Ibn Warraq
Why the west is best
Encounter Books

In this book, Ibn Warraq, an Islamic scholar and a leading figure in Koranic criticism, offers a frank and authoritative defense of the West from the outside looking in. Warraq examines the strengths and freedoms often taken for granted in the West and contrasts them with the stunning lack of freedoms in the majority of societies in the world, tackling taboo subjects of racism in Asian culture, Arab slavery, and Islamic Imperialism along the way. Why the West Is Best reasserts that the struggle for Western civilization is a fight we must win.

Jeffrey Weiss & Craig Weiss
I am my brother’s Keeper
American Volunteers in Israel’s war for Independence
Schiffer Military History

Based on recently declassified documents and more than two hundred interviews, “I am my brother’s keeper” tells the story of the more than one thousand Americans and Canadians, Jews and non-Jews, who fought in Israel’s War of Independence. Thirty-eight of the volunteers lost their lives in the struggle for a Jewish state. Others were wounded, and some ended up as prisoners of war of the Jordanian and Egyptian armies. This book captures the powerful story of those Jews and Christians who stood up to be counted at a critical time in Jewish history. Only three years after the Holocaust, these volunteers helped establish the State of Israel.

Kenneth Wishnia
Il quinto servitore
Longanesi

Vincitore del premio Adei Wizo 2011 narrativa ragazzi, questo romanzo è un thriller storico imperdibile ambientato nella Praga del 1500, un’epoca caratterizzata da un pernicioso antisemitismo di matrice cattolica. Una bambina cristiana viene sgozzata nella notte del venerdì santo e il suo corpo straziato e dissanguato è rinvenuto in una bottega ebraica. Sulla scena del crimine accorre Benyamin Ben Akiva, quinto servitore del ghetto per far luce sull’accaduto, ma la folla chiede a gran voce una punizione esemplare che faccia terminare una volta per tutte le sordide pratiche giudaiche. In catene, accusato di omicidio rituale, finisce il proprietario della bottega; sua moglie e sua figlia sono invece affidate al vescovo Stempfel, l’inquisitore appena arrivato in Boemia per liberare la regione dalla stregoneria. Stavolta neanche la protezione dell’imperatore Rodolfo potrà salvare gli ebrei dalla furia vendicatrice dei cristiani. Benyamin ha solamente tre giorni per assicurare alla giustizia il vero colpevole, altrimenti il ghetto intero sarà raso al suolo. Le uniche armi a sua disposizione sono la sottile arte del ragionamento e la millenaria sapienza ereditata dai tanti rabbini che l’hanno preceduto. Ma nei vicoli più bui del ghetto si aggira una realtà ben più cruda dello spettro antisemita.

Ruth R. Wisse
Jews and Power
Nextbook Schocken

Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power and
demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets.
Jews and Power contains much information in few pages and offers a simple argument: Zionism is the solution to Jewish powerlessness; Israel is the guarantor of the Jews’ safety. Further, the Jewish nation’s resumption of sovereignty in 1948 created opportunities for the Jews to bring benefits to humanity as a whole.

Robert Wistrich
A Lethal Obsession
Random House

In this major work of historical synthesis, the author, Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,  offers abundant evidence that genocidal anti-Semitism, and apologetics and indifference about is not only a matter of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust: it remains a key element of contemporary affairs. Lethal Obsession presents a profound interpretation of anti-Semitism both before and after 1945. Wistrich - who writes with the interpretive grasp of a historian of the first rank as well as with the passion and urgency that is so essential in the face of the genocidal threats made against Israel and the Jews in recent year - offers remarkable details of the persistence and permutation of this hallucinatory set of ideas within Europe as well as in the Middle East, North Africa and Iran.