Jerusalem has a particularly fraught archaeological heritage, with the battle over the city’s present and future reflected in disagreements surrounding its past. In “Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City,” Andrew Lawler shows how, just as the city reveals layers of history, so does the story of its excavation, with generations of archaeologists breaking earth in pursuit of radically different agendas.

It’s always rewarding when a story collection feels like more than the sum of its parts, as is the case with two compelling new debut releases.

Veronica Schanoes is a professor of English at Queens College in New York City whose academic research has included a focus on fairy tales. And, with particular attention to labor history and Jewish history, her inventive short story collection “Burning Girls and Other Stories” often turns to fairy tales as a framework for exploration.

My father’s sister Sandra suffered terribly from lupus. After Sandra fell into a long coma as a teenager, my grandmother traveled more than 1,000 miles for an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Despite the fact that she and my grandfather ran a pharmacy and spent their days dispensing medications, my grandmother turned to the rebbe in hopes that he could achieve for her daughter what modern medicine had been unable to accomplish.

I evoke this story because, although the image of the Jewish doctor may be a staple in our culture, we can easily forget that, for many Jews, scientifically based medicine has often shared the stage with healing practices rooted in religion and folklore.

Nearly 70 years after their execution for having allegedly passed atomic secrets to the USSR, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg remain a prominent presence in the American consciousness, perhaps because their story sits so uneasily in the American conscience.

British journalist and biographer Anne Sebba’s new and terrifically researched “Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy,” the first biography of Ethel to appear in several decades, uses previously unavailable materials to help shed light on the case and the lives behind it.

There is no shortage of fiction set in the Nazi era being written today, and most serious attempts sit atop an enormous amount of historical research. This is in stark contrast to two novels written in the late 1930s and given new life by major U.S. publishers this year.

These are works that did not emerge from excavating the past, but which sprang from the urgency of their moment as history was unfolding.

“The Passenger” was written in the aftermath of Kristallnacht by Berlin native Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz when he was in his early 20s.