E lisabeth G allas . A Mortuary of Books

In this well-researched and impressive book, Elisabeth Gallas demonstrates the significance of a little-known effort to rescue Nazi-looted books, documents, and cultural objects for understanding postwar struggles to reconstruct Jewish cultural life. She adds to the literature by challenging the myths of silence and passivity in Jewish communities outside of Europe. She persuasively demonstrates the active political engagement of leading Jewish figures in the United States, Great Britain, and pre-state Israel, who from the beginning of the Nazi regime worked to rescue Jewish scholars and to plan for the restoration of Jewish cultural life in postwar Europe. Once they realized the full extent of the genocide, their focus shifted to reconstructing Jewish cultural life in the new Jewish centers in the United States, Israel, and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain. To do this they not only had to locate the stolen objects but also to challenge international law. Their success was a rare instance of Jews exacting retributive justice.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Economic Justice · Genocide · Judaism · Mythology · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Silence · Sociology · State (computer science) · The Holocaust · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies