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Offering a multidimensional approach to one of the most important episodes of the twentieth century, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust offers readers and researchers a general history of the Holocaust while delving into the core issues and debates in the study of the Holocaust today. Each of the book's five distinct parts stands on its own as valuable research aids; together, they constitute an integrated whole. Part I provides a narrative overview of the Holocaust, placing it within the larger context of Nazi Germany and World War II. Part II examines eight critical issues or controversies in the study of the Holocaust, including the following questions: Were the Jews the sole targets of Nazi genocide, or must other groups, such as homosexuals, the handicapped, Gypsies, and political dissenters, also be included? What are the historical roots of the Holocaust? How and why did the "Final Solution" come about? Why did bystanders extend or withhold aid? Part III consists of a concise chronology of major events and developments that took place surrounding the Holocaust, including the armistice ending World War I, the opening of the first major concentration camp at Dachau,...

Features a historical overview of the Holocaust; a guide to Holocaust controversies; an encyclopedia of people, places, and terms; a chronology; and a comprehensive research guide.

This volume in the Problems in European Civilization series features a collection of secondary-source essays focusing on aspects of the Holocaust. The essays in this book debate the origins of the Holocaust, the motivations of the killers, the experience of the victims, and the various possibilities for intervention or rescue.

The current political standoffs of the 'War on Terror' illustrate that the interaction within and between the so-called Western and Middle Eastern civilizations is constantly in flux. A recurring theme however is how Islam and Muslims signify the 'Enemy' in the Western socio-cultural imagination and have become the 'Other' against which the West identifies itself. In a unique and insightful blend of critical race, feminist and post-colonial theory, Sunera Thobani examines how Islam is foundational to the formation of Western identity at critical points in its history, including the Crusades, the Reconquista and the colonial period. More specifically, she explores how masculinity and femininity are formed at such pivotal junctures and what role feminism has played in the wars against 'radical' Islam. Exposing these symbiotic relationships, Thobani explores how the return of 'religion' is reworking the racial, gender and sexual politics by which Western society defines itself, and more specifically, defines itself against Islam. Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality unpacks conventional as well as unconventional orthodoxies to open up new spaces in how we think about...

How the Holocaust is depicted and memorialized is key to our understanding of the atrocity and its impact. Through 18 case studies dating from the immediate aftermath of the genocide to the present day, Holocaust Representations in History explores this in detail. Daniel H. Magilow and Lisa Silverman examine film, drama, literature, photography, visual art, television, graphic novels, memorials, and video games as they discuss the major themes and issues that underpin the chronicling of the Holocaust. Each chapter is focused on a critical debate or question in Holocaust history; the case studies range from well-known, commercially successful works about the Holocaust to controversial examples which have drawn accusations of profaning the memory of the genocide. This 2nd edition adds to the mosaic of representation, with new chapters analysing poetry in the wake of the Holocaust and video games from the here and now. This unique volume provides an unmatched survey of key and controversial Holocaust representations and is of vital importance to anyone wanting to understand the subject and its complexities.

Susan Zuccotti describes the ever-escalating dangers to which Jewish refugees and recent immigrants were subjected to in France and Italy as the Holocaust marched forward. She chronicles the lives of nine central and eastern European Jewish families, through historical documents and personal testimonies.

Despite the massive literature on the Holocaust, our understanding of it has traditionally been influenced by rather unsophisticated early perspectives and silence. This book summarizes and criticizes the existing scholarship on the subject and suggests new ways by which we can approach its study. It addresses the use of victim testimony and asks important questions: What function does recording the past serve for the victim? What do historians want from it? Are these two perspectives incompatible? It also examines the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and compares them to those responsible for other acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the early years of the twentieth century. In addition, it looks at the bystanders--examining the complexity and ambiguity at the heart of contemporary reaction.

Waitman Wade Beorn's The Holocaust in Eastern Europe provides a comprehensive history of the Holocaust in the region that was the central location of the event itself while including material often overlooked in general Holocaust history texts. First introducing Jewish life as it was lived before the Nazis in Eastern Europe, the book chronologically surveys the development of Nazi policies in the area over the period from 1939 to 1945. This book provides an overview of both the German imagination and obsession with the East and its impact on the Nazi genocidal project there. It also covers the important period of Soviet occupation and its effects on the unfolding of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This text also treats in detail other themes such as ghettoization, the Final Solution, rescue, collaboration, resistance, and many others. Throughout, Beorn includes detailed examples of the similarities and differences of the nature of the Holocaust in various regions, in the words of perpetrators, witnesses, collaborators, and victims/survivors. Beorn also illustrates the complex nature of the Holocaust by discussing the difficult subjects of collaboration, sexual violence, the use...

A recipient of the Outstanding Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Librarians in its earlier edition, this updated edition of Judaica Reference Sources maintains its editorial excellence while revising and expanding coverage for the new century. Virtually every aspect of Jewish life, knowledge, history, culture, religion, and contemporary issues is covered in this annotated, bibliographic guide. A critical collection development tool for college, university, public school, and synagogue libraries, Judaica Reference Sources provides entries for over 1,000 reference works, as well as a selective list of related Web sites, in English, French, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Works published since 1970 are emphasized. Unique in providing expert guidance to Judaica material for the librarian, the layperson, the student, and the researcher, this reference guide is a versatile tool that will fulfill your every need for Judaica material.

Fully revised and updated, this second edition includes: · A much expanded selection of original documents, many never before anthologised in English · Added treatment of the role of non-Germans in the Holocaust and the geographical variations in Jewish response · Additional consideration of the much-debated nexus between the Holocaust and modernity · A new section on how 'the Holocaust' developed as a distinct historical topic · Useful and informative Chronology, Who’s Who and Glossary David Engel’s book is a taut, compact narration that appeals to the intellect as much, if not more, than to the emotions. It is sure to be welcomed by students in departments of History, Politics and European Studies as well as by anyone trying to get to grips with this complex and far-reaching subject for the first time.

Over 600 terms identify and explain the history and suffering of ethnic and religious groups experiencing genocide throughout the world. The people, places, governments, agencies, documents, legal terms, and all other aspects of genocide are defined for new students and scholars alike.

In the brutal fight that has raged in recent years over the reputation of Pope Pius XII_leader of the Catholic Church during World War II, the Holocaust, and the early years of the Cold War_the task of defending the Pope has fallen primarily to reviewers. These reviewers formulated a brilliant response to the attack on Pius, but their work was scattered in various newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals_making it nearly impossible for the average reader to gauge the results. In The Pius War, Weekly Standard's Joseph Bottum has joined with Rabbi David G. Dalin to gather a representative and powerful sample of these reviews, deliberately chosen from a wide range of publications. Together with a team of professors, historians, and other experts, the reviewers conclusively investigate the claims attacking Pius XII. The Pius War, and a detailed annotated bibliography that follows, will prove to be a definitive tool for scholars and students_destined to become a major resource for anyone interested in questions of Catholicism, the Holocaust, and World War II.

In The Existential Philosophy of Etty Hillesum Meins G.S. Coetsier offers an account of Etty Hillesum's spiritual and cultural life in light of the writings of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

This book describes the vibrant activity of survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe immediately after the Second World War. In the first postwar decade, these initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents along with testimonies, memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered in developing a Holocaust historiography that placed the experiences of Jews at the center and used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime. This book is the first in-depth monograph on these survivor historians and the organizations they created. A comparative analysis, it focuses on France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, analyzing the motivations and rationales that guided survivors in chronicling the destruction they had witnessed, while also discussing their research techniques, archival collections, and historical publications. It reflects growing attention to survivor testimony and to the active roles of survivors in rebuilding their postwar lives. It also discusses the role of documenting,...

Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History is a brief but comprehensive survey of the Third Reich based on current research findings that provides a balanced approach to the study of Hitler’s role in the history of the Third Reich. The book considers the economic, social, and political forces that made possible the rise and development of Nazism; the institutional, cultural, and social life of the Third Reich; World War II; and the Holocaust. World War II and the Holocaust are presented as logical outcomes of the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi movement. This new edition contains more information on the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), as well as Nazi complicity in the Reichstag Fire and increased discussion of consent and dissent during the Nazi attempt to create the ideal Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). It takes a greater focus on the experiences of ordinary bystanders, perpetrators, and victims throughout the text, includes more discussion of race and space, and the final chapter has been completely revised. Fully updated, the book ensures that students gain a complete and thorough picture of the period and issues. Supported by maps, images, and thoroughly updated...

The Nazis and their state-sponsored cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate a frequently unclear path to recover their property from governments and neighbors who had failed to protect them and who often had been complicit in their persecution. While the return of Nazi-looted art has garnered the most media attention, and there have been well-publicized settlements involving stolen Swiss bank deposits and unpaid insurance policies, there is a larger piece of Holocaust injustice that has not been adequately dealt with: stolen land and buildings, much of which today still remain unrestituted. This book is about the less publicized area of post-Holocaust restitution involving immovable (real) property confiscated from European Jews and others during World War II. In 2009, 47 countries convened in Prague to deal with the lingering problem of restitution of pre-war private, communal and heirless property stolen in the Holocaust. The outcome was the issuance by 47 states of the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, which aimed, among other things, to "rectify the consequences" of...

A comprehensive survey of writings about the Holocaust and religious response. Explores the impact of Christian anti-Semitism on the Holocaust and the Holocaust's impact on Christianity.

The Holocaust has bequeathed to contemporary society a cultural lexicon of intensely powerful symbols, a vocabulary of remembrance that we draw on to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible horror of the Shoah. Engagingly written and illustrated with more than forty black-and-white images, Holocaust Icons probes the history and memory of four of these symbolic relics left in the Holocaust’s wake. Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust:...

In June 1944, Teréz and Erzsi were sent to the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, where they would fight for their survival in a traumatic ordeal of unimaginable horror. Liberation in February 1945 should have meant the end of their nightmare, yet their homecoming would be delayed by the widespread confusion as the Russians swept through Eastern Europe crushing the Nazi regime. After internment in numerous Russian camps and an uncertain future, Teréz and Ezri finally returned to their shattered hometown of Oradea in August 1945. Told in a direct and riveting style that will haunt the reader long after the story is over, this memoir is a glimpse of the darkest and most uplifting aspects of our humanity from both an individual and historical point of view.

Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.

Few topics in modern history draw the attention that the Holocaust does. The Shoah has become synonymous with unspeakable atrocity and unbearable suffering. Yet it has also been used to teach tolerance, empathy, resistance, and hope. Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust provides a starting point for teachers in many disciplines to illuminate this crucial event in world history for students. Using a vast array of source materials--from literature and film to survivor testimonies and interviews--the contributors demonstrate how to guide students through these sensitive and painful subjects within their specific historical and social contexts. Each chapter provides pedagogical case studies for teaching content such as antisemitism, resistance and rescue, and the postwar lives of displaced persons. It will transform how students learn about the Holocaust and the circumstances surrounding it.

In Hitler's Shadow War, World War II scholar Donald M. McKale contends that the persecution and murder of the Jews, Slavs, and other groups was Hitler's primary effort during the war, not the conquest of Europe. According to McKale, Hitler and the Nazi leadership used the military campaigns of the war as a cover for a genocidal program that centered on the Final Solution. Hitler continued to commit extensive manpower and materials to this "shadow war" even when Germany was losing the battles of the war's closing years.

Nazis after Hitler traces the histories of thirty "typical" perpetrators of the Holocaust—some well known, some obscure—who survived World War II. Donald M. McKale reveals the shocking reality that the perpetrators were only rarely, if ever, tried and punished for their crimes, and nearly all alleged their innocence in Germany's extermination of nearly six million European Jews during the war, providing fodder for postwar Holocaust deniers. Written in a compelling narrative style, Nazis after Hitler is the first to provide an overview of the lives of Nazis who survived the war, the vast majority of whom escaped justice. McKale provides a unique and accessible synthesis of the extensive research on the Holocaust and Nazi war criminals that will be invaluable for all readers interested in World War II.

To date, war history has focused predominantly on the efforts of and impact of war on male participants. However, this limited focus disregards the complexity of gendered experiences with war and the military. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 investigates how conceptions of gender have contributed to the shaping of military culture, examining the varied ideals and practices that have socially differentiated men and women'swartime experiences. Covering the major periods in warfare since the seventeenth century, The Handbook explores cultural representations of war and the interconnectedness of the military with civil society and its transformations.

Fully annotated and completely updated—the most comprehensive guide to reference books in the field of history. * This guide includes 900+ complete entries for reference works and provides complete bibliographic information for over 400 other works * Descriptive annotations provide guidance to quality reference materials and offer a useful and time-saving alternative to research using the Internet * Topical chapters and detailed index help readers locate the materials they need for research and allow for effective searches of more obscure topics * The guide includes materials of interest for undergraduates, graduate students, academic researchers, and educated general readers

This book considers how women’s experiences have been treated in films dealing with Nazi persecution. Focusing on fiction films made in Europe between 1945 and the present, this study explores dominant discourses on and cinematic representation of women as perpetrators, victims and resisters. Ingrid Lewis contends that European Holocaust Cinema underwent a rich and complex trajectory of change with regard to the representation of women. This change both reflects and responds to key socio-cultural developments in the intervening decades as well as to new directions in cinema, historical research and politics of remembrance. The book will appeal to international scholars, students and educators within the fields of Holocaust Studies, Film Studies, European Cinema and Women’s Studies.

Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region’s political, cultural, and religious complexities.

This work includes international secondary literature on anti-Semitism published throughout the world, from the earliest times to the present. It lists books, dissertations, and articles from periodicals and collections from a diverse range of disciplines. Written accounts are included among the recorded titles, as are manifestations of anti-Semitism in the visual arts (e.g. painting, caricatures or film), action taken against Jews and Judaism by discriminating judiciaries, pogroms, massacres and the systematic extermination during the Nazi period. The bibliography also covers works dealing with philo-Semitism or Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hate. An informative abstract in English is provided for each entry, and Hebrew titles are provided with English translations.

An innovative contribution to the field of Holocaust studies, this set of interdisciplinary essays undertakes a gendered analysis of both Jewish and non-Jewish women as perpetrators, victims, rescuers, survivors, and postwar artists.

This book challenges current thinking on memory by examining the complex ways in which the social inheritance of the Nazi Holocaust is gendered. It considers how the past is handed down in the US, Poland and Britain through historiography, autobiographies, documentary and feature films, memorial sites and museums. It explores the configuration of socially inherited memories about the Holocaust in young people of different cultural backgrounds. Scholarly and accessible, the book provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the significance of gender in relation to cultural mediations of history.

German Jews faced harsh dilemmas in their responses to Nazi persecution, partly a result of Nazi cruelty and brutality but also a result of an understanding of their history and rightful place in Germany. This volume addresses the impact of the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler's regime on Jewish family life, Jewish women, and the existence of Jewish organizations and institutions and considers some of the Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Semitism and persecution. This volume offers scholars, students, and interested readers a highly accessible but focused introduction to Jewish life under National Socialism, the often painful dilemmas that it produced, and the varied Jewish responses to those dilemmas.

This historical study of the Holocaust explores the rescue activity in all 12 Protestant villages on the plateau of Vivarais-Lignon. Through letters, interviews, and unpublished autobiographical notes by some of the key rescuers, it highlights the extraordinary ordinary involvement of those who risked their lives to shelter thousands.

Dr Anwar El-Shahawy Professor of Physical Chemistry 1- Doctorat D'Etat De Science from USTL Montpellier France (1974- 1979) 2- Assistant Professor at Center of Science and Mathematics-Taif, KSA (1982-1986). 3- Head of Science Department, Faculty of Education-Nizwa (Sultanate of Oman) 1994-2000. 4- Professor of Physical Chemistry Since 1993 at Assiut University-Egypt. 5- Anwar El-Shahawy " Selected Topics in Physical Chemistry" Protea Publishing ,Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (2004) 6- Anwar S. El-Shahawy and Galal M. El-Nagar," Vibrational Spectra and Group Theory." Assiut University-Egypt (2008). ISBN 977-246-082-3

"Twenty years after the fall of Communism, scholarship on East-Central Europe has adopted mainstream western methodologies, but remains preoccupied with a narrow range of themes. Nationalism, identity, fin- de-siecle art and culture, and revisionist historiography dominate the field to the detriment of other subjects. Using a variety of lenses - literary, political, linguistic, medical - the authors address a conspectus of original themes, including Jewish literary life in interwar Romania; the Galician 'Alphabet War'; and Saxon eugenics in Transylvania. These case studies transcend their East-Central European context by engaging with conceptually broad questions. This volume additionally contains a comprehensive Introduction and topical Bibliography of use to students and teachers, resulting in one of the most creative collections of studies dealing with East-Central Europe to date. This volume has its roots in an interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Oxford, bringing together emerging and established scholars, with the explicit aim of broadening the study of this region, its history and culture beyond the established paradigms. Robert Pyrah is a Research Fellow at St...

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.

David Cesarani's Final Solution is an intelligent and thought-provoking short history of the Holocaust. Not only does David Cesarani draw together and engage with the latest scholarly research, making extensive use of previously untapped resources such as diaries and letters from within the ghettos and camps (many of them in Polish or Yiddish and therefore previously largely inaccessible to Anglo-American scholars) but by adopting a rigorously Judeocentric approach the whole narrative of the march to genocide and its aftermath, the book presents a subtly different timeline which casts afresh the horror of the period and engenders a significant re-evaluation of the how and why. Eschewing some of the more fevered theses about the guilt of the perpetrators (and indeed recasting how wide that net should be spread), David Cesarani's measured and skilful negotiation of a crowded field is, as a result, all the more devastating.

This collection represents some of the latest research on Primo Levi, the famous Auschwitz survivor Italian author, in the field of Italian Studies, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, literary theory, philosophy, and ethics. The author has collected an impressive group of scholars, including Ian Thomson, who has published a well-received biography of Levi in the UK (a US edition is due this year); Alexander Stille, who is a staff writer got the New Yorker as well as for the New York Times (he is also the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism ); and David Mendel, who knew Levi and had an extensive correspondence with the Italian writer. There are four essays on Levi's complex and fertile theory of the 'Gray Zone' and further essays on the myriad aspects of this thought. This is an excellent collection with new perspectives and interpretations of the life and work of Primo Levi.

Heroes and Victims explores the cultural power of war memorials in 20th-century Romania through two world wars and a succession of radical political changes—from attempts to create pluralist democratic political institutions after World War I to shifts toward authoritarian rule in the 1930s, to military dictatorships and Nazi occupation, to communist dictatorships, and finally to pluralist democracies with populist tendencies. Examining the interplay of centrally articulated and locally developed commemorations, Maria Bucur's study engages monumental sites of memory, local funerary markers, rituals, and street names as well as autobiographical writings, novels, oral narratives, and film. This book reveals the ways in which a community's religious, ethnic, economic, regional, and gender traditions shaped local efforts at memorializing its war dead.