cover image VOICES & VIEWS: A History of the Holocaust

VOICES & VIEWS: A History of the Holocaust

, . . Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, $69.95 (704pp) ISBN 978-0-9700602-0-4

The past 20 years has seen a burgeoning of scholarship on the Holocaust, as the genocide of six million European Jews has been explored from new and incisive angles. This thick collection of essays provides a comprehensive look at the best of this work. Divided into themes that correspond with time periods, it begins with a section titled "Jews, Gentiles and Germans," which explores the deep roots of anti-Semitism in European and German culture, and ends with a series of essays under the rubric "After the Holocaust." The interwar period is examined, as is Jewish resistance and the way the Nazis used propaganda to organize German youth. As befitting a compendium collected by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which honors gentiles who helped Jews during WWII, two sections examine the role of wartime rescue and rescuers. Highlighting individual essays is difficult, since there's not a weak one included. Dwork, herself a leading scholar in the field whose work has focused on the history of Oswiecim, the town that "hosted" Auschwitz, has included all of the field's heavyweights. Pathbreaking works, such as David Wyman's on the American "abandonment of the Jews" and Christopher Browning's examination of the role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust, are here, among many others. In addition, excerpts from memoirs by Primo Levi and Miep Gies, who helped Anne Frank's family, give the collection a human feel. The collection highlights the scholarly commitment to remembering the past so perhaps we can learn from it. Illus. (Mar.)