Download or read book Judging Privileged Jews written by Adam Brown and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called “privileged” positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi’s concept of the “grey zone,” this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on “privileged” Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of “representing the unrepresentable,” this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.
Download or read book Gray Zones written by Jonathan Petropoulos and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.
Download or read book Escapees written by Tanja von Fransecky and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the countless stories of resistance, ingenuity, and personal risk to emerge in the years following the Holocaust, among the most remarkable, yet largely overlooked, are those of the hundreds of Jewish deportees who escaped from moving trains bound for the extermination camps. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands alone over 750 men, women and children undertook such dramatic escape attempts, despite the extraordinary uncertainty and physical danger they often faced. Drawing upon extensive interviews and a wealth of new historical evidence, Escapees gives a fascinating collective account of this hitherto neglected form of resistance to Nazi persecution.
Download or read book Anxious Histories written by Jordana Silverstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last seventy years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. The author explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York. Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including memory studies, gender studies, diaspora theory, and settler colonial studies, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these historical narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating histories of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.
Download or read book Testimonies of Resistance written by Nicholas Chare and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sonderkommando—the “special squad” of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau—comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented—by themselves and by others—both during and after the Holocaust.
Download or read book Jewish Histories of the Holocaust written by Norman J.W. Goda and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.
Download or read book Shedding Light on the Darkness written by Nancy A. Lauckner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly, German Studies programs include courses on the Holocaust, but suitable course materials are often difficult to find. Teachers in higher education will therefore very much welcome this volume that examines and reflects both the practical and theoretical aspects of teaching about the Holocaust. Though designed primarily by and for North American Germanists and German Studies specialists, this book will prove no less useful for teachers in other countries and associated disciplines. It presents and describes successful Holocaust-related courses that have been developed and taught at U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities, demonstrating the depth, breadth, and variety of such offerings, while remaining mindful of the instructor's special moral responsibilities. Reflecting as it does, the innovative Holocaust pedagogy in North American German and German Studies, this collection serves the needs of educators who wish to revise or update their existing Holocaust courses and of those who are seeking guidance, ideas, and resources to enable them to develop their first Holocaust course or unit.
Download or read book The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia written by Wolf Gruner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to Hitler’s occupation, nearly 120,000 Jews inhabited the areas that would become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; by 1945, all but a handful had either escaped or been deported and murdered by the Nazis. This pioneering study gives a definitive account of the Holocaust as it was carried out in the region, detailing the German and Czech policies, including previously overlooked measures such as small-town ghettoization and forced labor, that shaped Jewish life. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Wolf Gruner demonstrates how the persecution of the Jews as well as their reactions and resistance efforts were the result of complex actions by German authorities in Prague and Berlin as well as the Czech government and local authorities.
Download or read book On the Death of Jews written by Nadine Fresco and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-03-10 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A meticulous and shattering investigation of eight horrific pictures...”—L’Arche In December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The majority were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer. The perpetrators took pictures of the December killings. These pictures are among the rare photographs from the first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt. From the forward by Dorota Glowackay: Straddling the boundary between historical inquiry and personal reflection, this extraordinary text unfolds as a series of encounters with eponymic Holocaust photographs. Although only a small number of photographs are reproduced here, Fresco provides evocative descriptions of many well-known images: synagogues and Torah scrolls burning on the night of Kristallnacht; deportations to the ghettos and the camps; and, finally, mass executions in the killing fi elds of Eastern Europe. The unique set of photographs included in On the Death of Jews shows groups of women and children from Liepaja (Liepája), shortly before they were killed in December 1941 in the dunes of Shkede (Škéde) on the Baltic Sea. In the last photograph of the series, we see the victims’ bodies tumbling into the pit.
Download or read book Matters of Testimony written by Nicholas Chare and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.
Download or read book The Unanswered Letter written by Faris Cassell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1939, as the Nazis closed in, Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to an American stranger who happened to share his last name. He and his wife, Viennese Jews, had found escape routes for their daughters. But now their money, connections, and emotional energy were nearly exhausted. Alfred begged the American recipient of the letter, “You are surely informed about the situation of all Jews in Central Europe.... By pure chance I got your address.... My daughter and her husband will go... to America.... Help us to follow our children.... It is our last and only hope....” After languishing in a California attic for decades, Alfred’s letter ended up in the hands of Faris Cassell, a journalist who couldn’t rest until she discovered the ending of the story. Traveling across the United States as well as to Austria, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and Israel, she uncovered an extraordinary story of heart-wrenching loss and unforgettable love that endures to this day. Did the Bergers’ desperate letter find a response? Did they—and their daughters—survive? Did they leave living descendants? You will find the answers here. A story that will move any reader, The Unanswered Letter is a poignant reminder that love and hope never die.
Download or read book Between Two Streams written by Abel J. Herzberg and published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. This book was released on 2008-12-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the height of the Holocaust it was Nazi policy to preserve small groups of "privileged" Jews for possible use in exchanges with Allied-held German civilians. One such internee--Abel Herzberg, a Dutch lawyer and writer--managed in the hell of Bergen-Belsen to keep a diary which chronicles the reality of daily existence in the camp, with its grotesquely dehumanizing conditions and the magnanimity and pettiness which they engendered. Among the passengers on the train that carried Herzberg both to Belsen and away from the camp a year later was a 9-year-old boy. Extraordinarily, that same boy--Jack Santcross--undertook to translate Herzberg's diary half a century later. The result is this unique eye-witness account of life in one of the most notorious Nazi concentrations camps and a work of great historical importance.
Download or read book The Vanishing American Jew written by Alan M. Dershowitz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998-09-08 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the meaning of Jewishness in light of the increasing assimilation of America's Jews and suggests ways to preserve Jewish identity.
Download or read book Essential Judaism Updated Edition written by George Robinson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning journalist tells you everything you need to know about being Jewish in this user-friendly guide that explains not only what Jews do and believe, but why.
Download or read book Auschwitz written by Miklós Nyiszli and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."
Download or read book Hitler s Bounty Hunters written by Ad van Liempt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were the Nazis so successful in deporting Jews? Why did families such as Anne Frank's get turned in? Investigative journalist Ad van Liempt pulls back the curtain on the shocking practice of Dutch bounty hunters of the Jews, and reveals that ordinary citizens were prepared to turn over their Jewish countrymen in exchange for cash.Van Liempt examines in great detail the careers of bounty hunters and describes some particularly horrifying cases. The most gripping are those involving young children. In one case, two bounty hunters traveled hundreds of miles to get their hands on a two-year-old girl living in a safe house; a month later she was gassed at Sobibor. In court, the bounty hunters consistently maintained that they received no premiums for their work, but the author shows the opposite to be true and traces the money involved.This haunting book uncovers a facet of the Holocaust that has previously been largely neglected and brings to light the day-to-day workings of the persecution of the Jews.
Download or read book Iraq s Last Jews written by T. Morad and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-10-27 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iraq's Last Jews is a collection of first-person accounts by Jews about their lives in Iraq's once-vibrant, 2500 year-old Jewish community and about the disappearance of that community in the middle of the 20th century. This book tells the story of this last generation of Iraqi Jews, who both reminisce about their birth country and describe the persecution that drove them out, the result of Nazi influences, growing Arab nationalism, and anger over the creation of the State of Israel.
