Crash Course in Jewish History explores the 3,800 years of Jewish existence while answering the great question: Why have the Jewish people been so unique and influential yet so relentlessly hated and persecuted? This volume is not only comprehensive and readable; it is also entertaining and enlightening. Historian and author Rabbi Ken Spiro takes the reader on a fascinating and informative journey through time, highlighting the key lessons of Jewish and world history, and most importantly, the profound relevance that the past holds for the future of both the Jewish people and humanity.

REVIEWS

“Jewish history is the key to understanding the Jewish world and general world history. The absence of readable Jewish history books that reflect the Jewish view of the events of millennia has contributed to Jewish assimilation and loss of Jewish identity. Rabbi Ken Spiro has written an excellent one-volume review of the story of the Jewish people over the past millennia. It provides easy reading regarding an otherwise detailed and complicated subject. Reading this book will help give one a better perspective on today’s world and especially a sense of positive self-identity for the modern Jew.”

    -Rabbi Berel Wein, Jewish historian and author of Echoes of Glory, Herald of Destiny, Triumph of Survival, and Faith and Fate

“Rabbi Ken Spiro has written a comprehensive, thoughtful, and highly educational survey of Jewish history in its widest aspects, giving the reader an insight into who the Jews are, what they have experienced through time, their leaders in thought and action through the millennia, and their religious life and heritage: above all, the ‘miracle’ of faith, creativity and continuity that they have preserved for mankind.”

     -Sir Martin Gilbert, preeminent British historian and official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, author of more than eighty historical works