With a country-by-country breakdown, Rabbi Wein depicts the unsettling period between the two world wars in which anti-Semitism was fomenting everywhere. Whether Jews lived in Stalinist Russia, anti-Semitic Poland, or in Germany under the failing Weimar Republic, their future was grim. Coupled with restrictions on immigration to Palestine and the United States, Jews truly had no safe place to go.

• the Yevsekas - Jewish communists
• the anti-Semitic overtone of Stalin's purges
• Birobidzhan - the communists' "Jewish state"
• the Polish government's attack on Shabbos and shechita
• the fate of the Jews in the Baltic states
• the uniqueness of Czechoslovakia
• the folkishe parties - the Nazis weren't the only ones