Making Sense Of The Holocaust

What lessons are conveyed implicitly and explicity in teaching and learning about the Holocaust? Through case studies, the author reflects on the lessons taught, highlighting strengths and missed opportunities and illuminating important implications for the teaching of other historical episodes.

This book is timely and necessary and often extremely challenging. It brings together an impressive cast of scholars, spanning several academic generations. Anyone interested in writing about the Holocaust should read this book and consider the implications of what is written here for their own work. There seems to me little doubt that Holocaust history writing stands at something of a cross roads, and the ways forward that this volume points to are extremely thought provoking. -- Tom Lawson, University of Winchester.

In Making Sense of War, Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies. The book explores the creation of the myth of the war against the historiography of modern schemes for social engineering, the Holocaust, ethnic deportations, collaboration, and postwar settlements. For communist true believers, World War II was the purgatory of the revolution, the final cleansing of Soviet society of the remaining elusive "human weeds" who intruded upon socialist harmony, and it brought the polity to the brink of communism. Those ridden with doubts turned to the war as a redemption for past wrongs of the regime, while others hoped it would be the death blow to an evil enterprise. For all, it was the Armageddon of the Bolshevik Revolution. The result of Weiner's inquiry is a bold, compelling new picture of a Soviet Union both reinforced and enfeebled by the experience of total war.

The controversial English-language debut of celebrated Israeli novelist Yishai Sarid is a harrowing, ironic parable of how we reckon with human horror, in which a young, present-day historian becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust. Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives. The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill. With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it? Praise for The Memory Monster: “Award-winning Israeli novelist Sarid’s latest work is a slim but powerful novel, rendered beautifully in English by translator Greenspan…. Propelled by the narrator’s distinctive voice, the novel is an original variation on one of the most essential themes of post-Holocaust literature: While countless writers have asked the question of where, or if, humanity can be found within the profoundly inhumane, Sarid incisively shows how preoccupation and obsession with the inhumane can take a toll on one’s own humanity…. it is, if not an indictment of Holocaust memorialization, a nuanced and trenchant consideration of its layered politics. Ultimately, Sarid both refuses to apologize for Jewish rage and condemns the nefarious forms it sometimes takes. A bold, masterful exploration of the banality of evil and the nature of revenge, controversial no matter how it is read.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “[A] record of a breakdown, an impassioned consideration of memory and its risks, and a critique of Israel’s use of the Holocaust to shape national identity…. Sarid’s unrelenting examination of how narratives of the Holocaust are shaped makes for much more than the average confessional tale.” —Publishers Weekly “Reading The Memory Monster, which is written as a report to the director of Yad Vashem, felt like both an extremely intimate experience and an eerily clinical Holocaust history lesson. Perfectly treading the fine line between these two approaches, Sarid creates a haunting exploration of collective memory and an important commentary on humanity. How do we remember the Holocaust? What tolls do we pay to carry on memory? This book hit me viscerally, emotionally, and personally. The Memory Monster is brief, but in its short account Sarid manages to lay bare the tensions between memory and morals, history and nationalism, humanity and victimhood. An absolute must-read.” —Julia DeVarti, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “In Yishai Sarid’s dark, thoughtful novel The Memory Monster, a Holocaust historian struggles with the weight of his profession…. The Memory Monster is a novel that pulls no punches in its exploration of the responsibility—and the cost—of holding vigil over the past.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

The “explosive” (The New York Times) bestseller that “redefined the history of the twentieth century” (The Washington Post ) This shocking book was the first account to tell the whole truth about Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II, and it remains the definitive account of that era. It sparked a firestorm of controversy both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Award-winning journalist John Cornwell has also included in this seminal work of history an introduction that both answers his critics and reaffirms his overall thesis that Pius XII fatally weakened the Catholic Church with his endorsement of Hitler—and sealed the fate of the Jews in Europe.

When and why do groups target each other for extermination? How do seemingly normal people become participants in genocide? Why do some individuals come to the rescue of members of targeted groups, while others just passively observe their victimization? And how do perpetrators and bystanders later come to terms with the choices that they made? These questions have long vexed scholars and laypeople alike, and they have not decreased in urgency as we enter the twenty-first century. In this book--the first collection of essays representing social psychological perspectives on genocide and the Holocaust-- prominent social psychologists use the principles derived from contemporary research in their field to try to shed light on the behavior of the perpetrators of genocide. The primary focus of this volume is on the Holocaust, but the conclusions reached have relevance for attempts to understand any episode of mass killing. Among the topics covered are how crises and difficult life conditions might set the stage for violent intergroup conflict; why some groups are more likely than others to be selected as scapegoats; how certain cultural values and beliefs could facilitate the initiation of genocide; the roles of conformity and obedience to authority in shaping behavior; how engaging in violent behavior makes it easier to for one to aggress again; the evidence for a "genocide-prone" personality; and how perpetrators deceive themselves about what they have done. The book does not culminate in a grand theory of intergroup violence; instead, it seeks to provide the reader with new ways of making sense of the horrors of genocide. In other words, the goal of all of the contributors is to provide us with at least some of the knowledge that we will need to anticipate and prevent future such tragic episodes.