The Strashun Library was among the most important Jewish public institutions in Vilna, and indeed in Eastern Europe, prior to its destruction during World War II. Mattityahu Strashun, descended from a long and distinguished line of rabbis, bequeathed...

For sale in CIS only! Between the French defeat in 1940 and liberation in 1944, the Nazis killed almost 80,000 of France's Jews, both French and foreign. Since that time, this tragedy has been well-documented. But there are other stories hidden with...

For sale in CIS only! Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a cosmopolitan "carnival of nations": French Huguenots, North African merchants, Spanish Moriscos – and Iberian New Christians, formerly Jewish families forcibly converted to Catholicism, now f...

Jerome Robbins (1918-1998) was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz and grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, where his Russian-Jewish immigrant parents owned the Comfort Corset Company. Robbins, who was drawn to dance at a young age, resisted the idea of joini...

He was amazing. "A little man with a Napoleonic penchant for the colossal and magnificent, Billy Rose is the country's No. 1 purveyor of mass entertainment", Life magazine announced in 1936. The Times reported that with 1,400 people on his payroll, R...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Compassion, levity, and laughter can be found in the darkest of places – and even in the smallest of creatures. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, J. R. Pick's novella "Society for...

Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657) was among the most accomplished and cosmopolitan rabbis of his time, and a pivotal intellectual figure in early modern Jewish history. He was one of the three rabbis of the "Portuguese Nation" in Amsterdam, a community...

German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment. Until now, attention was focused on Mendelssohn's German works – such as his groundbreaking "Jerusalem" – which have been duly tran...

This groundbreaking work rethinks conventional wisdom about Holocaust testimony, focusing on the power of language and place to shape personal narrative. Oral histories of Lithuanian Jews serve as the textual base for this exploration. Comparing the...

Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) was perhaps the foremost Jewish intellectual of the twentieth century. Pioneering the study of Jewish mysticism as a legitimate academic discipline, he overturned the rationalist bias of his predecessors and revealed an ex...