Books in the The Modern Jewish Experience series

How Jewish students promoted diversity in American culture

The compelling history of ten Jewish families rebuilding their lives in Warsaw after the Holocaust';amply illustrated... the book reverberates with hope' (Jewish Book Council). Warsaw, Poland, once described as the ';Paris of the East,' had been transformed into a landscape of ruin by the ravages of World War II. Among the few areas of the city center that escaped Nazi decimation was Ujazdowskie Avenue, where German officials lived during the occupation. In the late 1940s, while most surviving Polish Jews were making their homes in new countries, ten Jewish families reclaimed a once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue and began reconstructing their lives. These families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past. Based on interviews with family members, extensive archival research, and the families' personal papers and correspondence, Karen Auerbach presents an engrossing story of loss and rebirth, political faith and disillusionment, and the persistence of Jewishness.

When American Jewish men intermarry, goes the common assumption, they and their families are "lost" to the Jewish religion. The author shows that it is not necessarily so. She looks at intermarriage and parenthood through the eyes of a post-World War II cohort of Jewish men and discovers what intermarriage has meant to them and their families.

This book presents an unconventional history of minority nationalism in interwar Eastern Europe. Focusing on an influential group of grassroots activists, Tatjana Lichtenstein uncovers Zionist projects intended to sustain the flourishing Jewish national life in Czechoslovakia.The book shows that Zionism was not an exit strategy for Jews, but as a ticket of admission to the societies they already called home.It explores how and why Zionists envisioned minority nationalism as a way to construct Jews' belonging and civic equality in Czechoslovakia.By giving voice to the diversity of aspirations within interwar Zionism, the book offers a fresh view of minority nationalism and state building in Eastern Europe.