The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253333741 ISBN 13: 9780253333742

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1998

Synopsis

This volume presents the results of nearly fifty years of scholarship on the Holocaust by the world's most eminent researchers. Approaching the Shoah from diverse points of view, historians and sociologists, political scientists and theologians, literary scholars and psychologists disclose the insights yielded by their investigations. Growing out of the inaugural conference of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Institute, the book defines the state of knowledge about the Holocaust a half century after the event.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Berenbaum is former Director of the Research Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among his publications are After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience and The World Must Know.

Reviews

A huge and hugely significant collection of much of the best Holocaust scholarship to appear in the last half-century. This immense, one-volume tome is published in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, where editor Berenbaum was formerly director of the Research Institute. Assisting him is Abraham Peck, the executive director of Houston's Holocaust Museum and the editor of two volumes in the series Archives of the Holocaust. Researchers of this controversial event argue here over the timing of the Nazi decision to commit genocide (Martin Broszat vs. Eberhard Jackel), the reasons why it happened, how unique the Holocaust was (Yehuda Bauer), and how ordinary the killers were (Gordon J. Horwitz and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen). Nazi policy was carried out differently in each country; thus, scholars examine the cases of victims, survivors, and perpetrators in Britain (Louise London), France (Susan S. Zuccotti), Hungary (Paul A. Levine and Randolph L. Braham), Italy (Meir Michaelis), Romania (Jean Ancel), and even Turkey (Mark Epstein). Despite the words disputed and reexamined in the subtitle, the extent of the victim count isnt questioned, nor are Holocaust deniers given a forum. However, the collection tolerates adamant differences of opinion and controversial theories, such as Gerhard L. Weinberg's defense of London's closing of Palestine to Jewish refugees and his contention that only ``a tiny number'' of Jews would have been rescued had the Western Allies bombed the gas chambers. The complexities of Holocaust survivors are well covered by Marjorie Allard, Dori Laub, Dalia Ofer, and Dina Porat. Non-Jewish victims and rescuers of the Holocaust are also well represented. With this one weighty volume of 54 chapters (and extensive notes), a reader can learn how far Holocaust scholarship has progressed and what areas will be discussed for generations to come. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The 55 prominent contributors to this copious and important work, which grew out of a conference of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Institute, are historians, theologians, literary scholars, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. They include Raul Hilberg, author of the three-volume Destruction of the European Jews and other books; Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust; Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Eva Fogelman, author of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust; and Susan S. Zuccotti, author of The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. The more than 50 chapters explore such themes as the death camps; Jewish resistance; Nazi politics and racial ideology; ghettoization; deportation; the role of the Allies, the Axis, the neutral countries, and the Catholic Church; efforts of the rescuers; and the impact of the Holocaust on survivors. Destined to become an essential resource. George Cohen

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253333741
• ISBN 13: 9780253333742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 856
• Editor: Michael Berenbaum, Abraham J. Peck, United States Holocaust Musuem