Download or read book Music in the Holocaust written by Shirli Gilbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring theways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism.Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

Download or read book Admitting the Holocaust written by Lawrence L. Langer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-06-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the face of the Holocaust, writes Lawrence L. Langer, our age clings to the stable relics of faded eras, as if ideas like natural innocence, innate dignity, the inviolable spirit, and the triumph of art over reality were immured in some kind of immortal shrine, immune to the ravages of history and time. But these ideas have been ravaged, and in Admitting the Holocaust. Langer presents a series of essays that represent his effort, over nearly a decade, to wrestle with this rupture in human values--and to see the Holocaust as it really was. His vision is necessarily dark, but he does not see the Holocaust as a warrant for futility, or as a witness to the death of hope. It is a summons to reconsider our values and rethink what it means to be a human being. These penetrating and often gripping essays cover a wide range of issues, from the Holocaust's relation to time and memory, to its portrayal in literature, to its use and abuse by culture, to its role in reshaping our sense of history's legacy. In many, Langer examines the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust--in history, literature, film, and theology--have extended, and sometimes limited, our insight into an event that is often said to defy understanding itself. He singles out Cynthia Ozick as one of the few American writers who can meet the challenge of imagining mass murder without flinching and who can distinguish between myth and truth. On the other hand, he finds Bernard Malamud's literary treatment of the Holocaust never entirely successful (it seems to have been a threat to Malamud's vision of man's basic dignity) and he argues that William Styron's portrayal of the commandant of Auschwitz in Sophie's Choice pushed Nazi violence to the periphery of the novel, where it disturbed neither the author nor his readers. He is especially acute in his discussion of the language used to describe the Holocaust, arguing that much of it is used to console rather than to confront. He notes that when we speak of the survivor instead of the victim, of martyrdom instead of murder, regard being gassed as dying with dignity, or evoke the redemptive rather than grevious power of memory, we draw on an arsenal of words that tends to build verbal fences between what we are mentally willing--or able--to face and the harrowing reality of the camps and ghettos. A respected Holocaust scholar and author of Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Langer offers a view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses--in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape--and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century.

Download or read book Courage Under Siege written by Charles G. Roland and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Roland, a physician and historian, provides the first history of the medical disaster that took place in the Warsaw ghetto.

Download or read book Foregone Conclusions written by Michael André Bernstein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"—an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures. Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history. Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities. Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Download or read book The Holocaust written by Leni Yahil and published by Studies in Jewish History. This book was released on 1990 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the anti-semitic activities of the Nazis all over the globe, refuting common myths about the Holocaust, including the perception that Jews went peacefully to their deaths.

Download or read book The Terezin Requiem written by Josef Bor and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Jews of Warsaw 1939 1943 written by Yisrael Gutman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1989-02-22 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work chronicles the struggle of Warsaw Jewry from the outbreak of World War II (September 1939) through the final and most tragic chapter in the history of the community--the armed Jewish uprising, the annihilation of the remnant Jewish community, and the destruction of the traditional Jewish sector of the city (April-May 1943).

Download or read book Murder in Our Midst written by Omer Bartov and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He shows how the way we understand ourselves reflects the ambivalent effects of the Holocaust on our perceptions of war and violence, history and memory, progress and barbarism.

Download or read book Singing for Survival written by Gila Flam and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book To Live with Hope to Die with Dignity written by Joseph Rudavsky and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys the phenomenon of Jewish spiritual survival during the Holocaust in the framework of the Jewish urge to sanctify God through the affirmation of life ("Kiddush ha-hayyim") rather than through martyrdom ("Kiddush Hashem"). Describes the historical development of the concept of "Kiddush ha-hayyim." Ch. 2 (pp. 29-42), "The Ghetto as a Tool for Extermination, " summarizes the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews, and its implementation in the Kovno, Lodz, Vilna, and Warsaw ghettos. Discusses cultural, religious, literary, artistic, and political activities in these ghettos, designed to raise morale and help Jews to survive and live a meaningful existence.

Download or read book They Chose Life written by Yehuda Bauer and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining Jewish resistance in the Holocaust, dismisses the view that the Jews went to their deaths "like sheep to the slaughter". In the early stages of the Holocaust, resistance was passive, mainly a struggle for physical survival in the ghettos. In later stages, Jews took to armed resistance: uprisings in ghettos, partisan warfare, etc. Dwells on the role of the Judenräte in the struggle for survival, and the dilemmas with which Jewish leaders were confronted.

Download or read book Triumph of Hope written by Ruth Elias and published by Wiley. This book was released on 1999-09-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Triumph of Hope From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel Now available in English, here is the award-winning and internationally acclaimed testament of a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, where she was forced to confront perhaps the most agonizing choice ever imposed upon any woman, upon any human being . so that both she and her newborn infant should not die in a Nazi "medical" experiment personally conducted by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. And just as vividly, Ruth Elias recounts the aftermath of her imprisonment, and the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited. "One of the most powerful memoirs provided to us by a survivor." --Indiana Jewish Post and Opinion "Well-written . not only provides a remarkably honest picture of the unspeakable reality of living in ghettos and slave-labor and death camps, but also what it meant to be Jewish in Europe. in the 1920s and 1930s.. This is one of the best Holocaust memoirs I have read." --Washington Jewish Week "The understated tone of this memoir adds to the author's powerful re-creation of her life as a young Czechoslovak Jewish woman during the Holocaust." --Publishers Weekly