The BWC Circle Book Group meets monthly September-June on Sunday mornings. The group welcomes readers interested in expanding their understanding of the varieties of Jewish experience — the range of titles is broad as you will see from the list of past selections. Below are three highly recommended, recently discussed books that deal with resistance to Nazism and fascism.

All three titles are available at local public libraries in print, audiobook, and eBook formats. If you would like to be added to the Book Group listserv for email announcements about each Book Group meeting, please send your request to BookGroup@circleboston.org.

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis “This has become arguably Lewis’s most enduring novel, perhaps due to the chillingly recognizable depiction of the rise of a populist leader in America. The novel explores implications of creeping fascism and far-right ideologies, many of which have gained popularity and mainstream coverage since the ascendancy of Donald Trump in the present day. Lewis saw totalitarian patriotic populism emerging in his own period and used the novel to satirize society’s failures to halt its ascendancy.”

Prequel, an American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow delves into the complex history of American fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on figures like Philip Johnson, a Harvard graduate and architecture enthusiast drawn to Nazi Germany’s fascist ideology in contrast to the actions of his Jewish contemporary, Lincoln Kirstein, who recognized the threat of Nazism. Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters.

Paper Bullets, Two Artists who Risked their Lives to Defy the Nazis by Jeffrey H. Jackson. Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe were two singular, if long unsung, figures of WWII–French artists, lesbians, subversive and unapologetically empathetic to humanity. As gender-bending creatives in Paris, Schwob and Malherbe were known as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, respectively. As residents of the English Channel island of Jersey, they were a two-woman resistance movement against the Nazi occupation.