Ordinary Jews

To entitle this book Ordinary Jews was a bold choice, evoking Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Germans, which influenced a generation of Holocaust scholars and students. Evgeny Finkel does not shy away from big goals. Since most major genocide studies hitherto have not analyzed how members of targeted groups respond to violence, the author addresses an important gap. His aim is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of human behavior under mass violence as well as to empirical knowledge of the Holocaust. Finkel’s revised doctoral thesis, which received an award for best dissertation in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association, attempts to bridge political science and history by using methodological tools of the former to analyze overlooked aspects of the Holocaust (p. 194). The study returns agency to the victims by challenging the notion of their alleged passivity. Finkel questions the concept of “choiceless choices” (Lawrence Langer) by asking why did many people flee the Khmel’nik ghetto, for instance, while from other ghettos only a few Jews escaped? The study, thus, poses two main questions: why did Jews choose certain strategies, and why did those vary by locality? Finkel proposes a new typology of Jewish strategies: a) cooperation and collaboration; b) coping and compliance; c) evasion; and d) resistance (p. 7). He examines three ghettos whose prewar Jewish communities were comparable in size. During the war, the three ghettos were located in important administrative centers and each had a so-called Jewish council, a Jewish police, and an underground resistance

Agency (philosophy · Criminology · Genocide · Judaism · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Social science · Sociology · The Holocaust · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · History · Law