News:

Successful book launch in New York of Georgette Bennett’s Half-Jew–Full Life.

Above are some impressions from the well-attended book launch party at The Metropolitan Club in Manhattan, January 14, 2026.

Mark your calendars for upcoming events in connection with Half-Jew—Full Life:

First Presbyterian Church of New Canaan: Book talk and book signing on Sunday, February 1, 2026.

For more information about the event, see HERE.

New York Public Library: Follow the extraordinary life of Holocaust survivor Gary “Pips” Phillips—whose life was shaped by survival and reinvention. Date: February 19, 2026.

For more information, see HERE.

92nd Street Y in New York: Join Rabbi David Ingber for a special live taping of his acclaimed podcast Detours & Destinations as he and humanitarian Georgette Bennett discuss her new book, Half-Jew – Full Life. Date: March 10, 2026.

For more information, see HERE.

Read an EXCERPT from Half-Jew—Full Life that was published in Judith Magazine.

Buy the book Half-Jew—Full Life HERE.

Guest Essay

Half-Jew Full Life: The Challenges of Writing a Third Person Memoir
By Georgette Bennett

How to write a book about a dead subject who is not well known? How to relate his  roguish adventures with immediacy?  Written by a third person, any account would almost inevitably be at a remove from his experiences.  And that wouldn’t make for very compelling reading.

Half-Jew Full Life, The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream is based on dozens of audio tapes in which my subject, Gary “Pips” Phillips, tells his life story to his psychiatrist, in a stream-of-consciousness form. Because I had recourse to more than a thousand pages of transcribed audio tapes, I was able to use Pips’s voice throughout.  I many cases, it was through direct quotes.  In others, I paraphrased his descriptions of places and events.  At other times, it was almost as if I was in conversation with him.  Although the book is written in the third person, it is directly built on first-person source material.  That solved the problem of immediacy.

A native of Berlin, Pips was born to an Aryan mother and Jewish father.  As such, the Nazi regime classified him as a Mischling Ersten Grades, which translates as “mongrel, first degree” (the Nazis were not known for subtlety).  So long as he was living with his Aryan parent, he would have been spared most of the horrors of the Holocaust since Mischlinge were not automatically deportation cases.   But the very week the “Nuremberg Laws” were enacted—which stripped Jews of most of their civic rights—he decided to become a bar mitzvah, identifying as a Jew.  And then he fell in love with a full Jew, whose family was actually summoned for deportation.  Rather than letting her report to Gestapo headquarters, as ordered, he convinced her to go into hiding with him.  That cost him the protection of living with his Aryan mother, and he became just another Jew to be pursued and persecuted.  Scrounging for food and a place to sleep in-between arrests and repeated escapes from Gestapo prisons, he lived for years on the edge between survival and perdition.

Very little has been written about Mischlinge – especially those who identified as Jewish, making this a distinct Holocaust story.  But there’s a surfeit of American dream stories.  What holds the two parts of Pips’s story together?  He’s not here to make the connections between whatever lessons he learned from his Holocaust experiences and his subsequent life as a successful business owner in America. But I think his fearless self-determination, trickster-like shapeshifting, and acerbic sense of humor were techniques of survival that also served him well in making his mark in the business world.

Narratively, my biggest struggle was converting stream-of-consciousness content into a chronology of events.  Figuring out what happened when could be excruciating!  But once I had that structure in place, the pieces of the book came together.  I thought of it as a limited TV series in which each chapter was a different episode.

Of course, that source material is based on Pips’s memory, and memory is notoriously unreliable.  That meant that I had to fact-check everything.  I omitted anything I couldn’t verify. It was also important to create a sense of place. That meant researching key locations in Pips’s story, reconstructing the interwar period in the Berlin neighborhood where he lived, describing the mountains he loved to climb, painting a picture of Caneel Bay where he vacationed for years.

Finally, I needed to provide context in which to frame Pips’s story as part of a much bigger story.  That meant being both historian and detective.  As such, I researched specific aspects of the Holocaust – especially the experience of Berlin Jews – as well as mid-century American culture.

His story is timely.  It is a cautionary tale about how authoritarianism can creep up on us and the hazards of being in denial.  It is a case study of how dehumanizing policies, weaponized language, and physical violence mutually reinforce each other.  And it is an exploration of the meaning of identity and the price one may pay for holding on to it.

Pips was my closest relative and a fixture in my life.  When he died, he left me the rights to his story – a story that intersected with mine. He believed that he contributed nothing of import to the world and had nothing to leave behind except his story.  My goal in writing this book was to give Pips a legacy and to affirm that his life mattered.

More News

Bernard Schweizer gives a podcast interview about all things Heresy Press.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Calcopia Editor Nate Evans, Heresy Press founder Bernard Schweizer talks about what has (and has not) changed in publishing in the last few years, attacks on literary freedom from book bans to soft censorship, the role of AI in literature, as well as forthcoming exciting Heresy Press releases.

→ Listen to the podcast interview HERE.

Heresy Press adds another country to its international licensing portfolio—Turkey. 

“1984 Association (D84) is a non-profit organization based in Türkiye that strives to foster a pluralistic democratic society by advancing freedoms, rights, and rational public discussion.”

In collaboration with D84, The War On Words is being translated into Turkish and will be released there later this year. This is a significant development, especially as Turkey is a country with a precarious free speech situation, where the independent press is under attack. Heresy Press’s book by Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen will hopefully make a contribution to preserving the space of pluralism and freedom, in our own society and abroad.

Director’s Recommendations

Hooray! Reading appears NOT to be kaput. Enjoy this optimistic assessment of the state of reading as well as the staying power of the written word. Fascinating… and not a little reassuring.

Excerpt: “It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead. If I was a mad scientist hellbent on stopping people from reading, I’d probably invent something like the iPhone. And after I released my dastardly creation into the world, I’d end up like the Grinch on Christmas morning, dumbfounded that my plan didn’t work: I gave them all the YouTube Shorts they could ever desire and they’re still… reading!?”

→ Read the complete essay HERE.

Soft censorship is rearing its head again: Becky Tuch broke a story in LigMagNews about a personal essay that was accepted for publication by a literary magazine, only to have the offer yanked shortly afterwards. The reasons for this change of heart appear to be linked to the current malaise in publishing—hyper-sensitivity, ideological tunnel vision, and lack of courage. The rejected essay, “The Mann An Sich,” by the way, is excellent.

Excerpt: “In John’s particular case, the contents of his essay also seem relevant. John reveals profoundly private and sensitive information about his own life. In such an instance, I think editors have an especial responsibility to treat their writers’ work with care. Others may disagree with me on this, but I feel that if a writer shares details of personal trauma in a work, then editors ought to acknowledge the seriousness of what has been shared with them.

Instead, John was told that publication of his piece would not allow this magazine to be a space “that is inclusive, respectful.” Inclusive of whom? Respectful of whom and what? How is reneging on a publication offer inclusive or respectful to John, who has described his own experience with abuse? Is John’s perspective not welcome? More to the point here—Why was it welcome once, and not welcome now?”

→ Read the complete essay HERE.

Heresy Press author Michael Liska (author of Alice, or The Wild Girl) gives a brilliant interview on Zona Motel. This is a must-read for fans of historical fiction and for followers of Michael Liska and Heresy Press:

Excerpt: “As far as manipulating readers’ experiences goes: I think it all boils down to writing with an awareness of where the reader is at…knowing what you set up and then working to subvert that, to keep them guessing. In general, I think it’s really important to write with a sense of audience; with an awareness that you’re crafting an experience. I think writers too often get lost in this solipsistic notion that their writing is about pleasing only themselves or finding some true, unique thing they have to say, and they forget that prose fiction is a communicative medium. Dare I even say – a medium for entertainment.”

→ Read the interview HERE.