Jewish Lives Biography Series to Release 3 new books in Fall 2013

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - June 7, 2013 - PRLog -- Jewish Lives Biography Series is a series of brief, interpretive biographies that encourage the broadest exploration of Jewish culture and life.  It is anticipated that it will include as many as 100 titles on Jews from antiquity until today.  Conceived by financier, philanthropist and art collector Leon Black in collaboration with a team of scholars and in partnership with Yale University Press, the books seek to stimulate new thinking about figures from the bible, rabbinic culture, literature, science, politics, business, philosophy, music, show business, and elsewhere.  What, defines the Jewish experience is the question underlying this enterprise initiated by Leon Black whose hope it is that the books will be deemed essential reading by all those intrigued by the Jewish past and present.

Coming this Fall--

BERNARD BERENSON by Rachel Cohen
available October 2013

From a village in Lithuania, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) made his way to Harvard and Italy, became one of the great connoisseurs of Italian Renaissance painting, and survived two wars in his villa above Florence. His life, of influential writing and sometimes vexed picture dealing, was a commotion of brilliant women and men. With Isabella Stewart Gardner, Mary Berenson, Joseph Duveen, and others, he helped to shape the collections and artistic understanding of the Gilded Age.

PRIMO LEVI by Berel Lang
available November 2013

Primo Levi (1919-1987) had begun work as a chemist when, following the 1943 Nazi takeover of Northern Italy, he joined a partisan group. Soon captured and deported to Auschwitz in a transport of 650 Italian Jews, he was among its twenty-four survivors.  Returning to Turin, Levi wrote If This Is a Man about his months in Auschwitz; that book’s 1958 edition brought wider attention to Levi’s intense effort to understand the Holocaust.  His later books included The Periodic Table and The Drowned and the Saved.

LILLIAN HELLMAN by Dorothy Gallagher
available November 2013

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) knew everyone, did everything, had been everywhere. By the age of twenty-nine she had written The Children’s Hour, the first of four hit Broadway plays, and soon she was considered a member of America’s first rank of dramatists, a position she maintained for more than twenty-five years. Apart from her literary accomplishments—eight original plays and three volumes of memoirs—Hellman lived a rich life filled with notable friendships, controversial political activity, travel, and love affairs, most importantly with Dashiell Hammett. But by the time she died, the truth about her life and works had been called into question.

For more information go to: www.jewishlives.org