Award Winning Author:
LEAH GARRETT
X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War Two
ANGELS OF IWO JIMA: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN COMBAT NURSES IN THE FINAL BATTLES OF WORLD WAR TWO
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BASIC BOOKS US; ATLANTIC BOOKS UK Forthcoming 2025
X TROOP: THE SECRET JEWISH COMMANDOS OF WORLD WAR TWO
Mariner Books Harper Collins US; Chatto Penguin Books UK
ISBN-10 : 0358172039
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​X Troop was a secret Jewish commando unit that fought for the British against the Nazis on the front lines of all the major battles of World War Two. The commandos were Holocaust survivors from Austria and German who came to the UK on Kindertransport. When the war started, these German Jewish refugees were rounded up and interned in the UK,Australia, and Canada
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as 'enemy aliens'. Desperate to turn the tide of war, in 1942 Churchill created this top secret commando unit, where all of the men had to take on fake British names and personas. The men of X Troop were used both as commandos--killing the Nazis--and in counterintelligence--interrogating the enemy on the battlefield. And one of the commandos, remarkably, even rescued his own parents from Theresienstadt concentration camp. To uncover this remarkable story I declassified top-secret files, interviewed living commandos and their families, and went through archives all over the world. The story is particularly important during these difficult days because it shows how a group of rag tag Jewish refugees could come together and effectively fight evil.
YOUNG LIONS: HOW JEWISH AUTHORS REVINVENTED THE AMERICAN WAR NOVEL
Northwestern UP, 2017 ISBN-10 : 0810131757
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WINNER OF THE JORDAN SCHNITZER AWARD FOR MODERN JEWISH HISTORY
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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD
Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public's ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new "Jewish" war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.
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THE CROSS AND OTHER JEWISH STUDIES BY LAMED SHAPIRO, sole editor.
Yale University Press, 2007, ISBN-10 : 0300110693
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A riveting collection of controversial tales about violence in the modern world, by an undiscovered Yiddish master. Lamed Shapiro (1878-1948) was the author of groundbreaking and controversial short stories, novellas, and essays. Himself a tragic figure, Shapiro led a life marked by frequent ocean crossings, alcoholism, and failed ventures, yet his writings are models of precision, psychological insight, and daring. Shapiro focuses intently on the nature of violence: the mob violence of pogroms committed against Jews; the traumatic after effects of rape, murder, and powerlessness; the murderous event that transforms the innocent child into witness and the rabbi's son into agitator.
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JOURNEYS BEYOND THE PALE: YIDDISH TRAVEL WRITING IN THE MODERN WORLD
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, ISBN-10 : 0299184447
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Journeys beyond the Pale is the first book to examine how Yiddish writers, from Mendele Moycher Sforim to Der Nister to the famed Sholem Aleichem, used motifs of travel to express their complicated relationship with modernization. The story of the Jews of the Pale of settlement encompasses current-day Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland.
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A KNIGHT AT THE OPERA: Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser
Purdue UP, ISBN-10 : 1557536015
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A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannhäuser played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism.
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