During the Nazi occupation of Paris, no Jew was safe from arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. Few Parisians were willing to risk their own lives to help. Yet many Jews found refuge in an unlikely place, the sprawling complex of the Grand Mosque of Paris. Not just a place of worship but also a community center, this hive of activity was an ideal temporary hiding place for escaped prisoners of war and Jews of all ages, including children....

In the minds of many Americans, Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, Muslim men with violence, and Muslim women with oppression. A clash of civilizations appears to be increasingly manifest and the war on terror seems a struggle against Islam. These are all symptoms of Islamophobia. Meanwhile, the current surge in nativist bias reveals the racism of anti-Muslim sentiment. This book explores these anxieties through political cartoons and film--media...

In a world troubled by religious strife and division, Lowney's book takes us back to a medieval Iberia that prefigured the Renaissance, offering a hopeful historical reminder: Muslims, Christians, and Jews once lived together in Spain, creating a centuries-long flowering of commerce, culture, art, and architecture. In 711, a ragtag army of Muslim North Africans conquered Spain and launched Western Europe's first (and to date only) Islamic state. In...

Struggling to grasp the concept of 6 million Holocaust victims, the students at Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee decide to collect 6 million paper clips to better understand the extent of this crime against humanity. Because Norwegians invented the paper clip and used it as a symbol of solidarity against the Nazis, students started collecting them to help visualize such vast numbers of victims. As word spread online and in the media, paper...

Life has suddenly turned chaotic for high school student Stella since her brother, Rob, got home from his second tour of duty in Afghanistan: her school is on edge with ethnic tensions and her brother seems to be suffering from post-traumatic stress but will not talk about it. But when Rob's anger finally spirals out of control, Stella realizes she has to find the courage to take a stand against the forces of hate in her hometown.

In early 2003, James Miller and Saira Shah went to the Gaza Strip to make a documentary about what it is like to grow up in a conflict zone. They were entering a region that had been in turmoil for more than fifty years. The Gaza Strip, and its Palestinian Arab population, fell under Israel's control following the Six Day War of 1967. This film begins in Nablus, on the West Bank, and examines the lives of three Palestinian children, indoctrinated...

"The first middle-grade book from a picture book master-a harrowing, heartrending, illustrated account of his childhood escape from the terrors of war"--

"In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world's most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many people."--Page 4 of cover.