Nonfiction Chroncile - Books by Michael Goldfarb, Mark Mazower, Malalai Joya and Paul Johnson - Review - NYTimes.com EMANCIPATION How Liberating Europe's Jews From the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance. By Michael Goldfarb. Simon & Schuster, $30. Aperture. $85. In this collection of staged photographs, Ventura imagines that "an old circus performer looks back on his life"; his images evoke the Italy of the 1930s. Above, "The Painted Forest." "Is not Germany the ghetto of Europe?" asked the 19th-century German nationalist Ludwig Börne, bemoaning his people's lack of a state. Though the irony stings today, Börne was not being sarcastic: he genuinely believed that the emancipation of all peoples was somehow pegged to the emancipation of the Chosen People. Goldfarb, a former NPR journalist, says that history vindicated Börne - freeing the Jews proved indispensable to Europe's general progress. Goldfarb's story, told in part through the lives of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Alfred Dreyfus and Gustav Mahler, goes like this: As the 19th century dawned, the Ashkenazim, who stretched from Alsace to Russia - disenfranchised, impoverished and confined to the infamous ghettos - were the most obviously unfree people in Europe. Yet it was through their rather stark example that other more subtly oppressed groups - France's Third Estate, the stateless nations of Germany and Italy - realized their own needs for their own forms of freedom. Additionally, once emancipation arrived for the Jews, some pretty brilliant people no longer had to study Talmud their whole lives, thus freeing up their schedules so that they could come up with ideas like Marxian socialism and psychoanalysis. Freud considered the Jews" outrageously outsize contributions to these intellectual movements to be, like every­thing else, no accident. Goldfarb takes welcome delight in his subject, though he could have built more scaffolding to hold his disparate stories together. Ultimately, his book is a celebration of that strain of thought that speaks to the universal desire for emancipation, material and spiritual - an invaluable intellectual tradition that, apparently, is one more thing anti-Semites can blame the Jews for. NO ENCHANTED PALACE The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. By Mark Mazower. Princeton University, $24.95. Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, has identified a gigantic contradiction in the United Nations" very DNA that may explain how the ambitious, well-intentioned body evolved into Mess-on-East River. On the one hand, the United Nations was conceived as an instrument of the great powers - empire by other means. The British, for example, sought to fashion not an egalitarian community of nations but a successor to their own rule. However, opposing that predisposition are structural biases favoring the establishment of many small nation-states instead of a few big multicultural ones. What do you get when you cross great-power advantage with third-world strength of numbers? You get the familiar paralysis and incoherence. Mazower wishes to correct our naïve view of the founders" intentions, yet he never instructs us how our newly cleareyed understanding should alter our attitude. "Even though the U.N. had been established by the great powers," Mazower says, "third-world nationalists took its universalist rhetoric at face value, exploited its mechanisms and fostered international public opposition to continued colonial rule." Thus did the institution of the empires, by the empires and for the empires hasten the end of the imperial age. A WOMAN AMONG WARLORDS The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice. By Malalai Joya with Derrick O'Keefe. Scribner, $25. In this memoir, Joya, an Afghan activist and politician, bears witness to the horrific experience known as "being female in Afghanistan." She conveys the indignity of the forced wearing of the burqa with a power that distant and abstract condemnation can never muster: "You have no peripheral vision because of the netting in front of your eyes," she relates. And it's hot and suffocating under there. Joya's life has been singular and heroic: a covert educator of young girls in the western city of Herat, she was elected at 25 to the constitutional loya jirga of 2003. There, she gave a rabble-rousing speech - which you can and should watch on YouTube - branding the post-Taliban Afghanistan's higher-ups, many of whom were present in the packed Kabul room, as "criminals." Joya is ill-inclined to look upon the American intervention as the Good War, instead maintaining, "We are caught between two enemies - the Taliban on one side and the U.S./NATO forces and their warlord friends on the other." Joya's arguments, which have earned the plaudits of people like Noam Chomsky, are sometimes extreme, simplistic and misguided, but they are rarely without a grain of truth, and they have also gained credence among her countrymen recently. Still, her tendency to choose rageful denunciation over calm observation is immensely frustrating. Anyone can fulminate; Joya can testify. And nothing could be more potent than a faithful recitation of her remarkable life. Viking, $24.95. If we are being honest with ourselves, then a book this brief and relaxed, yet purporting to cover so jam-packed a life, must prompt the question: Why should we spend time and money on it instead of Googling "Churchill" and scanning the results for half an hour? It turns out that while Wikipedia can ably trace the arc of Churchill's life, Johnson - who enhances the familiar story with generous quotations from his subject as well as his own digressive and thoroughly English prose - can give the reader the definite sense of having known Churchill, or at least of having hung out with him for a bit. Breezing through Churchill's childhood, soldiering, war journalism, dark streak and daddy issues, Johnson, a journalist and historian, follows his 1910s fall, 1920s rise, 1930s fall and, finally, 1940 accession to the prime ministership. Johnson provides a sophisticated discussion of Churchill's astounding leadership, political and military, which is followed by a less sophisticated conclusion: "Did Churchill save Britain? The answer must be yes. No one else could have done it. The drip of hagiography in the book's first sections turns into a flood by the end, but Churchill's inspiration and charm are like Novocaine to a reader's skeptical faculties. "We shall fight on the beaches," Churchill informed his nation in its darkest hour, "we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Then, Johnson informs us, he added, out of the microphone's reach, "We shall fight with pitchforks and broomsticks, it's about all we've bloody got." "Churchill" lets you spend some time in this man's company, and who wouldn't want that? Marc Tracy is a staff writer at Tablet magazine.