"This cultural history of the American-Israeli relationship, beginning in the nineteenth century and going through 1947, when the state of Israel was established, to the present puts a focus on religion, Christian and Jewish, and its connections with individual American artists and their intense relationships with Israel. In high relief are the ... revealing and often little-known stories of individual writers, thinkers, and superstar performers in music, theater, dance, film, and television and their relationships"--

From the days of steamship travel to Palestine to today's evangelical Christian tours of Jesus's birthplace, the relationship between the United States and the Holy Land has become one of the world's most consequential international alliances. While the political side of U.S.-Israeli relations has long played out on the world stage, the relationship, as Shalom Goldman shows in this illuminating cultural history, has also played out on actual stages. Telling the stories of the American superstars of pop and high culture who journeyed to Israel to perform, lecture, and rivet fans, Goldman chronicles how the creative class has both expressed and influenced the American relationship with Israel. The galaxy of stars who have made headlines for their trips includes Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Scarlett Johansson. While diverse socially and politically, they all served as prisms for the evolution of U.S.-Israeli relations, as Israel, the darling of the political and cultural Left in the 1950s and early 1960s, turned into the darling of the political Right from the late 1970s. Today, as relations between the two nations have only intensified, stars must consider highly fraught issues, such as cultural boycotts, in planning their itineraries.

Examines the Business Administration Main Office of the SS, which built up the slave-labor system in Nazi concentration camps.

An architect who made drawings of conditions at Therezienstadt reveals his experiences

Postwar American officials desired, in principle, to promote Arab-Israeli peace in order to stabilize the Middle East. This book shows how, during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the desire for peace was not always an American priority. Instead, they consistently gave more weight to their determination to contain the Soviet Union.

According to Simon Wiesenthal, nearly half of the crimes associated with the Holocaust were committed by Austrians, who comprised just 8.5 percent of the population of Hitler's Greater German Reich. Bruce Pauley's book explains this phenomenon by providin

From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness." With these words Sara Nomberg-Przytyk begins this painful and compelling account of her experiences while imprisoned for two years in the infamous death camp. Writing twenty years after her liberation, she recreates the events of a dark past which, in her own words, would have driven her mad had she tried to relive it sooner. But while she records unimaginable atrocities, she also richly describes the human compassion that stubbornly survived despite the backdrop of camp depersonalization and imminent extermination. Commemorative in spirit and artistic in form, Auschwitz convincingly portrays the paradoxes of human nature in extreme circumstances. With consummate understatement Nomberg-Przytyk describes the behavior of concentration camp inmates as she relentlessly and pitilessly examines her own motives and feelings. In this world unmitigated cruelty coexisted with nobility, rapacity with self-sacrifice, indifference with selfless compassion. This book offers a chilling view of the human drama that existed in Auschwitz. From her portraits of camp personalities, an extraordinary and horrifying profile emerges of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose medical experiments resulted in the slaughter of nearly half a million Jews. Nomberg-Przytyk's job as an attendant in Mengle's hospital allowed her to observe this Angel of Death firsthand and to provide us with the most complete description to date of his monstrous activities. The original Polish manuscript was discovered by Eli Pfefferkorn in 1980 in the Yad Vashem Archive in Jerusalem. Not knowing the fate of the journal's author, Pfefferkorn spent two years searching and finally located Nomberg-Przytyk in Canada. Subsequent interviews revealed the history of the manuscript, the author's background, and brought the journal into perspective.