Anti-Semitism emerged in the late nineteenth century as a political movement that swept the masses. It presented a worldview in which a cohesive tribe called "the Jews" conspired to rule the earth by controlling international capital markets, trade, and money lending, while at the same time working to destroy—through revolutionary plots—the very capitalist system it supposedly controlled. It is easy to draw a straight line from this paranoid thinking at the turn of the century to the murderous delusions of fascism in the twentieth century. But, argues Laura Engelstein, the line was not straight. Anti-Semitism as a political weapon had its opponents, even in Eastern Europe, where its consequences were particularly terrible. Jewish leaders who joined forces in various countries and in cooperation with non-Jewish public figures worked for the rights of Jews and in firm opposition to persecution and acts of violence against Jews. In Tsarist and Soviet Russia, as well as in Poland and Ukraine – regions notorious in the West as centers of hatred for Jews – there were also those who saw anti-Semitism as a harmful burden on society and their movement. In the introduction to the book, Engelstein describes the different ways in which Jews were treated through the ways in which one Jew, Maurice Greenfeld, the author's grandfather, dealt with the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the civil war that followed, including the expressions of hostility and sympathy he encountered throughout his life. In the following chapters, she reveals the – sometimes surprising – positions of Russian liberals such as Prince Sergei Urusov, Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, and Polish émigré in Paris Andrzej Bobkowski. The chapters on the inevitable rise of anti-Semitism thus examine the complex reasons why leaders and intellectuals renounced pogroms and incitement against the Jewish population. Engelstein added a short introduction to the Hebrew edition of the book.

The book relates the story of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s as perceived by its participants. On the basis of interviews with almost 300 activists from over 60 cities, it portrays the movement's evolution in all its facets. It examines the activist's personality and background and the path he or she took prior to becoming active, including the presentation of documents to the authorities, that branded him or her as a social pariah and potential traitor. The book discusses the emergence of a refusenik community that enabled their struggle with the all-powerful regime to leave the country while maintaining a "normal" existence for an unpredictable duration. Two chapters view the variety of instruments to which the activists had recourse as they developed the tactics and strategy of that struggle, while three final chapters review specific topics that were an inseparable part of the movement's story. They cover the confrontation with the KGB – the persistent shadowing, interrogations, arrests, trials and camps; the return to Judaism in the search for roots and identity; and the movement's links with the Jewish and non-Jewish world outside.

This book collects rewritten articles and essays by the author related first and foremost, but not exclusively, to the catastrophe of the Holocaust as an epistemic crisis – qualified as a “rupture in civilization”, i.e. the destruction of concepts deeply rooted in a common anthropology of humankind, while focusing on methodological as well as conceptual questions. The composition of the volume runs roughly chronologically along several layers of interpretation – embracing questions of German constitutional law, the formation of Continental expansionist geopolitical thinking, the epistemology of the Holocaust, the assertion and transformation of paradigms of historical interpretation in the second half of the 20th century, especially the turn from social history to memory studies, as well as the turn from a Western- and Eurocentric approaches into the direction of colonial and global history.

In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache (circa 1550-1616), who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. In Samuel Pallache , his world is viewed as a microcosm of early modern society, one far more interconnected, cosmopolitan, and fluid than is often portrayed. Pallache's missions and misadventures took him from Islamic Fez and Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. Through these travels, the authors explore the workings of the Moroccan sultanate and the Spanish court, the Jewish communities of Fez and Amsterdam, and details of the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. At once a sweeping view of two continents, three faiths, and five nation-states and an intimate story of one man's remarkable life, Samuel Pallache is history at its most compelling.

The author of Sefer Emeq Ha-Bakha (The Vale of Tears), Yosef ha-Cohen, was a sixteenth-century Jewish doctor of Spanish origin who lived in Italy. This book was not printed in his lifetime. A few copies of the manuscript copied by hand survived. In this volume, Yosef ha-Cohen collected essays written about pogroms against the people of Israel during the Second Temple period and the loss of political independence in Eretz Israel.

In his book History, Literature, Critical Theory (2013), the historian Dominique La Capra presented the ways in which the voice of the narrator in the 19th and 20th century novel came to a collapse, which reflects the modern traumatic experience. This study employs this theoretical prism in order to construct a cultural dimension of 20th century Jewish poetics - a dimension in which trauma is reflected in its linguistic representation, but also shapes this same representation. The book offers an understanding of Jewish literature in the 20th century as a far-reaching cultural experience, in which the human figure is not made possible by words, but rather collapses into the animal, the absence, the broken witness, the Muslim, the eastern, the Arab and the queer.

This is a major, unprecedented study of the Soviet partisan movements' intelligence activity in 1941-1945, and its impact on the outcome of the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It contributes significantly to the understanding of the Soviet intelligence culture and practice during WWII, as well as to the study of the Holocaust, which is provided with clear well-documented evidence of the Soviet leadership's knowledge about the extermination of the local Jews by the Nazis and their supporters.

Walter (1887-1966) and his son Moshe (1922-2017) Wolf, both born in Hamburg, had very unusual life stories. Their autobiographies coalesce and intertwine in this powerful book - the father recounts his Jewish-bourgeoisie childhood in Germany, his military service with the German forces during World War I, his work as a banker and the building of his family; he tells of his escape from Nazi Germany and his new life in the United States. Meanwhile, his son pursues his point of view, continuing the family story from the moment he arrived in Israel, describing his own choices - working the land and joining the British Army in the war against Germany. This outstanding tale enriches even further the fascinating, multi-faceted image of German Jewry, offering a path, now more relevant than ever, into contemporary Israeli society.

This book is an edited collection of papers, in Hebrew, addressing the unique phenomenon of the collection of testimonies from child survivors of the Holocaust while they were still children or teenagers in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The instructions for these interviews go as far back as 1945. The book maps the collecting, publication and filming of testimonies and addresses issues of authenticity, methodology dissemination and reception. Who interviewed the children and how? What is the correct way to read these interviews and what can be studied from them? Do the existing interviews faithfully reflect the children's experiences and feelings? What was the cultural and social background of these interviews and their publication? These testimonies teach the strategies Jewish families used to save themselves and especially the children: not passively like 'sheep to the slaughter' but coping with changing situations by struggling . The testimonies also teach us about the relationship between Jews and gentiles; rescue and sacrifice on the part of non-Jews on the one hand, and the persecution and murder on the other. Some of the papers are adapted translation of papers published in English and some were written for this volume by historians, linguists and literati. Included is also contemporary material from the period. Participating researchers: Boaz Cohen, Joanna Michlic, Gabriel Finder, Beate Muller, Rita Horvath, Zuzanna Schnepf-Kolacz, Sharon Geva, Emunah Nachmani-Gafni and Yvonne Kozlovski-Golan

Cinema is the most democratic form of art, dependent on the taste of millions of viewers. Within the cinematic historical genre in Arab cinema one finds a rich intellectual discourse, in a constant dialogue with state, censorship and audience. The book Back to the Past: Filmed History in Arab Cinema invites the readers to know the Arab cinema industry, mainly the Egyptian one, through the historical genre, and "medieval" films as its core. In films taking place in Middle Ages , the viewers meet warriors and poets, besides the leaders and founders of Islam. These films present also the images of Mongol and Crusaders invaders, slaves and concubines, Mamluks, Christians and Jews. The book surveys also the transition from a situation of Egyptian cinema exported to the Arab world, into the creation of Pan-Arab historical discourse within the satellite channels.

David Weinberg’s multi-national study focuses on the efforts by the Jews of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to reconstruct their lives after the Second World War. These efforts have largely been ignored, perhaps because the emphasis on assisting survivors in displaced persons camps in occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy and in developing Israel as the center of the Jewish world after the Holocaust diverted attention from the struggle by Jews in western Europe to recover their voice and sense of purpose. Weinberg attempts to set the record straight, presenting the challenges that were faced both in the national context and in the world Jewish arena and examining how they were dealt with. Weinberg begins his study by reviewing the action taken to revive Jewish communities in the three countries materially and institutionally, remodeling them as efficient, self-sustaining, and assertive bodies that could meet new challenges. With the creation of the State of Israel, Jews who stayed in western Europe had to defend their decision to do so while nevertheless showing public support for the new nation. There was also a felt need to respond quickly and effectively to any sign of antisemitism. In addition, tensions arose between Jews and non-Jews concerning wartime collaboration in deportations, and the need to memorialize Jewish victims of Nazism. The Cold War offered challenges of its own: the perceived need to exclude communist elements from communal affairs was countered by a resistance to pressures from American Jewish leaders to sever links with Jews in eastern Europe. Yet beneath the show of assertiveness Jewish life was fragile, not only because of the physical depletion of the population and of its leadership but because the Holocaust had shaken religious beliefs and affiliations and had raised questions about the value of preserving ethnic and religious identity. At the same time, new forms of Jewish consciousness had evolved, meaning that Jewish leaders had to provide for diverse educational, religious, and cultural needs. This book's comprehensive approach offers a broad and valuable addition to existing studies on the regeneration of Jewish life in individual European countries. Underscoring the similar political, cultural, social, and economic issues facing Jewish survivors in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands after the Holocaust, David Weinberg demonstrates how, with the aid of international Jewish organizations, they used unprecedented means to meet unprecedented challenges. It is a story worth telling that adds much to our understanding of postwar European Jewish life.

From Empathy to Denial is the first comprehensive study of the broad range of Arab responses to the Holocaust based on years of painstaking historical research. The book explores how Holocaust representations developed after the Second World War by analyzing themes, and case studies, spanning a period of almost seventy years. It shows how these perceptions evolved in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict.