A Guide to Jewish Studies: The Holocaust

"The Holocaust has been the subject of countless books, works of art, and memorials. Fifty-five years after the fact the world still ponders the enormity of this disaster. The Holocaust Encyclopedia is the only comprehensive single-volume work of reference providing both a reflective overview of the subject and abundant detail concerning major events, policy decisions, cities, and individuals. Up-to-date and designed for easy access, the encyclopedia presents information on the major aspects of the Holocaust in essays by scholars from eleven countries who draw on a number of sources—including recently uncovered evidence from the former Soviet bloc—to provide in-depth studies on the political, social, religious, and moral issues of the Holocaust as well as short entries identifying events, sites, and individuals. The book also has more than 250 photographs, many of them rare, and 19 maps." - from the publisher

"This three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Includes more than 600 black-and-white photographs." - from the publisher

"This landmark work answers two of the most fundamental questions in history - how, and why, did the Holocaust happen? Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, in his magnum opus, he combines their enthralling eyewitness testimony, a large amount of which has never been published before, with the latest academic research to create the first accessible and authoritative account of the Holocaust in more than three decades. This is a new history of the Holocaust in three ways. First, and most importantly, Rees has created a gripping narrative that contains a large amount of testimony that has never been published before. Second, he places this powerful interview material in the context of an examination of the decision making process of the Nazi state, and in the process reveals the series of escalations that cumulatively created the horror. Third, Rees covers all those across Europe who participated in the deaths, and he argues that whilst hatred of the Jews was always at the epicentre of Nazi thinking, what happened cannot be fully understood without considering the murder of the Jews alongside plans to kill millions of non-Jews, including homosexuals, "Gypsies" and the disabled. Through a chronological, intensely readable narrative, featuring enthralling eyewitness testimony and the latest academic research, this is a compelling new account of the worst crime in history." - from the publisher

"In examining one of the defining events of the twentieth century, Doris L. Bergen situates the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts. Unlike many other treatments of the Holocaust, this revised, third edition discusses not only the persecution of the Jews, but also other segments of society victimized by the Nazis: Roma, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet POWs, the disabled, and other groups deemed undesirable. In clear and eloquent prose, Bergen explores the two interconnected goals that drove the Nazi German program of conquest and genocide--purification of the so-called Aryan race and expansion of its living space--and discusses how these goals affected the course of World War II. Including firsthand accounts from perpetrators, victims, and eyewitnesses, her book is immediate, human, and eminently readable." - from the publisher

"Antisemitism, as hatred of Jews and Judaism, has been a central problem of Western civilization for millennia, and its history continues to invite debate. This book untangles the history of the phenomenon, from ancient religious conflict to 'new' antisemitism in the 21st century. Steven Beller reveals how Antisemitism grew as a political and ideological movement in the 19th century, how it reached its dark apogee in the worst genocide in modern history - the Holocaust - and how Antisemitism still persists around the world today. In the new edition of this thought-provoking Very Short Introduction, Beller brings his examination of this complex and still controversial issue up to date with a discussion of Antisemitism in light of the 2008 financial crash, the Arab Spring, and the on-going crisis between Israel and Palestine." - from the publisher

Covering the story of prejudice against Jews from the time of Christ through the rise of Nazi Germany, The History of Anti-Semitism presents in elegant and thoughtful language a balanced, careful assessment of this egregious human failing that is nearly ubiquitous in the history of Europe.

Editor's Note: The most comprehensive history of antisemitism, written by one the pioneers of Holocaust studies and antisemitism studies. The volumes are v. 1. From the time of Christ to the court Jews -- v. 2. From Mohammed to the Marranos -- v. 3. From Voltaire to Wagner -- v. 4. Suicidal Europe, 1870-1933.

"The Coming of the Holocaust aims to help readers understand the circumstances that made the Holocaust possible. Peter Kenez demonstrates that the occurrence of the Holocaust was not predetermined as a result of modern history but instead was the result of contingencies. He shows that three preconditions had to exist for the genocide to take place: modern anti-Semitism, meaning Jews had to become economically and culturally successful in the post-French Revolution world to arouse fear rather than contempt; an extremist group possessing a deeply held, irrational, and profoundly inhumane worldview had to take control of the machinery of a powerful modern state; and the context of a major war with mass killings. The book also discusses the correlations between social and historical differences in individual countries regarding the success of the Germans in their effort to exterminate Jews." - from the publisher

"Klaus Fischer charts the tortured history of German-Jewish relations over a millennium, from migration and ghettoization in the Middle Ages to enlightenment and emancipation in the eighteenth century to varieties of anti-Jewish prejudices in the Second Reich to the rise of pathological Judeophobia in the years 1918 to 1933. The aim of the book is to provide a historical explanation for this change in consciousness that began with a religious prejudice, moved to social and political discrimination, and ended up in annihilatory rage." - from the publisher

"On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the brink of annihilation. In this provocative book, Bernard Wasserstein presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught. In the 1930s, as Europe spiraled toward the Second World War, the continent’s Jews faced an existential crisis. The harsh realities of the age—anti-Semitic persecution, economic discrimination, and an ominous climate of violence—devastated Jewish communities and shattered the lives of individuals. The Jewish crisis was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Demographic collapse, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution were all taking their toll. The problem was not just Nazism: In the summer of 1939 more Jews were behind barbed wire outside the Third Reich than within it, and not only in police states but even in the liberal democracies of the West. The greater part of Europe was being transformed into a giant concentration camp for Jews. Unlike most previous accounts, On the Eve focuses not on the anti-Semites but on the Jews. Wasserstein refutes the common misconception that they were unaware of the gathering forces of their enemies. He demonstrates that there was a growing and widespread recognition among Jews that they stood on the edge of an abyss. On the Eve recaptures the agonizing sorrows and the effervescent cultural glories of this last phase in the history of the European Jews. It explores their hopes, anxieties, and ambitions, their family ties, social relations, and intellectual creativity—everything that made life meaningful and bearable for them. Wasserstein introduces a diverse array of characters: holy men and hucksters, beggars and bankers, politicians and poets, housewives and harlots, and, in an especially poignant chapter, children without a future. The geographical range also is vast: from Vilna (the 'Jerusalem of the North') to Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris, from the Judeo-Espagnol-speaking stevedores of Salonica to the Yiddish-language collective farms of Soviet Ukraine and Crimea. Wasserstein’s aim is to 'breathe life into dry bones.' Based on comprehensive research, rendered with compassion and empathy, and brought alive by telling anecdotes and dry wit, On the Eve offers a vivid and enlightening picture of the European Jews in their final hour." - from the publisher

"From one of the world's most distinguished historians, a magisterial new reckoning with Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological and social growth and change challenged that of the United States. Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia's and less anti-Semitic than France's; representative institutions were thriving, and competing political parties and elections were a central part of life. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin? There is no story in twentieth-century history more important to understand, and Richard Evans has written the definitive account for our time." - from the publisher

"Since its publication in 1960, William L. Shirer's monumental study of Hitler's German Empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of this century's blackest hours. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. With millions of copies in print around the globe, it has attained the status of a vital and enduring classic."

""This book is a collection of documents, mostly translated from the German, that covers the entire Third Reich, from the beginnings of National Socialism in Munich in 1919, through the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, and ultimately the defeat of the Third Reich. It is wide-ranging, covering the core doctrine of anti-Semitism, education, German youth, women and marriage, science, health, the Church, literature, visual arts, music, the body, industry, sports, and the resistance." - from the publisher

Consists of v. 1. The rise to power, 1919-1934 -- v. 2. State, economy, and society, 1933-1939 -- v. 3. Foreign policy, war and racial extermination -- v. 4. The German home front on World War II.

"Hitler's rise to power, Germany's march to the abyss, as seen through the eyes of Americans--diplomats, military, expats, visiting authors, Olympic athletes--who watched horrified and up close. By tapping a rich vein of personal testimonies, Hitlerland offers a startlingly fresh perspective on this heavily dissected era. Some of the Americans in Weimar and then Hitler's Germany were merely casual observers, others deliberately blind; a few were Nazi apologists. But most slowly began to understand the horror of what was unfolding, even when they found it difficult to grasp the breadth of the catastrophe. The most perceptive of these Americans helped their reluctant countrymen begin to understand the nature of Nazi Germany as it ruthlessly eliminated political opponents, instilled hatred of Jews and anyone deemed a member of an inferior race, and readied its military and its people for a war for global domination." - from the publisher

"It is impossible to understand the history of modern Europe without some knowledge of the Weimar Republic. The brief fourteen-year period of democracy between the Treaty of Versailles and the advent of the Third Reich was marked by unstable government, economic crisis and hyperinflation and the rise of extremist political movements. At the same time, however, a vibrant cultural scene flourished, which continues to influence the international art world through the aesthetics of Expressionism and the Bauhaus movement. In the fields of art, literature, theatre, cinema, music and architecture – not to mention science – Germany became a world leader during the 1920s, while her perilous political and economic position ensured that no US or European statesman could afford to ignore her. Incorporating original research and a synthesis of the existing historiography, this book will provide students and a general readership with a clear and concise introduction to the history of the first German Republic." - from the publisher

"Although Jewish participation in German society increased after World War I, Jews did not completely assimilate into that society. In fact, says Michael Brenner in this intriguing book, the Jewish population of Welmar Germany became more aware of its Jewishness and created new forms of German-Jewish culture in literature, music, fine arts, education, and scholarship. Brenner presents the first in-depth study of this culture, drawing a fascinating portrait of people in the midst of redefining themselves. The Weimar Jews chose neither a radical break with the past nor a return to the past but instead dressed Jewish traditions in the garb of modern forms of cultural expression. Brenner describes, for example, how modern translations made classic Jewish texts accessible, Jewish museums displayed ceremonial artifacts in a secular framework, musical arrangements transformed synagogue liturgy for concert audiences, and popular novels recalled aspects of the Jewish past. Brenner's work, while bringing this significant historical period to life, illuminates contemporary and even enhancement of Jewish distinctiveness, combined with the seemingly successful participation of Jews in a secular, non-Jewish society, offer fresh insight into modern questions of Jewish existence, identity, and integration into other cultures." - from the publisher

"A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen. Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In [this book], Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time. To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany's leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler's hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship. Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder." - from the publisher

"The failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism remains one of the most challenging problems of 20th-century European history. The German Right, 1918-1930 sheds new light on this problem by examining the role that the non-Nazi Right played in the destabilization of Weimar democracy in the period before the emergence of the Nazi Party as a mass party of middle-class protest. Larry Eugene Jones identifies a critical divide within the German Right between those prepared to work within the framework of Germany's new republican government and those irrevocably committed to its overthrow. This split was only greatly exacerbated by the course of German economic development in the 1920s, leaving the various organizations that comprised the German Right defenceless against the challenge of National Socialism. At no point was the disunity of the non-Nazi Right in the face of Nazism more apparent that in the September 1930 Reichstag elections"-- Provided by publisher.

"Germany's Stormtroopers engaged in a vicious siege of violence that propelled the National Socialists to power in the 1930s. Known also as the SA or Brownshirts, these "ordinary" men waged a loosely structured campaign of intimidation and savagery across the nation from the 1920s to the "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934, when Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and many other SA leaders were assassinated on Hitler's orders. In this deeply researched history, Daniel Siemens explores not only the roots of the SA and its swift decapitation but also its previously unrecognized transformation into a million-member Nazi organization, its activities in German-occupied territories during World War II, and its particular contributions to the Holocaust. The author provides portraits of individual members and their victims and examines their milieu, culture, and ideology. His book tells the long-overdue story of the SA and its devastating impact on German citizens and the fate of their country" - from the publisher

"In February 1933, Adolf Hitler had only a tenuous grasp on power. Chancellor of Germany for merely four weeks, he led a fragile coalition government. The Nazis had lost seats in the Reichstag in the recent election, and claimed only three of thirteen cabinet posts. Then on February 27th, arson sent the Reichstag, the home and symbol of German democracy, up in flames. Immediately blaming the Communists, Hitler's new government approved a decree that tore the heart out of the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic and cancelled the rule of law. Five thousand people were immediately arrested. The Reichstag fire marked the true beginning of the Third Reich, which ruled for 12 more years. The controversy surrounding the fire's origins has endured for 80. In Burning the Reichstag, Benjamin Hett offers a gripping account of Hitler's rise to dictatorship-one that challenges orthodoxy and recovers the true significance of the part the fire played. At the scene the police arrested 23-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist stonemason. Though he was initially dismissed abroad as a Nazi tool, post-war historians since the 1950s have largely judged him solely guilty-a lone arsonist exploited by Hitler. Hett's book reopens the case, providing vivid portraits of key figures, including Rudolf Diels, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and the historian Fritz Tobias, whose account of the fire has, until now, been the standard. Making use of a number of new sources and archives, Hett sets the Reichstag fire in a wider context, revealing how and why it has remained one of the last mysteries of the Nazi period, and one of the most controversial and contested events in the 20th century." - from the publisher

"When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he and other Nazis had firm ideas on what they called a racially pure “community of the people.” They quickly took steps against those whom they wanted to isolate, deport, or destroy. In these essays informed by the latest research, leading scholars offer rich histories of the people branded as “social outsiders” in Nazi Germany: Communists, Jews, “Gypsies,” foreign workers, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals, and the homeless, unemployed, and chronically ill. Although many works have concentrated exclusively on the relationship between Jews and the Third Reich, this collection also includes often-overlooked victims of Nazism while reintegrating the Holocaust into its wider social context." - from the publisher

"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 anti-miscegenation 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" - from the publisher

"Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodge-podge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed him, however briefly, into the most powerful leader in the world. How did he discover that ideology? How was it that cohorts of leaders, followers, and ordinary citizens adopted aspects of National Socialism without experiencing the "leader" first-hand or reading his works? They shared a collective desire to create a harmonious, racially select, "community of the people" to build on Germany's socialist-oriented political culture and to seek national renewal. If we wish to understand the rise of the Nazi Party and the new dictatorship's remarkable staying power, we have to take the nationalist and socialist aspects of this ideology seriously. Hitler became a kind of representative figure for ideas, emotions, and aims that he shared with thousands, and eventually millions, of true believers who were of like mind . They projected onto him the properties of the "necessary leader," a commanding figure at the head of a uniformed corps that would rally the masses and storm the barricades. It remains remarkable that millions of people in a well-educated and cultured nation eventually came to accept or accommodate themselves to the tenants of an extremist ideology laced with hatred and laden with such obvious murderous implications." - from the publisher

"When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders, using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. Never before nor since has there been such a detailed study of governmental leaders who orchestrated mass killings. Before the war crimes trial began, it was self-evident to most people that the Nazi leaders were demonic maniacs. But when the interviews and psychological tests were completed, the answer was no longer so clear. The findings were so disconcerting that portions of the data were hidden away for decades and the research became a topic for vituperative disputes. Gilbert thought the war criminals' malice stemmed from depraved psychopathology. Kelley viewed them as ordinary men who were creatures of their environment. Who was right? Drawing on his decades of experience as a psychiatrist and the dramatic advances within psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience since Nuremberg, Joel E. Dimsdale looks anew at the findings and examines in detail four of the war criminals, Robert Ley, Hermann Goering, Julius Streicher, and Rudolf Hess. Using increasingly precise diagnostic tools, he discovers a remarkably broad spectrum of pathology. Anatomy of Malice takes us on a complex and troubling quest to make sense of the most extreme evil." - from the publisher

"The scale and the depth of Nazi brutality seem to defy understanding. What could drive people to fight, kill, and destroy with such ruthless ambition? Observers and historians have offered countless explanations since the 1930s. According to Johann Chapoutot, we need to understand better how the Nazis explained it themselves. We need a clearer view, in particular, of how they were steeped in and spread the idea that history gave them no choice: it was either kill or die.

Chapoutot, one of France’s leading historians, spent years immersing himself in the texts and images that reflected and shaped the mental world of Nazi ideologues, and that the Nazis disseminated to the German public. The party had no official ur-text of ideology, values, and history. But a clear narrative emerges from the myriad works of intellectuals, apparatchiks, journalists, and movie-makers that Chapoutot explores. The story went like this: In the ancient world, the Nordic-German race lived in harmony with the laws of nature. But since Late Antiquity, corrupt foreign norms and values—Jewish values in particular—had alienated Germany from itself and from all that was natural. The time had come, under the Nazis, to return to the fundamental law of blood. Germany must fight, conquer, and procreate, or perish. History did not concern itself with right and wrong, only brute necessity. A remarkable work of scholarship and insight, The Law of Blood recreates the chilling ideas and outlook that would cost millions their lives."

"Chronicles the events and people involved in the rescue of 10,000 children from Nazi territories, and what happened after the war. Official tie-in to the Warner Brothers documentary. First hand account of the extraordinary rescue mission of 10,000 children before the outbreak of World War II. For nine months before the outbreak of World War II, Britain conducted an extraordinary rescue mission. It opened its doors to over 10,000 endangered children, 90 percent of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These children were taken into foster homes and hostels in Britain, expecting eventually to be reunited with their parents. Most of the children never saw their families again. Into the Arms of Strangers recounts the remarkable story of this rescue operation, known as the Kindertransport, and its dramatic impact on the lives of the children who were saved. The book is the companion to the feature-length documentary which was released in the theatres by Warner Bros. in Fall 2000. It contains stories in their own words from the child survivors, rescuers, parents, and foster parents. They recount, in harrowing detail, the effects of the Nazi's reign of terror, the horror of Kristallnacht, the agonizing decision by the parents to send their children away, the journey, the difficulties of adjustment in Britain, the outbreak of war, and the children's tragic discovery afterward that most of their parents had perished in concentration camps. The stories are heartbreaking, but also inspiring. These are the stories of those who survived with the help of others; they are stories about the strength and resolve of children; and most astonishing, these are stories not yet heard about the Holocaust." - from the publisher

"In 1939, on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, seven-year-old Edith Milton (then Edith Cohn) and her sister Ruth left Germany by way of the Kindertransport, the program which gave some 10,000 Jewish children refuge in England. The two were given shelter by a jovial, upper-class British foster family with whom they lived for the next seven years. Edith chronicles these transformative experiences of exile and good fortune in The Tiger in the Attic, a touching memoir of growing up as an outsider in a strange land. In this illuminating chronicle, Edith describes how she struggled to fit in and to conquer self-doubts about her German identity. Her realistic portrayal of the seemingly mundane yet historically momentous details of daily life during World War II slowly reveals itself as a hopeful story about the kindness and generosity of strangers. She paints an account rich with colorful characters and intense relationships, uncanny close calls and unnerving bouts of luck that led to survival. Edith's journey between cultures continues with her final passage to America—yet another chapter in her life that required adjustment to a new world—allowing her, as she narrates it here, to visit her past as an exile all over again. ." - from the publisher

"Escaping Hitler is the personal story of Eva Wyman and her family's escape from Nazi Germany to Chile in the sociohistorical context of 1930s and 1940s, a time when the Chilean Nazi party had an active presence in the country's major institutions. Based primarily on interviews with German Jewish refugees and family correspondence, Eva Goldschmidt Wyman provides an intimateaccount of Jews in Germany in the 1930s as Nazi controls tightened and family members were taken to Riga concentration camp. Wyman recounts Kristallnacht in Stuttgart, where her father was principal of the Jewish school, his imprisonment in Dachau, and his release and immigration to Great Britain. Escaping Hitler details the family's escape from Germany and subsequent life in Chile, providing an intimate look at daily life on the steam ship Conte Grande during the voyage from Italy to Chile in 1939, Nazi espionage and anti-Semitic activity in Chile, and the Nazi influence in South America in general." - from the publisher

"Whitehall and the Jews is the most comprehensive study to date of the British response to the plight of European Jewry under Nazism. It contains the definitive account of immigration controls on the admission of refugee Jews to the United Kingdom, and reveals the doubts and dessent that lay behind British policy." - from the publisher

"This book, which draws on a rich array of primary sources and archival materials, offers the first major appraisal of French responses to the Jewish refugee crisis after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. It explores French policies and attitudes toward Jewish refugees from three interrelated vantage points: government policy, public opinion, and the role of the French Jewish community." - from the publisher

"An analysis of what many considered to be FDR's failure to rescue imperiled Jewish Europeans during World War II challenges beliefs that depict the president as anti-Semitic, drawing on extensive research to profile Roosevelt as a friend and staunch protector of Jewish people throughout the world." - from the publisher

"Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations fateful policies during the Holocaust. Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDRs consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away-actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war. What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the presidents private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelts statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administrations policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans"--Publisher's description."The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDRs personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewrys foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDRs policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administrations realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives." - from the publisher

"Eugenicist arguments ranking the presumed genetic virtue of various ethnic groups helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the United States for more than forty years. By 1921 Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that 'biological laws' had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law that remained U.S. policy until 1965 was enacted three years later. Okrent connects the work of the American eugenicists to Nazi racial policies and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad." - from the publisher

"In 1921 and 1924, the United States passed laws to sharply reduce the influx of immigrants into the country. By allocating only small quotas to the nations of southern and eastern Europe, and banning almost all immigration from Asia, the new laws were supposed to stem the tide of foreigners considered especially inferior and dangerous. However, immigrants continued to come, sailing into the port of New York with fake passports, or from Cuba to Florida, hidden in the holds of boats loaded with contraband liquor. Jews, one of the main targets of the quota laws, figured prominently in the new international underworld of illegal immigration. However, they ultimately managed to escape permanent association with the identity of the 'illegal alien' in a way that other groups, such as Mexicans, thus far, have not. In After They Closed the Gates, Libby Garland tells the untold stories of the Jewish migrants and smugglers involved in that underworld, showing how such stories contributed to growing national anxieties about illegal immigration. Garland also helps us understand how Jews were linked to, and then unlinked from, the specter of illegal immigration. By tracing this complex history, Garland offers compelling insights into the contingent nature of citizenship, belonging, and Americanness." - from the publisher

"With The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer completes his major historical work on Nazi Germany and the Jews. The book describes and interprets the persecution and murder of the Jews throughout occupied Europe. The enactment of German extermination policies and measures depended on the cooperation of local authorities, the assistance of police forces, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. This implementation depended as well on the victims’ readiness to submit to orders, often with the hope of attenuating them or of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. This multifaceted study—at all levels and in different places—enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity, and interrelatedness of the many components of this history. Based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices—mainly from diaries, letters, and memoirs—Saul Friedländer avoids domesticating the memory of these unprecedented and horrific events. The convergence of these various aspects gives a unique quality to The Years of Extermination. In this work, the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation." - from the publisher

"In 1939, the Nazi regime's plans for redrawing the demographic map of Eastern Europe entailed the expulsion of millions of Jews. By the fall of 1941, these plans had shifted from expulsion to systematic and total mass murder of all Jews within the Nazi grasp. This book is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis ever written of what took place during this crucial period--of how, precisely, the Nazis' racial policies evolved from persecution and "ethnic cleansing" to the Final Solution of the Holocaust. Meticulously documenting the process that led to this fatal development, Browning shows that Adolf Hitler was the key decision-maker throughout, approving major escalations in Nazi persecution of the Jews at victory-induced moments of euphoria." - from the publisher

"Historians long have analyzed the emergence of the “final solution of the Jewish question” primarily on the basis of German documentation, devoting much less attention to wartime Jewish perceptions of the growing threat. Jürgen Matthäus fills this critical gap by showcasing the highly insightful reports compiled during the first half of World War II by two Geneva-based offices: those of Richard Lichtheim representing the Jewish Agency for Palestine and of Gerhart Riegner’s World Jewish Congress office. Since the first days of war, Lichtheim’s predictions of Jewish dead ran in the millions and increased progressively with the rising tide of Nazi rule over Europe. His and Riegner’s perceptions of German anti-Jewish policy resulted from shared goals and personal experiences as well as from their bureaus’ range of functions and the massive problems that impacted the gathering and communicating of information on the unfolding Holocaust in German-controlled Europe. Beyond the specifics of the wartime Geneva setting, these sources show how human cognition works in times of extreme crisis and contribute to a better understanding of the potential inherent in Jewish sources for gauging perpetrator actions. The reports and contextual information featured here reflect the first narratives on the Holocaust, their emergence, evolution, and importance for post-war historiography." - from the publisher

"Drawing on a rich archive that includes photographs, objects, official documents, and personal papers, the editors of Jews in Nazi Berlin have assembled a multifaceted picture of Jewish daily life in the Nazi capital during the height of the regime's power. The book's essays and images are divided into thematic sections, each representing a different aspect of the experience of Jews in Berlin." - from the publisher

"This encyclopedia offers detailed entries on the various ghettos into which the Jews of Eastern Europe were confined during the Holocaust. Entries on each ghetto are written by scholars and specialists on their topic and include location, wartime name, and geographical coordinates, and, for the larger ghettos, information on life before World War II and during the Soviet occupation era, German (Nazi) occupation, ghetto structure, institutional life and leadership, terror and killing operations, underground resistance, and the number of survivors at liberation. They also describe the differences between each ghetto and examine the difficulties of daily life in the ghetto, coping strategies, and different forms of resistance.
The first reference book of its kind, The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust is a valuable resource for diverse disciplines and is supplemented by a special DVD of wartime footage of ghettos filmed in real time during the Holocaust." - from the publisher

"The notorious concentration camp system was a central pillar of the Third Reich, supporting the Nazi war against political, racial and social outsiders whilst also intimidating the population at large. Established during the first months of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, several million men, women and children of many nationalities had been incarcerated in the camps by the end of the Second World War. At least two million lost their lives. This volume offers the first overview of the recent scholarship that has changed the way the camps are studied over the last two decades. Written by an international team of experts, the book covers such topics as the earliest camps; social life, work and personnel in the camps; the public face of the camps; issues of gender and commemoration; and the relationship between concentration camps and the Final Solution. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the current historiography of the camps, highlighting the key conclusions that have been made, commenting on continuing areas of debate, and suggesting possible directions for future research."-- Publisher's description.

"Created by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the monumental 7-volume encyclopaedia that the present work inaugurates will make available - in one place for the first time - detailed information about the universe of camps, sub-camps, and ghettos established and operated by the Nazis - altogether some 20,000 sites, from Norway to North Africa and from France to Russia. This volume covers three groups of camps: the early camps established in the first year of Hitler's rule, the major concentration camps with their constellations of sub-camps that operated under the control of the SS-Business Administration Main Office, and youth camps. Overview essays precede entries on individual camps and sub-camps. Each entry provides basic information about the purpose of the site; the prisoners, guards, working and living conditions; and key events in its history. Material drawn from personal testimonies helps convey the character of each site, while source citations for each entry provide a path to additional information." - from the publisher

"First published in 1955, with a revised edition appearing five years later, H.G. Adler's Theresienstadt, 1941-1945 is a foundational work in the field of Holocaust studies. As the first scholarly monograph to describe the particulars of a single camp - the Jewish ghetto in the Czech city of Terezín - it is the single most detailed and comprehensive account of any concentration camp. Adler, a survivor of the camp, organized the book into three sections: a history of the ghetto, a detailed institutional and sociological analysis of the camp, and an attempt to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and the victims. A collaborative effort between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Terezín Publishing Project makes this authoritative text on Holocaust history available for the first time in the English language, with a new afterword by the author's son Jeremy Adler." - from the publisher.

"From January 1945, in the last months of the Third Reich, about 250,000 inmates of concentration camps perished on death marches and in countless incidents of mass slaughter. They were murdered with merciless brutality by their SS guards, by army and police units, and often by gangs of civilians as they passed through German and Austrian towns and villages. Even in the bloody annals of the Nazi regime, this final death blow was unique in character and scope. In this first comprehensive attempt to answer the questions raised by this final murderous rampage, the author draws on the testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Hunting through archives throughout the world, Daniel Blatman sets out to explainto the extent that is possiblethe effort invested by mankinds most lethal regime in liquidating the remnants of the enemies of the Aryan race before it abandoned the stage of history." - from the publisher

"Seventy years have passed since the tortured inmates of Hitler's concentration and extermination camps were liberated. When the horror of the atrocities came fully to light, it was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners. Yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives. Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors--their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors' immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead." - from the publisher.

"Although the period leading up to the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews has been well recorded, few sources convey the incremental effect of specific decrees aimed to dehumanize the Jews who were caught in Hitler's net, and how their everyday lives were transformed. These letters, written by Malvina Fischer to her daughter Mimi Weisz, have been translated and edited by her granddaughter Edith Kurzweil. They convey with vivid immediacy the fears and premonitions, the ghettoization and escape attempts that were the common experience of Viennese and German Jews in the years preceding the implementation of the "Final Solution."In the first section of the volume, Kurzweil establishes the personal and political contexts of the letters (written between April 6, 1940 and December 1941, when Malvina Fischer and her family were deported) and links them to the then emerging "Jewish laws." The second section contains the letters themselves and documents the throttling grip in which the authorities held every Viennese Jew who had not managed to escape. The third section consists of translations of official summaries of the relevant laws, ordinances, and edicts--many of them marked "secret"--which inexorably determined that Kurzweil's family become part of the "final solution." From these letters and documents we become aware, also, of the profusion of legal entities dealing with Jews, the rivalries among them, and the free-floating dimensions of victims' fear and dread.Because the letters are full of allusions rather than straightforward information, and characterized by self-censorship, Edith Kurzweil has annotated them and inserted the relevant numbers of the specific laws as these were being applied." - from the publisher

"How and why did 75 percent of Jews escape the Holocaust in France, despite the Nazi extermination plan and the collaboration of the Vichy regime? How can this unexpected survival rate, of which the French themselves are still largely unaware, be explained? The author sheds a new light on the everyday life tactics and tricks that allowed the persecuted to escape raids and deportations. Beyond the international context and geographical, political and cultural factors, the author shows that the Jews found in France a degree of empathy, especially from the summer of 1942, despite anti-Semitism and denunciation. Between arrests and deportations, gestures of mutual aid and practices of solidarity, the author brings together the history of the 220,000 Jews in France who were still alive at the end of the occupation. It is a history close to the daily realities of the persecuted Jews, illustrated by the trajectories of individuals and families." - from the publisher

"The Holocaust in the Soviet Union is the most complete account to date of the Soviet Jews during World War II and the Holocaust (1941-45). Reports, records, documents, and research previously unavailable in English enable Yitzhak Arad to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of the Jews." - from the publisher

"Despite their common heritage, Jews born and raised on opposite sides of the Polish-Soviet border during the interwar period acquired distinct beliefs, values, and attitudes. Variances in civic commitment, school lessons, youth activities, religious observance, housing arrangements, and perceptions of security deeply influenced these adolescents who would soon face a common enemy. Set in two cities flanking the border, Grodno in the interwar Polish Republic and Vitebsk in the Soviet Union, Borderland Generation traces the prewar and wartime experiences of young adult Jews raised under distinct political and social systems. Each cohort harnessed the knowledge and skills attained during their formative years to seek survival during the Holocaust through narrow windows of chance. Antisemitism in Polish Grodno encouraged Jewish adolescents to seek the support of their peers in youth groups. Across the border to the east, the Soviet system offered young Vitebsk Jews opportunities for advancement not possible in Poland, but only if they integrated into the predominantly Slavic society. These backgrounds shaped responses during the Holocaust. Grodno Jews deported to concentration camps acted in continuity with prewar social behaviors by forming bonds with other prisoners. Young survivors among Vitebsk’s Jews often looked to survive by posing under false identities as Belarusians, Russians, or Tatars. Tapping archival resources in six languages, Borderland Generation offers an original and groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which young Polish and Soviet Jews fought for survival and the complex impulses that shaped their varying methods." - from the publisher

"In this book, Yehuda Bauer, an internationally acclaimed Holocaust historian, describes the destruction of small Jewish townships, the shtetls, in what was the eastern part of Poland by the Nazis in 1941–1942. Bauer brings together all available documents, testimonies, and scholarship, including previously unpublished material from the Yad Vashem archives, pertaining to nine representative shtetls. In line with his belief that “history is the story of real people in real situations,” Bauer tells moving stories about what happened to individual Jews and their communities. Over a million people, approximately a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust, came from the shtetls. Bauer writes of the relations between Jews and non-Jews (including the actions of rescuers); he also describes attempts to create underground resistance groups, efforts to escape to the forests, and Jewish participation in the Soviet partisan movement. Bauer’s book is a definitive examination of the demise of the shtetls, a topic of vast importance to the history of the Holocaust." - from the publisher

"One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into a reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne's Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations. After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne's surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it. Most arresting is the sinking realization that Jedwabne's Jews were clubbed, drowned, gutted, and burned not by faceless Nazis, but by people whose features and names they knew well: their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street. As much as such a question can ever be answered, Neighbors tells us why." - from the publisher

"Jan Gross's hugely controversial Neighbors was a historian's disclosure of the events in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, when the citizens rounded up the Jewish population and burned them alive in a barn. The massacre was a shocking secret that had been suppressed for more than sixty years, and it provoked the most important public debate in Poland since 1989. From the outset, Anna Bikont reported on the town, combing through archives and interviewing residents who survived the war period. Her writing became a crucial part of the debate and she herself an actor in a national drama. Part history, part memoir, The Crime and the Silence is the journalist's account of these events: both the story of the massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past. Including the perspectives of both heroes and perpetrators, Bikont chronicles the sources of the hatred that exploded against Jews and asks what myths grow on hidden memories, what destruction they cause, and what happens to a society that refuses to accept a horrific truth. A profoundly moving exploration of being Jewish in modern Poland that Julian Barnes called 'one of the most chilling books,' The Crime and the Silence is a vital contribution to Holocaust history and a fascinating story of a town coming to terms with its dark past."

"On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, Ukraine held the largest Jewish community in Europe. Between 1941 and 1944, some 1.4 million Jews were killed there. This volume sheds new light on themes of perpetration, collaboration, Jewish-Ukrainian relations, testimony, rescue and Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine." - from the publisher

"Babi Yar is a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and a site of massacres carried out by German forces and by local Ukrainian collaborators during their campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place 29-30 September 1941, killing 33,771 Jews. This book records the author's experience under the Nazis in the Ukraine. Anatoli was 12 years old in 1941 when the Germans occupied Kiev. Beginning with seventy thousand Jews, they proceeded to murder hundreds of thousands of the city's population in the ravine of Babi Yar, and deported thousands more to Germany for slave labor. Anatoli survived two incredible years of slaughter, terror, and starvation. As the Soviet Army approached from the East, the Nazis began their frantic and methodical attempt to erase the evidence of their crimes at Babi Yar. Anatoli first published the book Babi Yar about these atrocities in the Soviet Union in 1966, however the book was censored by the Soviets so the sense of the book was distorted and many original passages deleted. Anatoli escaped to the West in 1969, smuggling out of Russia films of his uncensored manuscripts. This book is an uncensored version of Babi Yar. It shows far more than anti-German sentiments, the oppression and persecution he so movingly documents is as much Soviet as Nazi." - from the publisher

"The Holocaust in Hungary provides a comprehensive documentary account of one of the most brutal and effective killing campaigns in history. After Nazi Germany took control of Hungary late in World War II, Jews were rounded up with unprecedented speed and sent directly to Auschwitz. They would form the largest group of victims who perished in that camp. The authors present extensive reports, testimonies, and other primary sources of these events accompanied by in-depth commentary that spans the years from the late 1930s to the fractured landscape of postwar Hungary. Their volume will be essential reading for all students and scholars interested in Holocaust and genocide studies." - from the publisher

"A gripping revisionist history that shows how ordinary Italians played a central role in the genocide of Italian Jews during the Second World WarIn this gripping revisionist history of Italy's role in the Holocaust, Simon Levis Sullam presents an unforgettable account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy's Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Mussolini's collaborationist republic was under German occupation. While most historians have long described Italians as relatively protective of Jews during this time, The Italian Executioners tells a very different story, recounting in vivid detail the shocking events of a period in which Italians set in motion almost half the arrests that sent their Jewish compatriots to Auschwitz. This brief, beautifully written narrative shines a harsh spotlight on those who turned on their Jewish fellow citizens. These collaborators ranged from petty informers to Fascist intellectuals--and their motives ran from greed to ideology. Drawing insights from Holocaust and genocide studies and combining a historian's rigor with a novelist's gift for scene-setting, Levis Sullam takes us into Italian cities large and small, from Florence and Venice to Brescia, showing how events played out in each. Re-creating betrayals and arrests, he draws indelible portraits of victims and perpetrators alike. Along the way, Levis Sullam dismantles the seductive popular myth of italiani brava gente--the "good Italians" who sheltered their Jewish compatriots from harm. The result is an essential correction to a widespread misconception of the Holocaust in Italy. In collaboration with the Nazis, and with different degrees and forms of involvement, the Italians were guilty of genocide." - from the publisher

The Holocaust in Croatia recounts the history of the Croatian Jewish community during the Second World War, with a focus on the city of Zagreb. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein have grounded their study on extensive research in recently opened archives, additionally aided by the memories of survivors to supplement and enrich the interpretation of documents. The authors' accessible narrative, here available in English for the first time, has been praised for its objectivity (including rare humane acts by those who helped to save Jews) and is complemented by a large bibliography offering an outstanding referential source to archival materials. The Holocaust in Croatia stands as the definitive account of the Jews in Croatia, up to and including the criminal acts perpetrated by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regine, adding significantly to our knowledge of the Holocaust." - from the publisher.

"This remarkable book traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaitė, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well. Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania." - from the publisher

"Purifying the Nation is a provocative exploration of the Holocaust in World War II Romania. Vladimir Solonari argues that the persecution of Jews and Roma by the Romanian government was not a response to pressure from the country's ally, Nazi Germany, but rather stemmed from the vision of an ethnically pure Romania. Through a rigorous, archive-based analysis of the country's interwar political and intellectual climate and policies and practices during its alliance with the Nazis, Solonari sheds valuable new light on the genocidal activities of one of Hitler's European satellites." - from the publisher

"Holocaust accounts typically cast Jewish victims as meek, going "like sheep to the slaughter." Given such portrayals, people ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This book's goal is not to dispel the myth of Jewish passivity, however; instead, it argues that Jewish resistance deserves explanation. Research on social movements shows that protest occurs when protesters have an opportunity for action and both the material resources and belief in themselves to get their protest off the ground, but members of Jewish resistance movements lacked these factors. So why did they fight back? Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, the book answers this question by comparing three Jewish ghettos during World War II: Warsaw (site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943), Vilna (where activists planned for armed resistance in the ghetto but could not achieve that goal), and Lodz (where no plans for armed resistance emerged). It finds that resistance rested on Jews' assessments of the threats facing them, and especially on their hope for survival. Somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival and saw such resistance as the best response to their situation. These findings have implications for other examples of resistance under extreme conditions, such as prison riots and rebellions of enslaved people." - from the publisher

"This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country - in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps. The essays presented here consider Jewish resistance to be resistance by Jewish persons in specifically Jewish groups, or by Jewish persons working within non-Jewish organizations. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis - acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying. These attempts to remain physically, intellectually, culturally, morally, and theologically alive constituted resistance to Nazi oppression, which was designed to demolish individuals, destroy their soul, and obliterate their desire to live. The contributors are among the most renowned Holocaust authorities in Israel, Europe, Canada, and the United States. The essays treat Jewish resistance in France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Yishuv, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Poland, Romania, the Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, and Hungary. Some essays describe children's resistance and music as resistance. The authors explain why different types of resistance occurred in some places but not in others and how factors such as terrain played a vital role in why one type of resistance took place in some areas but was impossible elsewhere. The importance of chronology and the progress of the war are also considered." - from the publisher

"In 1943, the Nazis liquidated Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. A year later, they threatened to complete the city's destruction by deporting its remaining residents. A sophisticated and cosmopolitan community a thousand years old was facing its final days--and then opportunity struck. As Soviet soldiers turned back the Nazi invasion of Russia and began pressing west, the underground Polish Home Army decided to act. Taking advantage of German disarray and seeking to forestall the absorption of their country into the Soviet empire, they chose to liberate the city of Warsaw for themselves. Warsaw 1944 tells the story of this brave and errant calculation. For more than sixty days, the Polish fighters took over large parts of the city and held off the SS's most brutal forces. But in the end, their efforts were doomed. Scorned by Stalin and unable to win significant support from the Western Allies, the Polish Home Army was left to face the full fury of Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. The crackdown that followed was among the most brutal episodes of history's most brutal war, and the celebrated historian Alexandra Richie depicts this tragedy in riveting detail. Using a rich trove of primary sources, Richie relates the terrible experiences of individuals who fought in the uprising and perished in it. Her clear-eyed narrative reveals the fraught choices and complex legacy of some of World War II's most unsung heroes." - from the publisher

"The Warsaw Uprising during the spring of 1944 is the most infamous rebellion, but there were other occasions of Jews and other prisoners fighting back--often with stunning results--against their murderers via the armed Jewish resistance. Destroying gas chambers, efforts to take over camps, and escaping en masse were just some of the brave methods attempted to stop the machinery of the Holocaust throughout Poland and the Ukraine. In virtually every case, the brave men and women who rebelled against their captors, paid dearly with their lives. Holocaust Heroes recounts the stories of these individuals who fought against victimization and acted with bravery, resourcefulness, and resistance to fight against their tragic fate."--Jacket.

""One of the most important untold stories of World War II. The light of days is a soaring landmark history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who helped weaponize Poland's Jewish youth groups to resist the Nazis. Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--became the nerves of a wide-ranging resistance network that fought the Nazis"--Jacket flap.Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town's water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown." - from the publisher

"Nechama Tec tells the story of the largest armed rescue operation of Jews by Jews in World War II. Arguing that the success of the Bielski partisans, as the rescue organization came to be known, would have been unthinkable without the vision of one man, Tec offers penetrating insight into the group's commander, Tuvia Bielski. Tec brings to light the untold story of Bielski's struggle as a partisan who lost his parents, wife, and two brothers to the Nazis, yet never wavered in his conviction that it was more important to save one Jew than to kill twenty Germans. She shows how, under Bielski's guidance, the partisans smuggled Jews out of heavily guarded ghettos, scouted the roads for fugitives, and led retaliatory raids against Belorussian peasants who collaborated with the Nazis. Herself a Holocaust survivor, Nechama Tec here draws on wide-ranging research and never before published interviews with surviving partisans--including Tuvia Bielski himself--to reconstruct here the poignant and unforgettable story of those who chose to fight." - from the publisher

"The deep forests of Poland and Belarus are the domain of the occupying Germans during World War II. The three Bielski brothers go into the forests to undertake the impossible task of foraging for food, weapons and survival, not just for themselves but for a large mass of Polish Jews fleeing from the German war machine. The brothers, living with the fear of discovery, must contend with neighboring Soviet partisans and deciding whom to trust. They take on the responsibility of guardians and motivate hundreds of women, men, children and elderly to join their fight against the Nazi regime while hiding in makeshift homes in the dark, cold, unforgiving forest. At the same time, the brothers turn a band of war defectors into powerful freedom fighters. Based on true events." - from the publisher

"e events of the Holocaust have been well documented. Almost ninety percent of European Jewry was murdered. But for the survivors, the psychological impact of the Holocaust has stretched beyond 1945. An innocence has been eradicated. A view of their fellow man has been indelibly imprinted: "What did the world learn from the Holocaust?" a survivor was asked. "What the world learned from the Holocaust is that you can kill six million Jews and no one will care." The Aftermath offers a perspective of how one who has lived with terror for years is able to avoid paralysis and move forward. It is a book about how people live with gnawing doubts and uncertainty concerning their past actions and inactions, doubts and uncertainties which can cause them to feel ambivalent about their very existence. It is a tale of the anguish they feel because they possess firsthand knowledge of the evil in people, which so unjustly struck and deprived them of what was rightly theirs. For while Holocaust survivors seem, in most ways, to be like you and me, they are also aware of a subterranean world which may afflict them without warning. It is far easier to extinguish human beings than to extinguish their memories." - from the publisher

"For the first two decades following the end of World War II, discussion of the destruction of European Jewry was largely absent from American culture and the tragedy of the Holocaust was generally seen as irrelevant to non-Jewish Americans. Today, the Holocaust is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find its voice. At a time when a sense of Holocaust fatigue seems to be setting in and when the remaining survivors are at the end of their lives, it affirms that confronting traumatic memories and catastrophic histories can help us make our world mean something beyond ourselves." - from the publisher

"Some half a million Jews lived in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. Over the next decade, thousands would flee. Among these refugees, teens and young adults formed a remarkable generation. Born between 1914 and 1928, they were old enough to appreciate the loss of their homeland and the experience of flight, but often young and flexible enough to survive and even flourish in new environments. Many would go on to make great contributions to their new countries and to the world."
"The young Jews who fled the Nazis escaped to Palestine and the United States, to the Soviet Union and England, to South America and Shanghai and Australia. Some even remained in Germany, in hiding throughout the war. From a variety of backgrounds - some secular, some observant; some Zionists, some German patriots; some poor, some well-to-do - they are united by the experience of flight from Nazi persecution during their formative years. This generation has produced such disparate figures as Henry Kissinger and "Dr. Ruth" Westheimer; noted academics and political leaders of both Israel and East Germany; even a Benedictine abbot, a Hindu guru, and a West African chieftain. Drawing on interviews, published and unpublished memoirs, and his own experiences, Walter Laqueur skillfully combines these numerous individual stories and experiences to paint a vivid collective portrait of Generation Exodus." - from the publisher

"How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, Clifford charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them—as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children—often branded “the lucky ones”—had to struggle to be able to call themselves “survivors” at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford’s powerful and surprising narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss." - from the publisher

"According to Jewish tradition, Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world. In The Righteous, distinguished historian Sir Martin Gilbert explores the courage of those who, throughout Germany and in every occupied country, took incredible risks to help Jews whose fate would have been sealed without them. Indeed, many lost their lives for their efforts. From Greek-Orthodox Princess Alice of Greece to the Ukrainian Uniate Archbishop of Lvov, from priests and soldiers to employees and neighbors, many risked, and sacrificed, everything to help their fellow man. Drawing from twenty-five years of original research, Gilbert re-creates the remarkable stories of the non-Jews who have received formal recognition by the State of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations." - from the publisher

"In this brilliantly researched and insightful book, psychologist Eva Fogelman presents compelling stories of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust--and offers a revealing analysis of their motivations. Based on her extensive experience as a therapist treating Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and those who helped them, Fogelman delves into the psychology of altruism, illuminating why these rescuers chose to act while others simply stood by. While analyzing motivations, Conscience And Courage tells the stories of such little-known individuals as Stefnaia Podgorska Burzminska, a Polish teenager who hid thirteen Jews in her home; Alexander Roslan, a dealer in the black market who kept uprooting his family to shelter three Jewish children in his care, as well as more heralded individuals such as Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and Miep Gies. Speaking to the same audience that flocked to Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning movie, Schindler's List, Conscience And Courage is the first book to go beyond the stories to answer the question: Why did they help?" - from the publisher

"Amid the dark, ghastly history of World War II, the literally extraordinary story, never before fully researched by a historian, of how the Danish people banded together to save their fellow Jews from the Nazis—told through the remarkable unpublished diaries and documents of families forced to run for safety, leaving their homes and possessions behind, and of those who courageously came to their aid. In 1943, with its king and administration weakened but intact during the Nazi occupation, Denmark did something that no other country in Western Europe even attempted. Anticipating that the German occupying powers would soon issue the long-feared order to round up the entire population of Jews for deportation to concentration camps, the Danish people stood up in defiance and resisted. The king, politicians, and ordinary civilians were united in their response—these threatened people were not simply Jews but fellow Danes who happened to be Jewish, and no one would help in rounding them up for confinement and deportation. While diplomats used their limited but very real power to maneuver and impede matters in both Copenhagen and Berlin, the warning that the crisis was at hand quickly spread through the Jewish community. Over fourteen harrowing days, as they were helped, hidden, and protected by ordinary people who spontaneously rushed to save their fellow citizens, an incredible 7,742 out of 8,200 Jewish refugees were smuggled out all along the coast—on ships, schooners, fishing boats, anything that floated—to Sweden. While the bare facts of this exodus have been known for decades, astonishingly no full history of it has been written. Unfolding on a day-to-day basis, Countrymen brings together accounts written by individuals and officials as events happened, offering a comprehensive overview that underlines occupied Denmark’s historical importance to Hitler as a prop for the model Nazi state and revealing the savage conflict among top Nazi brass for control of the country. This is a story of ordinary glory, of simple courage and moral fortitude that shines out in the midst of the terrible history of the twentieth century and demonstrates how it was possible for a small and fragile democracy to stand against the Third Reich." - from the publisher

"Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village of scattered houses high in the mountains of the Ardèche. Surrounded by pastures and thick forests of oak and pine, the plateau Vivarais lies in one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Eastern France, cut off for long stretches of the winter by snow. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of the area saved thousands wanted by the Gestapo: resisters, freemasons, communists, downed Allied airmen, and above all Jews. Many of these were children and babies, whose parents had been deported to the death camps in Poland. After the war, Le Chambon became the only village to be listed in its entirety in Yad Vashem's Dictionary of the Just. Just why and how Le Chambon and its outlying parishes came to save so many people has never been fully told. Caroline Moorehead brings to life a story of outstanding courage and determination, and of what could be done when even a small group of people came together to oppose German rule. It is an extraordinary tale of silence and complicity. In a country infamous throughout the four years of occupation for the number of denunciations to the Gestapo of Jews, resisters and escaping prisoners of war, not one single inhabitant of Le Chambon ever broke silence. The story of Le Chambon is one of a village, bound together by a code of honour, born of centuries of religious oppression. And, though it took a conspiracy of silence by the entire population, it happened because of a small number of heroic individuals, many of them women, for whom saving those hunted by the Nazis became more important than their own lives." - from the publisher

"Izzy s Fire Finding Humanity in the Holocaust (revised 2008) tells the harrowing yet hope-filled true story of five Lithuanian Jewish families during the Holocaust who escaped Kovno Ghetto and were ultimately hidden (and saved) by a Catholic farm family. All 13 Jews ended up living in a 9 x 12 x 4 underground hole as World War II raged around them. Some lived underground for about seven months. Beasley draws from personal interviews, research and numerous memoirs, including extensive memoirs from Israel "Izzy" Ipson, who helped his family escape from Kovno Ghetto, one of the most notorious killing fields for Jews in Lithuania. The Ipps, as they were known then, relocated to Richmond following their liberation and later changed their name to Ipson." - from the publisher

"This is the inside story of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., told by the very people who developed the museum as a place for learning, communicating, and remembering. This book conveys the dedication to truth and scholarship that is the foundation of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and details the museum's role in presenting evidence of lives and events that must never be forgotten. This illustrated volume 'chronicles the story of the development of and meaning behind the museum. Weinberg and Elieli provide readers with insight into the plan and construction of the structure; the design and selection of materials for the permanent exhibits; and the architectural considerations that helped to create such a rich and meaningful experience for all who visit the memorial. The authors explore the building and exhibits as well as discuss the values and principles inherent in any Holocaust collection." - from the publisher

"Each year, millions of people visit Holocaust memorials and museums, with the number of tourists steadily on the rise. What lies behind the phenomenon of 'Holocaust tourism' and what role do its participants play in shaping how we remember and think about the Holocaust? In Postcards from Auschwitz, Daniel P. Reynolds argues that tourism to former concentration camps, ghettos, and other places associated with the Nazi genocide of European Jewry has become an increasingly vital component in the evolving collective remembrance of the Holocaust. Responding to the tendency to dismiss tourism as commercial, superficial, or voyeuristic, Reynolds insists that we take a closer look at a phenomenon that has global reach, takes many forms, and serves many interests. The book focuses on some of the most prominent sites of mass murder in Europe, and then expands outward to more recent memorial museums. Reynolds provides a historically-informed account of the different forces that have shaped Holocaust tourism since 1945, including Cold War politics, the sudden emergence of the "memory boom" beginning in the 1980s, and the awareness that eyewitnesses to the Holocaust are passing away. Based on his on-site explorations, the contributions from researchers in Holocaust studies and tourism studies, and the observations of tourists themselves, this book reveals how tourism is an important part of efforts to understand and remember the Holocaust, an event that continues to challenge ideals about humanity and our capacity to learn from the past." - from the publisher

"An introduction to key issues in the study of war and memory that examines significant conflicts in twentieth-century Europe In order to understand the history of twentieth-century Europe, we must first appreciate and accept how different societies and cultures remember their national conflicts. We must also be aware of the ways that those memories evolve over time. In War and Public Memory: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Europe, Messenger outlines the relevant history of war and its impact on different European nations and assesses how and where the memory of these conflicts emerges in political and public discourse and in the public sphere and public spaces of Europe. The case studies presented emphasize the major wars fought on European soil as well as the violence perpetrated against civilian populations. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the conflict and then proceeds with a study of how memory of that struggle has entered into public consciousness in different national societies. The focus throughout is on collective social, cultural, and public memory, and in particular how memory has emerged in public spaces throughout Europe, such as parks, museums, and memorial sites. Messenger discusses memories of the First World War for both the victors and the vanquished as well as their successor states. Other events discussed include the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent conflicts in the former Soviet Union, the Armenian genocide, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the legacy of the civil war in Spain, Germanys reckoning with its Nazi past, and the memory of occupation and the Holocaust in France and Poland." - from the publisher

"Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal’s life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel’s Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel." - from the publisher

"For more than half a century, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have hunted, confronted, and exposed Nazi war criminals, tracking them down in places as far-flung as South America and the Middle East. It is they who uncovered the notorious torturer Klaus Barbie, known as 'the Butcher of Lyon, ' in Bolivia. It is they who outed Kurt Lischka as chief of the Gestapo in Paris, the man responsible for the largest deportation of French Jews. And it is they who, with the help of their son, Arno, brought the Vichy police chief Maurice Papon to justice. They were born on opposite sides of the Second World War. Beate's father was in the Wehrmacht, while Serge's father was deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew. But when Serge and Beate met on the Paris metro, they instantly fell in love. They soon married and have since dedicated their lives to 'hunting the truth'--both as world-famous Nazi hunters and as meticulous documenters of the fate of the innocent French Jewish children who were killed in the death camps. They have been jailed and targeted by letter bombs, and their car was even blown up. Yet nothing has daunted the Klarsfelds in their pursuit of justice. Beate made worldwide headlines at age twenty-nine by slapping the high-profile ex-Nazi propagandist Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and shouting 'Nazi!' Serge intentionally provoked a neo-Nazi in a German beer hall by wearing an armband with a yellow star on it, so that the press would report on the assault. When Pope John Paul II met with Austria's then-president, Kurt Waldheim, a former Wehrmacht officer in the Balkans suspected of war crimes, the Klarsfelds' son, dressed as a Nazi officer, stood outside the Vatican. The Klarsfelds also dedicated themselves to defeating Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and his daughter Marine Le Pen's 2017 campaign for president in France. Brave, urgent, and buoyed by a remarkable love story, Hunting the Truth is not only the dramatic memoir of bringing Nazis to justice, it is also the inspiring story of an unrelenting battle against prejudice and hate." - from the publisher

"Describes the capture and subsequent trial of Adolf Eichmann by Jewish authorities and examines the effects genocide has on survivors.The capture of SS officer Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in 1960 and his subsequent trial by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular dealt with the legacy of genocide on a scale never seen before. Historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the effect that the survivors' courtroom testimony--which was itself not without controversy--had on a world that had until then never fully understood what those in the camps had actually experienced. As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide, this trial of the century offers a legal, moral, and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil." - from the publisher

"Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg reveals the pivotal role the Soviet Union played in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946. The Nuremberg Trials (IMT), most notable for their aim to bring perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in the wake of World War II, paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this new history of the trials, a central part of the story has been ignored or forgotten: the critical role the Soviet Union played in making them happen in the first place. While there were practical reasons for this omission--until recently, critical Soviet documents about Nuremberg were buried in the former Soviet archives, and even Russian researchers had limited access--Hirsch shows that there were political reasons as well. The Soviet Union was regarded by its wartime Allies not just as a fellow victor but a rival, and it was not in the interests of the Western powers to highlight the Soviet contribution to postwar justice" - from the publisher

"The author shows how, despite witnesses and evidence to the contrary, this irrational idea has not only continued to gain adherents but has become an internationally organized movement. She argues vehemently against giving Holocaust deniers a forum in the name of free speech or freedom of the press and she details the efforts of California revisionist Bradley Smith, who pushed a "Holocaust was a hoax" campaign in college newspapers throughout the United States.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 perpetuated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. Forty years ago, such notion 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 of 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 over the past decade 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." - from the publisher

"In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving, whose libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was tried in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled Irving a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief adviser for the defense, uses this famous trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise. For instance, don't all historians in the end bring a subjective agenda to bear on their reading of the evidence? Is it possible that Irving lost his case not because of his biased history but because his agenda was unacceptable? The central issue in the trial -- as for Evans in this book -- was not the past itself, but the way in which historians study the past. In a series of short, sharp chapters, Richard Evans sets David Irving's methods alongside the historical record in order to illuminate the difference between responsible and irresponsible history. The result is a cogent and deeply informed study in the nature of historical interpretation." - from the publisher

"Denying History takes a bold and in-depth look at those who say the Holocaust never happened and explores the motivations behind such claims. While most commentators have dismissed the Holocaust deniers as antisemitic neo-Nazi thugs who do not deserve a response, historians Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in the minds and culture of these Holocaust "revisionists." In the process, they show how we can be certain that the Holocaust happened and, for that matter, how we can confirm any historical event. This edition is expanded with a new chapter and epilogue examining current, shockingly mainstream revisionism." - from the publisher

"Much post-Holocaust Jewish thought published in North America has assumed that the Holocaust shattered traditional religious categories that had been used by Jews to account for historical catastrophes. But most traditional Jewish thinkers during the war saw no such overwhelming of tradition in the death and suffering delivered to Jews by Nazis. Through a comparative reading of postwar North American and wartime Orthodox Jewish texts about the Holocaust, Barbara Krawcowicz shows that these sources differ in the paradigms-modern and historicist for North American thinkers, traditional and covenantal for Orthodox thinkers-in which they employ historical events." - from the publisher

"This volume presents a wide-ranging selection of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust. It will be the most complete anthology of its sort, bringing together for the first time: (1) a large sample of ultra-orthodox writings, translated from the Hebrew and Yiddish; (2) a substantial selection of essays by Israeli authors, also translated from the Hebrew; (3) a broad sampling of works written in English by American and European authors. These diverse selections represent virtually every significant theological position that has been articulated by a Jewish thinker in response to the Holocaust. Included are rarely studied responses that were written while the Holocaust was happening." - from the publisher

"This is a comprehensive collection of readings from the work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential German thinkers of the twentieth century. What took place in Auschwitz revokes what Adorno termed the “Western legacy of positivity,” the innermost substance of traditional philosophy. The prime task of philosophy then remains to reflect on its own failure, its own complicity in such events. Yet in linking the question of philosophy to historical occurrence, Adorno seems not to have abandoned his paradoxical, life-long hope that philosophy might not be entirely closed to the idea of redemption. He prepares for an altogether different praxis, one no longer conceived in traditionally Marxist terms but rather to be gleaned from “metaphysical experience.” In this collection, Adorno's literary executor has assembled the definitive introduction to his thinking. Its five sections anatomize the range of Adorno's concerns: “Toward a New Categorical Imperative,” “Damaged Life,” “Administered World, Reified Thought,” “Art, Memory of Suffering,” and “A Philosophy That Keeps Itself Alive.” A substantial number of Adorno’s writings included appear here in English for the first time. This collection comes with an eloquent introduction from Rolf Tiedemann, the literary executor of Adorno’s work." - from the publisher

"In To Mend the World Emil L. Fackenheim points the way to Judaism's renewal in a world and an age in which all of our notions—about God, humanity, and revelation—have been severely challenged. He tests the resources within Judaism for healing the breach between secularism and revelation after the Holocaust. Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Hegel, Heidegger, and Buber figure prominently in his account." - from the publisher