European practice. Ultimately, the German architects of genocide found support for the Final Solution in nearly all the countries they occupied or were allied with. Without diminishing the guilt of German perpetrators, Aly documents the involvement of all of Europe in the destruction of the Jews, once again deepening our understanding of this most tormented history. Praise for Europe Against the Jews 1880-1945 “A masterpiece.” —Die Zeit “If HBO’s The Plot Against America makes you want to know the grim real-life context, read German historian Götz Aly’s new book, Europe Against the Jews.” —New YorkMagazine “A major work on anti-Semitism of incredible research and singular scholarship. . . . Aly delivers again, this time expanding his lens outside of Germany to offer further revelations about the Holocaust.” —Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book China and the Jewish People written by Salomon Wald and published by Gefen Publishing House Ltd. This book was released on 2004 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish people and world Jewish leadership are facing critical dilemmas, opportunities and challenges. These create a need for systematic thinking to examine the range of decisions that may affect the standing of world Jewry in the decades to come. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) was established as an independent think tank whose mission is to contribute to the continuity of the Jewish people and Judaism, and their thriving future. China and the Jewish People' is the first document in a series of strategy papers dedicated to improving the standing of the Jewish people in emerging superpowers without biblical tradition.China and Jewish People: Old Civilizations in a New Era by Dr. Shalom Salomon Wald, is a crucial book that addresses the Jewish people and their issues with China.

Download or read book The History of Terrorism written by Gérard Chaliand and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in English in 2007 under title: The history of terrorism: from antiquity to al Qaeda.

Download or read book The Perennial Conspiracy Theory written by Michael Hagemeister and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Perennial Conspiracy Theory is a collection of essays on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document which has created a pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory. The author analyses the murky origins of this notorious forgery and the contested claims of authorship. He explores the impact of the Protocols on various countries during the interwar years including Soviet Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Nazi Germany, and the United States. He also profiles figures closely associated with the dissemination of antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as Sergei Nilus and Leslie Fry, as well as examining the controversies arising from the famous Bern trial related to the Protocols. The book concludes with an assessment of the ongoing influence of the Protocols in post-Soviet Russia. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of antisemitism, conspiracy theories, the far right, Jewish studies, and modern history.