April 19, 2024
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started on April 19th, 1943. For 27 days, a few hundred young Jewish men and women, poorly armed with a few pistols and homemade grenades, fought… READ MORE
September 9, 2022
We are pleased to present here an adapted excerpt from Zvi Preigerzon’s Memoirs of a Jewish Prisoner of the Gulag, translated from the Hebrew, accompanied by a personal introduction from editor and translator Alex Lahav. The book tells the story of Zvi Preigerzon’s arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment in the Gulag and describes many of the Jewish prisoners whom he met there.
July 26, 2022
Akira Kitade, author of Emerging Heroes: WWII-Era Diplomats, Jewish Refugees, and Escape to Japan reflects on what sparked his interest in the subject of the book, the journey to publication, and what the book’s positive reception has meant to him.
May 9, 2022
In celebration of Jewish American History month, we’ll be highlighting some of our books that explore the Jewish American experience and celebrate the historical, cultural, and political achievements of Jewish Americans in American society. Below, Daniel Soyer, editor of The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century, provides a short introduction the book and its importance, in addition to explaining the way it sheds unique light on the Jewish American experience.
May 2, 2022
Ronald Meyer (Harriman Institute, Columbia University) reflects on working with Deborah Martinsen on her recently published Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”: A Reader’s Guide before her passing, and provides a touching tribute to Dr. Martinsen’s life, scholarly work, and legacy.
April 27, 2022
We are pleased to present here an excerpt of Don’t Be a Stranger: Russian Literature and the Perils of Not Fitting In, accompanied by a short personal introduction in which the author, Jason Galie, situates the volume’s analysis of the svoj/chuzhoj dichotomy in Russian society and literature within the larger context of the current war in Ukraine. Don’t Be a Stranger explores the consequences of being marked an outsider in the Russian-speaking world through a close study of several seminal works of Russian literature. The author combines the fields of literary studies, linguistics, and sociology to illuminate what prompted Christof Ruhl, an economist at the World Bank, to comment, about Russia, “On a very broad scale, it’s a country where people care about their family and friends. Their clan. But not their society.”
February 24, 2022
We are pleased to present here an excerpt of Death and Love in the Holocaust: The Story of Sonja and Kurt Messerschmidt, accompanied by a short personal introduction from author Steve Hochstadt. The book tells the story of Kurt and Sonja Messerschmidt, who met in Nazi Berlin, married in the Theresienstadt ghetto, and survived Auschwitz. They witnessed the death of Jews every day for two years, but never stopped building their own life together. The words of these survivors, which are contextualized with explanations of historical explanations from the author each chapter, create a direct relationship with the reader, as if they were telling the story in their living room.
Death and Love in the Holocaust is out March 1, 2022 and is available for preorder wherever books are sold. The excerpt published here is from the chapter “Slave Labor.”
June 9, 2021
This is a guest post by Wiesiek Powaga, translator of Palestine for the Third Time, a book of reportage originally published in Poland in 1933 by Ksawery Pruszyński, a young reporter working for a Polish newspaper on assignment in Mandate Palestine. Here, Powaga introduces Pruszyński and his formative friendship with Mojżesz Pomeranz.
May 12, 2021
This series features volumes designed to enrich the reading of key works in the history of Russian literature by providing essential commentary on the author’s biography, intellectual engagements and influences, as well as the historical and political context in which the work arose. ASP Companions are accessible guides for general readers without knowledge of Russian or extensive familiarity with Russian literature and history, while also providing an au courant introduction to advanced study. Each volume is written by an individual scholar with recognized expertise on the work, or by a group of scholars who examine the writer or work from a variety of perspective.
March 5, 2021
This Purim I used the privilege of working as Production Editor at Academic Studies Press in a completely new way: I cooked from the proofs. Not that I used the paper with printed text as an ingredient or to make fire but having the early access to the content of one of our forthcoming titles, Sephardi: Cooking the History. Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century to Today by Hélène Jawhara Piñer, I went through the PDF on my screen and selected four recipes which looked easy to cook and delicious—thanks to the seductive photos the author made for the book. Indeed these dishes were quick and simple, and with no ingredients too exotic for a regular supermarket.
