Jewish studies – The Bell Bookshop

Britain’s Jews

Emma — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘?detailed and fair.’ – The Spectator‘An exhaustive, impressive achievement.’ – The TabletAs a minority, Jews in Britain are confident, their institutions competent and mature. And yet within Jewish life in Britain there is a pervading sense of anxiety.Jews in Britain have risen to the top of nearly every profession, they run major companies, sit at the top tables in politics, make their voices heard in the media, are prominent in science and the arts. Of course there is serious poverty and gross disadvantage, just as there is in any community. But on any objective measure, British Jews have done well. Particularly when we consider where they came from, the impoverished, often oppressed lives that many Jews lived in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire less than 200 years ago.Jews have lived in Britain longer than any other minority. They’ve been here so long, and are so ingrained into the national fabric, that they are often not considered to be a minority at all. Until a periodic outburst of antisemitism or a flare up in the Middle East, or both, turns the spotlight on them once again.British Jews have another distinction too. They have lived safely and securely, continuously, in Britain longer than any other modern Jewish community has lived anywhere else in the world. They have organised themselves in a way that serves as a model both to more recent immigrant communities in Britain and to Jewish communities elsewhere. Being British, they wear their distinctions lightly, they don’t trumpet their achievements, in fact they rarely make a noise at all. But they give back quietly: established Jewish organisations help more recently arrived minorities to create their own structures, charities draw on the Jewish experience of dislocation and persecution to help oppressed people in the developing world, philanthropists support causes far beyond the boundaries of their own communities.Britain’s Jews is a challenging look at Jewish life in the UK today. Based on conversations with Jews from all walks of life, it depicts, in ways that are at times disturbing, at other times inspiring, what it is like to be Jewish in 21st century Britain. And why Jewish life is still a subject of fascination.

Music of exile

Emma — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience?

In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler’s Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile-composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.

Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today’s repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape-and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture.

The forgers

Emma — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The inspirational story of the ordinary people who forged the documents that saved thousands of Jewish lives in World War Two.

‘Powerful … gripping … inspiring’ JONATHAN DIMBLEBY

Between 1940 and 1943, a small group of Polish diplomats and Jewish activists in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable – and until now, almost completely unknown – humanitarian operation. Under the leadership of the Polish Ambassador, Aleksander Lados, they undertook a systematic programme of forging identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust.

The Lados operation was one of the largest rescue missions of the entire war, and The Forgers tells this extraordinary story for the first time. We follow the desperate bids of Jews to obtain these life-saving documents, and their painful uncertainty over whether they will be granted protection from the Nazis’ murderous fury. And we witness the quiet heroism of those who decided to act in an attempt to save thousands of lives.

‘Fascinating’ The Times

‘Remarkable’ Sunday Times

‘As gripping as it is moving’ JULIA BOYD

‘An astonishing book’ KATJA HOYER

Mother’s boy

Emma — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘One of the all-time great memoirs’ Daily Telegraph
‘Wonderful…candid, shrewd and moving’ William Boyd
‘Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious’ Simon Schama

Howard Jacobson’s funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer.

Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother’s Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new – and often surprising – ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne.

Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson’s parents and friends, this is the story of a writer’s beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be.

‘Hilariously brilliant’ David Baddiel

‘Howard Jacobson brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

My life

Emma — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘The gripping memoir of a remarkable woman who rose to the top in a man’s world. A compelling political story of courage and struggle, power and leadership, war and crisis – and the making of Israel. A classic of 20th century history‘ Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY

‘A remarkable, almost incredible personal history … stimulating and fascinating’ IRISH TIMES

‘A rare and wholly unforgettable work’ SATURDAY REVIEW

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JULIA NEUBERGER

Golda Meir was without doubt one of the most incredible women of her – and any – time. Born in 1898 in Kyiv, she was the daughter of an impoverished carpenter – and became the first (and only) female Prime Minister of Israel. Meir’s earliest memory is of her father boarding up the front door in response to rumours of an imminent pogrom. The family emigrated to the US and for a while Meir lived with her sister, where she was exposed to debates on Zionism, women’s suffrage, literature and socialism. She became a teacher, and after her marriage emigrated again to Palestine, settling on a kibbutz.

Always politically active, she became Israel’s first envoy to Moscow; was promoted to Foreign Minister and ultimately elected as Prime Minister, leader of Israel. In her autobiography she wrote: ‘To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for more than 2,000 years, with all the pain and torment that has been inflicted upon it’

The little girl who could not cry

Emma — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Number One International Bestseller.

The heartbreaking, inspiring true story of a girl sent to Auschwitz who survived the evil Dr Josef Mengele’s pseudo-medical experiments. With a foreword by His Holiness Pope Francis.

Lidia Maksymowicz was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their ‘crime’ that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Once there, Lidia was picked by Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children’s block. It was here that she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother – who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia – was her only tie to humanity.

By the time Birkenau was liberated her family had disappeared. Even her mother was presumed dead. Lidia was adopted by a woman from the nearby town of Oswiecim. Too traumatised to feel emotion, she was not an easy child to care for but she came to love her adoptive mother and her new home. Then, in 1962, she discovered that her birth parents were still alive. They lived in the USSR – and they wanted her back. Lidia was faced with an agonising choice . . .

The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry is powerful, moving and ultimately hopeful, as Lidia comes to terms with the past and finds the strength to share her story – even making headlines when she meets Pope Francis, who kisses her tattoo. Above all she refuses to hate those who hurt her so badly, saying, ‘Hate only brings more hate. Love, on the other hand, has the power to redeem.’

Letters to Camondo

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

From the author of the bestselling phenomenon The Hare with Amber Eyes

As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well.

The Camondos lived just a few doors away from Edmund de Waal’s forebears. Like de Waal’s family, they were part of belle époque high society. They were also targets of anti-Semitism.

Count MoÃ¯se de Camondo created a spectacular house filled with art for his son to inherit. Over a century later, de Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and, in a haunting series of letters addressed to Camondo, he tells us what happened next.

‘Illuminating… A wonderful tribute to a family and to an idea’ Guardian

‘Letters to Camondo immerses you in another age… Dazzling’ Financial Times

X Troop

Emma — Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

June 1942. The Third Reich is victorious everywhere. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who escaped to Britain just before the War. Many have lost their families, their homes - their whole worlds. And now, in the crucial final battles against the Nazis, they will stop at nothing to defeat them. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad. Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Europe to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp.

The Book of Jewish Food

Emma — Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF THE CLASSIC JEWISH COOKBOOK WITH NEW RECIPES AND MATERIAL

In this internationally acclaimed book, Claudia Roden interweaves more than 800 recipes with the stories and histories that have shaped Jewish cooking over the centuries. The recipes are treasures garnered from almost sixteen years of Roden’s research around the world, enjoying the immense diversity of traditional Jewish food.

Roden shares the most essential dishes from her native Egypt and beyond, taking us on a journey through the Jewish Diaspora: from the Ashkenazi world there is hallah bread, wine-poached salmon and luscious plum tarts, and the Sephardi chapter boasts an array of tabbouleh, falafel and the inimitable orange Passover cake.

The result is a cookbook unlike any other: a learned, loving and delicious tribute to the variety and vitality of Jewish culture the world over. With new material for this special twenty-fifth anniversary edition, this is the definitive book of Jewish cuisine; a celebration of the food, and the people, that have shaped our culinary world as we know it.