"Warsaw and Jerusalem deals with different aspects of the inherent paradoxes of Jewish-Polish relations. Written by scholars from Israel and from Poland, who study history, culture, education, and politics, this book forms a unique interdisciplinary collage. Thus, it has a twofold advantage: as an academic insight in the field of Jewish studies; and as a social bonder of an academic community that has its representatives in universities in Israel and in Poland.This project is bound to be an inspiring source for scholars of Jewish studies and Jewish history. In college or university classes, the collection of a variety of chapters will aid students who compose their assignments and need brainwave resources in the field. With a contribution to the deep comprehension of the ongoing discourse about historical as well as nowadays relations between Israel – that represents the Jewish people – and Poland, this book will also appeal to institutes that commemorate Jewish community life in Poland, particularly those who concentrate on Holocaust memorial and Holocaust studies. Many of these institutes aim to be centers where life before and after the Holocaust can be studied, and this book certainly falls within the framework of a resource-book for such cause. As opposed to other volumes in this field, this book forms – to a certain extent – a primary source. It talks less about Jewish culture or education from a scholarly examining angle, and prefers to present Jewish culture and education with a broad variety of examples. Additionally, it is highly updated, it tells the full story not only about pre-Holocaust Jewish culture in Poland, but also about current educational projects. All in all, it is not a stand-alone handbook for Jewish-Polish studies; but it can certainly function as an initial source-book for anyone who studies the subject."--

Warsaw and Jerusalem deals with different aspects of the inherent paradoxes of Jewish-Polish relations. Written by scholars from Israel and from Poland, who study history, culture, education, and politics, this book forms a unique interdisciplinary collage. Thus, it has a twofold advantage: as an academic insight in the field of Jewish studies; and as a social bonder of an academic community that has its representatives in universities in Israel and in Poland. This project is bound to be an inspiring source for scholars of Jewish studies and Jewish history. In college or university classes, the collection of a variety of chapters will aid students who compose their assignments and need brainwave resources in the field. With a contribution to the deep comprehension of the ongoing discourse about historical as well as nowadays relations between Israel – that represents the Jewish people – and Poland, this book will also appeal to institutes that commemorate Jewish community life in Poland, particularly those who concentrate on Holocaust memorial and Holocaust studies. Many of these institutes aim to be centers where life before and after the Holocaust can be studied, and this book certainly falls within the framework of a resource-book for such cause. As opposed to other volumes in this field, this book forms – to a certain extent – a primary source. It talks less about Jewish culture or education from a scholarly examining angle, and prefers to present Jewish culture and education with a broad variety of examples. Additionally, it is highly updated, it tells the full story not only about pre-Holocaust Jewish culture in Poland, but also about current educational projects. All in all, it is not a stand-alone handbook for Jewish-Polish studies; but it can certainly function as an initial source-book for anyone who studies the subject.

In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service. Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions. Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In this remarkable book, which combines both memoir and historical analysis, Peter F. Dembowski describes the fate some five thousand Christians of Jewish origin lived in the Warsaw ghetto during the early 1940s.

A dazzling novel—set in early 1970's New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of World War II, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance. “Looks deeply at the echoes and overlaps among art, resistance, love, and history ... an impressive debut.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Female Persuasion New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Travelling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves. An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.