Examines types of Iberian Conversos from the late 14th to the 17th centuries and surveys Christian and Jewish attitudes towards them. Argues that the Jewish identity of Conversos was complicated and existed along a broad spectrum ranging from complete abandonment to ardent Judaizing.

When Iberian Jews were converted to Catholicism under duress during the Inquisition, many struggled to retain their Jewish identity in private while projecting Christian conformity in the public sphere. To root out these heretics, the courts of the Inquisition published checklists of koshering practices and "grilled" the servants, neighbors, and even the children of those suspected of practicing their religion at home. From these testimonies and other primary sources, Gitlitz & Davidson have drawn a fascinating, award-winning picture of this precarious sense of Jewish identity and have re-created these recipes, which combine Christian & Islamic traditions in cooking lamb, beef, fish, eggplant, chickpeas, and greens and use seasonings such as saffron, mace, ginger, and cinnamon. The recipes, and the accompanying stories of the people who created them, promise to delight the adventurous palate and give insights into the foundations of modern Sephardic cuisine.

Explain why so many American Jews are deeply uncomfortable with this outpouring of Christian support.

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New Spain. After extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Hordes concluded that there was, in New Mexico and the Southwest, a Sephardic legacy derived from the converso community of Spanish Jews. In To the End of the Earth, Hordes explores the remarkable story of crypto-Jews and the tenuous preservation of Jewish rituals and traditions in Mexico and New Mexico over the past five hundred years. He follows the crypto-Jews from their Jewish origins in medieval Spain and Portugal to their efforts to escape persecution by migrating to the New World and settling in the far reaches of the northern Mexican frontier. Drawing on individual biographies (including those of colonial officials accused of secretly practicing Judaism), family histories, Inquisition records, letters, and other primary sources, Hordes provides a richly detailed account of the economic, social and religious lives of crypto-Jews during the colonial period and after the annexation of New Mexico by the United States in 1846. While the American government offered more religious freedom than had the Spanish colonial rulers, cultural assimilation into Anglo-American society weakened many elements of the crypto-Jewish tradition. Hordes concludes with a discussion of the reemergence of crypto-Jewish culture and the reclamation of Jewish ancestry within the Hispano community in the late twentieth century. He examines the publicity surrounding the rediscovery of the crypto-Jewish community and explores the challenges inherent in a study that attempts to reconstruct the history of a people who tried to leave no documentary record.

This is the dramatic story of the rescue of Jews from Europe after World War II by North American Jewish volunteers who smashed through the British blockade and brought thousands of refugees to safe haven in Palestine through the illegal Aliyah Bet. Film director Alan Rosenthal was inspired by this book to create his documentary film Waves of Freedom, released in 2008. Packed with photos, and enhanced by the eminent historian Sir Martin Gilbert's introduction, this meticulously researched book is the definitive word on a little-known chapter of Jewish history. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Murray S. Greenfield was one of the volunteer sailors in the Aliyah Bet operations. He has served as executive director of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) and as volunteer director of the American Association for Ethiopian Jewry (AAEJ). He lives in Israel with his wife Hana.

Stone unlocks the amazing secrets to the success of the Jewish people. Their time-honored principles help create wealth, maintain health, raise successful children, and pass on generational blessings.

Herz offers a photographic tribute to the descendents of New Mexico's secret Jews.

"For many in the United States, Crypto-Judaism has been shrouded in memory and for others it has become an imagined land that might have been, often with little information about the actual history and heritage of the group. Today, in the American southwest and in parts of Latin America there is a movement to reclaim Jewish identity, and people are describing the memories of Jewish identity with the family and the remnants of Jewish practice. That has sparked interest in learning more about Sepharad, the Spain of the Jews, and the diaspora of Spanish Jews and their cousins, the Crypto-Jews. Myths have grown around the concept of Sepharad sometimes obscuring the realities of what it was. There was a "golden age" for Jews in Spain during the early Muslim period, but as the reconquest heated up and Christian rule replaced that of Muslims, the Jewish experience turned dark until the light of the Jews was put out in Spain. In my experience in New Mexico, I have found that local oral traditions about Jewish family identity or reclaimed Jewish identity can be rich, but in some cases not coinciding with historical information. So, there can be multiple tracks of inherited or imagined information in addition to historical documentation. The belief about the association between Judaism and Spain that is expressed among some is that anyone of Spanish descent must have sangre Judia "Jewish blood". That contradicts what we know of the demographics of Spain, which suggest that at the time of the Expulsion, Jews were a minuscule part of the population, probably close to two percent. Crypto-Judaism is an attempt to draw a historical baseline of established information of what we know about those times and the Crypto-Jewish experience"--