Traces four hundred years of Jewish history from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and discusses the anti-semitism facing European Jews, the Jews of czarist Russia, their struggle for civil rights in the 1830s and 1840s, Jewish life in America, the effects of World War One and the Holocaust of World War Two, and much more.

"The Great War, as World War I was known in its time, was described by its survivors and contemporary historians as "the war to end all wars," "the war to make the world safe for democracy." By its end, in November 1918, Europe's authoritarian old empires had fallen, and new and seemingly democratic successor states and governments were rising from the ensuing debris. In chronicling an era that was both visionary and tempestuous, Howard M. Sachar...