General Books

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge

Edward Kritzler

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Subjects -> History -> World -> Jewish -> General

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition forced many Jews to flee the country. The most adventurous among them took to the high seas as freewheeling outlaws. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, they attacked and plundered the Spanish fleet while forming alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding.

JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN is the entertaining saga of a hidden chapter in Jewish history and of the cruelty, terror, and greed that flourished during the Age of Discovery. Readers will meet such daring figures as “the Great Jewish Pirate” Sinan, Barbarossa’s second-in-command; the pirate rabbi Samuel Palache, who founded Holland's Jewish community; Abraham Cohen Henriques, an arms dealer who used his cunning and economic muscle to find safe havens for other Jews; and his pirate brother Moses, who is credited with the capture of the Spanish silver fleet in 1628--the largest heist in pirate history.

Filled with high-sea adventures—including encounters with Captain Morgan and other legendary pirates—and detailed portraits of cities stacked high with plunder, such as Port Royal, Jamaica, JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN captures a gritty and glorious era of history from an unusual and eye-opening perspective.

And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost

Roger Bennett, Josh Kun

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> History & Criticism

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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What started out as a mutual affinity for kitschy Jewish album covers–think Neil Diamond baring his chest hair on the cover of Hot August Night or Barbra Streisand in hot pants on the cover of Streisand Superman–soon became a quest for identity, history, and culture between the grooves of LPs.

Together, Roger Bennett and Josh Kun embarked on a thrilling journey, scouring the world to collect thousands of vinyl LPs from attics, garage sales, and dusty archives. Pieced together, these scratched, once-loved and now-forgotten audio gems tell a vibrant tale: the story of Jews in America. And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl spans the history of Jewish recorded music from the 1940s to the 1980s, weaving an account that begins with sacred songs and ends with the holy trinity of Neil, Barbra, and Barry. The LPs found here are also a love letter to forgotten moments in Jewish American pop history, celebrating well-dressed cantors singing Christmas tunes, Long Island suburbanites dancing the mambo, and Chassidic prog-rockers.

The music, much of which is no longer available in any format, is brought to life through commentary from writers Aimee Bender, Etgar Keret, Michael Wex, and Shalom Auslander; performers Sandra Bernhard and Motown legend Lamont Dozier; music critics Oliver Wang and Anne Powers; and TV pioneer Norman Lear. A gateway to a forgotten kingdom of sound, the good, the bad, and the ugly of Jewish vinyl gives this aspect of Jewish culture the attention it so richly deserves.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)

Lucette Lagnado

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Total reviews: 52 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Lucette Lagnado's father, Leon, is a successful Egyptian businessman and boulevardier who, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit, makes deals and trades at Shepherd's Hotel and at the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. After the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, Leon loses everything and his family is forced to flee, abandoning a life once marked by beauty and luxury to plunge into hardship and poverty, as they take flight for any country that would have them.

A vivid, heartbreaking, and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lagnado's unforgettable memoir is a sweeping story of family, faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph set against the stunning backdrop of Cairo, Paris, and New York.

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a "brilliant, crushing book" and the New Yorker as a memoir of ruin "told without melodrama by its youngest survivor," The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit recounts the exile of the author's Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her father's heroic and tragic struggle to survive his "riches to rags" trajectory.

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

Ariel Sabar

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Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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In a remote and dusty corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an ancient community of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic—the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers, humble peddlers and rugged loggers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.

In the 1950s, after the founding of the state of Israel, Yona and his family emigrated there with the mass exodus of 120,000 Jews from Iraq—one of the world's largest and least-known diasporas. Almost overnight, the Kurdish Jews' exotic culture and language were doomed to extinction. Yona, who became an esteemed professor at UCLA, dedicated his career to preserving his people's traditions. But to his first-generation American son Ariel, Yona was a reminder of a strange immigrant heritage on which he had turned his back—until he had a son of his own.

My Father's Paradise is Ariel Sabar's quest to reconcile present and past. As father and son travel together to today's postwar Iraq to find what's left of Yona's birthplace, Ariel brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, telling his family's story and discovering his own role in this sweeping saga. What he finds in the Sephardic Jews' millennia-long survival in Islamic lands is an improbable story of tolerance and hope.

Populated by Kurdish chieftains, trailblazing linguists, Arab nomads, devout believers—marvelous characters all— this intimate yet powerful book uncovers the vanished history of a place that is now at the very center of the world's attention.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

Art Spiegelman

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Total reviews: 150 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Some historical events simply beggar any attempt at description--the Holocaust is one of these. Therefore, as it recedes and the people able to bear witness die, it becomes more and more essential that novel, vigorous methods are used to describe the indescribable. Examined in these terms, Art Spiegelman's Maus is a tremendous achievement, from a historical perspective as well as an artistic one.

Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs--Spiegelman compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.

This is neither easy nor pleasant. However, Vladek Spiegelman and his wife Anna are resourceful heroes, and enough acts of kindness and decency appear in the tale to spur the reader onward (we also know that the protagonists survive, else reading would be too painful). This first volume introduces Vladek as a happy young man on the make in pre-war Poland. With outside events growing ever more ominous, we watch his marriage to Anna, his enlistment in the Polish army after the outbreak of hostilities, his and Anna's life in the ghetto, and then their flight into hiding as the Final Solution is put into effect. The ending is stark and terrible, but the worst is yet to come--in the second volume of this Pulitzer Prize-winning set. --Michael Gerber

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt

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Subjects -> History -> Middle East -> Israel

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Total reviews: 196 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

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The Israel Lobby,” by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. Now in a work of major importance, Mearsheimer and Walt deepen and expand their argument and confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran. They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing declared, “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.” The publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is certain to widen the debate and to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (Maus)

Art Spiegelman

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Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Painting in order to Avoid Self-Portraits 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

At first glance, Maus might seem like yet another attempt to spin the genocide of the Jewish people into something demeaning. I have seen people turn and walk away from the selection because of that, and when I suggested this as required reading in a class it was initially met with hostile responses. Looking into the reading changed the way people saw the thing being constructed here, however, and by the time the class had finished they felt like I did about the book because they were more than taken. They were moved and then some.

Far from words like "stereotyping," Maus tells a story that people see as disarming at first by casting the Nazis as cats and the Jewish people as mice. This makes it seem like it is approachable in ways that humanity isn't, and it also brings about a medium that people of all ages can understand. While it might be painful for someone really young to read it can still be read by kids, and the story doesn't look like a history book at first glance so the "what" and the "why" can be seen with fresh eyes. This leads to being able to take in the characters for what they are; individuals with individual lives and not vast amounts of statistics that lost the ability to live because of a word like "holocaust" or "Nazi." To me that is one of the most important things that the book does because, amidst it all, we can see reflections of people we know. The book takes the time to painstakingly make sure we never lose sight of that; unlike other books it neither glorifies the terrible nor does it make the miniscule mundane. Here, everything matters and the results hurt. The first book take a lot of tie exploring this and the second book, here, furthers that by picking up the pieces and showing you what happens when suffering continues to dig its claws into the fabric of lives.
It works well at what it does and then some and makes me happy I could introduce both portions to people that would otherwise miss out on it.
This collection of two actually found my face streaked with tears and the conversations we had about the read garnered much of the same response.

Much can be said about Spiegelman's work and how the characterizations are explored but the reality of the book is that it takes a hard-to-approach subject and shows it to everyone willing to explore. This means that a society hardened to the plight of something that seems so far removed can feel the pulse of something too monstrous for description.
I highly recommend and utterly respect both volumes of this work and cannot give it enough praise.

Editorial Review:

MAUS was the first half of the tale of survival of the author's parents, charting their desperate progress from prewar Poland Auschwitz. Here is the continuation, in which the father survives the camp and is at last reunited with his wife.

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (Newly Expanded Paperback Edition)

Simon Wiesenthal

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The Sunflower, Pain and Forgiveness, Past and Present 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Summoned to the bedside of a dying Nazi who had willingly participated in the systematic annihilation of Europe's Jews, concentration camp inmate Simon Wiesenthal found himself the captive, solitary witness to this 21-year-old SS man's confession of responsibility for committing acts of unspeakable cruelty.

Kurt had asked a nurse to bring him a Jew (any Jew would do); quite by chance the nurse selected Wiesenthal from the work detail assigned to the hospital that day. Against his will, he listened to this man recount his experience of packing a house full of Jewish men, women, and children and then setting the house on fire while lobbing grenades into the inferno and shooting at anyone who had attempted to escape this hell. Kurt watched a father, mother, and small boy leap from a window to their certain death. Before the leap, the father had shielded the child's eyes.

The image haunted Kurt, who was unable to fight again. Instead, he froze on the battlefield and suffered and injury that first cost him his sight and then took his life. Before he died, though, he wanted to confess his sins to a Jew that he might be forgiven and die in peace.

Wiesenthal, who was about the same age as this soldier, heard him out but refused to forgive. Instead, he offered silence in response to the story and returned to the concentration camp.

The experience haunted Wiesenthal; soon after it happened, he discussed it with his friends back at the camp, with a Polish Catholic seminarian. Much later, he presented the story to theologians, political leaders, Holocaust survivors, and victims of other attempted genocides and asked each of these persons what he or she would have done in the same situation.

The story itself is first book of The Sunflower; the responses to the question, "The Symposium," are the text of the second book in this volume. Broadly grouped, the respondents are Jews and Christians, primarily. There are two Buddhist respondents and one Chinese respondent who makes no reference to religion though his response is in keeping with Buddhist thinking. Within these broad categories respondents reflect on different facets of the experience Wiesenthal describes and facets of their faith and life experiences and knowledge to make a response.

The Jewish respondents point to the fact that only the person against whom a sin has been committed has the right to forgive the sinner. Therefore, Kurt cannot be forgiven; his victims are dead. The Christian respondents point out, first, that they feel they have no right to address the question because they have never been on the receiving end of genocide. Then they point out that God alone can forgive and that it is incumbent on each of us sinners to find forgiveness in our hearts for others. The Buddhists respond, as Buddhists do, in the present tense and with an eye on enlightenment--a release from suffering. Each perspective reflects a different concept of individuality and therefore of the nature of accountability.

For this reader, The Sunflower accomplishes the important task of bringing the reader into the concentration camp alongside one of its victims, into the hospital room of the dying SS man, and into the heart of the questions the Holocaust raises about responsibility, accountability, forgiveness, restitution, and grace. These are questions that refuse pat answers and therefore remain alive and active in our minds. Wiesenthal's book challenges our ability to empathize with those who suffer and our ability to think about how and why we believe what we do about ourselves and each other. It is a humble and beautiful tribute to those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. We too can honor their memory by participating in the conversation this book presents.

Editorial Review:

Author Simon Weisenthal recalls his demoralizing life in a concentration camp and his envy of the dead Germans who have sunflowers marking their graves. At the time he assumed his grave would be a mass one, unmarked and forgotten. Then, one day, a dying Nazi soldier asks Weisenthal for forgiveness for his crimes against the Jews. What would you do? This important book and the provocative question it poses is birthing debates, symposiums, and college courses. The Dalai Lama, Harry Wu, Primo Levi, and others who have witnessed genocide and human tyranny answer Wiesenthal's ultimate question on forgiveness.

The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged, New Updated Edition

Flavius Josephus

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Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

an amazing reference 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

want to know how Christianity was working when the apostles were still the ones calling the shots? here is a first/second century historians perspective on what was going on in that time

Editorial Review:

This renowned reference book has served scholars, pastors, students, and those interested in the background of the New Testament for years. The insight given into the Essene community, the destruction of Jerusalem and the interpretations and traditions of the Old Testament in first century Judaism is invaluable. The outlook of Josephus, a late first century Pharisee and historian, on Jesus and the New Testament documents is enlightening and provocative. As an original reference, The Works of Josephus is essential to a full understanding of the first century, the time of Christ and the New Testament.

Complete and unabridged, this is the best one-volume edition of the classic translation of JosephusÂ' works. The entire text has been reset in modern, easy-to-read type; numbering corresponding to that used in the Loeb edition has been added to the text; and citations and cross-references have been updated from Roman numerals to Arabic numbers.

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (Hinges of History)

Thomas Cahill

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Total reviews: 141 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

EXCELLENT 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Excellent book detailing the beginning of the first monotheistic religion
The author tells the story in a wonderful proseful way and most important suggests the importance of the beliefs mentioned in the book to the world.

Editorial Review:

Thomas Cahill, author of the bestselling How the Irish Saved Civilization, continues his Hinges of History series with The Gifts of the Jews, a light-handed, popular account of ancient Jewish culture, the culture of the Bible. The book is written from a decidedly modern point of view. Cahill notes, for instance, that Abraham moved the Jews from Ur to the land of Canaan "to improve their prospects," and that the leering inhabitants of Sodom surrounded Lot's lodging "like the ghouls in Night of the Living Dead." The Gifts of the Jews nonetheless encourages us to see the Old Testament through ancient eyes--to see its characters not as our contemporaries but as those of Gilgamesh and Amenhotep. Cahill also lingers on often-overlooked books of the Bible, such as Ruth, to discuss changes in ancient sensibility. The result is a fine, speculative, eminently readable work of history.