Jewish Non-fiction


Showing 1 - 17 of 17  There are a total of 217 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "American ghost"
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Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"In American Ghost, Hannah Nordhaus traces the life, death, and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother Julia, from her childhood in Germany to her years in the American West with her Jewish merchant husband. As she traces the strands of Julia's life, Nordhaus uncovers a larger tale of how a true-life story becomes a ghost story and how difficult it can sometimes be to separate history and myth"-- "Nordhaus traces the life, death, and...
Book cover for "Avenue of spies"
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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"The best-selling author of The Liberator brings to life the incredible true story of an American doctor in Paris, and his heroic espionage efforts during the Second World War. The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris's hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young...
Book cover for "The Berlin shadow"
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand their father's relentless drive...

4. Brazen

Book cover for "Brazen"
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"A riveting, inspiring memoir of one woman's escape from an extremist religious sect and an extraordinary rise from housewife to shoe designer, to CEO and co-owner of the modeling agency Elite World Group. Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart's life-what she wore, what she ate, what she thought-was controlled by the dictates of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At nineteen, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she...
Book cover for "Come to this court & cry"
Star rating for Come to this court & cry
Description:
Investigating the death of Herberts Cukurs, a fugitive Nazi from Latvia who had served in her grandfather's unit, and modern efforts to exonerate him for his past actions, the author explores both her family story and the legacy of the post-Holocaust era in Europe, and how that legacy extends into the present.
Book cover for "Concealed"
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Description:
Esther Amini grew up in Queens, New York, during the freewheeling 1960s. She also grew up in a Persian-Jewish household, the American-born daughter of parents who had fled Mashhad, Iran. In Concealed, she tells the story of being caught between these two worlds: the dutiful daughter of tradition-bound parents who hungers for more self-determination than tradition allows. Exploring the roots of her father's deep silences and explosive temper, her mother's...
Book cover for "East West street"
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Book cover for "Endpapers"
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Description:
A portrait of a Jewish German family divided by exile, abandonment and emigration.
Book cover for "Jews in the garden"
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Description:
"Investigative journalist Judy Rakowsky and her elderly cousin Sam, a Holocaust survivor, never knew what happened to their family during the Holocaust. All they knew was that their relatives were hidden away from the Nazis by neighbors, and then they were never heard from again. Over the course of two decades, the two traveled back to Sam's hometown in Poland in search of clues to what became of their lost family-but when they asked questions, doors...
Book cover for "The last kings of Shanghai"
Star rating for The last kings of Shanghai
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Shanghai, 1936. The Cathay Hotel, located on the city's famous waterfront, is one of the most glamorous in the world. Built by Victor Sassoon--billionaire playboy and scion of the Sassoon dynasty--the hotel hosts a who's who of global celebrities: Noel Coward...
Book cover for "The lost"
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
For five years, Daniel Mendelsohn traveled the globe searching for an answer to the question he had first asked as a boy decades earlier: What really happened to his great-uncle's family during the Holocaust? Here, Mendelsohn weaves together his discoveries about the past, family secrets and Judaism itself. He visits nearly a dozen countries on four continents in pursuit of the truth, eventually interviewing the town's twelve living survivors. Along...
Book cover for "Our America, Nuestra América, unsere Amerika"
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Book cover for "Plunder"
Star rating for Plunder
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The story of [the author's] quest to reclaim his family's apartment building in Poland--and of the astonishing entanglement with Nazi treasure hunters that follows"--
Book cover for "Prague winter"
Star rating for Prague winter
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:

"A riveting tale of her family's experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority. . . . More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of Czechoslovakian democracy." — Los Angeles Times

Drawn from her own memory, her parents' written reflections, and interviews

...
Book cover for "The Sassoons"
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"A spectacular story, the making of a dynasty, one of the great untold sagas of a gilded Jewish Bagdadi family-the merchant princes of the orient, that built a vast empire through finance and trade: opium, cotton, oil, shipping, banking, that reached across three continents, and ultimately changed the destinies of nations. For more than two centuries, from the 18th to the 20th, they were one of the richest families in the world, known as 'the Rothschilds...
Book cover for "Those who forget"
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"Published to international awards and acclaim, [this] is journalist Géraldine Schwarz's ... account of her German and French grandparents' lives during World War II, an in-depth history of Europe's post-war reckoning with fascism, and an urgent appeal to remember as a defense against today's rise of far-right nationalism"--
Book cover for "When time stopped"
Star rating for When time stopped
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Neumann dives into the secrets of her father's past: years spent hiding in plain sight in war-torn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew"--Publisher marketing.