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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > Second World War
In the last half century, ways of thinking about the Holocaust have
changed somewhat dramatically. In this volume, noted scholars
reflect on how their own thinking about the Holocaust has changed
over the years. In their personal stories they confront the
questions that the Holocaust has raised for them and explore how
these questions have been evolving. Contributors include John T.
Pawlikowski, Richard L. Rubenstein, Michael Berenbaum, and Eva
Fleischner.
This volume provides an indispensable resource for anyone studying
the Holocaust. The reference entries are enhanced by documents and
other tools that make this volume a vital contribution to Holocaust
research. This volume showcases a detailed look at the multifaceted
attempts by Germany's Nazi regime, together with its collaborators,
to annihilate the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. Several
introductory essays, along with a rich chronology, reference
entries, primary documents, images, and a bibliography provide
crucial information that readers will need in order to try to
understand the Holocaust while undertaking research on that
horrible event. This text looks not only at the history of the
Holocaust, but also at examples of resistance (through armed
violence, attempts at rescue, or the very act of survival itself);
literary and cultural expressions that have attempted to deal with
the Holocaust; the social and psychological implications of the
Holocaust for today; and how historians and others have attempted
to do justice to the memory of those killed and seek insight into
why the Holocaust happened in the first place. Comprehensively
examines all angles of the Holocaust within one easily readable
volume written by experts Includes primary documents, with
appropriate introductions, to set the historical and contemporary
contexts for the entries Contains useful chronologies of the events
surrounding the Holocaust Provides a number of contextualizing
essays on various facets of the Holocaust, which precede the
reference entries themselves
Examines literature and art to reveal the German genocidal gaze in
Africa and the Holocaust. The first genocide of the twentieth
century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between
1904-1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they
exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the
surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The
perception of Africans as subhuman-lacking any kind of
civilization, history, or meaningful religion-and theresulting
justification for the violence against them is what author
Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the "genocidal gaze," an attitude
that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze:
From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the
trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the
Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Baer also
considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous
people and their leaders upon the German imperialists. Baer
explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama
genocide and the Holocaust-concepts such as racial hierarchies,
lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and
endloesung (final solution) that were deployed by German
authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify
genocide. She also notes the use of shared
methodology-concentration camps, death camps, intentional
starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children-in
both instances. While previous scholars have made these links
between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust,
Baer's book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate
this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of
Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German
Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an
acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts
that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and
reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that
calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and
discloses their malignant convictions. Her transnational analysis
provides the groundwork for future studies of links between
imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the
devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.
Flares of Memory is a collection of ninety-two stories written by over forty Jewish survivors and several US Army liberators about their experiences during the Holocaust. The stories collected in this volume were developed in a writing workshop led by Brostoff and Chamovitz for survivors of the Holocaust in the hope of preserving their memories for posterity. The contributors to this collection relate their recollections of being children, teenagers, and young adults during the Holocaust. Their individual experiences testify to the horror of the period as well as the moments of courage and luck that allowed them to survive while offering a tribute to the lives and cultures that were destroyed. The volume organizes the stories thematically into chapters, and includes a detailed timeline of the Holocaust, a map of concentration camps, and photographs of the contributors.
Interdisciplinary overview of American Jewish life post-Holocaust.
The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a
particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary,
these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and
Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II,
the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened
by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry.
Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous
assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard
to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have
expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar
decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying
increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic,
artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this
period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the
Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe.
Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the
Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art,
history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the
American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by
its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other
cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern
European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era.
We commonly associate the term "Holocaust" with Nuremberg and
Kristallnacht, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, Auschwitz and
Treblinka. Appearing as they do in countless books and films, these
symbols of hatred penetrate our consciousness, memory, and history.
But, unfortunately, our memory is selective, and, in the case of
Romania, our knowledge is scant. In 1939 the Jewish population of
Romania exceeded 750,000: the third largest concentration of Jews
in Europe. By 1944, some 400,000 had disappeared. Another 150,000
Ukrainian Jews died at the hands of Romanian soldiers. In the quest
for a "final solution" Romania proved to be Hitler's most
enthusiastic ally. In The Silent Holocaust, Butnaru, himself a
survivor of the Romanian labor camps, provides a full account and
demonstrates that anti-Semitism was a central force in Romania's
history. He begins by examining the precarious status of Romanian
Jewry in the years prior to World War I. He then reviews the period
to the establishment in September, 1940, of the National Legionary
State, a period when anti-Semitism became the unifying force in
politics. The remainder of the book covers the Holocaust years, and
reveals that Romania's premeditated mass murder of Jews was well
underway before the Reich's gas chambers became operational. The
Silent Holocaust has been called a "work of epic and historical
worth" and it is invaluable for students of World War II, the
Holocaust, and Jewish and Eastern European studies.
Does religion encourage altruism on behalf of those who do not
belong? Are the very religious more likely to be altruistic toward
outsiders than those who are less religious? In this book Pearl M.
Oliner examines data on Christian rescuers and nonrescuers of Jews
during the Holocaust to shed light on these important questions.
Drawing on interviews with more than five hundred
Christians--Protestant and Catholic, very religious, irreligious,
and moderately religious rescuers and nonrescuers living in
Nazi-occupied Europe, Oliner offers a sociological perspective on
the values and attitudes that distinguished each group. She
presents several case studies of rescuers and nonrescuers within
each group and then interprets the individual's behavior as it
relates to his or her group. She finds that the value patterns of
the religious groups differ significantly from one another, and she
is able to highlight those factors that appear to have contributed
most toward rescue within each group.
It takes courage beyond belief to sneak out in the night to dig in
the garbage for scraps to keep from starving when you know you
would be killed if you were caught, or to crawl through ice and
snow to freedom because the muscles in your legs atrophied from
sitting in a hay mow for almost two years. To defect to the west,
leaving all your family behind, not knowing when or if you'll ever
see them again, or to endure the work, starvation diet, and
beatings of concentration camp life also were courageous acts.
However, these and other challenges were everyday living for
millions such as those in this book. While those around them fell
victim to WWII atrocities and did not survive, these people fought
hard and won the right to live.
This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self
and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the
twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book
test a diverse range of ways of identifying as Jews and with the
Jewish people, while engaging with postmodern and postcolonial
discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism. This book selects six
key areas in which the boundaries of Jewish identities have been
interrogated and renegotiated: nation, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, religion, and the Holocaust. In each of these areas
Sicher explores how major and emerging contemporary writers and
artists re-envision the meaning of their identities. Such
re-envisioning may be literally visual or metaphorical in the
search for expression of artistic self between the conventional
paradigms of the past and new ways of thinking.
"Rhodes and the Holocaust" is the story of "La Juderia," the
Jewish community that once lived and flourished on Rhodes Island,
the largest of the twelve Dodecanese islands in the Mediterranean
Sea near the coast of Turkey. While the focus of the accounts of
the Holocaust has for the most part been on the Jewish populations
of Eastern and Middle Europe, little seems to be known of the
events that affected those communities in Greece and the
surrounding Aegean Islands during that time.
The population of this group was almost annihilated, reduced
from a thriving community of over 80,000, to less than a 1,000
survivors, who were left to tell their stories. Among the victims
of Rhodes Island were the grandmother and aunt of the author, who
were killed by falling bombs, and his grandfather, who was taken to
the Auschwitz concentration camp. This history tells of the deceit
and inhuman treatment the entire Jewish community of Rhodes
experienced during their deportation and eventual "liberation" by
the Russian Army.
The heart-wrenching story of the Rhodes Jewish community is told
through the experiences of a thirteen-year-old boy, taken by the
Nazis to Auschwitz along with his father and his eleven-year-old
sister.; Most of all, Rhodes and the Holocaust makes known the
story of that community's existence and struggle for survival.
Because the Holocaust, at its core, was an extreme expression of
a devastating racism, the author contends it has special
significance for African Americans. Locke, a university professor,
clergyman, and African American, reflects on the common experiences
of African American and Jewish people as minorities and on the
great tragedy that each community has experienced in its
history--slavery and the Holocaust. Without attempting to equate
the experiences of African Americans to the experiences of European
Jews during the Holocaust, the author does show how aspects of the
Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish community worldwide, and the
long-lasting consequences relate to slavery, the civil rights
movement, and the current status of African Americans.
Written from a Christian perspective, this book argues that the
implications of the Holocaust touch all people, and that it is a
major mistake to view the Holocaust as an exclusively Jewish event.
Instead, the author asks whether it is possible for both African
Americans and Jewish Americans to learn from the experience of the
other regarding the common threat that minority people confront in
Western societies. Locke focuses on the themes of parochialism and
patriotism and reexamines the role of the Christian churches during
the Holocaust in an effort to challenge some of the prevailing
views in Holocaust studies.
As violence and turmoil continue to define the former
Yugoslavia, basic questions remain unanswered: What are the forces
behind the Serbian expansionist drive that has brought death and
destruction to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo? How did
the Serbs rationalize, and rally support for, this genocidal
activity?
Heavenly Serbia traces Serbia's nationalist and expansionist
impulses to the legendary battle of Kosovo in 1389. Anzulovic shows
how the myth of "Heavenly Serbia" developed to help the Serbs
endure foreign domination, explaining their military defeat and the
loss of their medieval state by emphasizing their own moral
superiority over military victory. Heavenly Serbia shows how this
myth resulted in an aggressive nationalist ideology which has
triumphed in the late twentieth century and marginalized those
Serbs who strive for the establishment of a civil society.
"Modern Serbian nationalism...and its contradictory
connections...have been sources of considerable scholarly
interest...Branimir Anzulovic's compendium is a good example of the
genre, made all the more useful by Anzulovic's excellent command of
the literature."
--Ivo Banac, "History of Religions"
Author interview with CNN: http:
//www.cnn.com/chat/transcripts/branimir_chat.html
This book follows the story of suspected Nazi war criminals in the
United States and analyzes their supposed crimes during World War
II, their entry into the United States as war refugees in the 1940s
and 1950s, and their prosecution in the 1970s and beyond by the
U.S. government, specifically by the Office of Special
Investigation (OSI). In particular, this book explains why and how
such individuals entered the United States, why it took so long to
locate and apprehend them, how the OSI was founded, and how the OSI
has tried to bring them to justice. This study constitutes a
thorough account of 150 suspects and examines how the search for
them connects to larger developments in postwar U.S. history. In
this latter regard, one major theme includes the role Holocaust
memory played in the aforementioned developments. This account adds
significantly to the historiographical debate about when and how
the Holocaust found its way into American Jewish and also general
American consciousness. In general, these suspected Nazi war
criminals could come to the United States largely undetected during
the early Cold War. In this atmosphere, they morphed from Nazi
collaborators to ardent anti-Communists and, outside of some big
fish, not even within the Jewish community was their role in the
Holocaust much discussed. Only with the Eichmann trial in the early
1960s did interest in other Holocaust perpetrators increase,
culminating in the founding of the OSI in the late 1970s. The
manuscript makes use, among other documents, of declassified
sources from the CIA and FBI, little used trial accounts, and hard
to locate OSI records.
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