Steven Jay Cohen

Each of the three seeds in this story?a cherry seed in the Middle East, an acacia seed in Australia, a lotus seed in Asia?survives a difficult journey through flood, fire, or drought, then sprouts (in the case of the lotus seed, a hundred years later) and flourishes. To author Stephie Morton, nature's powerful forces are a metaphor for the hardships faced by displaced children. Kids, like seeds, thrive when given a chance.

In Brooklyn in the late 1940s, adolescent Michael Devlin is a dutiful son to his widowed mother and a conscientious altar boy at the parish church. One day, he meets Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a chance encounter that inaugurates a friendship with vast consequences, good and bad, for both of them. Michael lost his father in the war, and the rabbi, a recent immigrant to this country, lost his wife. The threads of their connection widen and strengthen as the...

The acclaimed story of a soul awakening to the ecstasy of the senses, the power of language, and the meaning of existence. Kazin's memorable description of his life as a young man as he makes the journey from Brooklyn to "Americanca"--The larger world that begins at the other end of the subway in Manhattan. A classic portrayal of the Jewish immigrant culture of the 1930s.

"A groundbreaking portrait of contemporary Israel by award-winning author Ethan Michaeli, who documents the nation at its most volatile moment by weaving together the personal histories of Holocaust survivors, tech millionaires, Torah scholars, Ethiopian Prisoners of Zion, Russian emigres, West Bank settlers, and Palestinians"--

An avid member of the Hitler Youth in 1940s Vienna, Johannes Betzler discovers his parents are hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa behind a false wall in their home. His initial horror turns to interest--then love and obsession. After his parents disappear, Johannes is the only one aware of Elsa's existence in the house and the only one responsible for her survival. By turns disturbing and blackly comic, haunting and cleverly satirical, Christine Leunens's...

"An erudite and accessible survey of Jewish life and culture in the twentieth century, as reflected in seminal texts. Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times), formidable and perceptive literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the salient works of modern Jewish thought. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust...

"In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel (1906-1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill-gotten riches, from an early-twentieth-century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity. Through the 1920s, 1930s, and most of...

In a gathering of stories, Many Have Pictures Like This chronicles a family's history and passing, from Armenian villages before WWI to the Armenian Genocide, to Romania and finally to the United States. Much is fictionalized, all is based on truth, and the author asks the question throughout: What is owed to one's dead?Whether walking with his father to a pizzeria or sitting with his mother in an imagined coffee house, whether enjoying his grandmother's...

The first book-length work on market monetarism, written by its leading scholar. Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of the 21st century. ...

In 1892, Dom, a nine-year old stowaway from Naples, Italy, arrives in New York and must learn to survive the perils of street life in the big city.