When we hear the word “amidah,” it is usually referring to the standing prayer that is the core of the Jewish prayer service. But the same word has an entirely different meaning in the work of Yehuda Bauer, a towering and commanding figure among the historians of the Holocaust. “Amidah” is his word for Jewish resistance, and it is the focus of his latest book, “The Death of the Shtetl” (Yale University Press, $35).

If J. D. Salinger had written “The Catcher in the Rye” and nothing else, he would still be remembered as an enduringly important novelist. The same can be said of Joseph Heller and “Catch-22” or E. L. Doctorow and “Ragtime” (or, for that matter, “The Book of Daniel”). And Don DeLillo earned his literary laurels with “Libra,” a re-imagining of the assassination of John F. Kennedy that is, for me, the Great American Novel.

If you do not already own a recording of Bach’s suites for the solo cello, you will certainly buy one before you finish reading Eric Siblin’s superb new book, “The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece” (Atlantic Monthly Press: $24.00).

Robert S. Wistrich, author of “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad” (Random House: $40.00), has been called “the dean of historians of anti-Semitism.” Born the son of Jewish refugees from Poland in Soviet Central Asia on the day President Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, Wistrich was raised in Cracow, Paris and London and studied at Cambridge and University College in London.

“American exceptionalism,” the notion that the United States is unique among the nations of the world, dates back to de Tocqueville, but it has become one of the besetting problems of American foreign policy. We tell ourselves that we are uniquely good, a shining city on a hill, and we are baffled when our friends and enemies alike fail to see us as the cowboys in the white hats.

At one strange and terrible moment in 1944, a conversation took place in Nazi-occupied Budapest between Adolf Eichmann and a charming rogue named Joel Brand, a man who preferred to spend his time in cafes while his wife ran the family’s little glove-making business. Eichmann offered Brand a deal — 1 million Jewish men, women and children would be set free in exchange for 10,000 trucks. “Blood for goods” is the phrase that Eichmann used to describe the deal he was proposing to make.