The Jews in the Twentieth Century : An Illustrated History

Plot

Amazon.com Review
From the Jewish communities in turn-of-the-century Europe, the Middle East, and Asia to the Zionist settling of Palestine and the Eastern European immigration to America, from the persecutions that led to the Holocaust to the renewal of Jewish communities throughout the world, The Jews in the Twentieth Century affords its reader a panoramic view. Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill and a noted Holocaust expert, provides straightforward, chronologically organized essays about each phase of Jewish history. The photographs, however, are the real reason to spend time with this book. More than 400 images, many of them never before published, convey the breadth and depth of Jewish experience in the last century, from abject suffering to exultant singing to everyday living. After the harrowing Holocaust images of World War II, a chapter titled "Rehabilitation, Statehood and Renewal" offers an image of startling normality. A young man seated is at a desk in front of a microscope, a smile just beginning to cross his face. Through a window behind him a tree is visible, its leaves reflecting the sun. The caption reads, "Jack Brauns, a survivor of the ghetto and the concentration camps, left Austria for Italy, determined to become a surgeon." One can't help be amazed, relieved, and hopeful. --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Situated somewhere between a solid, intelligent primer and a luxurious coffee-table book, this 100-year chronicle of Jewish history, practice, culture, art and survival is informative, succinctly written and handsomely produced. Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill and noted historian, has written a text that carefully and lucidly intertwines an enormous range of people, events, themes and ideas. Simultaneously covering events in many cultures and countries on one page he moves from a Jewish French officer who interpreted for the British during WWI to Jewish theological arguments supporting the draft in the U.S. and the work of Jews in Europe in their own national war efforts he gracefully weaves a cohesive panorama of European and American history. But the backbone and glory of volume are its more then 350 photographs. While there are a plethora of head shots (perhaps more then needed) from public figures such as Walter Lippmann and Walther Rathenau to feminists such as Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Zionists such as Esther Cailingold and movie stars such as Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau many of the historical photographs are remarkable and astonishing: Jewish resistance fighters being rounded up as the Warsaw ghetto is in flames; a "Jewish" snowman created by Hitler youth, elderly Orthodox men drinking Pepsi at an Arab cafe after the Six Day War, Hollywood star John Gilbert sitting in a director's chair with his name spelled in Yiddish on the back and a rarely seen photo of a four-year-old Anne Frank and her sister. While the book is packed full with information, there are some curious omissions, such as theologian and civil rights champion Abraham Joshua Heschel and philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt.