German and Jewish ways of life have been interwoven in Worms, Germany, for over a thousand years. Despite radical changes brought about by expulsion of Jews, wartime devastation, social advancement, cultural and religious renewal, and the Jewish comm...

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history" – the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire as well as in communities in Western Europe. At the height of its power...

Using testimonies, Nazi documents, memoirs, and artistic representations, this volume broadens and deepens comprehension of Jewish women's experiences of rape and other forms of sexual violence during the Holocaust. The book goes beyond previous stud...

While imparting their ethical lessons, rabbinic texts often employ vivid images of death, aging, hunger, defecation, persecution, and drought. In "Confronting Vulnerability", Jonathan Wyn Schofer carefully examines these texts to find out why their c...

Fundamentally different from other more prominent, Jewish traditions and experiences, the Sephardic tradition has long served to bind together the various Jewish communities of the Mediterranean basin. In "The Sephardic Legacy", Henry Toledano immers...

During their ascendency and subsequent occupation of much of Europe, the Nazis plundered the documents and cultural treasures of Jewish organizations as well as other groups and individuals they deemed to be enemies of the Reich. When the Nazis were...

The thirst for exotic ornament among fashionable women in the metropoles of Europe and America prompted a bustling global trade in ostrich feathers that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War. When feathers fell out of fashion with consu...

In "The Choice", Arnine Cumsky Weiss and Carol Weiss Rubel present the stories of forty-five converts to Judaism. These reflective narratives demonstrate that no two converts' experiences are alike, yet most share some common characteristics: a spiri...

Who are the Quakers, what do they believe, and what do they practise? At the heart of their faith lies the conviction that everyone can have a direct experience of God without the mediation of priests or religious leaders. They express this in a uniq...

In this first examination of Lenin's genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin's maternal grandfather was a Jew. He examines why and...