​In her book, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, author and book critic Donna Rifkind vividly describes the 1930s and 1940s, when 10,000 German-speaking refugees, most of them Jews, found a safe haven from Nazism in Los Angeles. These exiles included professors, novelists, stage and film directors, symphony orchestra conductors, screenwriters, music composers, film actors and actresses, movie producers, and a host of motion picture technicians. Historians have termed the exodus  “…the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history.”

The émigrés from Germany and Austria included Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Berthold Brecht, S. Z. Sakall, Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Klemperer, Peter Lorre, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel.

Part of the latter’s harrowing escape route included a six-week stop in the French city of Lourdes. Rifkind reports that Franz Werfel, though Jewish, “visited the Catholic shrine dedicated to Bernadette Soubiros and prayed for a miracle. He vowed that if he managed to escape from Europe, he would write a book to honor the saint.”

His The Song of Bernadette, published in 1941, was a bestseller, and the film of the same title won many awards. Rifkind sadly notes there were “Not nearly enough miracles” for those who desperately attempted to escape Nazism in the years before America’s entry into World War II.

​When the Germans launched their blitzkrieg conquest of France in 1940, they seized only 45 percent of the country. Much of the southern part remained “unoccupied.” To rule that region, the Nazis installed a subservient pro-German puppet regime, led by the aged, authoritarian World War I military hero, Marshall Phillipe Petain. It was headquartered in the spa resort city of Vichy.

Perhaps as a result of Claude Rains’ portrayal of the corrupt, but benign Vichy French police chief in the 1942 film “Casablanca,” a myth emerged that Jews were somehow physically protected under the Vichy regime. Not so. Francoise Frenkel’s tightly written, highly personal A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis debunks this myth.

Born near Lodz, Poland in 1889, Frenkel as a young Jewish woman studied music in Germany and art in Paris. But French literature was her first love, and in 1921, only three years after the end of World War I, Frenkel and her Russian Jewish husband, Simon Reichenstein, opened a Francophile bookshop in the capital of Germany, France’s longtime, bitter adversary.

It was a gamble that paid off when the shop attracted a “curiously mixed” group of customers that included “eccentrics, artists, celebrities and well heeled women.” French literary giants Andre Gide and Andre Maurois lectured in her store during the Weimar Republic years that tragically ended in 1933, when Hitler gained power in Germany.

During his lifetime, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was frequently confused with another internationally famous photographer: his friend Edward Steichen. So, too, were Stieglitz’s remarkable achievements often overshadowed by the fame of his wife, artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

But Phyllis Rose’s book Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters (part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series) brings her subject out of the shadows and into his deserved place in history as the person who made “taking pictures” a respected art form. Rose, a literary critic and a retired professor of English literature at Wesleyan University, has combined her knowledge of photography and modern art with an excellent grasp of the historical trends and events that shaped the artistic world from the Victorian and Gilded Ages to the end of World War II.

Alfred Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey into a wealthy, highly cultured German-Jewish family. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Germany following the failed political revolution in 1848. Alfred’s father, Edward, was a kunstmensch, an art man who “read Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare…studied works by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Leonardo…”

​Professor Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) of the Hebrew University – arguably the greatest Jewish scholar of the 20th century – considered himself an archeologist. No, not the kind of person who digs into the history-laden soil of Israel, but rather one who delves into the Jewish religious tradition that Scholem described as “a field strewn with ruins.”

Scholem described his life’s work as “…the modest but necessary task of clearing the ground of much scattered debris and laying bare the outlines of a great and significant chapter in the history of the Jewish religion.”

“Cushing, Spellman, O’Connor: The Surprising Story of How Three American Cardinals Transformed Catholic-Jewish Relations,” by Rabbi James Rudin. Eerdmans. 157 pages. $18.00.

Rabbi James Rudin provides a well-researched yet easily accessible insider’s view on the how the Second Vatican Council’s statement against anti-Semitism came into being. In particular, he underscores the roles of two Influential men – Cushing and Spellman – in gaining support for the transformative “Nostra Aetate” document that finally became official Vatican policy in 1965.