New Jewish Books
In 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” the young Baruch Spinoza abandoned his family’s import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious...
In 1925, James Henry Breasted, famed Egyptologist and director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, sent a team of archaeologists to the Holy Land to excavate the ancient site of Megiddo―Armageddon...
In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not...
The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina...
No biblical text has been more central to the politics of modern Israel than the book of Joshua. Named after a military leader who became the successor to Moses, it depicts the march of...
A wide-ranging look at the history of Western thinking since the seventeenth century on the purpose of the Jewish people in the past, present, and future What is the purpose of Jews in the...
How the kibbutz movement thrived despite its inherent economic contradictions and why it eventually declined The kibbutz is a social experiment in collective living that challenges traditional economic theory. By sharing all income and...
What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Hidden Heretics tells the fascinating, often...
A finely drawn portrait of Einstein’s sixteen months in Prague In the spring of 1911, Albert Einstein moved with his wife and two sons to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, where he accepted a...
A groundbreaking examination of a little-known but defining episode in early modern Jewish history A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of...
A Karakas Speaks by C.M. Kosemen
The Nazi, the Princess, and the Shoemaker: My Father’s Holocaust Odyssey by Scott M. Neuman
Jerusalem Drawn and Quartered by Sarah Tuttle-Singer
Global Jewish Foodways: A History by Hasia R. Diner & Simone Cinotto