Prof. Dov Levin was one of the first researchers who recognized the value of recording oral history as one of the primary sources for understanding the events of the twentieth century. This book includes brief summaries of 611 interviews, conducted between 1957 and 2008, that were deposited in the archive of the Oral History Division of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry. Many of the interviews were conducted with Lithuanian Jews, as part of Prof. Levin's important research on the Jews of the Baltic countries in the inter-war period, during the Shoa and under Soviet rule. Other interviews deal with the history of Israel and its culture. Levin's collection of oral histories includes interviews of people from different countries, different social environments, and varied political views, reflecting the wide spectrum of his interests and studies. This book was published by Magnes press for the Avraham Herman Institute of contemporary Jewry.

This volume of Polin is a wide-ranging contribution to the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania and to developing an inclusive national narrative. It deals in depth with the specific character of Lithuanian Jewry; Lithuanian–Jewish relations; Vilna as the focus of Jewish life; the impact of the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and of the post-war Soviet reoccupation; the subsequent slow revival of Jewish life; and recent attempts to investigate the past and to accommodate the legacy of the Holocaust.

This is the story of a nearly forgotten chapter of the Holocaust—of over 16,000 Jewish women, girls and children, their origins, itineraries and fates, who suffered in the horrendous Nazi concentration camp for women, Ravensbrück. As a historian, Judith Buber Agassi was struck by the changing conditions, countries of origin, and fates of these women during 5 distinct periods during the 6 years of the camp's existence. As a sociologist, she studied the social relations of the Jewish prisoners among themselves as well as with the non-Jewish majority. After the mass murder of Jewish prisoners early in 1942, a larger group organization became impossible, but the Jewish women developed a special and effective form of small-group organization, the so-called camp-families. As a sociologist of gender, she surveyed the educational background and patterns of behavior specific to Jewish women, and has produced an impressive study.

"A comprehensive and compelling chronicle of a 2000-year-old fabrication that Jews engage in the ritual murder of Christians, a racial fantasy exploited by the Nazis in the 20th century and by radical Islam in the 21st" - Professor Colin Tatz AO, Sydney, Australia The Pinnacle of Hatred provides a comprehensive history of the blood libel allegation against the Jews. Deftly insinuated and finely honed in medieval Christianity, the charge that Jews murder children and others in order to use their blood for ritual purposes was elaborated further by 19th-century antisemitic jurists, and widely promoted in the anti-Jewish campaigns of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich. A myth that will not die, the charge continues to be made by neo-Nazis and radical Muslim preachers. Drawing on primary sources and documents not previously available in English, Darren O’Brien takes a radical new approach in understanding the historical origins and longevity of the blood libel allegation and its tributaries—crucifixion murder, plain murder, mutilation murder, and the misnamed “ritual murder.”

The prominent historian Karl Bosl, who during World War II had been a high school teacher in Ansbach, Franconia, intimated that he had been critical of the Nazis and asserted that he had belonged to a small group that engaged in active resistance; one of its members, Robert Limpert, was apprehended by the Nazis and brutally put to death just hours before the Americans arrived. The present study, based on a large number of unpublished official and private documents, records Bosl’s manifold links to the Nazi regime and reveals that as late as December 1944 he delivered a stirring lecture before Ansbach’s Nazi leadership in which he extolled the struggle for the preservation of Hitler’s Greater German Reich; yet as early as September 1945 he vigorously condemned Nazism at a ceremony at Limpert’s grave. The documents attest also to how Bosl succeeded in persuading Ansbach’s Denazification Tribunal that he had risked his life opposing the Nazis. An unpublished account allows for a detailed reconstruction of the daring, little-known activities of young Limpert and his three classmates.

The book discusses religious descriptions of Nazism. In the secular twentieth century, two important German writers perceive Nazism in religious terms: the unprecedented brutality and violence evoked the ancient image of the devil, reincarnated in a new form. Mann and Hochhuth portray the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in the light of the Judeo-Christian devil and the legend of a pact with the devil. Before the war, Klaus Mann interprets the rise of Nazism as a manifestation of devilishness which lies within man. Mephisto became part of the German mind, dictating its thoughts and actions. After the war, as the atrocities of the Holocaust were known, Hochhuth believes that a transcendental power is directing history; Doctor Mengele is yet another incarnation of the ancient devil, dominating the fate of man.

Contents Robert S. Wistrich - Jewish "Otherness" in Historical Perspective Anthony Kauders - Liberalism, Multiculturalism, and Jewish Identity in the Federal Republic, 1945-1990 Nelly Las - Secularism, Feminism, and Antisemitism: The Islamic Veil in France Martina Libertad Weisz - Micro-physics of Otherness: Jews, Muslims, and Latin Americans in Today's Spain Suzanne Rutland and Sol Encel - Australian Multiculturalism: Immigration, Race, and Religion Micahel C. Kotzin - Pictures at an exhibition: Art Galleries, the Academy, and Anti-Israel Polemics Heidemarie Wawrsyn - Nazis in the Holy Land Jeffrey Herf - Nazi Broadcasts to the Middle East during the Holocaust Menahem Milson - A European Plot on the Arab Stage Robert S. Wistrich - Antisemitism: The European and Islamic Legacies Annexe: Interview with the Author

The present volume is being published on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the Farhūd, the pogrom committed by religious and nationalist Arabs against the Jews of Iraq on the Jewish holiday of Pentecost (Shavu‘ot), 1–2 June 1941. The Hebrew edition of this book was published in 1992 by the Research Institute of Babylonian Jewry in Or Yehuda, Israel . This volume is a revised version of the Hebrew edition. The title consists of papers on the pogrom and on the events leading up to it which were originally published in English, others which were written in Hebrew and now appear in English for the first time, and documents which have not been previously published, including an updated list of the names of victims of the Farhūd and a map indicating the places in Baghdad where rioters attacked Jews. This book thus provides the English reader with comprehensive and updated information on the Farhūd and constitutes a memorial to the innocent victims killed during these pogroms and whose only crime was that they were Jews.

This book is dealing with the uses of the memory of the Resistance and of the Holocaust, born in the wake of the war between the years 1945–1985. Italy is used as a case study for the understanding, shaping and the formation of the new European national identities post World War II. This title focuses on the Italian agenda and is shedding a new light on the process of reconstruction and revitalization (including the rebuilding of national self-identity). The book traces the changes in the character and functions of historical memory during this period when national consciousness was u ndergoing a critical development in its search for unity. It leads to a broader venue of the tensions between the memory of anti-fascist resistance on the one hand and the shameful and disturbing awareness of the fascist past on the other. This is the first attempt of a synthesis of this kind of Italian history that combines all interdisciplinary sources: memoir literature and literary sources in general, historiographic debates as well as political discussions.

This introductory book deals with the bonds created between German physicians and the Nazi biomedical vision based upon racial and eugenic conceptions. These ideological connections and the attitudes of many Nazi doctors, culminating in the actions of Mengele and other SS physicians in Auschwitz , may be described as a Medicalization of the Holocaust. In July 1933, the sterilization law was enacted. Under the pretext of war, the Nazi modus operandi was changed to medical murder. It strove to stop the spread of hereditary diseases by gassing to death sick people judged “unfit” to be included among “Aryan Germans”. Although officially abandoned in summer 1941, Hitler used the expertise gained by the medical murderers to design the “Final Solution”. Nazi physicians operated the first annihilation camps like Treblinka, while others initiated the process of Ghettoization, arguing that the Jews were spreading epidemics. The second part of this book depicts the courageous efforts of many Jewish doctors to resist annihilation. In many ghettos, Jewish doctors worked on behalf of the “Judenrat” to try keep people alive. A clandestine medical faculty functioning in the Warsaw ghetto was the pinnacle of Jewish intellectual resistance. Even in concentration camps, physicians attempted to sustain the basic creeds of medical ethics by protecting and saving patients. The last chapters of the book deal with the efforts to cope with the lessons of the Nazi misuse of medicine.

« Le Retour de la question juive ? » D’entrée de jeu, un problème. S’agit-il de la « question » juive ou du « fait » juif ? Au fil des textes qui compoent ce volume de Perspectives, la réflexion oscille entre ces options et relance l’interrogation. Mais pour ce qui est du « retour », autre élément de notre titre, aucun doute, le sujet revient, redevient d’actualité. Mais sous quelles formes ? Des penseurs venus des horizons intellectuels les plus divers (philosophes, historiens, politologues ou psychanalystes) se sont penchés sur ce retour de la question juive. Question “éternelle”, comme le dit la carte postale qui orne la couverture de ce nouveau numéro de Perspectives, mais aussi, hélas, contemporaine.