Best Jewish Biographies Books
Here you will get Best Jewish Biographies Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books for you.
1. Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth
Author: by Noa Tishby
Free Press (April 6, 2021)
English
352 pages
A fascinating and very moving (Aaron Sorkin, award-winning screenwriter of The West Wing and The Social Network) chronological timeline spanning from Biblical times to today that explores one of the most interesting countries in the worldIsrael.Israel. The small strip of arid land is 5,700 miles away but remains a hot-button issue and a thorny topic of debate.
But while everyone seems to have a strong opinion about Israel, how many people actually know the facts? Here to fill in the information gap is Israeli American Noa Tishby. But this is not your Bubbie’s history book (Bill Maher, host of Real Time with Bill Maher).
Instead, offering a fresh, 360-degree view, Tishby brings her passion, humor, and deep intimacy (Yossi Klein Halevi, New York Times bestselling author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor) to the subject, creating an accessible and dynamic portrait of a tiny country of outsized relevance.
Through bite-sized chunks of history and deeply personal stories, Tishby chronicles her homeland’s evolution, beginning in Biblical times and moving forward to cover everything from WWI to Israel’s creation to the disputes dividing the country today. Tackling popular misconceptions with an abundance of facts, Tishby provides critical context around headline-generating controversies and offers a clear, intimate account of the richly cultured country of Israel.
2. The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor
Author: by Eddie Jaku
Harper
English
208 pages
A New York Times BestsellerIn this uplifting memoir in the vein of The Last Lecture and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust survivor pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best possible life.
Born in Leipzig, Germany, into a Jewish family, Eddie Jaku was a teenager when his world was turned upside-down. On November 9, 1938, during the terrifying violence of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Eddie was beaten by SS thugs, arrested, and sent to a concentration camp with thousands of other Jews across Germany.
Every day of the next seven years of his life, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors in Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and finally on a forced death march during the Third Reich’s final days. The Nazis took everything from Eddiehis family, his friends, and his country.
But they did not break his spirit. Against unbelievable odds, Eddie found the will to survive. Overwhelming grateful, he made a promise: he would smile every day in thanks for the precious gift he was given and to honor the six million Jews murdered by Hitler.
3. All But My Life
Author: by Gerda Klein
Hill and Wang
English
272 pages
All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein’s six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops-including the man who was to become her husband-in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey.
Gerda’s serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps.
Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of “all but her life.” By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead.
Despite her horrifying experiences, Klein conveys great strength of spirit and faith in humanity. In the darkness of the camps, Gerda and her young friends manage to create a community of friendship and love. Although stripped of the essence of life, they were able to survive the barbarity of their captors.
4. Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend
Author: by Joshua M. Greene
English
352 pages
164722215X
Winner Best of Los Angeles Award’s “Best Holocaust Book – 2021” A must-read that hopefully will be adapted for the screen. Greene lets Wilzig’s effervescent spirit shine through, and his story will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Library JournalUnstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure.
While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp.
After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis, a service that earned him a visa to America. On arrival, he made three vows: to never go hungry again, to support the Jewish people, and to speak out against injustice.
He earned his first dollar shoveling snow after a fierce blizzard. His next job was laboring in toxic sweatshops. From these humble beginnings, he became President, Chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and grew a full-service commercial bank to more than $4 billion in assets.
5. Surviving The Forest (World War II Brave Women Fiction)
Author: by Adiva Geffen
English
230 pages
1796269409
Five shots on Saturday morning change their fate foreverShurka is a happy young woman who lives a fairy tale life with her beloved husband and their two young children, in a pretty house in a village in Poland. She believes that nothing can hurt them.
Or so she thinksThen, World War II breaks out and the happy family quickly understands that their happiness has come to a brutal end. The family is forced to flee their house and find shelter in a neighboring ghetto, where they come to realized that the Gestapo is taking Jews away on trucks every night, never to be seen again.
The family makes a brave and difficult choice to flee to the dark forest. There, surrounded by animals, they know that this is their only chance of escaping the real beasts. They have no idea what will await them, but they know that doing nothing is not an option if they wish to survive.
Surviving the Forest is the second book in the “World War II Brave Women” series
6. Letters to Camondo
Author: by Edmund de Waal
English
192 pages
0374603480
A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de CamondoLetters to Camondo is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de Camondo, the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in Paris, now the Muse Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art.
The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, the Rothschilds of the East, who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle poque high society, as well as being targets of antisemitismmuch like de Waal’s relations, the Ephrussi family, to whom they were connected.
Moise de Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with art for his son, Nissim; after Nissim was killed in the First World War, the house was bequeathed to the French state. Eventually, the Camondos were murdered by the Nazis.
After de Waal, one of the world’s greatest ceramic artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.
7. Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy
Author: by Anne Sebba
English
320 pages
1250198631
New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba’s moving biography of Ethel Rosenberg, the wife and mother whose execution for espionage-related crimes defined the Cold War and horrified the world. In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart.
Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother.
This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than thirty years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then. Ethel was a bright girl who might have fulfilled her personal dream of becoming an opera singer, but instead found herself struggling with the social mores of the 1950’s.
She longed to be a good wife and perfect mother, while battling the political paranoia of the McCarthy era, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a mother who never valued her. Because of her profound love for and loyalty to her husband, she refused to incriminate him, despite government pressure on her to do so.
8. The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams
Author: by Jonathan Ned Katz
English
240 pages
1641605162
On these pages, Eve Adams rises up, loves, rebelsher times, eerily resembling our own. Joan Nestle, cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and author of A Restricted Country Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovers the forgotten story of radical lesbian Eve Adams and her long-lost book Lesbian Love Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Eve Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912, took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York.
Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love. Adams’s bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the US Bureau of Investigation, leading to her surveillance and arrest. Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene book and of attempted sex with a policewoman sent to entrap her.
Adams was jailed and then deported back to Europe, and ultimately murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz. In The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early, daring activist.
9. Philip Roth: The Biography
Author: by Blake Bailey
English
912 pages
039324072X
New York Times Bestseller The renowned biographer’s definitive portrait of a literary titan. Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations.
The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene. Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain.
Bailey examines Roth’s rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.
Tracing Roth’s path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth’s engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture.100 photographs
10. Night (The Night Trilogy Book 1)
Author: by Elie Wiesel
B007TQ9PK4
Penguin
May 3, 2012
Night, Elie Wiesel’s harrowing first-hand account of the Holocaust, is a devastating exploration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope. Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor’s perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust.
Translated by Marion Wiesel with a preface by Elie Wiesel’A slim volume of terrifying power’ The New York Times’To the best of my knowledge no one has left behind him so moving a record’ Alfred Kazin’Wiesel has taken his own anguish and imaginatively metamorphosed it into art’ Curt Leviant, Saturday Review
11. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
Author: by Deborah Feldman
B005GG0M60
Simon & Schuster
February 14, 2012
Now a Netflix original series! Unorthodox is the bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman’s escape from a religious sect, in the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Carolyn Jessop’s Escape, featuring a new epilogue by the author. As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read.
Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life among the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, regardless of the obstacles, she would have to forge a pathfor herself and her sonto happiness and freedom.
12. The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah: Fear and Love in the Modern Middle East
Author: by Adam Valen Levinson
B06XH318X2
English
10890 KB
Chronically questioning, funny, and bold, a young American explores the majority-Muslim lands that scare him most. Armed only with college Arabic and restless curiosity, Adam Valen Levinson sets out to learn about the world 9/11 made us fear. From a base in globalized and sterilized Abu Dhabi, he sets out to lunch in Taliban territory in Afghanistan, travels under the watchful eye of Syria’s secret police, risks shipwreck en route to Somalia, investigates Yazidi beliefs in a sacred cave, cliff dives in Oman, celebrates New Year’s Eve in Tahrir Square, and, at every turn, discovers a place that matches not at all with its reputation.
Valen Levinson crosses borders with wisecracking humor, erudition, and humanity, seeking common ground with bros everywhere, and finding that people who pray differently often laugh the same. And as a young man bar mitzvahed eight years late, he slowly learns how childish it is to live by decisions and distinctions born of fear.
13. The Diary of a Young Girl. Anne Frank
Author: by Anne Frank
Puffin Books
English
0141315199
The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963.
This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informativean unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.
15. I Only Wanted to Live (A WW2 Jewish Boy Holocaust Survival True Story (World War II Memoir))
Author: by Arie Tamir
English
318 pages
1694929361
Three mass deportations.A death sentence. One remarkable story of survival. When Leosz was only six, his life changed unimaginably. World War II broke out in 1939, sweeping the young boy into the whirlwind of the Holocaust. For six long torturous years, Leosz witnessed and experienced every imaginable suffering: myriads of overcrowded transports headed for concentration camps, life on the streets of occupied Poland as an abandoned child, hiding from cruel Nazis, forced labor under conditions of starvation and the constant threat of death.
Only one thing kept him safehis unwavering will to go on living. This is the incredible and inspiring story of a little Jewish boy who managed to survive all possible levels of hell by clinging on to life.
16. Lalechka
Author: by Amira Keidar
English
279 pages
1697342353
A little girl is smuggled out of a Ghetto. Two courageous women. And an inspirational story of survival. In 1941, the height of World War II, in a Polish ghetto a baby girl named Rachel was born. Her parents, Jacob and Zippa, were willing to do anything to keep her alive.
They nicknamed her Lalechka. Just before Lalechka’s first birthday, the Nazis began to systematically murder everyone in the ghetto. Her father, understood that staying in the ghetto would mean certain death for his child. In a desperate but hope-filled move, Lalechka’s parents decided to save their daughter, no matter at what cost.
Jacob smuggled them outside the boundaries of the ghetto where Zippa’s Polish friends, Irena and Sophia, were waiting. She entrusted her beloved Lalechka to them and returned to the ghetto to remain with her husband and parents unaware of the fate that awaited her.
Irena and Sophia took on the burden of caring for Lalechka during the war, pretending that she was part of their family despite the grave danger of being discovered and executed. Lalechka is based on the unique journal written by the young mother during the annihilation of the ghetto, as well as on interviews with key figures in the story, rare documents, and authentic letters.
