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"The true story of a vigilante group of Holocaust survivors who conspired to kill six million Germans, Nakam (Hebrew for 'vengeance') tells the story of 'the Avengers' (Nokmim), a group of young Holocaust survivors led by poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner, who undertook a mission of revenge against Germany following the crimes of the Holocaust. Motivated by both the atrocities they had endured and the realization that murderous antisemitic attacks on survivors continued long after the Nazi surrender, these fifty young men and women sought retaliation at a level commensurate with the devastation caused by the Holocaust, making clear to the world that Jewish blood would no longer be shed with impunity. Had they been successful, they would have poisoned city water supplies and loaves of bread distributed to German POWs, with the aim of killing six million Germans. Kovner and his followers went to great lengths to carry out their plans, going so far as to obtain the plans for Nuremberg's municipal water system, secure large quantities of poison, infiltrate a POW camp and the bakery that supplied it, and distribute poisoned bread to prisoners - but their plots were ultimately stymied. Most of the members of Nakam eventually returned to Israel, where for decades many of them refused to speak publicly about their roles in the group. While the Avengers' story began to come to light in the 1980s, details of the relations between the group and Zionist leadership and the motivations of its members have remained unknown. Drawing on rich archival sources and in-depth interviews with the Avengers in their later years, historian Dina Porat examines the formation of the group and the clash between the formative humanistic values held by its members and their unrealized plans for violent retribution."--

"This book explores the dynamic role of love in German-Jewish lives, from the birth of the German Empire in the 1870s, to the 1970s, a generation after the Shoah. During a remarkably turbulent hundred-year period when German Jews experienced five political regimes, rapid urbanization, transformations in gender relations, and war and genocide, the romantic ideals of falling in love and marrying for love helped German Jews to develop a new sense of self. Appeals to romantic love were also significant in justifying relationships between Jews and non-Jews, even when those unions created conflict within and between communities. By incorporating novel approaches from the history of emotions and life-cycle history, Christian Bailey moves beyond existing research into the sexual and racial politics of modern Germany and approaches a new frontier in the study of subjectivity and the self. German Jews in Love draws on a rich array of sources, from newspapers and love letters to state and other official records. Calling on this evidence, Bailey shows the ways German Jews' romantic relationships reveal an aspect of acculturation that has been overlooked: how deeply cultural scripts worked their way into emotions; those most intimate and seemingly pre-political aspects of German-Jewish subjectivity"--

"In the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler's genocidal campaign against Jews. But the horrors of the Holocaust were not limited to the concentration camps of Europe: antisemitic terror spread through Vichy French imperial channels to France's colonies in North Africa, where in the forced labor camps of Algeria and Morocco, Jews and other 'undesirables' faced brutal conditions and struggled to survive in an unforgiving landscape quite unlike Europe. In this richly historical graphic novel, historian Aomar Boum and illustrator Nadjib Berber take us inside this lesser-known side of the traumas wrought by the Holocaust by following one man's journey as a Holocaust refugee"--

"A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. These objects and the memories they evoke are among the threads that scholar and writer Susan Rubin Suleiman uses to weave back together the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the hopes parents have for their children and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as a case study of how historical events are always at work in our private lives. As a young girl growing up in a poor Jewish neighborhood in Budapest, Susan learned to call herself by a new name--the name on the false papers her father had obtained to keep their family safe. When the Nazis marched into Hungary in the spring of 1944, Susan's relatives in northeast Hungary would be among the 450,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, but her immediate family survived undercover in Budapest; later on, they would emigrate to Chicago by way of Vienna, Paris, Haiti and New York. In her adult life as a prominent feminist professor, Susan rarely allowed herself to think about this chapter of her past--but eventually, when she had children of her own, she found herself called back to Budapest, unlocking memories that would change the perspective of her scholarship and the trajectory of her career. In this poignant memoir, Susan returns to her childhood in Budapest and adolescence and young womanhood in the United States, negotiating the expectations of her parents and her own desire to be "truly American." At once an intellectual autobiography and a reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and family, Daughter of History invites us to consider how the objects that underpin our own lives are gateways to the past"--

"For the sixty thousand German Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and found refuge in Mandate Palestine between 1933 and 1941, migration meant radical changes: it transformed their professional and cultural lives and confronted them with a new language, climate, and society. Bridging German-Jewish and Israeli history, this book tells the story of German-Jewish migration to Mandate Palestine/Eretz Israel as gender history. It argues that this migration was shaped and structured by gendered policies and ideologies and experienced by men and women in a gendered form - from the decision to immigrate and the anticipation of change, through the outcomes for family life, body, self-image, and sexuality. Immigration led to immediate transformations in allocations of tasks within the family, concepts of masculinity and femininity, and participation in the labor market and domestic life. Through a close examination of archival materials in German, English, and Hebrew, including administrative records, personal documents, newspapers, and oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book follows Jewish migrants along their journeys from Germany and into the workplaces, living rooms, and kitchens of their new homeland, providing a new perspective on everyday life in Mandate Palestine. Viola Alianov-Rautenberg's work illuminates key issues at the intersection of migration studies, German-Jewish studies, and Israeli history, demonstrating how the lens of gender enriches our understanding of social change, power, ethnicity, and nation-building"--

"Originally published in Hebrew in 2019 under the title Ha-tsiyonut ha-meshichit shel ha-gaon mi-Vilna: Hamtza atah shel masoret."

"This book investigates a fundamental tension in Hasidic studies: How did a religious movement known to be radical in its views about God, revelation, and personal religiosity simultaneously produce commitment to the structures and obligations of Jewish law? Exploring the movement from its emergence in the mid-1700s until 1815, Ariel Evan Mayse argues that nomos, eros, and mystical piety merged in Hasidism to produce a daring and highly original theory of the commandments and their significance. The novum of Hasidism is visible not in whether its leaders broke or upheld rabbinic norms, but in the movement's vivid attempt to rethink the purpose of ritual. Shedding allegiance to the notion of law, Mayse claims that the methods and vocabulary of ritual studies are better suited to helping us understand the contradictions and tensions of this religious movement as well as its remarkable intellectual vitality. Delving into the full range of Hasidic sources (legal writings, sermons, regimen vitae, theological treatises, responsa, letters, and hagiography) and reading them together with studies of ritual across the past three decades, this book argues that Hasidism offers a sophisticated intellectual vision that pushes beyond a host of hopelessly insufficient binaries such as law and spirit, nomos and eros, mind and body, tradition and innovation"--