Category Book Reviews

by Abraham Hoffman

TROPICAL ZION: GENERAL TRUJILLO, FDR, AND THE JEWS OF SOSUA
by Allen Wells
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
448 p. Map, Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, Index.
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At first inspection this book might seem to be a major examination of a minor event. After all, fewer than a thousand German and Austrian Jews were rescued in General Rafael Trujillo’s scheme to bring Jewish refugees to the Dominican Republic.

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by Abraham Hoffman

SECRECY AND DECEIT: THE RELIGION OF THE CRYPTO-JEWS
by David M. Gitlitz
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996.
677 pp. Notes, Appendix, Works Cited, Index.
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This book provides a masterful study of how Jews in Spain, Portugal, and their Western Hemisphere colonies attempted to preserve their religion and heritage against the persecutions of the Inquisition and the Catholic Church.

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by Abraham Hoffman

THE DEATH OF THE SHTETL
by Yehuda Bauer
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
208 pp. Maps, Notes, Works Cited, Index.
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Yehuda Bauer, a renowned historian and author of My Brother’s Keeper, Rethinking the Holocaust, and many other books, has written a book that focuses tightly on nine shtetlach in the kresy, the marshes of eastern Poland,

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