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by Subject: Jewish Studies

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• eBook available May 2017

  The Absent Jews

  Kurt Forstreuter and the Historiography of Medieval Prussia

  Hess, C.

  For nearly a century, it has been a commonplace of Central European history that there were no Jews in medieval Prussia—the result, supposedly, of the ruling Teutonic Order’s attempts to create a purely Christian crusader’s state. In this groundbreaking historical investigation, however, medievalist Cordelia Hess demonstrates the very weak foundations upon which that assumption rests. In exacting detail, she traces this narrative to the work of a single, minor Nazi-era historian, revealing it to be ideologically compromised work that badly mishandles its evidence. By combining new medieval scholarship with a biographical and historiographical exploration grounded in the 20th century, The Absent Jews spans remote eras while offering a fascinating account of the construction of historical knowledge.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: Medieval/Early Modern

• eBook available November 2019

  The Anatomy of the Holocaust

  Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship

  Hilberg, R.
  Pehle, W. H. & Schlott, R. (eds)

  A multifaceted look at historian Raul Hilberg, tracing the evolution of Holocaust research from a marginal subdiscipline into a vital intellectual project.

  “I would recommend this book to both Holocaust historians and general readers alike. The breadth and depth of Hilberg’s research and his particular insights have not yet been surpassed by any other Holocaust scholar.”—Jewish Libraries News & Reviews

  Though best known as the author of the landmark 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews, the historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. The Anatomy of the Holocaust collects some of Hilberg’s most essential and groundbreaking writings―many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise inaccessible to nonspecialists―in a single volume. Supplemented with commentary and notes from Hilberg’s longtime German editor and his biographer.

  From the Introduction:
  This selection by the editors from the multitude of his published texts focuses on Hilberg’s intellectual interests as a Holocaust researcher. Among other topics, they deal with the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, the number of victims, the role of the Judenräte(Jewish councils), and the function of the railway and the police in the extermination process. The scholarly impulses extending from Hilberg’s work remain remarkable and virulent almost a decade after his death.2 They deserve to be readily accessible in one place to historians and the interested public in the new compilation offered here. Many of the debates influenced by Hilberg are not yet resolved. The texts presented can be quite revealing in light of these controversies.

  Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies

• eBook available August 2020

  Antisemitism in Galicia

  Agitation, Politics, and Violence against Jews in the Late Habsburg Monarchy

  Buchen, T.

  In the last third of the nineteenth century, the discourse on the “Jewish question” in the Habsburg crownlands of Galicia changed fundamentally, as clerical and populist politicians emerged to denounce the Jewish assimilation and citizenship. This pioneering study investigates the interaction of agitation, violence, and politics against Jews on the periphery of the Danube monarchy. In its comprehensive analysis of the functions and limitations of propaganda, rumors, and mass media, it shows just how significant antisemitism was to the politics of coexistence among Christians and Jews on the eve of the Great War.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Jewish Studies

• eBook available November 2018

  Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion

  Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe

  Crouthamel, J., Geheran, M., Grady, T., & Köhne, J. B. (eds)

  During the First World War, the Jewish population of Central Europe was politically, socially, and experientially diverse, to an extent that resists containment within a simple historical narrative. While antisemitism and Jewish disillusionment have dominated many previous studies of the topic, this collection aims to recapture the multifariousness of Central European Jewish life in the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike during the First World War. Here, scholars from multiple disciplines explore rare sources and employ innovative methods to illuminate four interconnected themes: minorities and the meaning of military service, Jewish-Gentile relations, cultural legacies of the war, and memory politics.

  Subject: Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2020

  Can Academics Change the World?

  An Israeli Anthropologist's Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus

  Shokeid, M.

  Moshe Shokeid narrates his experiences as a member of AD KAN (NO MORE), a protest movement of Israeli academics at Tel Aviv University, who fought against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, founded during the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). However, since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin and the later obliteration of the Oslo accord, public manifestations of dissent on Israeli campuses have been remarkably mute. This chronicle of AD KAN is explored in view of the ongoing theoretical discourse on the role of the intellectual in society and is compared with other account of academic involvement in different countries during periods of acute political conflict.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies

• eBook available August 2018

  Carnage and Care on the Eastern Front

  The War Diaries of Bernhard Bardach, 1914-1918

  Bardach, B.

  For nearly all of the Great War, the Jewish doctor Bernhard Bardach served with the Austro-Hungarian army in present-day Ukraine. His diaries from that period, unpublished and largely overlooked until now, represent a distinctive and powerful record of daily life on the Eastern Front. In addition to key events such as the 1916 Brusilov Offensive, Bardach also gives memorable descriptions of military personalities, refugees, food shortages, and the uncertainty and boredom that inescapably attended life on the front. Ranging from the critical first weeks of fighting to the ultimate collapse of the Austrian army, these meticulously written diaries comprise an invaluable eyewitness account of the Great War.

  Subjects: History: World War I Jewish Studies

• eBook available April 2017

  Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath

  Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive

  Kangisser Cohen, S., Fogelman, E., & Ofer, D. (eds)

  The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors’ accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive’s over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

  Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies

• eBook available May 2012

  Czechs, Germans, Jews?

  National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia

  Capkova, K.

  The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one’s national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author’s research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry – the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History (General)

• eBook available June 2021

  Do Not Forget Me

  Three Jewish Mothers Write to Their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto

  Saltiel, L. (ed)

  Following the Axis invasion of Greece, the Nazis began persecuting the country’s Jews much as they had across the rest of occupied Europe, beginning with small indignities and culminating in mass imprisonment and deportations. Among the many Jews confined to the Thessaloniki ghetto during this period were Sarina Saltiel, Mathilde Barouh, and Neama Cazes—three women bound for Auschwitz who spent the weeks before their deportation writing to their sons. Do Not Forget Me brings together these remarkable pieces of correspondence, shocking accounts of life in the ghetto with an emotional intensity rare even by the standards of Holocaust testimony.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: World War II Genocide History

• eBook available April 2007

  Escape From Hell

  The True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol

  Wetzler, A.

  A shocking account of Nazi genocide and the inhuman conditions in Auschwitz, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief with which the revelations were met.

  “Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews…. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them.”—Sir Martin Gilbert

  Together with another young Slovak Jew Rudolf Vrba, both deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence – a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas.

  The book is cast in the form of a novel to allow information not personally collected by the two fugitives but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented.

  From the Introduction by Dr. Robert Rozett
  Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. [...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: World War II Literary Studies

• eBook available August 2019

  Escapees

  The History of Jews Who Fled Nazi Deportation Trains in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands

  von Fransecky, T.

  Of the countless stories of resistance, ingenuity, and personal risk to emerge in the years following the Holocaust, among the most remarkable, yet largely overlooked, are those of the hundreds of Jewish deportees who escaped from moving trains bound for the extermination camps. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands alone over 750 men, women and children undertook such dramatic escape attempts, despite the extraordinary uncertainty and physical danger they often faced. Drawing upon extensive interviews and a wealth of new historical evidence, Escapees gives a fascinating collective account of this hitherto neglected form of resistance to Nazi persecution.

  Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies Mobility Studies

• eBook available September 2013

  A Fatal Balancing Act

  The Dilemma of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939-1945

  Meyer, B.

  In 1939 all German Jews had to become members of a newly founded Reich Association. The Jewish functionaries of this organization were faced with circumstances and events that forced them to walk a fine line between responsible action and collaboration. They had hoped to support mass emigration, mitigate the consequences of the anti-Jewish measures, and take care of the remaining community. When the Nazis forbade emigration and started mass deportations in 1941, the functionaries decided to cooperate to prevent the “worst.” In choosing to cooperate, they came into direct opposition with the interests of their members, who were then deported. In June 1943 all unprotected Jews were deported along with their representatives, and the so-called intermediaries supplied the rest of the community, which consisted of Jews living in mixed marriages. The study deals with the tasks of these men, the fate of the Jews in mixed marriages, and what happened to the survivors after the war.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

• eBook available November 2019

  German Railroads, Jewish Souls

  The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution

  Browning, C. R., Hayes, P. & Hilberg, R.

  A rich and accessible introduction to the role of the German railway system in the Holocaust, a topic that remains understudied even today.

  Renowned Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg considered the German railway system that delivered European Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe to be not only an essential component of the “machinery of destruction” but also emblematic of the amoral bureaucracy that helped to implement the Jewish genocide.

  German Railroads, Jewish Souls centers around Hilberg’s seminal essay of the same name, a landmark study of German railways in the Nazi era long unavailable in English. Supplemented with additional writings from Hilberg, primary source materials, and historical commentary from leading scholars Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes.

  “This important book unites three prominent scholars tackling crucial questions about German railways and the Holocaust. Two essays from the late, renowned Raul Hilberg investigate their overlooked role in the extermination of the European Jews. They provide groundbreaking investigations into the German railway as the prototype of a bureaucracy and challenge its supposed banality. While Christopher Browning eloquently situates Hilberg’s essays within the historical literature, Peter Hayes makes a detailed critique of the common but false belief that the deportation and annihilation of the Jews were more of a priority for the Nazis than the war effort. This question, arising from Hilberg’s essays, demonstrates the continued significance of his work today.”—Wolf Gruner, author, The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses

  Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History Transport Studies

• eBook available October 2022

  German–Jewish Studies

  Next Generations

  Wallach, K. & Elyada. A. (eds)

  As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies

• eBook available September 2019

  The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia

  Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses

  Gruner, W.

  Prior to Hitler’s occupation, nearly 120,000 Jews inhabited the areas that would become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; by 1945, all but a handful had either escaped or been deported and murdered by the Nazis. This pioneering study gives a definitive account of the Holocaust as it was carried out in the region, detailing the German and Czech policies, including previously overlooked measures such as small-town ghettoization and forced labor, that shaped Jewish life. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Wolf Gruner demonstrates how the persecution of the Jews as well as their reactions and resistance efforts were the result of complex actions by German authorities in Prague and Berlin as well as the Czech government and local authorities.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

• eBook available March 2012

  Israeli Identities

  Jews and Arabs Facing the Self and the Other

  Auron, Y.

  The question of identity is one of present-day Israel’s cardinal and most pressing issues. In a comprehensive examination of the identity issue, this study focuses on attitudes toward the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora; the Holocaust and its repercussions on identity; attitudes toward the state of Israel and Zionism; and attitudes toward Jewish religion. Israeli Arab students (Israeli Palestinians) and Jewish Israeli students were asked corresponding questions regarding their identity. It was found that, rather than lessening its impact over the years, the Holocaust has become a major factor, at times the paramount factor in Jewish identity. Similarly, among Palestinians the Naqba has become a major factor in Palestinian-Israeli identity. However, the overall results show that the identity of a Jewish citizen of Israel is not purely Israeli, nor is it purely Jewish. It is, to varying degrees, a synthesis of Jewish and Israeli components, depending on the particular sub-groups or sub-identities. The same holds for Israeli-Arabs or Israeli-Palestinians who have neither a purely Israeli identity nor a purely Palestinian (or Arab) one.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Sociology

• eBook available January 2015

  Jesus Reclaimed

  Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene

  Homolka, W.

  After centuries of persecution, oppression, forced migrations, and exclusion in the name of Christ, the development of a Jewish “Quest for the Historical Jesus” might seem unexpected.  This book gives an overview and analysis of the various Jewish perspectives on the Nazarene throughout the centuries, emphasizing the variety of German voices in Anglo-American contexts. It explores the reasons for a steady increase in Jewish interest in Jesus since the end of the eighteenth century, arguing that this growth had a strategic goal: the justification of Judaism as a living faith alongside Christianity.

  Subject: Jewish Studies

• eBook available July 2010

  Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

  Dilemmas and Responses

  Nicosia, F. & Scrase, D. (eds)

  German Jews faced harsh dilemmas in their responses to Nazi persecution, partly a result of Nazi cruelty and brutality but also a result of an understanding of their history and rightful place in Germany. This volume addresses the impact of the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler’s regime on Jewish family life, Jewish women, and the existence of Jewish organizations and institutions and considers some of the Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Semitism and persecution. This volume offers scholars, students, and interested readers a highly accessible but focused introduction to Jewish life under National Socialism, the often painful dilemmas that it produced, and the varied Jewish responses to those dilemmas.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: World War II Genocide History

• eBook available March 2021

  Jewish Self-Hate

  Lessing, T.

  A seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time.

  The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept’s origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß.

  Written on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, Lessing’s hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside.

  “The truthful translation by Peter Appelbaum, including Lessing’s own footnotes, manages to make this book more readable than the German original. Two essays by Sander Gilman and Paul Reitter provide context and the wisdom of hindsight.”—Frank Mecklenburg, Leo Baeck Institute

  From the forward by Sander Gilman:
  Theodor Lessing’s (1872–1933) Jewish Self-Hatred (1930) is the classic study of the pitfalls (rather than the complexities) of acculturation. Growing out of his own experience as a middle-class, urban, marginally religious Jew in Imperial and then Weimar Germany, he used this study to reject the social integration of the Jews into Germany society, which had been his own experience, by tracking its most radical cases…. Lessing’s case studies reflect the idea that assimilation (the radical end of acculturation) is by definition a doomed project, at least for Jews (no matter how defined) in the age of political antisemitism.

  Subject: Jewish Studies

• eBook available October 2013

  The Legacy of Liberal Judaism

  Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation

  Curthoys, N.

  Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt’s indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History (General)

• eBook available June 2012

  Marginal At the Center

  The Life Story of a Public Sociologist

  Kimmerling, B.

  A self-proclaimed guerrilla fighter for ideas, Baruch Kimmerling was an outspoken critic, a prolific writer, and a “public” sociologist. While he lived at the center of the Israeli society in which he was involved as both a scientist and a concerned citizen, he nevertheless felt marginal because of his unconventional worldview, his empathy for the oppressed, and his exceptional sense of universal justice, which were at odds with prevailing views. In this autobiography, the author, who was born in Transylvania in 1939 with cerebral palsy, describes how he and his family escaped the Nazis and the circumstances that brought them to Israel, the development of his understanding of Israeli and Palestinian histories, of the narratives each society tells itself, and of the implacable “situation”—along with predictions of some of the most disturbing developments that are taking place right now as well as solutions he hoped were still possible. Kimmerling’s deep concern for Israel's well-being, peace, and success also reveals that he was in effect a devoted Zionist, contrary to the claims of his detractors. He dreamed of a genuinely democratic Israel, a country able to embrace all of its citizens without discrimination and to adopt peace as its most important objective. It is to this dream that this posthumous translation from Hebrew has been dedicated.

  Subjects: Sociology Jewish Studies

• eBook available December 2015

  Matters of Testimony

  Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz

  Chare, N. & Williams, D.

  In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.

  Subject: Genocide History Jewish Studies

• eBook available December 2016

  Microhistories of the Holocaust

  Zalc, C. & Bruttmann, T. (eds)

  How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe’s Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

  Subjects: Genocide History History: World War II Jewish Studies

• eBook available January 2018

  Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Middle East

  Arab and Turkish Responses

  Nicosia, F. R. & Ergene, B. A. (eds)

  Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region’s political, cultural, and religious complexities.

  Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies

• eBook available September 2019

  Nearly the New World

  The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945

  Newman, J.

  “In this rich and resonant study, Joanna Newman recounts the little-known story of this Jewish exodus to the British West Indies...”—Times Higher Education

  In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe.

  Nearly the New World tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue—and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option.

  From the introduction:
  This book is called Nearly the New World because for most refugees who found sanctuary, it was nearly, but not quite, the New World that they had hoped for. The British West Indies were a way station, a temporary destination that allowed them entry when the United States, much of South and Central America, the United Kingdom and Palestine had all become closed. For a small number, it became their home. This is the first comprehensive study of modern Jewish emigration to the British West Indies. It reveals how the histories of the Caribbean, of refugees, and of the Holocaust connect through the potential and actual involvement of the British West Indies as a refuge during the 1930s and the Second World War.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available March 2021

  On the Death of Jews

  Photographs and History

  Fresco, N.

  “A meticulous and shattering investigation of eight horrific pictures…”—L’Arche

  In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The majority were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer.

  The perpetrators took pictures of the December killings.

  These pictures are among the rare photographs from the first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt.

  From the forward by Dorota Glowackay:
  Straddling the boundary between historical inquiry and personal reflection, this extraordinary text unfolds as a series of encounters with eponymic Holocaust photographs. Although only a small number of photographs are reproduced here, Fresco provides evocative descriptions of many well-known images: synagogues and Torah scrolls burning on the night of Kristallnacht; deportations to the ghettos and the camps; and, finally, mass executions in the killing fi elds of Eastern Europe. The unique set of photographs included in On the Death of Jews shows groups of women and children from Liepaja (Liepája), shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of Shkede (Škéde) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the series, we see the victims’ bodies tumbling into the pit.

  Subjects: Genocide History Media Studies Jewish Studies

• eBook available November 2018

  Probing the Limits of Categorization

  The Bystander in Holocaust History

  Morina, C. & Thijs, K. (eds)

  Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were “once a part of this history,” bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.

  Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2013

  Race, Color, Identity

  Rethinking Discourses about 'Jews' in the Twenty-First Century

  Sicher, E. (ed)

  Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and “Jews”, and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors—leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies—discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available December 2020

  Recognizing the Past in the Present

  New Studies on Medicine before, during, and after the Holocaust

  Hildebrandt, S., Offer, M., & Grodin, M. A. (eds)

  Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler’s regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History Jewish Studies

• eBook available April 2020

  Resettlers and Survivors

  Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989

  Fisher, G.

  Located on the border of present-day Romania and Ukraine, the historical region of Bukovina was the site of widespread displacement and violence as it passed from Romanian to Soviet hands and back again during World War II. This study focuses on two groups of “Bukovinians”—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—as they navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in and after 1945. Through comparisons of the narratives and self-conceptions of these groups, Resettlers and Survivors gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies

• eBook available June 2020

  Resisting Persecution

  Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust

  Pegelow Kaplan, T. & Gruner, W. (eds)

  Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies Genocide History

• eBook available December 2017

  Rethinking Holocaust Justice

  Essays across Disciplines

  Goda, N. J. W. (ed)

  Since the end of World War II, the ongoing efforts aimed at criminal prosecution, restitution, and other forms of justice in the wake of the Holocaust have constituted one of the most significant episodes in the history of human rights and international law. As such, they have attracted sustained attention from historians and legal scholars. This edited collection substantially enlarges the topical and disciplinary scope of this burgeoning field, exploring such varied subjects as literary analysis of Hannah Arendt’s work, the restitution case for Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, and the ritualistic aspects of criminal trials.

  Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies

• eBook available November 2020

  Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema

  Hales, B. & Weinstein, V. (eds)

  The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available March 2020

  Rethinking the Age of Emancipation

  Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany, 1800–1918

  Baumeister, M., Lenhard, P., & Nattermann, R. (eds)

  Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as “late nations”, including the parallel roles of “great men” such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two “late” nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Jewish Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available June 2017

  Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History

  Lässig, S. & Rürup, M. (eds)

  What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century

• eBook available September 2019

  Testimonies of Resistance

  Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando

  Chare, N. & Williams, D. (eds)

  The Sonderkommando—the “special squad” of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau—comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented—by themselves and by others—both during and after the Holocaust.

  Subjects: History: World War II Genocide History Jewish Studies

• eBook available January 2022

  The Vienna Gestapo, 1938-1945

  Crimes, Perpetrators, Victims

  Boeckl-Klamper, E., Mang, T., & Neugebauer, W.

  The Vienna Gestapo headquarters was the largest of its kind in the German Reich and the most important instrument of Nazi terror in Austria, responsible for the persecution of Jews, suppression of resistance and policing of forced labourers. Of the more than fifty thousand people arrested by the Vienna Gestapo, many were subjected to torturous interrogation before being either sent to concentration camps or handed over to the Nazi judiciary for prosecution. This comprehensive survey by three expert historians focuses on these victims of repression and persecution as well as the structure of the Vienna Gestapo and the perpetrators of its crimes.

  Subjects: History: World War II Jewish Studies

• eBook available October 2011

  Vienna Is Different

  Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin-de-Siècle to the Present

  Herzog, H. H.

  Assessing the impact of fin-de-siècle Jewish culture on subsequent developments in literature and culture, this book is the first to consider the historical trajectory of Austrian-Jewish writing across the 20th century. It examines how Vienna, the city that stood at the center of Jewish life in the Austrian Empire and later the Austrian nation, assumed a special significance in the imaginations of Jewish writers as a space and an idea. The author focuses on the special relationship between Austrian-Jewish writers and the city to reveal a century-long pattern of living in tension with the city, experiencing simultaneously acceptance and exclusion, feeling “unheimlich heimisch” (eerily at home) in Vienna.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present Literary Studies

• eBook available December 2017

  Visitors to the House of Memory

  Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin

  Bishop Kendzia, V.

  As one of the most visited museums in Germany’s capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum’s evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Jewish Studies Educational Studies Memory Studies

• eBook available June 2020

  Voices on War and Genocide

  Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town

  Bartov, O. (ed)

  Taking as its point of departure Omer Bartov’s acclaimed Anatomy of a Genocide, this volume brings together previously unknown accounts by three individuals from Buczacz. These rare narratives give personal glimpses into daily life in unsettled times: a Polish headmaster during World War I, a Ukrainian teacher and witness to both Soviet and German rule, and a Jewish radio technician, genocide survivor, and member of the Polish resistance. Together, they offer a prismatic perspective on a world remote from our own that nonetheless helps us understand how people not unlike ourselves responded to mass violence and destruction.

  Subjects: History: World War II Jewish Studies Genocide History

• eBook available August 2017

  World War I and the Jews

  Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America

  Rozenblit, M. L. and Karp, J. (eds)

  World War I utterly transformed the lives of Jews around the world: it allowed them to display their patriotism, to dispel antisemitic myths about Jewish cowardice, and to fight for Jewish rights. Yet Jews also suffered as refugees and deportees, at times catastrophically. And in the aftermath of the war, the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian and Ottoman Empires with a system of nation-states confronted Jews with a new set of challenges. This book provides a fascinating survey of the ways in which Jewish communities participated in and were changed by the Great War, focusing on the dramatic circumstances they faced in Europe, North America, and the Middle East during and after the conflict.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: World War I