Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust

Politics, Violence, Memory highlights important new social scientific research on the Holocaust and initiates the integration of the Holocaust into mainstream social scientific research in a way that will be useful both for social scientists and historians. Until recently social scientists largely ignored the Holocaust despite the centrality of these tragic events to many of their own concepts and theories.

In Politics, Violence, Memory the editors bring together contributions to understanding the Holocaust from a variety of disciplines, including political science, sociology, demography, and public health. The chapters examine the sources and measurement of antisemitism; explanations for collaboration, rescue, and survival; competing accounts of neighbor-on-neighbor violence; and the legacies of the Holocaust in contemporary Europe. Politics, Violence, Memory brings new data to bear on these important concerns and shows how older data can be deployed in new ways to understand the "index case" of violence in the modern world.

Jeffrey S. Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany 1945–1989, coeditor of Growing Apart?, and coauthor of Intimate Violence. Follow him on X @JeffreyKopstein.

Jelena Subotić is Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. She is the author of Hijacked Justice and Yellow Star, Red Star. Follow her on X @suboticjelena.

Susan Welch was Professor of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University. She was the coauthor of numerous books and author of several articles on Holocaust transports.