Jewish American Heritage Month is commemorated in May and is a national month of paying tribute to the generations of Jewish Americans who helped form the fabric of American history, culture and society.
Join us for the program Jews in the American Theater: A Legacy Like No Other, on May 19 @7pm.
Believe it or not, there was a time when there were no Jews in the American theater. What changed that? And how did Jews come to play such a vital role in every aspect of the business, reshaping it over the last 150 years?
Entertainment historian John Kenrick returns, using fascinating behind the scenes stories and rare photos and performance videos to celebrate the role Jewish men and women have played on Broadway and beyond.
Here are some nonfiction titles available with your Livingston Library card that highlight and speak to the Jewish experience throughout history. Also listed are DVDs and online resources.
Nonfiction
Antisemitism in America : A Warning by Charles E. Schumer
This book illuminates the Jewish experience and the prejudices both hidden and overt that have led to the chronic persecution of the Jewish people. By placing antisemitism in its proper historical context, and drawing from Senator Schumer’s own life, the book informs Americans’ understanding of the causes of the recent swell of antisemitic rhetoric and violence in our country. In very personal terms, it will engage with debates over the purpose and meaning of Israel and help draw a line between legitimate criticism of its government and when criticism of Israel as a Jewish homeland verges into antisemitism.
Children of Radium : A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne
This extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis. Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection-first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz.
Cold Crematorium : Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz by Jozsef Debreczeni
The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps. When József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived the “selection,” which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”-the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders-anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder-decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die. Debreczeni survived the liberation of Auschwitz and immediately recorded his experiences in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest, most merciless indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, is an eyewitness account of incomparable literary quality.
The Counterfeit Countess: the Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust by Elizabeth B. White
White tells the remarkable, unknown story of “Countess Janina Suchodolska,” a Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Poland’s Nazi occupiers. Mehlberg operated in Lublin, Poland, headquarters of Aktion Reinhard, the SS operation that murdered 1.7 million Jews in occupied Poland. Using the identity papers of a Polish aristocrat, she worked as a welfare official while also serving in the Polish resistance. With guile, cajolery, and steely persistence, the “Countess” persuaded SS officials to release thousands of Poles from the Majdanek concentration camp. She won permission to deliver food and medicine–even decorated Christmas trees–for thousands more of the camp’s prisoners. At the same time, she personally smuggled supplies and messages to resistance fighters imprisoned at Majdanek, where 63,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits. Incredibly, she eluded detection, and ultimately survived the war and emigrated to the US.
The Dressmaker’s Mirror : Sudden Death, Genetics, and a Jewish Family’s Secret by Susan Weiss Leibman
A narrative that is equal parts genetic and family detective story, geneticist Liebman chronicles the sorrows that a deadly mutation caused in her family as well as how she discovered the killer: a new heart disease gene mutation that affects 1 in 800 Ashkenazi Jews.
Eminent Jews : Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer by David Denby
Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American, they were hell-bent on shaking up the world of their fathers. They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a common historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. As prosperity for American Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people listened to music, defined what was vulgar or not, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the nation’s soul.
Exploring American Jewish History Through 50 Historic Treasures by Avi Y. Decter
This full-color book offers students and general readers new perspectives on the rich complexity of Jewish experiences in America. Each of the treasures is described in historical, material, and visual contexts, offering readers new, unexpected insights into the meanings of Jewish life, history, and culture.
Fear No Pharaoh : American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery by Richard Keitner
The story of how American Jews engaged with questions of slavery and politics in the Civil War era.
First Lady of Laughs : The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America’s First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian by Grace Kessler Overbeke
Piecing together the forgotten story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish female stand-up comedian, this book reveals the history of women in comedy, American Jews, and how stand-up found its feet.
For Such a Time as This : On Being Jewish Today by Elliott J. Cosgrove
Drawing on the rich trove of Jewish history and tradition, Rabbi Cosgrove, one of today’s most influential spiritual guides and thought leaders, helps listeners make sense of this fraught and trying time. With warmth and wisdom, Rabbi Cosgrove explores the challenging questions embedded in the soul of American Jewry.
Leonard Cohen : The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall by Christophe Lebold
Lebold follows the singer’s cosmopolitan life from Montreal and New York to the Greek island of Hydra and examines his perpetual dialogues with himself, God, and avalanches. We see how six decades of radiant pessimism and a few thousand nights in hotel rooms transformed a young Jewish poet who longed to be a saint into an existentialist troubadour in love with women and a gravelly voiced crooner who taught a thousand ways of dissolving into love.
The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America by Daniel Schulman
The incredible saga of the German-Jewish immigrants—with now familiar names like Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Warburg and Schiff, Lehman and Seligman—who profoundly influenced the rise of modern finance.
10/7 : 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron
The definitive account of the 10/7 attacks through the stories of its victims and the communities they called home. 10/7 chronicles the massacre that ignited a war through the stories of more than 100 civilians. These stories are the products of extensive interviews with survivors, the bereaved, and first responders in Israel and beyond. Yaron profiles victims from a wide range of communities-depicting the fullness of their lives, not just their final moments-to honor their memories and reveal the way the attack ripped open Israeli society and put the entire Middle East on the precipice of disaster.
On Being Jewish Now by Antoine Campagnon
On October 7th, 2023, Jews in Israel were attacked in the largest pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a day felt by Jews everywhere who came together to process and speak out in ways some never had before. In this collection, 75 contributors speak to Jewish joy, celebration, laughter, food, trauma, loss, love, and family, and the common threads that course through the Jewish people: resilience and humor.
Proust: A Jewish Way by Antoine Compagnon
Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust’s portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness.
Tablets Shattered : The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer
A definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in.
To Be a Jew Today : A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People by Noah Feldman
A guide to contemporary Judaism by a law professor and public intellectual.
Two Wheels to Freedom : The Story of a Young Jew, Wartime Resistance, and a Daring Escape by Arthur J. Magida
Though Cioma Schonhaus was only 11 years old when the Nazis first came to power, his cleverness and resourcefulness eventually made him an unlikely hero and bon vivant. As a young adult staying one step ahead of the S.S., Cioma would dine in swanky restaurants and frequent trendy bars and have plenty of romances–all while sabotaging weapons in the munitions factory where he worked. He even bought a sailboat and taught himself how to sail. These hijinks never distracted Cioma from a deeper mission. Trained as an artist, Cioma’s masterfully forged fake IDs ensured that several hundred Jews survived the war. When he learned the Gestapo was closing in on him, Cioma masterminded a singularly daring escape: spending a month biking to Switzerland, he became the only person to cycle his way out of the Third Reich.
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew by Emmanuel Acho
For Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby no question about Jews is off-limits. They go there. They cover Jews and money. Jews and power. Jews and privilege. Jews and white privilege. The Black and Jewish struggle. Emmanuel asks, Did Jews kill Jesus? To which Noa responds, “Why are Jewish people history’s favorite scapegoat?” They unpack Judaism itself: Is it a religion, culture, a peoplehood, or a race? And: Are you antisemitic if you’re anti-Zionist? The questions—and answers—might make you squirm, but together, they explain the tropes, stereotypes, and catalysts of antisemitism in America today.
Unsettled : American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine by Oren Kroll-Zeldin
Examines the role of young American Jews in the Palestine solidarity movement and argues that their activism and commitment to ending the occupation and Israeli apartheid is a Jewish value, which is a necessary response to the changing conditions of American Jewish life in the twenty-first century.
Zelda Popkin : The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer by Jeremy D. Popkin
Popkin lived and wrote through all the great changes of American Jewish women’s lives in the 20th century: the reaction against religious tradition, women’s emancipation, struggles against antisemitism, the impact of the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, and the upsurge of Jewish identity in the 1960s.
DVDs
When two Jews finally manage to escape the Auschwitz concentration camp, they compile a detailed report about the systematic genocide at the camp. However, with Nazi propaganda and international liaisons still in place, their account seems to be too harrowing to believe.
I Danced for the Angel of Death: The Dr. Edith Eva Eger Story
At the age of sixteen, Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. Hours after her parents were killed, Nazi officer Dr. Josef Mengele (The Angel of Death), forced her to dance for his amusement. This dance saved her life.
Chronicles the 350 year saga of immigrants who gradually wove themselves into the fabric of American life without abandoning their traditions.
Discusses the history of Jewish immigration to the United States throughout the centuries.
The Jewish People: A Story of Survival
This is the story of Jewish survival. From slavery to the loss of their homeland; from exile to anti-Semitism; from pogroms to near annihilation in the Holocaust, they managed to endure while so many communities have vanished. Spanning millennia, this history of the Jewish people explores how a small group who started as desert nomads overcame countless obstacles to survive to the present day.
Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo in Poland, saved nearly 300 Jews during the Second World War. This is a poignant documentary that is an extraordinary true story about the humanitarian spirit, as exemplified by two people who, with enormous personal risk to themselves, faced the most challenging circumstances with bravery and decency. In 1965, Jan and Antonina Zabinski were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
Simon Schama presents this epic series exploring the extraordinary story of the Jewish experience from ancient times to the present day. Both deeply historical and utterly contemporary, this is a compelling film about distinctiveness and difference, separation and isolation, tolerance and prejudice. It is also a celebration of the ways in which Jewish thought, imagination, and achievement have transformed the world for us all.
Online Resources
Kanopy available with your Livingston Library card has several films/documentaries on Jewish Americans, Jewish history and cinema.
The Jewish History Resource Center
-Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian