The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict (Royal Historical Society, 1978) analysed the first decade of the Palestine mandate, drawing on the approaches to imperial history suggested by Robinson and Gallagher in their Africa and the Victorians.

Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 1979), again based mainly on recently released British records, examined the British record in relation to the Jewish genocide in Europe, focusing on British receptivity to Jewish immigration to the UK, to the empire, and to Palestine, on British policy regarding relief supplies sent through the economic blockade to Nazi Europe, and on official reaction to proposals for the bombing of Auschwitz and for aid to Jewish resistance in occupied Europe.

The Jews in Modern France (University Press of New England, 1985), edited with Frances Malino, brought together essays originally prepared for a conference organized at Brandeis University.

The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (Yale, 1988) was an experiment in biography that drew partly on the models offered by A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo and Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Hermit of Peking. The Crime Writers’ Association awarded this book their Golden Dagger for Non-Fiction.

Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford, 1992) was a political biography of the first High Commissioner under the British mandate in Palestine and the successor to Lloyd George as leader of the British Liberal Party.

Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945 (Harvard, 1996) proposed a radical reassessment of post-Hitler European Jewry; the picture of demographic decline, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution provoked considerable debate.

Secret War in Shanghai (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), an account of the rivalries of the great powers in North China during World War II, was partly based, like the biography of Trebitsch Lincoln, on the archive of the British-controlled Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch. This book elicited some critical reactions on account of its portrait of widespread collaborationism among the foreign communities (including the British and the Americans) in Shanghai.

Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (Yale, 2001) returned to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The book surveyed the diplomatic history of the Jerusalem question over the past two hundred years, with a close focus on the period since 1967. The book emphasized the historic roots of the current divisions in the city and the exploitation of religious devotion to the city by politicians of all three monotheistic faiths.

Israelis and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight? Can They Stop? (Yale, 2003) re-engages with some of the themes of The British in Palestine and re-examines them in a larger frame and over a longer period. It analyses, in particular, demography, social relations, especially the labour market, and environmental pressures, showing how all of these have shaped and continue to shape Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford, 2007) is a general history of the continent since 1914. The twentieth century witnessed some of the most brutish episodes in history. Yet it also saw incontestable improvements in the conditions of existence for most inhabitants of the continent. It was a century of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental spoliation, of imperial expansion and retraction, of authoritarian repression and of individualism resurgent. Barbarism and Civilization attempts to encapsulate and reinterpret the experience of Europeans in the course of the tumultuous twentieth century.

On the Eve: the Jews of Europe before the Second World War (Simon & Schuster, 2012) portrays European Jewry on the brink of its destruction. It examines the existential crisis that Jews faced throughout the continent and shows that the challenges to collective Jewish survival came as much from within as without. On the Eve discusses Jews' hopes and fears, anxieties and ambitions, family ties, internal and external relations, their cultural creativity, amusements, songs, fads and fancies, dress, diet, and, insofar as they can be grasped, the things that made existence meaningful for them. The fundamental objective is to restore forgotten men, women, and children to the historical record, to breathe renewed life momentarily into those who were soon to be dry bones. The book was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize in 2013.

The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Harvard, 2014) challenges the ahistorical interpretation of the role of the Nazi-appointed Jewish councils in Nazi-occupied Europe that was offered by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Ambiguity of Virtue tells the story of Gertrude van Tijn’s work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, enabling many Jews to escape to safety. Some later called her a heroine; others denounced her as a collaborator. Was she merely a pawn of the Nazis, or should she be commended for taking advantage of such opportunities as offered themselves to save Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity?

A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, The Place We Went Back To (Allen Lane, 2023) ‘A little place – you won’t have heard of it’ is what my father used to say when people asked him where exactly our people came from. Krakowiec is a small town situated on what is today the border between Ukraine and Poland. It also lies at the epicentre of the tumultuous national and ideological conflicts that have shaped the destiny of modern Europe. This book traces the history of the town over the past six centuries; it analyses the evolving patterns of social interaction among its three communities, Jews, Ukrainians (Greek Catholics), and Poles (Roman Catholics); and it retrieves the story of my family’s intimate, tortured relationship with a place that we once called home.