A fraught moment in the encounter between men and women is the one in which an ailing woman seeks a cure from a healer — sometimes a physician, sometimes a psychotherapist, and sometimes a prophet.

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.