The Genizah

In November 1945, the eyes of the world turned to Nuremberg. Humanity was seeking not only the truth about Nazi crimes but also a vision of what justice might look like in their aftermath. The trials are traditionally associated with a roll call of famous men, but they were only part of the story. Not only were there women involved in the trial in every role―as journalists, researchers, lawyers, interpreters, court reporters, witnesses, artists, and even defendants―but they were pivotal in the trial’s outcome. The Nuremberg Women tells the story of eight women: a brilliant American lawyer, three pioneering journalists, two German, one British, an iconoclastic artist, a beautiful refugee aristocrat, a dauntless survivor of Auschwitz, and a young Russian translator. From the major stories about justice, gender, and politics at a pivotal moment in the twentieth century to the smaller, daily intimate tales of the women’s affairs and bar-room disputes, The Nuremberg Women shows the most famous trial of the twentieth century in a new light―making a brave new case for it having been a more diverse and democratic exercise than has often been recognized. They reveal a Nuremberg that is more intimate, human, and haphazard; one that was lower paid and less publicized. They demonstrate that the trial was remarkable not because it was perfect but because, against all odds, it happened. Thanks to these women and many others, justice was served.

Zionism in Translation concerns exchanges―primarily of letters but also drafts, reviews, and other ephemera―sent to or from Jerusalem in the decades after 1948. All were written in German and Hebrew by a fascinating range of literary figures, including Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Amichai, Ludwig Strauss, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Leah Goldberg, Peter Szondi, Paul Celan, and Tuvia Ruebner. Na’ama Rokem illuminates the complexities that emerge as the two languages mix in this extraordinary epistolary network. The writers that Rokem studies here contend with the genocidal violence that brought the rich historical relation between German and Hebrew to a seeming end. They also grapple, in different ways, with the new reality in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. The bilingual conversation that crosses over between German and Hebrew in these letters thus centers around the question of Jewish fate in the twentieth century and is immersed in negotiations about Jewish nationalism, the Zionist movement, and the possibilities of Jewish poetry. In the space between German and Hebrew, Rokem argues, the protagonists of her story voice ambivalences and hesitancies not found elsewhere. Zionism in Translation joins a growing body of scholarship that uncovers the complex modes of belonging and resistance that unfold around the Zionist movement in the twentieth century. It will interest all readers concerned with modern Jewish intellectual, cultural, and literary history, the history of Zionism, and writers such as Arendt or Celan.

Holocaust literature for children and young adults reveals the ways we imagine, narrate, communicate, and alter the facts of war, genocide, and trauma. In order to understand the Holocaust and its representations, it is important not to overlook figurative tellings and retellings; this is uniquely apparent in literature for young people, in which such imaginative and metaphorical movements are essential. In Figures of Youth: Metaphor and Imagination in Children's Holocaust Literature, Joanna Krongold explores the depth and breadth of Holocaust literature for young people, from wartime writings to present-day imaginings. Spanning chronological time periods, cultures, and genres, Figures of Youth examines the representational muzzles and creative possibilities of children's and young adult Holocaust literature. The experimentation and inventiveness inherent in literature for young people make it fruitful ground for exploring the complexities of the Holocaust. Figures of Youth charts patterns of representation as time propels authors farther away from the event itself, demonstrating how and why children's literature makes important contributions to the field of Holocaust studies. By placing well-known texts like Anne Frank's diary in conversation with those that have been excluded or ignored in scholarly discourse surrounding Holocaust literature, the author offers a new and innovative understanding of metaphor and figurative dynamics in the representation of genocide.

After October 7th, which confronted children with unimaginable violence, the potential to apply post-WW II and Holocaust child rehabilitation approaches became clearly visible and urgent. After 1945, hundreds of thousands of children had to be brought back to everyday life against the background of harrowing experiences during the Holocaust years. This volume bridges historical insights with current challenges, offering strategies for rehabilitating conflict-affected youth. It synthesizes knowledge from diverse fields to support victims of war and displacement. The work transforms past experiences into actionable support, equipping professionals with insights to reshape child rehabilitation in conflict zones, underscoring the importance of historical lessons in addressing present-day crises.

Analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Fred Wander, Barbara Honigmann, Julia Franck, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, and Kat Kaufmann to explore current debates on Israel, the German Democratic Republic, gender, Jewish and Muslim identity, and antisemitism. Her new readings of German-language texts by younger authors present robust challenges to entrenched ideas concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, multidirectional memory, and a range of other memory debates. Jewish identity and Muslim identity are shown in direct conversation with other migrants' experiences, and literature is revealed to be a brave space where Holocaust memory is newly imagined. Mueller's study invites a radically new way to think about the Holocaust and sheds new and valuable light on adjacent contemporary discourses.

In the past decades, commemorative volumes with contributions from esteemed scholars have been published at each decade anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust (the ghettoization and deportation of 1944). While these volumes have become milestones in Hungarian research, they rarely contained the research results of young academics who, in the past decades, have caught up with the trends in Western Holocaust research. Therefore, in this publication we not only aim to commemorate the Holocaust in Hungary but also to present new approaches and perspectives, such as the gendered aspect, microhistory, memory research, trauma studies, and so forth. This volume, for the first time, provides a synthesis of current Holocaust research in Hungary for international academics working in the fields of Holocaust studies, genocide studies, and Hungarian studies.

Though Paul Celan's poems are widely appreciated, the richness of his life has escaped scholarly attention. Anna Arno pens the definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's great writers, exploring Celan's Jewish upbringing at the crossroads of European cultures, the ravages of the Holocaust, exile, and his struggles with mental illness.

<p>This book explores the resilience of Jewish civil society organizing in Ukraine during the tumultuous early months of the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion. Developed in collaboration with Paideia - the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, the research chronicles a project that involved Ukrainian Jewish communities during wartime through Paideia’s alumni network. Drawing on rich empirical data, the authors examine the multifaceted work of Jewish organizations and organizing efforts, from sustaining rituals to engaging in humanitarian work. The book examines single case studies and broader cross-organizational analyses, shedding light on the capacity of Jewish groups to repurpose activities, pivot from serving specific communities to addressing broader societal needs, and mobilize resources under extreme conditions. This resilience, the authors argue, is shaped by a complex interplay of factors: pre-existing organizational structures, transnational networks, and the fusion of symbolic and material elements rooted in the Ukrainian-Jewish experience. By situating these efforts within a wider context, the book uses different streams of organization studies to provide an in-depth analysis of resilient civil society organizing during wartime. Aimed at organization scholars, civil society researchers, activists, and those interested in Jewish culture and Ukrainian history, this book offers critical insights into the possibility of civil society resilience in the face of war.</p>

This volume sits at the crossroads between Holocaust studies and the history of migration and examines how different forms of migration, broadly understood, were part of the preparation, organization, and execution of the Holocaust. Such a comprehensive analysis of the intersection between the Holocaust and phenomena of migration during this period is currently missing from historiography. Therefore, larger questions are addressed such as: How can research on migration during and after the Holocaust illuminate the latter and vice-versa? How did displacement affect vulnerability and complicity of populations and their memory? Were there opportunities for escape and flight from the Holocaust and under what circumstances? What roles played citizenship, gender, and race in the intersection of migration and the Holocaust? Did the destruction by the Holocaust also destroy the memory of those who were uprooted?

This book presents a comprehensive introduction to the broad and developing field of women, gender, and sexuality in the Holocaust. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates global, gender fluid, and intersectional perspectives, it examines experiences of Nazi Germany, the Nazi-occupied territories, ghettos, camps, resistance and rescue, and partisan movements. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Holocaust synthesizes fresh approaches and frameworks in Holocaust and gender studies research, addressing topics including female perpetrators, sexual violence, masculinity, and queer experiences. Rose introduces readers to interpretations from a wide range of fields, from film and photography to law and psychology. Recognizing the importance of understanding the events of the Holocaust in their historical context, the text begins with an examination of gender roles prior to the rise of the Nazis and expands to include the aftermath and the legacy of the Holocaust through the lens of gender and sexuality. With timelines and definitions of key terminology, this is an essential and accessible resource for students and scholars of the Holocaust, gender studies, and genocide studies as well as all those seeking a better understanding of this evolving discipline.

When the Second World War began, Theodor Meron was a Jewish-born boy of just 9. He survived ghettos, camps and unimaginable atrocities, but lost most of his family, finding sanctuary in British Palestine after the Holocaust. Now, more than eight decades later, Judge Meron is a recognized world leader in both the scholarship and practice of international criminal justice--having served as the president of three UN tribunals, delivering landmark decisions on genocide and war crimes.<br> <br> This extraordinary memoir revisits Meron's time as a legal adviser to governments, often swimming against the tide; as a restless diplomat, a boundary-pushing scholar and ultimately a ground-breaking international judge. Meron has given his life to the service of justice. He is famous for his 1967 opinion finding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank to be illegal under international law, an opinion he issued as a legal adviser to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. More recently, he has advised the International Criminal Court on potential crimes in the Russia-Ukraine war, and in Israel and Gaza since 2023.<br> <br> The founding institutions of international justice today face unprecedented threats. Meron's life story could not be a better timed reminder of the importance of accountability.

In this fascinating and innovative book, Rina Dudai looks at Holocaust trauma through the lens of poetic testimony: the act of writing poetry and prose to both relay and process traumatic events. Dudai begins with a study of both factual testimony and the act of bearing witness in the aftermath of trauma. She uses these as the foundations for her exploration of poetic testimony and the benefits the creator will find over and above other forms of testimony. Showing how this method avoids the additional trauma often brought about by making survivors directly address their experience, Dudai offers a new toolkit to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists working with patients experiencing trauma. Through an analysis of the works of three writers who survived the Holocaust – Primo Levi, Ka-Tzetnik, and Aharon Appelfeld – Dudai establishes a conceptual framework for discussing this mode of testimony and the poetic language through which it speaks. By comparing the work of these writers, Dudai identifies the distinct qualities of this form of poetic language while establishing a foundation for discourse of other literary works that deal with trauma. Through close textual analysis and the incorporation of therapeutic concepts like "acting out" and "working through," Psychoanalysis, Poetic Testimony, and the Trauma of the Holocaust is an invaluable resource to psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals working with trauma patients, as well as students and scholars of literature and 20th-century history.

Bridge builder: My life since the Holocaust is the fourth and final volume of Shimon Redlich's autobiographical cycle, which began with Together and Apart in Brezany (2002), a description of relations among Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in his native town and his survival during the Holocaust. It continued with Life in Transit (2010), an account of his family's resettlement in postwar Lodz and a new life in Israel. A New Life in Israel (2018) portrayed his adjustment to life on a kibbutz and service in the Israel Defense Forces. In Bridge Builder, Redlich recounts his life since the late fifties. It features his academic journey from student in Jerusalem and the US to professor at Ben-Gurion University, his friendships, his encounters with Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe, and his unconventional approach to controversial topics. As in previous volumes, in Bridge Builder Redlich's own memories are supported and enriched by meticulous historical research.

Situated within the broadly understood subfield of environmental memory studies, this book explores Israeli forests as spaces of commemoration. It investigates their significance in the Jewish‑Israeli memory culture over the last century, as well as their role as a recurrent form of environmental memorial, understood as a commemoration that uses the organic as both the symbolic and the building substance. In doing so, it reveals the roles that the natural environment plays in memory practices: as a carrier of symbolic meanings, and also as an acting, more‑than‑human element of memorial spaces. Employing the perspective of environmental hermeneutics, the analysis is grounded in the realities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and reflects on the intricate intersection of ideological, political, socio‑economic, personal, and institutional dimensions of local tree planting. Simultaneously, it draws from instances of arboreal commemorations found in other geographical and cultural contexts, situating the practice of memorial forests within the wider framework of environmental memory and its associated social practices. In this way, it offers instructive insights for other cases of arboreal remembrance, highlighting both the potential benefits and risks linked to environmental memorials. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach, this fascinating and groundbreaking volume will engage scholars and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including Memory Studies, Cultural Geography, Israel Studies, and Environmental Humanities.

Intimate in voice and sweeping in historical reach, "Was It Just a Matter of Luck?" bears witness to the endurance of memory and the moral force of survival. Through the voice of his mother, Ray Kaner - a fiercely intelligent young woman who endured four years in the Lódź ghetto, brutal slave labor, and near death in Bergen-Belsen - Dr. Charles Kaner reconstructs her harrowing passage through the Holocaust and the sustaining power of sisterhood that helped her survive. Interwoven with his own journey as a second-generation survivor, Kaner traces how Ray transformed unspeakable trauma into purpose. In postwar America, she became a quiet but determined force in the preservation of Holocaust memory, helping to establish one of the nation's earliest survivor-testimony projects and laying crucial groundwork for what would become the Museum of Jewish Heritage. At once a son's act of devotion and a profound historical reckoning, Was It Just a Matter of Luck? asks not only how one woman survived, but how survival itself became a legacy.

Dress in Auschwitz is the first comprehensive study of prisoners' clothing in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including survivor memoirs and unpublished primary sources, testimonies, personal interviews, surviving garments, scholarly work, and rare illustrations, the book explores the experience of Auschwitz prisoners through the lens of their clothing.

This source edition on the persecution and murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany presents in a total of 16 volumes a thematically comprehensive selection of documents on the Holocaust. The work illustrates the contemporary contexts, the dynamics, and the intermediate stages of the political and social processes that led to this unprecedented mass crime. It can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and all other interested parties. The edition comprises authentic testimony by persecutors, victims, and onlookers. These testimonies are furnished with academic annotations and the vast majority of them are published here for the first time in English.

The existence and achievements of Jewish “self-rescuers” within Nazi-occupied Hungary remains, in spite of their significance, historically underexplored. In this illuminating chronicle of the life and work of a Jewish couple, László and Eugenia Szamosi, Remembering Resistance seeks to address this lacunae, offering a unique insight into a family’s personal history of resistance under the Nazi regime. Combining oral testimony from fellow survivors, with a previously-unpublished translation of László’s memoir, this book foregrounds the remarkable work of the Szamosis and their network, in rescuing Jews from the Death Marches and reuniting displaced families. Through doing so, this book offers a powerful framework for mediating how we remember Jewish experiences of the Holocaust.

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last planned book, Geoffrey Hartman confronts contradictions that pose a challenge for our present and future. The passing of Holocaust survivors and their immediate families makes continued acts of witnessing more necessary even as distance in time makes the identities and acts of future witnessing more complicated. With characteristic intensity and humanity, Hartman's essays explore the full complexity of how to transmit knowledge of the Holocaust to the future in ways that avoid simplification, the illusion of synthesis, or the aspiration to final closure, on the one hand, or compulsive repetition on the other. A significant part of the answer, for Hartman, requires special attention to the role of literary and audiovisual forms in promoting an active witnessing to extreme suffering that is relevant both for our time and the encroaching future.