Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

by John Boyne

Berlin 1942 When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. ... (more)

Sarah's Key

by Tatiana de Rosnay

A New York Times bestseller. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this... (more)

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History

by James Carroll

In this "rare book that combines searing passion . . . with a subject that has affected all of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church"s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life as a Catholic. "Fascinating, brave and sometimes infuriating" (Time), this dark history is more than a... (more)

Holocaust: A History

by Deborah Dwork

A magisterial, dramatic account that reshapes the way we think and talk about the greatest crime in history. Unrivaled in reach and scope, Holocaust illuminates the long march of events, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, which led to this great atrocity. It is a story of all Europe, of Nazis and their allies, the experience of wartime occupation, the suffering and strategies of marked victims, the... (more)

The Devil's Arithmetic (Puffin Modern Classics)

The Devil's Arithmetic (Puffin Modern Classics)

by Jane Yolen

Hannah thinks tonight’s Passover Seder will be the same as always. Little does she know that this year she will be mysteriously transported into the past where only she knows the horrors that await.

What I Saw And How I Lied

by Jordan Cray, Judy Blundell

When Evie's father returned home from World War II, the family fell back into its normal life pretty quickly. But Joe Spooner brought more back with him than just good war stories. When movie-star handsome Peter Coleridge, a young ex-GI who served in Joe's company in postwar Austria, shows up, Evie is suddenly caught in a complicated web of lies that she only slowly recognizes. She finds herself falling for... (more)

The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War

The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War

by Martin Gilbert

Deftly weaving together historical research and survivors' testimonies, The Holcaust is Gilbert's acclaimed and definitive history of the European Jews, fom Hitler's rise to power to Germany's surrender to the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps.

The Cure

by Sonia Levitin

"You are a criminal, Gemm 16884--aggressive, hostile, nonconforming. We have noted tendencies toward diversity in your gait, in your dreams, and most especially in your repeated persistence in"--the Elder cleared his throat--"making music." Branded a deviant--and therefore a threat--to the utopian society of Conformity, Harmony, and Tranquility that exists in the year 2407, Gemm 16884 is given the choice between... (more)

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France

by Carmen Callil

Bad Faith tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and con men—Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and “Commissioner for Jewish Affairs,” who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work, “controlling” its Jewish population. Though he is one of the less remembered figures of the Vichy government, Darquier (the aristocratic “de Pellepoix” was appropriated) was one of its most hideously... (more)

Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (Making History)

Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (Making History)

by Martin Gilbert

In the early hours of November 10, 1938, Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods across Germany, leaving behind them a horrifying trail of terror and destruction. More than a thousand synagogues and many thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed, while thirty thousand Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—was a decisive stage... (more)

Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust

Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust

by Philippe Burrin

From a leading historian of Nazi Germany, a new exploration of the evolution of policies that led to the horror of the Holocaust. One of the continuing puzzles of twentieth-century history is how Germany moved from a kind of anti-Semitism that was despicable, but did not seem exceedingly dangerous, to the Final Solution. This question has been much debated in recent years, and historians have arrived at very... (more)

The Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century. Since its publication in 1947, it has been read by tens of millions of people all over the world. It remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. Restored in this Definitive Edition are diary entries that were omitted from the original edition. These passages,... (more)

The Fixer: A Novel

by Bernard Malamud

A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel. Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young... (more)

AMERICAN SKIN: A Novel

by Don De Grazia

American Skin was first published in the United Kingdom to resounding acclaim after the author used his last seventy-five dollars to make an unsolicited submission to the publisher of the Scottish beats, whose work he admired. It is a timeless story about a young man's coming-of-age as well as a stunning portrait of the class and racial tensions that pervade our society. Alex Verdi is on the lam, fleeing... (more)

The Septembers of Shiraz

by Dalia Sofer

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their... (more)

Night Trilogy: Book 1

Night

by Elie Wiesel

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night , a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers... (more)

People of the Book: A Novel

by Geraldine Brooks

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March , the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript through centuries of exile and war In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish... (more)

In the Name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitler's GermanyH. W. Koch

In the Name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitler's Germany

by H. W. Koch

A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion

A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion

by Stephen Eric Bronner

In its portrayal of Judaism as a worldwide conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of Christian civilization, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion remains one of the most infamous documents ever written. Despite being proven a crude forgery, the pamphlet managed to pervade twentieth Century thinking, often being twisted to suit its handlers' purposes, and to justify the most extreme persecution of the Jews.... (more)

Gli occhiali d'oroGiorgio Bassani

Gli occhiali d'oro

by Giorgio Bassani

Text: Italian

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: anti-semitism

by John Boyne

by Tatiana de Rosnay

by James Carroll

by Deborah Dwork

by Jane Yolen

by Jordan Cray, Judy Blundell

by Martin Gilbert

by Sonia Levitin

by Carmen Callil

by Martin Gilbert

by Philippe Burrin

by Anne Frank

by Bernard Malamud

by Don De Grazia

by Dalia Sofer

by Elie Wiesel

by Geraldine Brooks

by H. W. Koch

by Stephen Eric Bronner

by Giorgio Bassani