This single volume traces three approaches to the study of the Holocaust - through notions of history, theories of memory, and a focus on art and representation. It introduces students to the different ways we have come to understand the Holocaust, gives them an opportunity to ask questions about those conclusions, and examines how this event can be understood once all the survivors are gone. In addition, the book looks at the different disciplines - history, sociology, religious studies, and literary interpretation, among others - through which studies of the Holocaust take place.
Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars. The handbook is thematically divided into five broad sections. Part One, Enablers, concentrates on the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust. Part Two, Protagonists, concentrates on the principal persons and groups involved in the Holocaust and attempts to disaggregate the conventional interpretive categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. It examines the agency of the Nazi leaders and killers and of those involved in resisting and surviving the assault. Part Three, Settings, concentrates on the particular places, sites, and physical circumstances where the actions of the Holocaust's protagonists and the forms of persecution were literally grounded. Part Four, Representations, engages complex questions about how the Holocaust can and should be grasped and what meaning or lack of meaning might be attributed to events through historical analysis, interpretation of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection. Part Five, Aftereffects, explores the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights.
'Excellent ... an astounding amount of material.' Times Educational Supplement Popular culture often portrays the Holocaust as a horrific drama played out between Nazi executioners and ghetto Jewish victims - in short, a single aberration of history. Introducing the Holocaust is a powerful graphic guide that dissolves this stereotype, explaining the causes and its relevance today. It places the Holocaust where it belongs - at the centre of modern European and world history. Haim Bresheeth and Stuart Hood - along with Litza Jansz's outstanding illustrations - bring a unique and unforgettable perspective to how we think about this most dark of shadows on human history.
European Mennonites and the Holocaust is one of the first books to examine Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust, sometimes as rescuers but more often as killers, accomplices, beneficiaries, and bystanders.
Holocaust and Human Behavior uses readings, primary source material, and short documentary films to examine the challenging history of the Holocaust and prompt reflection on our world today
From the still-unsettling perspective of half a century, 13 contributors evaluate Holocaust fallout from four vantage points: through historical writings, literature, and cinema; in relation to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel; and its impact on American Jewish life, and on European Jewry in the postwar period. The incisive articles result from meetings at Indiana University in 1995. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Holocaust is usually understood as a European story. Yet, this pivotal episode unfolded across North Africa and reverberated through politics, literature, memoir, and memory—Muslim as well as Jewish—in the post-war years. The Holocaust and North Africa offers the first English-language study of the unfolding events in North Africa, pushing at the boundaries of Holocaust Studies and North African Studies, and suggesting, powerfully, that neither is complete without the other. The essays in this volume reconstruct the implementation of race laws and forced labor across the Maghreb during World War II and consider the Holocaust as a North African local affair, which took diverse form from town to town and city to city. They explore how the Holocaust ruptured Muslim–Jewish relations, setting the stage for an entirely new post-war reality. Commentaries by leading scholars of Holocaust history complete the picture, reflecting on why the history of the Holocaust and North Africa has been so widely ignored—and what we have to gain by understanding it in all its nuances. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service. Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions. Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Featured in the PBS documentary, "The US and the Holocaust" by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein "Superbly written and researched, synthesizing the classics while digging deep into a vast repository of primary sources." —Josef Joffe, Wall Street Journal Why? explores one of the most tragic events in human history by addressing eight of the most commonly asked questions about the Holocaust: Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why murder? Why this swift and sweeping? Why didn’t more Jews fight back more often? Why did survival rates diverge? Why such limited help from outside? What legacies, what lessons? An internationally acclaimed scholar, Peter Hayes brings a wealth of research and experience to bear on conventional views of the Holocaust, dispelling many misconceptions and challenging some of the most prominent recent interpretations.
