Jewish Histories of the Holocaust

Norman Goda’s Jewish Histories of the Holocaust is an extraordinarily rich collection of essays that brings together an impressive range of Holocaust scholars. Many of the articles represent introductory ways into an individual author’s wider body of work on their particular aspect of the Holocaust’s Jewish history—from Daniel Blatman’s summary of the death marches, to Timothy Snyder’s introduction to the ‘Bloodlands’, to Omer Bartov’s work on Bucacsz. In that sense it would be a valuable place to start for anyone trying to understand the depth and variety of Jewish histories in the context of the Holocaust. Of course that richness and variety also represents something of a challenge to the reviewer and I will only be able to deal with a handful of the articles in anything approaching the detail such scholarship demands. This volume is usefully divided in five parts, which encompass the range of contemporary approaches to the Jewish Holocaust experience—starting with an attempt to summarize the debate about the specificity or otherwise of the Jewish Holocaust within both a more general understanding of lethal violence in twentieth-century Europe and a more expansive sense of the role of genocide in the human past. The volume then goes on to evaluate questions of Jewish leadership, resistance, types of documentation and of course the aftermaths and memory of violence and dislocation. Overall Goda’s volume is attempting to assert the centrality of the Jewish history within Holocaust studies. In doing so the essays here are set against something of a straw man. It is just not the case that historians still ‘overwhelmingly devote themselves to the study of the perpetrators’ as Alexandra Gabarini suggests in her essay here—although this fact does not mean that the need to work with the documentary sources provided by the victims is any less urgent.

Context (archaeology) · Expansive · Genocide · Judaism · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · The Holocaust · Variety (cybernetics) · Computer Science · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law