Resisting Persecution

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.

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History, Professor of History, and Interim Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of The Language of Nazi Genocide (2009) and The German-Jewish Press and Journalism Beyond Borders, 1933-1943 (2023, in Hebrew) as well as the co-editor of Beyond ‘Ordinary Men’: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography (2019) and Police and Holocaust (2023, in German).

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, Professor of History and Founding Director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California. He is the author of eleven books, ten of them on the Holocaust, including Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis (2006), The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia (2019) and Resisters. How Ordinary Jews fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany (2023).