Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and Wolf Gruner

Raul Hilberg’s path-breaking 1961 study The Destruction of the European Jews rightfully remains on the reading list of any serious student of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Hilberg’s insistence on European Jews‘ alleged “almost complete lack of resistance” has been subjected to frequent scholarly criticism. He partially based this claim on a cursory reading of petitions: “Everywhere, the Jews pitted words against rifles” and “everywhere they lost.”

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Voices on War and Genocide

Omer Bartov, Brown University

Now available in print and eBook, VOICES OF WAR AND GENOCIDE “assembles three extraordinarily rich personal accounts covering different periods and aspects of the history of the Galician town and region of Buczacz. Such narratives are extremely rare; even rarer are ones that are as informative and illuminating as these three” (Thomas Kühne, Clark University). Learn more here.

This book is derived from research I carried out for my recent monograph, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). In the course of looking for documents in scores of archives and libraries, as well as  seeking personal accounts that would help me reconstruct the “biography” of a small town in eastern Europe, I found three remarkable diaries about events in Buczacz during the two world wars. While the monograph I was writing attempted to capture the individual voices of the town’s residents as a way of understanding how a community of interethnic coexistence was transformed into a site of communal genocide, it was not possible to bring to light the different protagonists’ personal stories as told from their own perspective. This is precisely what Voices on War and Genocide offers. 

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Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day

Photo by K.VrtanesyanApril 24 marks the 103rd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.  Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is held annually to recognize and mourn more than 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide, the most tragic element of Armenian history.
For a limited time, take advantage of a special 25% discount off all of our War and Genocide Series titles by entering the code WG18 in your shopping cart.
For more information on Armenian Genocide please visit armenian-genocide.org.
In recognizing the significance of the occasion we would like to bring to your attention a range of Armenian Genocide titles, including our War and Genocide Series, which reflects a growing interest in the study of war and genocide within the framework of social and cultural history.  Continue reading “Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day”

International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

Berghahn BooksTo mark International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda on 7 April, we’re offering FREE access to these relevant journal articles from Conflict and Society, Focaal, Journeys, and Social Analysis until April 14. 

From the UN website:

On 26 January 2018, the United Nations General Assembly adopted draft resolution A/72/L.31, designating 7 April as the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, recalling that Hutu and others who opposed the genocide were also killed. The new resolution amends the title of the annual observance, which was originally established on 23 December 2003 (A/RES/58/234) as International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.

The date, 7 April, marks the start of the 1994 genocide. Every year, on or around that date, the United Nations organizes commemorative events at its Headquarters in New York and at United Nations offices around the world.

 


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SIMULATED SHELVES: BROWSE April 2017 NEW BOOKS

We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Educational Studies, Environmental StudiesGenocide Studies, History and Jewish Studies, along with our New in Paperback titles.


Paperback Original

REDESCRIBING RELATIONS
Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics
Edited by Ashley Lebner
Afterword by Marilyn Strathern

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Searching for Feelings: The Scrolls of Auschwitz and Son of Saul

Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitzby Nicholas Chare & Dominic Williams

 

Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams are the authors of Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz and recently published an article about the book on Slate’s blog, The Vault.
 
The Hungarian director László Nemes was moved by writings known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz to create the award-winning film Son of Saul. The Scrolls of Auschwitz comprise a variety of documents composed by members of the Sonderkommando, or Special Squad, a group of predominantly Jewish prisoners who were tasked with running the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These writings were buried in the grounds of the crematoria in 1944. Between 1945 and 1980, eight caches of documents by five known authors were recovered. The writings have retrospectively become known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, as this is how the historian Ber Mark’s book Megiles Oyshvits, which transcribes several of the manuscripts, was translated into English in 1985.

 

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