Did Jews actually live in Old Rus′? Or is it a historical myth? For a long time, researchers and historians have wrestled with two extreme theories while working with evidence: from completely denying the presence of Jewish communities in early Eastern Europe, to exaggerating their size and role in the ensuing formation of Eastern European Jewry.

The sources presented in Jews in Old Rus′: A Documentary History do not corroborate either of these extreme interpretations of absence or presence. In this book, Alexander Kulik adopts a framework that enables readers to conclude the existence of a Jewish settlement in Rus´.

By bringing together primary sources in Latin, Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic, this volume provides the definitive scientific answer to one of Eastern Europe’s most debated historical questions.

Furious Harvests transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of the grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other.

Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev was imprisoned from 2015 to 2017 in a concentration camp set up by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. He spent most of that time in Izolyatsia—a defunct insulation materials factory that the Russians converted into a torture camp.

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Aseyev’s story exposes Russia’s brutal actions against Ukraine, long before the war began in 2022. Torture, isolation, rape, and psychological abuse have been routinely deployed by Russians against Ukrainians since 2014 in what can be described as a genocidal war. Aseyev’s moving story is also a reflection on how a person can survive atrocities and return to the world to share their experiences while maintaining their humanity.

This memoir is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the price of truth in the occupied Donbas.