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Stained Glass
A Reflective History of Antisemitism
Flora Cassen (Author)
9781487557898
Paperback / softback, published 24 March 2026
358 pages, 22 illustrations
21.6 x 14 x 2.5 cm, 0.34 kg
"This is a powerful and compelling book that speaks to our time but also offers a longer-term historical perspective that is often lacking in contemporary discussions of antisemitism in the present. Deeply moving, I look forward to seeing it in the world." - Laura Levitt, author of The Objects that Remain and American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust "Stained Glass is my favorite kind of book: one I have a really hard time describing. What do you call a memoir that is also art history, a book about antisemitism that is also about Jewish pride, a scholarly history as concise as a sonnet? I don’t know, but it’s worth reading, now." - Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood and Judy Blume: A Life "Moving between Europe and America, personal memory and historical scholarship, Flora Cassen probes antisemitism, Holocaust memory, Jewish belonging, and the renewed sense of isolation that followed October 7. Written with remarkable economy and intellectual honesty, Stained Glass is a quiet masterpiece." - Daniel B. Schwartz, author of Ghetto: The History of a Word
In Stained Glass, Flora Cassen traces a Jewish life shaped by family and history, moving between medieval Europe and the present to connect lived experience with the longer arc of Jewish history. Drawing on her upbringing in Antwerp’s Jewish community and her grandparents’ escape from Nazi-occupied Europe to the Belgian Congo, Cassen writes from within a past in which powerlessness rubbed shoulders with power. From her later life in the United States, she considers Jewish life in Europe as a mirror that reflects enduring questions about vulnerability and belonging. Stained Glass asks what it means to leave Europe behind and to encounter in American Jewish life a vitality that is strikingly beautiful yet never fully settled.
Foreword by Yossi Klein Halevi Preface: A Jew-Free Europe Jonathas’ Story Acknowledgments
Walking on History
Culture Shocks
History Doesn’t Change – Only Our Interpretation Does
The Dutch Synagogue in the Belgian Shtetl
Learning from the Past
In the Shadow of the Shoah
A History of Tears or Resilience?
Medieval Anti-Judaism
Christ-Killers Past and Present
The Story That Never Dies
The Jewish Badge in Renaissance Italy
Wake up, Flora!
Getting Slapped by Both Wings
Teaching about Hate
Monuments in the Present
Anti-Judaism in the West
Two Women in Antwerp
When Spain and Portugal Expelled Beatrice (1492 and 1497)
Inquisition
From Lisbon to Antwerp
Beatrice’s Story
Hidden Identities, Double Selves
Pola’s Antwerp
The Belgian Exodus
Life under Nazi Occupation
A Wartime Marriage
The Lemon on My Seder Plate
Looking Jewish
Crossing the Pyrenees Mountains
Arrested
In the Congo
A New Life
Becoming Colonists
Exile, Not Home
Meanwhile Back Home
Friendships
The Histories I Carry
Holding the Contradictions
Tell Me about Mala
No One Saw Him Die
Mala’s Escape
In Mala’s Broken House
A House Built on Shaky Foundations
Marching to the Past
Maybe It’s Better to Forget?
I Was 20 in 1945
Everyone Learned the Lessons of the Holocaust Except…
An Old Christian Reproach
Like the Cross at Auschwitz
The Backlash Years
The Price and Politics of Memory
Pink, Fat, and Wealthy Jews
Jews and Money: An Old Myth
Don’t Touch our Carnival
The Jewish Soccer Team
Who?
Hannah and Irene
To Stay or Go?
Why Not There?
Jewish Women Protesting
In My Classroom
Definitions, Definitions…
October Seven
Loneliness
A Verbal Ghetto
Gaza
Zionist and Anti-War
Could I Come up with Better Words?
Replacism and Eliminationism
The Myth of Elimination as Justice
A Christian Transfer of Guilt
A Replacist and an Eliminationist Meet in a Bar
Which Past in Our Future
Not the Holocaust but the Middle Ages
Court Jews
Protection or Rights?
The Personal is Political
What I Learned from a Disappeared Suitcase
Who Stole the Carps?