COMING SOON: Fall 2024

Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success
By Alexandra Popoff

Publication Date: August 6, 2024

A deeply researched biography of the prominent and divisive writer Ayn Rand, whose pro-capitalist novels and nonfiction have influenced three generations of Americans
 
Biographer Alexandra Popoff traces the life and creative achievement of Ayn Rand (1905–1982), one of America’s most provocative writers and whose best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have enjoyed impressive longevity. Born into a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Rand (then Alisa Rosenbaum) lived through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, and the onset of Soviet totalitarian dictatorships––experiences that made her profoundly anticommunist. When in 1926 Rand escaped from Stalinist Russia to realize her talent in America, she was also determined to expose the Communist system.
 
Through her apprenticeship in Hollywood, where she worked as a scriptwriter, to her first anti-Communist novel, We the Living, Rand doggedly pursued her goal, battling the Soviet belief system, along with its precepts of collectivism and statism. She defended American capitalism, individualism, prosperity, and creativity; her literary heroes were talented high achievers. While Marx had declared war on capitalism and prophesied the triumph of the proletariat, Rand, whose family was dispossessed by the Bolsheviks, glorified the wealth-creator and held the masses in contempt. In Atlas Shrugged, her most controversial novel, she promoted laissez-faire capitalism and the morality of rational self-interest. She envisaged apocalypse in America if it followed the socialist path.

Alexandra Popoff is a former Moscow journalist and Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow. She is the author of several literary biographies, including the award-winning Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century and Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography. She lives in Canada.

Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah
By Ezra Glinter

Publication Date: October 29, 2024

The life and thought of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, one of the most influential—and controversial—rabbis in modern Judaism
 
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one of the world’s best-known Hasidic groups, is driven by the belief that we are on the verge of the messianic age. One man is most recognized for the movement’s success: the seventh and last Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), believed by many of his followers to be the Messiah.
 
While hope of redemption has sustained the Jewish people through exile and persecution, it has also upended Jewish society with its apocalyptic and anarchic tendencies. So it is not surprising that Schneerson’s messianic fervor made him one of the most controversial rabbinic leaders of the twentieth century. How did he go from being an ordinary rabbi’s son in the Russian Empire to a mystical sage who revitalized a centuries-old Hasidic movement, constructed an outreach empire of unprecedented scope, and earned the admiration and condemnation of political, communal, and religious leaders in America and abroad?
 
Ezra Glinter’s deeply researched account is the first biography of Schneerson to combine a nonpartisan view of his life, work, and impact with an insider’s understanding of the ideology that drove him and that continues to inspire the Chabad-Lubavitch movement today.

Ezra Glinter is the senior staff writer and editor at the Yiddish Book Center. He is the editor of Have I Got a Story for You, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Sneak Peek: Winter 2025 + Beyond*

Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin
Oppenheimer by David Reiff
Abraham by Anthony Julius
Gertrude Stein by Lauren Elkin
Hannah Arendt by Masha Gessen
Carole King by Jane Eisner
Philip Roth by Steven J. Zipperstein
Rebecca by Judith Shulevitz
Bob Dylan by Sasha Frere-Jones
Edmond de Rothschild by James McAuley
Susan Sontag by Benjamin Taylor
Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Jeffrey Rosen
…and many more.

*A sample of titles in production. Publication dates TBD.