Best Selling Books by Miriam Cohen

Jim's anxieties on his first day of school are happily forgotten when he makes a new friend.

It's Valentine's Day and the first graders are excited about the cards they will receive. Their teacher requests everybody in class to send a Valentine's card to everybody else so that nobody feels left out. However, in their eagerness to create the best cards the first graders remember to make cards only for their best friends! This upsets George who does not get as many Valentines as everybody else. Luckily, his friends know just how to cheer him up and as they play music and dance around him, it is one happy Valentine's Day party for everybody after all!

The narrator of this story idolizes his older brother. But when big brother leaves for the army, the narrator tries his best to fill big brother's shoes for his younger brother.

When first grade plans a costume party, Anna Maria dresses as a princess, Willy is a clown, and Jim is "the Strongest Man in the World." But when the third-grade bully arrives and tries to ruin the fun, Jim saves the day when he accidentally takes on the bully, proving that he really is a strong man!

When the lady from the principal's office brings a test for the first grade class, the children have trouble with the test and feel bad. Fortunately, their teacher explains that a test doesn't reflect important things like creativity, kindness, and friendship.

Oscar was hot and bored on the subway train. Then he saw the Island Lady with a huge basket. "Want to know what's inside?" she asked. And out she brought a cool island breeze, the green Caribbean Sea, good things to eat� a calypso man and music and everone joined in the fun.

Alex and his classmates learn together that he doesn't need to tell lies in order for people to like him.

Layla is a shy new girl in first grade and her classmates wonder why she wears a head scarf. As the school day progresses, the first graders learn about Layla's culture and help make her feel more at ease in her new school. Part of the We Love First Grade!™ series.

Every morning when Mommy goes to work, I kiss her goodbye. Daddy stays home with me, and we do everything together–we do the laundry, we dance, we read, we race to the park. Everything is fun with Daddy. At bedtime Daddy reads to me, and sometimes he falls asleep.

When Jim's dog is killed, the other first graders experience with him his natural reactions to death.

Provides an original approach to the emerging practice of reparations for international crimes and a fresh analysis of the recent jurisprudence at the International Criminal Court.

Jacob no longer rides on his father’s back. He is now a big brother. He is helping his daddy today, pushing his little sister in a stroller to the park. His little sister is as cute as a button, but my, she is a wild thing! She runs everywhere in the park. Jacob can’t take his eyes off her for a minute, running fast to catch her.

Cohen examines shifting patterns in the family roles, work lives, and schooling of two generations of Italian-American women, paying particular attention to the importance of these women's pragmatic daily choices.

Julia Lathrop was a social servant, government activist, and social scientist who expanded notions of women's proper roles in public life during the early 1900s. Appointed as chief of the U.S. Children's Bureau, created in 1912 to promote child welfare, she was the first woman to head a United States federal agency. Throughout her life, Lathrop challenged the social norms of the time and became instrumental in shaping Progressive reform. She began her career at Hull House in Chicago, the nation's most famous social settlement, where she worked to improve public and private welfare for poor people, helped establish America's first juvenile court, and pushed for immigrant rights. Lathrop was also co-founder of one of America's first schools of social work. Later in life she became a leader in the League of Women Voters and an advisor on child welfare to the League of Nations. Following Lathrop's life from her childhood and college education through her social service and government work, this book gives an overview of her enduring contribution to progressive politics, women's employment, and women's education. It also offers a look at how one influential woman worked within the bounds of traditional conventions about gender, race, and class, and also pushed against them.

Impatient to begin reading, a first-grader doesn't realize that there is more to reading than books.

An account of the Holocaust experiences of Chanah Kaufman (née Zucker), born in 1929 to an Orthodox Jewish family, related from the viewpoint of the young girl that she was at the time. In Brussels, her parents paid a non-Jew to hide Chanah in her basement. Subsequently she was taken to the Misericorde convent in Leuven, where she and other Jewish girls were hidden throughout the war. The nuns pressured her to convert, convincing her that otherwise the Nazis might kill her along with those who gave her shelter. However, inwardly she always remained Jewish. When the war ended, the nuns did not inform their wards, hoping that the Jewish children they saved would remain Catholics. Chanah was eventually taken to a Jewish orphanage, the Tiefenbrunner Home. Her parents and brother did not survive. She immigrated to Israel after the war. An appendix on pp. 322-344 discusses the role of the general and Jewish undergrounds in Belgium in hiding Jewish children and returning them to their people after the war.

Second-grader Jim isn't sure what he wants to be for Halloween but he knows he wants to be scary.

Jim is the only one in the first grade who is scared of The Thing on television. He feels so ashamed. No one else is afraid. He won't even play Super Heroes with the rest of the class. But when a praying mantis walks on Danny's arm, no one wants to touch it. Only one brave first grader dares to take it off. Who could it be?

At an end-of-the-year beach picnic, Anna Maria, Jim, and the other children realize they will miss First Grade and their teacher, but decide they are ready for Second Grade after all.

The first grade is going on a trip to the museum. It's an exciting day for everybody. The teacher says the most important thing is to stick together. So when Danny says he knows where the dinosaur is, Jim and his friends follow. The only problem is, the friends have stayed together, but somehow the teacher and the rest of the class got lost!

A first grader learns to accept himself as he is.

A fourteen-year-old boy in Brooklyn who has grown up in the foster care system discovers respect and love with a parochial school girl and with the eccentric couple who take him in.

The first grade is getting ready to put on a play for the whole school. Everyone wants a part in "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." The teacher picks Paul to be the troll, Danny to be the biggest goat, and Jim to be one of the trees. But Jim wants to be a troll, not a tree. So Jim interrupts the rehearsals and acts bossy to his classmates. Finally it is the day of the big play. But Paul has stage fright. Can Jim find a way to help his friend and save the play?

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, Jim and his friends in the first grade are busy preparing for a special holiday, painting a mural, writing a play, and creating a giant turkey costume

The first graders learn to accept the new boy, who is blind, as just like themselves.

Before they ever meet her, the first graders imagine what their new teacher will be like.

George's classmates are proud to know him when his fast action in an emergency saves an elderly friend's life.

Jacob was mean to Honey, and now everyone is mad at him, in this humorous sequel to Second-Grade Friends.

When the light in the classroom incubator burns out, two friends are brought together again as they act to save the lives of the unhatched chickens.

Fourth-grader Emily is forced to think about her Jewish heritage when the new boy, an Orthodox Jew, refuses to participate in the school Christmas celebrations.

Written by best-selling author Miriam Cohen, A Daughter of Two Mothers is the incredible, true account of a handicapped widow's forced separation from her infant daughter, the years of longing and searching, the legal battle, and the subsequent destruction brought by the Nazis. Open this book and you will step into the world of a generation gone, of pre- and post-war Hungarian Jewry, as young Leichu moves between two communities and their divergent lifestyles. This is a gripping story of separation and reunion, of pure faith and acceptance of G-d's will, and of triumph over despair.

In the tradition of Kristen Roupenian, Rebecca Schiff, and Ottessa Moshfegh, a darkly humorous debut collection that follows four girls from childhood to adulthood.

Jim, caught up in a self-fulfilling prophecy, finally realizes he isn't so bad in art after all when a new art teacher transfers to his school.