In this brilliantly researched and insightful book, psychologist Eva Fogelman presents compelling stories of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust--and offers a revealing analysis of their motivations. Based on her extensive experience as a therapist treating Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and those who helped them, Fogelman delves into the psychology of altruism, illuminating why these rescuers chose to act while others simply stood by. While analyzing motivations, Conscience And Courage tells the stories of such little-known individuals as Stefnaia Podgorska Burzminska, a Polish teenager who hid thirteen Jews in her home; Alexander Roslan, a dealer in the black market who kept uprooting his family to shelter three Jewish children in his care, as well as more heralded individuals such as Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and Miep Gies. Speaking to the same audience that flocked to Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning movie, Schindler's List, Conscience And Courage is the first book to go beyond the stories to answer the question: Why did they help?

Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination is an analysis of the ancient Christian myth that casts Jews as a 'witness-people', and this myth's presence in contemporary religious discourse. It treats diverse products of the Christian imagination, including systematic theology, works of fiction, and popular writings on biblical prophecy. The book demonstrates that the witness-people myth, which was first articulated by Augustine and which determined official attitudes towards Jews in medieval Christendom, remains a powerful force in the Christian imagination.

How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history. When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today. The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.