The Choice of the Jews Under Vichy

Adam Rayski Will Sayers

ISBN 10: 0268040214 / ISBN 13: 9780268040215

Published by University of Notre Dame Press, 2022

About this Item

Print on Demand pp. xvi + 388.

Seller Inventory # 26695294

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Choice of the Jews Under Vichy
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268040214
• ISBN 13: 9780268040215
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, Adam Rayski buttresses his analysis of war-era archival materials with his own personal testimony. His research in the archives of the military, the Central Consistory of the Jews of France, the police, and Philippe Pétain demonstrates the Vichy government’s role as a zealous accomplice in the Nazi program of genocide. He documents the efforts and absence of efforts of French Protestant and Catholic groups on behalf of their Jewish countrymen; he also explores the prewar divide between French-born and immigrant Jews, manifested in cultural conflicts and mutual antagonism as well as in varied initial responses to Vichy’s antisemitic edicts and actions. Rayski reveals how these Jewish communities eventually set aside their differences and united to resist the Nazi threat.

About the Authors

Adam Rayski (1913–2008) left Poland in 1932 for Paris, where he became a full-time journalist working for the Neie Presse, a leftist Yiddish-language daily newspaper. From July 1941 until the end of World War II he served as national secretary of the Jewish Section of the French Communist Party and headed the Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l'Entraide, in which he played a major part in Jewish survival in France.

William Sayers is the Cornell University Library’s selector for French literature and has an adjunct professorship in the Department of Comparative Literature.