Judah Benjamin
Judah Benjamin

Author: James Traub

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0300229267

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A moral examination of Judah Benjamin--one of the first Jewish senators, confidante to Jefferson Davis, and champion of the cause of slavery "This new biography complicates the legacy of Benjamin . . . who used his nimble legal mind to defend slavery and the Confederacy."--New York Times Book Review "A cogent argument for acknowledging, rather than ignoring, Benjamin's role in both Jewish and American history."--Diane Cole, Wall Street Journal Judah P. Benjamin (1811-1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography, author James Traub grapples with the difficult truth that Benjamin, who was considered one of the greatest legal minds in the United States, was a slave owner who deployed his oratorical skills in defense of slavery. How could a man as gifted as Benjamin, knowing that virtually all serious thinkers outside the American South regarded slavery as the most abhorrent of practices, not see that he was complicit with evil? This biography makes a serious moral argument both about Jews who assimilated to Southern society by embracing slave culture and about Benjamin himself, a man of great resourcefulness and resilience who would not, or could not, question the practice on which his own success, and that of the South, was founded.

Judah P. Benjamin
Judah P. Benjamin

Author: Eli N. Evans

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 0029099110

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This biography was acclaimed by The New York Times as "deeply interesting" and "an absorbing account" of the life of the man called "the brains of the Confederacy". 16 pages of illustrations.

How the Jews Defeated Hitler
How the Jews Defeated Hitler

Author: Benjamin Ginsberg

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1442222387

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One of the most common assumptions about World War II is that the Jews did not actively or effectively resist their own extermination at the hands of the Nazis. In this powerful book, Benjamin Ginsberg convincingly argues that the Jews not only resisted the Germans but actually played a major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The question, he contends, is not whether the Jews fought but where and by what means. True, many Jews were poorly armed, outnumbered, and without resources, but Ginsberg shows persuasively that this myth of passivity is solely that--a myth. Instead, the Jews resisted strongly in four key ways: through their leadership role in organizing the defense of the Soviet Union, their influence and scientific research in the United States, their contribution to allied espionage and cryptanalysis, and their importance in European resistance movements. In this compelling, cogent history, we discover that Jews contributed powerfully to Hitler's defeat.

The Jewish Confederates
The Jewish Confederates

Author: Robert N. Rosen

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 9781570033636

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Reveals the breadth of Jewish participation in the American Civil War on the Confederate side. Rosen describes the Jewish communities in the South and explains their reasons for supporting the South. He relates the experiences of officers, enlisted men, politicians, rabbis and doctors.

Jewish Primitivism
Jewish Primitivism

Author: Samuel J. Spinner

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2021-07-27

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1503628280

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Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.

The Elixir of Immortality
The Elixir of Immortality

Author: Gabi Gleichmann

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 629

ISBN-13: 1590515900

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A mesmerizing debut novel that spans a thousand years of European and Jewish history seen through the beguiling members of the Spinoza family Since the eleventh century, the Spinoza family has passed down, from father to son, a secret manuscript containing the recipe for immortality. Now, after thirty-six generations, the last descendant of this long and illustrious chain, Ari Spinoza, doesn’t have a son to whom to entrust the manuscript. From his deathbed, he begins his narrative, hoping to save his lineage from oblivion. Ari’s two main sources of his family’s history are a trunk of yellowing documents inherited from his grandfather, and his great-uncle Fernando’s tales that captivated him when he was a child. He chronicles the Spinozas’ involvement in some of Europe’s most formative cultural events with intertwining narratives that move through ages of tyranny, creativity, and social upheaval: into medieval Portugal, Grand inquisitor Torquemada’s Spain, Rembrandt’s Amsterdam, the French Revolution, Freud’s Vienna, and the horrors of both world wars. The Elixir of Immortality blends truth and fiction as it rewrites European history through comic, imaginative, scandalous, and tragic tales that prove “the only thing that can possibly give human beings immortality on this earth: our ability to remember.”

We the Black Jews
We the Black Jews

Author: Yosef Ben-Jochannan

Publisher: Black Classic Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 9780933121409

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Dr. Ben destroys the myth of a "white Jewish race" and the bigotry that has denied the existence of an African Jewish culture. He establishes the legitimacy of contemporary Black Jewish culture in Africa and the diaspora and predates its origin before ancient Nile Valley civilizations.

Lincoln and the Jews
Lincoln and the Jews

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2015-03-17

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1250059534

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One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images, many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection, that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before. Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans, including members of Lincoln's cabinet and many of his top generals during the Civil War, were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln, this book shows, exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He also expressed a uniquely deep knowledge of the Old Testament, employing its language and concepts in some of his most important writings. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisors and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns, and in response to Jewish sensitivities, even changed the way he thought and spoke about America. Through his actions and his rhetoric—replacing "Christian nation," for example, with "this nation under God"—he embraced Jews as insiders. In this groundbreaking work, the product of meticulous research, historian Jonathan D. Sarna and collector Benjamin Shapell reveal how Lincoln's remarkable relationship with American Jews impacted both his path to the presidency and his policy decisions as president. The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America.