This groundbreaking collection presents for the first time in English a substantial body of poetry from the world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem's call to plumb the "tremendous poetic potential concealed" in the Kabbalistic tradition,...

Just a week after the Kristallnacht terror in 1938, young Luzie Hatch, a German Jew, fled Berlin to resettle in New York. Her rescuer was an American-born cousin and industrialist, Arnold Hatch. Arnold spoke no German, so Luzie quickly became transla...

The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the northern coast, who became, to some extent, beneficiaries of colonialism. But to the south, in the Sahara, Jews faced a harsher colonial treatment. In "S...

When Laura Silver's favorite knish shop went out of business, the native New Yorker sank into mourning, but then she sprang into action. She embarked on a round-the-world quest for the origins and modern-day manifestations of the knish. The iconic po...

Feet, bras, autopsies, hair – Peggy Shinner takes an honest, unflinching look at all of them in "You Feel So Mortal", a collection of searing and witty essays about the body: her own body, female and Jewish; those of her parents, the bodies she came...

Glamorous, talented, audacious – Lillian Hellman knew everyone, did everything, had been everywhere. By the age of twenty-nine she had written "The Children's Hour", the first of four hit Broadway plays, and soon she was considered a member of Americ...

Why are words so important to Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument...

More than simply a method of communication shared by a common people, the Hebrew language was always an integral part of the Jewish cultural system and, as such, tightly interwoven into the lives of the prophets, poets, scribes and priests who used i...

In 1943, twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi had just begun a career in chemistry when, after joining a partisan group, he was captured by the Italian Fascist Militia and deported to Auschwitz. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, he was one of only...

This book makes accessible – for the first time in English – declassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotia...