Based on last wills and testaments composed by Jamaican Jews between 1673 and 1815, this book explores the social and familial experiences of one of the most critical yet understudied nodes of the Atlantic Portuguese Jewish Diaspora. Stanley Mirvis e...

Few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Stan Lee. The characters he created – Spider-Man and Iron Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four – occupy Hollywood's imagination and production schedules, generate billions at t...

When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. Christopher Str...

In this rich, wide-ranging, and meticulously researched account, Kenneth Austin examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther's wri...

In 1916, the war in Europe having prevented a tour abroad, Harry Houdini wrote a film treatment for a rollicking motion picture. Though the movie was never made, its title, "The Marvelous Adventures of Houdini: The Justly Celebrated Elusive American"...

An anthology of Jewish culture between the world wars, the editors' selections convey the variety, breadth, and depth of Jewish creativity in those tempestuous decades. Despite – or perhaps because of – external threats, Jews vigorously fought over r...

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a...

He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter". Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today". Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts – including "Scarfac...

This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highli...

Irving Berlin (1888-1989) has been called – by George Gershwin, among others – the greatest songwriter of the golden age of the American popular song. "Berlin has no place in American music", legendary composer Jerome Kern wrote; "he is American musi...