The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938–1967 by Jeffrey S. Gurock

This article argues that Albert Friedlander’s edited book, Out of the Whirlwind (1968), should be recognised as pathbreaking. Among the first to articulate the idea of ‘Holocaust literature’, it established a body of texts and contextualised these as a way to integrate literature – as well as historical writing, music, art and poetry – as critical to an understanding of the Holocaust. This article also situates Out of the Whirlwind through the personal history of Friedlander and his wife Evelyn, who was a co-creator of the book, his colleagues from Hebrew Union College, and the illustrator, Jacob Landau. It explores the work’s connection to the expansive, humanistic development of progressive Judaism in the United States, Britain and continental Europe. It also underscores Friedlander’s study of Leo Baeck as a means to understand the importance of mutual accountability, not only between Jews, but in Jews’ engagement with the wider world.

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Searching for Justice After the Holocaust

10.1093/oso/9780190923068.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Michael J. Bazyler ◽

Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽

Kristen L. Nelson ◽

Rajika L. Shah

Keyword(s):

Best Practices ◽

Legal History ◽

Holocaust Survivors ◽

European Parliament ◽

Slave Labor ◽

Insurance Policies ◽

The Holocaust ◽

History Of ◽

Nazi Era ◽

Property Restitution

The Nazis and their cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate unclear and hostile legal paths to recover their stolen property from governments and neighbors who often had been complicit in their persecution and theft. While the return of Nazi-looted art and recent legal settlements involving dormant Swiss bank accounts, unpaid insurance policies and use of slave labor by German companies have been well-publicized, efforts by Holocaust survivors and heirs over the last 70 years to recover stolen land and buildings were forgotten. In 2009, 47 countries convened in Prague to deal with the lingering problem of restitution of prewar private, communal, and heirless property stolen during the Holocaust. The outcome was the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, aiming to “rectify the consequences” of the wrongful Nazi-era immovable property seizures. This book sets forth the legal history of Holocaust immovable property restitution in each of the Terezin Declaration signatory states. It also analyzes how each of the 47 countries has fulfilled the standards of the Guidelines and Best Practices of the Terezin Declaration. These standards were issued in 2010 in conjunction with the establishment of the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI), a state-sponsored NGO created to monitor compliance. The book is based on the Holocaust (Shoah) Immovable Property Restitution Study commissioned by ESLI, written by the authors and issued in Brussels in 2017 before the European Parliament.

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German Angst

10.1093/oso/9780198714187.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Frank Biess

Keyword(s):

Federal Republic ◽

National Socialism ◽

West Germany ◽

Peace Movements ◽

Original Analysis ◽

The Holocaust ◽

The Future ◽

History Of ◽

Fear And Anxiety ◽

Relationship Of

German Angst analyzes the relationship of fear and democracy in postwar West Germany. While fear has historically been associated with authoritarian regimes, the book highlights the role of fear and anxiety in a democratizing society: these emotions undermined democracy and stabilized it at the same time. By taking seriously postwar Germans’ uncertainties about the future, the book challenges dominant linear and teleological narratives of postwar West German “success.” It highlights the prospective function of memories of war and defeat, of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Fears and anxieties derived from memories of a catastrophic past that postwar Germans projected into the future. Based on case studies from the 1940s to the present, the book provides a new interpretive synthesis of the Federal Republic. It tells the history of the Federal Republic as a series of recurring crises, in which specific fears and anxieties emerged, served a variety of political functions, and then again abated. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary insights of emotion studies, the book transcends the dichotomy of “reason” and “emotion.” Fear and anxiety were not exclusively irrational and dysfunctional but served important roles in postwar democracy. These emotions sensitized postwar Germans to the dangers of an authoritarian transformation, and they also served as the emotional engine of the environmental and peace movements. The book also provides an original analysis of the emotional basis of right-wing populism in Germany today, and it explores the possibilities of a democratic politics of emotion.

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The Tropes of Jewish/Muslim Difference

10.1093/oso/9780199856237.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Yulia Egorova

Keyword(s):

Reference Point ◽

Jewish Communities ◽

Communal Violence ◽

Anti Semitism ◽

The Holocaust ◽

History Of ◽

The Way

The chapter explores how notions of Jewish and Muslim difference play out in the history of communal violence in independent India. In doing so it will first interrogate the way in which trajectories of anti-Muslim ideologies intersect in India with Nazi rhetoric that harks back to Hitler’s Germany, and the (lack of) the memory of the Holocaust on the subcontinent. It will then discuss how the experiences of contemporary Indian Jewish communities both mirror and contrast those of Indian Muslims and how Indian Jews and the alleged absence of anti-Semitism in India have become a reference point in the discourse of the Hindu right deployed to mask anti-Muslim and other forms of intolerance.

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On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽

10.3390/h10010012 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 12

Author(s):

Rachel F. Brenner

Keyword(s):

Eastern Europe ◽

Jewish Identity ◽

Personal Life ◽

Holocaust Memory ◽

The Holocaust ◽

The World ◽

Family Level ◽

History Of ◽

Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

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The Afterlife of Empire in Beckett’s How It Is

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd hui ◽

10.1163/18757405-03301007 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 88-105

Author(s):

Anthony Cordingley

Keyword(s):

Algerian War ◽

Literary Representation ◽

The Holocaust ◽

History Of ◽

Historical Moment

Abstract Relationships of political domination in Beckett’s Comment c’ est (1961)/How It Is (1964) are typically read through a specific historical moment (the Holocaust, the Algerian War) or literary representation (Dante, Sade). This article reveals spectres in the text from the long history of the colonisation of Ireland to the legacy of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism; it explores Beckett’s sense of complicity in the Anglo-Irish Ascendency.

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