The #1 New York Times bestseller that traces the rise of the Guggenheims, the Goldmans, and other families from immigrant poverty to social prominence.
They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into...

"The memoir of Holocaust survivor Estelle Glaser Laughlin, published sixty-four years after her liberation from the Nazis"--Provided by publisher.

Following the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, frightened parents were forced to find refuge for their children, far from the escalating anti-Jewish violence. To that end, a courageous group of Belgian women organized a desperate and highly dangerous rescue mission to usher nearly 1,000 children out of Germany and Austria. Of these children, ninety-three were placed on a freight train, traveling through the night away from their families...

This is the story of a crushingly ordinary man who had the misfortune to live in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. The son of a baptized Jewish father and a Protestant mother, Willy Wiemokli (1908–1983) was declared a half-Jew by the laws of the Third Reich, and because of this, he and his father were briefly interned in Buchenwald. Although his father was eventually executed in Auschwitz in 1943, Willy went on to become an accountant...

Originally published in 1997, Bacskai's powerful ethnography portrays the political, religious, and individual forces that came to bear on the Orthodox Jewish tradition as it struggled for survival in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Hungary. Jews who returned to their homes eagerly reestablished their close-knit community lives. However, they were greeted with hostility and faced daily prejudice. Following the fall of Hungarian democracy, the number...

Despite their common heritage, Jews born and raised on opposite sides of the Polish-Soviet border during the interwar period acquired distinct beliefs, values, and attitudes. Variances in civic commitment, school lessons, youth activities, religious observance, housing arrangements, and perceptions of security deeply influenced these adolescents who would soon face a common enemy. Set in two cities flanking the border, Grodno in the interwar Polish...