The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

David Biale (ed.), The Cultures of the Jews (New York, 2002), is an essential collection of essays reflecting new historical thinking, available either in one big volume from biblical antiquity to the present or, for the later period, Vol. 3, Modern Encounters.

Hillel Halkin, Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel (New York, 2002);

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age of the Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (Princeton, 2013);

Adam Kirsch, The Making of Benjamin Disraeli (New York, 2008);

Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (London, 2010);

Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (New Haven, 2009);

So I expect some of the sense that Jewish history is a gazetteer annotated by announcements of weddings, scandalous runaways and oncoming assaults, comes from this yeasty brew of narratives cooked up most supper times.