Download or read book Ordinary Jews written by Evgeny Finkel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Jewish responses during the Holocaust shed new light on the dynamics of genocide and political violence Focusing on the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust, Ordinary Jews examines the different patterns of behavior of civilians targeted by mass violence. Relying on rich archival material and hundreds of survivors' testimonies, Evgeny Finkel presents a new framework for understanding the survival strategies in which Jews engaged: cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance. Finkel compares Jews' behavior in three Jewish ghettos—Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok—and shows that Jews' responses to Nazi genocide varied based on their experiences with prewar policies that either promoted or discouraged their integration into non-Jewish society. Finkel demonstrates that while possible survival strategies were the same for everyone, individuals' choices varied across and within communities. In more cohesive and robust Jewish communities, coping—confronting the danger and trying to survive without leaving—was more organized and successful, while collaboration with the Nazis and attempts to escape the ghetto were minimal. In more heterogeneous Jewish communities, collaboration with the Nazis was more pervasive, while coping was disorganized. In localities with a history of peaceful interethnic relations, evasion was more widespread than in places where interethnic relations were hostile. State repression before WWII, to which local communities were subject, determined the viability of anti-Nazi Jewish resistance. Exploring the critical influences shaping the decisions made by Jews in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, Ordinary Jews sheds new light on the dynamics of collective violence and genocide.
Download or read book Ordinary Jews written by Evgeny Finkel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Jewish responses during the Holocaust shed new light on the dynamics of genocide and political violence Focusing on the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust, Ordinary Jews examines the different patterns of behavior of civilians targeted by mass violence. Relying on rich archival material and hundreds of survivors' testimonies, Evgeny Finkel presents a new framework for understanding the survival strategies in which Jews engaged: cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance. Finkel compares Jews' behavior in three Jewish ghettos—Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok—and shows that Jews' responses to Nazi genocide varied based on their experiences with prewar policies that either promoted or discouraged their integration into non-Jewish society. Finkel demonstrates that while possible survival strategies were the same for everyone, individuals' choices varied across and within communities. In more cohesive and robust Jewish communities, coping—confronting the danger and trying to survive without leaving—was more organized and successful, while collaboration with the Nazis and attempts to escape the ghetto were minimal. In more heterogeneous Jewish communities, collaboration with the Nazis was more pervasive, while coping was disorganized. In localities with a history of peaceful interethnic relations, evasion was more widespread than in places where interethnic relations were hostile. State repression before WWII, to which local communities were subject, determined the viability of anti-Nazi Jewish resistance. Exploring the critical influences shaping the decisions made by Jews in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, Ordinary Jews sheds new light on the dynamics of collective violence and genocide.
Download or read book Ordinary Jews written by Yehoshue Perle and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation of a modern Yiddish masterpiece.
Download or read book Hitler s Willing Executioners written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book Ordinary Men written by Christopher R. Browning and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews.
Download or read book Ordinary Jews written by Evgeny Finkel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Jewish responses during the Holocaust shed new light on the dynamics of genocide and political violence Focusing on the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust, Ordinary Jews examines the different patterns of behavior of civilians targeted by mass violence. Relying on rich archival material and hundreds of survivors' testimonies, Evgeny Finkel presents a new framework for understanding the survival strategies in which Jews engaged: cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance. Finkel compares Jews' behavior in three Jewish ghettos—Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok—and shows that Jews' responses to Nazi genocide varied based on their experiences with prewar policies that either promoted or discouraged their integration into non-Jewish society. Finkel demonstrates that while possible survival strategies were the same for everyone, individuals' choices varied across and within communities. In more cohesive and robust Jewish communities, coping—confronting the danger and trying to survive without leaving—was more organized and successful, while collaboration with the Nazis and attempts to escape the ghetto were minimal. In more heterogeneous Jewish communities, collaboration with the Nazis was more pervasive, while coping was disorganized. In localities with a history of peaceful interethnic relations, evasion was more widespread than in places where interethnic relations were hostile. State repression before WWII, to which local communities were subject, determined the viability of anti-Nazi Jewish resistance. Exploring the critical influences shaping the decisions made by Jews in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, Ordinary Jews sheds new light on the dynamics of collective violence and genocide.
Download or read book Lives in Common written by Menachem Klein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see events through the eyes of policy-makers, generals or diplomats. Menachem Klein offers an illuminating alternative by telling the intertwined histories, from street level upwards, of three cities-Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron-and their intermingled Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants, from the nineteenth century to the present. Each of them was and still is a mixed city. Jerusalem and Hebron are holy places, while Jaffa till 1948 was Palestine's principal city and main port of entry. Klein portrays a society in the late Ottoman period in which Jewish-Arab interactions were intense, frequent, and meaningful, before the onset of segregation and separation gradually occurred in the Mandate era. The unequal power relations and increasing violence between Jews and Arabs from 1948 onwards are also scrutinised. Throughout, Klein bases his writing not on the official record but rather on a hitherto hidden private world of Jewish-Arab encounters, including marriages and squabbles, kindnesses and cruelties, as set out in dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies and testimonies. Lives in Common brings together the voices of Jews and Arabs in a mosaic of fascinating stories, of lived experiences and of the major personalities that shaped them over the last 150 years. Most books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see events through the eyes of policy-makers, generals or diplomats. Menachem Klein offers an illuminating alternative by telling the intertwined histories, from street level upwards, of three cities-Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron-and their intermingled Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants, from the nineteenth century to the present. Each of them was and still is a mixed city. Jerusalem and Hebron are holy places, while Jaffa till 1948 was Palestine's principal city and main port of entry. Klein portrays a society in the late Ottoman period in which Jewish-Arab interactions were intense, frequent, and meaningful, before the onset of segregation and separation gradually occurred in the Mandate era. The unequal power relations and increasing violence between Jews and Arabs from 1948 onwards are also scrutinised. Throughout, Klein bases his writing not on the official record but rather on a hitherto hidden private world of Jewish-Arab encounters, including marriages and squabbles, kindnesses and cruelties, as set out in dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies and testimonies. Lives in Common brings together the voices of Jews and Arabs in a mosaic of fascinating stories, of lived experiences and of the major personalities that shaped them over the last 150 years.
Download or read book Resisting Persecution written by Thomas Pegelow Kaplan and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-06-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.
Download or read book After Genocide written by Sue Lieberman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2015 was the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War Two, and, for Jews, the seventieth anniversary of the end of the worst Jewish catastrophe in diaspora history. After Genocide considers how, more than two generations since the war, the events of the Holocaust continue to haunt Jewish people and the worldwide Jewish population, even where there was no immediate family connection. Drawing from interviews with "ordinary" Jews from across the age spectrum, After Genocide focuses on the complex psychological legacy of the Holocaust. Is it, as many think, a "collective trauma"? How is a community detached in space and time traumatised by an event which neither they nor their immediate ancestors experienced?"Ordinary" Jews' own words bring to life a narrative which looks at how commonly-recognised attributes of trauma - loss, anger, fear, guilt, shame - are integral to Jewish reactions to the Holocaust.
Download or read book Jews on the Frontier written by Shari Rabin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jews on the Frontier offers a religious history that begins in an unexpected place: on the road. Shari Rabin recounts the journey of Jewish people as they left Eastern cities and ventured into the American West and South during the nineteenth century. It brings to life the successes and obstacles of these travels, from the unprecedented economic opportunities to the anonymity and loneliness that complicated the many legal obligations of traditional Jewish life. Without government-supported communities or reliable authorities, where could one procure kosher meat? Alone in the American wilderness, how could one find nine co-religionists for a minyan (prayer quorum)? Without identity documents, how could one really know that someone was Jewish?"--[Site internet éditeur].
Download or read book A Small Town Near Auschwitz written by Mary Fulbrook and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers. The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war. But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945. This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.
Download or read book Hitler s True Believers written by Robert Gellately and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ordinary Men written by Christopher R. Browning and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—Newsweek Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs. Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever. While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.
Download or read book Why the Germans Why the Jews written by Götz Aly and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Countless historians have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and insightful as those of maverick German historian Götz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly shows that German anti-Semitism was—to a previously overlooked extent—driven in large part by material concerns, not racist ideology or religious animosity. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the difficulties of the lethargic, economically backward German majority stood in marked contrast to the social and economic success of the agile Jewish minority. This success aroused envy and fear among the Gentile population, creating fertile ground for murderous Nazi politics. Surprisingly, and controversially, Aly shows that the roots of the Holocaust are deeply intertwined with German efforts to create greater social equality. Redistributing wealth from the well-off to the less fortunate was in many respects a laudable goal, particularly at a time when many lived in poverty. But as the notion of material equality took over the public imagination, the skilled, well-educated Jewish population came to be seen as having more than its fair share. Aly's account of this fatal social dynamic opens up a new vantage point on the greatest crime in history and is sure to prompt heated debate for years to come.
Download or read book Unsettled written by Melvin Konner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-09-28 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far reaching, intellectually rich, and passionately written, Unsettled takes the whole history of Western civilization as its canvas and places onto it the Jewish people and faith. With historical insight and vivid storytelling, renowned anthropologist Melvin Konner charts how the Jews endured largely hostile (but at times accepting) cultures to shape the world around them and make their mark throughout history—from the pastoral tribes of the Bronze Age to enslavement in the Roman Empire, from the darkness of the Holocaust to the creation of Israel and the flourishing of Jews in America. With fresh interpretations of the antecedents of today's pressing conflicts, Unsettled is a work whose modern-day reverberations could not be more relevant or timely.
Download or read book Ordinary Jews in an Extraordinary World written by Larry W. Freudenberg and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Larry W. Freudenberg tells the story of his family starting with his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Abraham Isaacks who came to America in 1697 as an indentured servant and the fascinating tale of Larry's father and paternal grandparents who came to America in 1940 as refugees and survivors from the horrors of Hitler's Nazi Germany. His grandmother, a retired physical therapist is regarded as one of Charleston's most admired citizens. Larry is the fourth generation owner of Triest Agency in Charleston. Established in 1903 by Larry's great grandfather, Montague Triest (pictured second from the right on the cover), this company is one of the oldest surviving small businesses in the south.
Download or read book Prologue to Annihilation written by Stephen H. Norwood and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American and British appeasement of Nazism during the early years of the Third Reich went far beyond territorial concessions. In Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich, Stephen H. Norwood examines the numerous ways that the two nations' official position of tacit acceptance of Jewish persecution enabled the policies that ultimately led to the Final Solution and how Nazi annihilationist intentions were clearly discernible even during the earliest years of Hitler's rule. Further, Norwood looks at the nature and impact of American and British Jewish resistance to Nazi persecution and the efforts of Jews at the grassroots level to press Jewish organizations to respond more forcefully to the Nazi menace. He examines the worldwide protest and boycott movements against Germany and German goods as well as mass demonstrations by working-class and lower-middle-class Jews in many American and British cities. Prologue to Annihilation details how the events of 1930-1936 tested American and British societies' willingness to accept Nazism and its anti-Jewish philosophy and illuminates the divisions that existed even within the Jewish community about how best to challenge Nazi antisemitic policies and atrocities.
