Naomi Kramer and Ronald Headland to approach the universal issues that inevitably arise in discussing the Holocaust -- evil, courage, human dignity, moral responsibility and the existential qualities of humankind -- through individual experience. Consisting of two main parts, the book explores one individual's experience during the Shoah and the historical context in which these experiences occurred.
If we are responsible educators, the causes of the Holocaust must be addressed in order to prevent future genocide. Contemporary Jewish Identity: Emanuele Ottolenghi and Mark Weitzman examine contemporary antisemitism in Europe and North America respectively. Michael Pollan reflects upon Jewish identity from the unique perspective of a young Jew who worked as a civil servant for the Austrian government in a program designed to acknowledge Austria's role as a perpetrator of the Shoah. Testimony: Firsthand testimony will soon be available only in memoirs or recorded oral histories. In the future, second and subsequent generations must speak as witnesses. Sheldon Schreter, a grandchild of Holocaust victims, describes a visit with his four sons to Sighet, Romania, his parents' birthplace, and struggles with the question of 'Why?' The prevention of genocide is, in large measure, dependent upon the good will and intervention of citizens living in modern cultures.
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Included among these are descriptions of the main features of the reports and the various stages in their compilation, examples and methodology of presentation of the killings, and comparisons of reporting procedures and totals of victims shot by each of the four Einsatzgruppen. The study begins by noting the post-war discovery of the reports and then assumes a roughly chronological sequence in its overall treatment. An outline of the major National Socialist agencies and general reporting practices before the war is followed by the events of the war as reflected in the reports. Then the postwar "life" of the reports is examined with particular reference to their use as legal evidence at Nuremberg as well as a consideration of their reliability as historical source material.
The denial of the Holocaust has no more credibility than the assertion that the earth is flat. Yet there are those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. Sixty years ago, such notions were the province of pseudohistorians who argued that Hitler never meant to kill the Jews, and that only a few hundred thousand died in the camps from disease; they also argued that the Allied bombings of Dresden and other cities were worse than any Nazi offense, and that the Germans were the “true victims” of World War II. For years, those who made such claims were dismissed as harmless cranks operating on the lunatic fringe. But as time goes on, they have begun to gain a hearing in respectable arenas, and now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how—despite tens of thousands of living witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence—this irrational idea not only has continued to gain adherents but has become an international movement, with organized chapters, “independent” research centers, and official publications that promote a “revisionist” view of recent history. Lipstadt shows how Holocaust denial thrives in the current atmosphere of value-relativism, and argues that this chilling attack on the factual record not only threatens Jews but undermines the very tenets of objective scholarship that support our faith in historical knowledge. Thus the movement has an unsuspected power to dramatically alter the way that truth and meaning are transmitted from one generation to another.
How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.
"The SAGE Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies is one of the best handbooks outlining the latest thinking on race and ethnic studies published in recent years...The breadth of themes and the depth of discussion are ambitious, offering the reader an A-Z guide of contemporary thinking on race and ethnicity...a valuable resource for scholars and activists alike." - Runnymede Bulletin What is the state of race and ethnic studies today? How has the field emerged? What are the core concepts, debates and issues? This panoramic, critical survey of the field supplies researchers and students with a vital resource. It is a rigorous, focused examination of the central questions in the field today. The text examines: The roots of the field of race and ethnic studies. The distinction between race and ethnicity. Methodological issues facing researchers. Intersections between race and ethnicity and questions of sexuality, gender, nation and social transformation. The challenge of multiculturalism. Race, ethnicity and globalization. Race and the family. Race and education. Race and religion. Planned and edited by a distinguished team of Anglo-American scholars, the Handbook pools an impressive range of international world class expertise and insight. It provides a landmark work in the field which will be the measure of debate and research for years to come.
Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah′-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician in Lódz at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two-day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world. Jadzia’s daughter, anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer, constructs an intimate ethnography that weaves a personal family narrative against a twentieth-century historical backdrop. As Rylko-Bauer travels back in time with her mother, we learn of the particular hardships that female concentration camp prisoners faced. The struggle continued after the war as Jadzia attempted to rebuild her life, first as a refugee doctor in Germany and later as an immigrant to the United States. Like many postwar immigrants, Jadzia had high hopes of making new connections and continuing her career. Unable to surmount personal, economic, and social obstacles to medical licensure, however, she had to settle for work as a nurse’s aide. As a contribution to accounts of wartime experiences, Jadzia’s story stands out for its sensitivity to the complexities of the Polish memory of war. Built upon both historical research and conversations between mother and daughter, the story combines Jadzia’s voice and Rylko-Bauer’s own journey of rediscovering her family’s past. The result is a powerful narrative about struggle, survival, displacement, and memory, augmenting our understanding of a horrific period in human history and the struggle of Polish immigrants in its aftermath.
An investigative journalist peels back the lid on a shameful century of mass sterilization and human breeding programs in the U.S. that began in 1904 with a large-scale eugenics movement, a movement that has been reborn in the modern era with the rise of genetics and human engineering. Reprint.
