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From the 1860s to 1939, thousands of poor young women from Eastern Europe were sold into prostitution by a notorious Jewish gang called the Zwi Migdal.  The "white slaver" even became a figure of literature in works like I.B.

"If the trials and tribulations of Latin America's Jewry might be found in a nutshell, it is in The Centaur and the Garden," writes Ilan Stavans of Moacyr Scliar's most famous novel.

In 1939, Billie Holiday took the stage at Café Society, a New York nightclub, and sang these words:  "Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." David M

"Claudia Roden is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit maker," declares historian Simon Schama.

In 1903, sixteen years after Emma Lazarus's death, a plaque with her poem "The New Colossus" was mounted onto the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

On July 27, 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community declared Baruch Spinoza excommunicated, and, at the age of 23, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He denied the immortality of the soul and challenged the accepted belief that the Torah was literally given by God.

In compelling, unconventional novels, from The Book of Daniel to Billy Bathgate to The March, E.L.