The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Yiddish Learning charts Mel Brooks’s meteoric rise

charts Mel Brooks’s meteoric rise from a Depression-era kid in Brooklyn to the recipient of the National Medal of Arts

“Magisterial…Covers this dark history with insight and skill…A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history

This groundbreaking work rethinks conventional wisdom about Holocaust testimony

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Hundreds of thousands of Jews began the twentieth century as new arrivals in a foreign land yet soon became shapers and definers of American culture itself

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Yiddish Learning charts Mel Brooks’s meteoric riseNational Jewish Book Awards Winner Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize A Best Book of 2024: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, The Economist, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Kirkus Reviews, The Independent, BookPage, The Sunday Times (London) RemarkableCompellingFine and tautIndelible. The New York Times Moving, unnerving, and deeply sexy. Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with