For the Love of Shirley

This is the story of Shirley Rosalyn Kraus Tydor, the American-born daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her father was an atheist\communist and her mother a traditional Jew. Shirley, the rebel, became a career woman and married her boss, an Orthodox Holocaust survivor and a widower twice her age, with two adult children. The couple lived in South Dakota and Montana, returned to NY in 1959 where their daughter was born, and worked as travel agents before moving to Israel in 1974. Shirley traveled the world when few Americans even possessed passports. "For the Love of Shirley" provides readers with an intimate glimpse into one Jewish woman-s challenges and choices in postwar Jewish America.

Prof. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz is the Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research and Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of numerous books and articles and specializes in topics per¬taining to Gender, Jewish religious life, the Holocaust, Memory, State of Israel, The United States, and Commemoration. Among her books are Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell 1998); The Bergson Boys and the Ori¬gins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy (Syracuse UP 2005); Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Collective Israeli Memory (University Press of Wisconsin, 2010); Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain 1938-1945 (Purdue University Press, 2012); Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women (Peter Lang, 2013); My Name is Freida Sima: The American-Jewish Women-s Immigrant Experience Through the Eyes of a Young Girl from the Bukovina (Peter Lang, 2017); and A Very Special Life: The Bernice Chronicles (Peter Lang, 2018).