A challenge to traditional views of Jewish passivity in the face of
the Holocaust. One of the most contentious aspects of that tragedy
concerns the disputed role of the Jews themselves during WW II.
Introduced into the postwar debate about the Holocaust with Hannah
Arendt's accusations against Jewish leaders in her landmark work
Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Jews have since been accused of
accepting extermination with resignation and docility. That
scenario is effectively contested by Lazare, a Holocaust survivor
himself, a member of the French Jewish underground during WW II,
and scientific editor at the International Center for Holocaust
Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. He presents overwhelming
evidence that French Jews were active in the Resistance. And he
demonstrates in compelling detail how Jewish resistance took many
more forms than just armed insurgency. He traces how the myriad
array of small actions undertaken by French Jews - from the
establishment of underground networks to the smuggling of children
across borders - eventually coalesced into a concerted and
collective effort to survive the Nazi program of extermination.
Besides the study's value in gathering this material, Lazare offers
an important theoretical reconsideration. French Jews were acutely
conscious of an inevitable fact: French gentiles could obey the
laws of Vichy and occupied France and survive. Jews had no such
option. Therefore, the Jewish Resistance in France, according to
Lazare, was qualitatively different from the French Resistance.
Christian French were fighting for their country's independence,
while Jews were fighting for the survival of their people. This
distinction generated much controversy when the book was published
in France. Perhaps the formulation is overly rigid: The Resistance
also saw itself as fighting for survival, both its own and that of
civilization itself. The controversy, however, does nothing to
diminish Lazare's accomplishment in bringing to light an important
episode in the history of the 20th century. (Kirkus Reviews)
A survivor of the Holocaust and a distinguished scholar of
Jewish history, Lucien Lazare presents a compelling defense of the
Jewish resistance movement in France during World War II, arguing
that rescue was a genuine and significant way of fighting back.
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