Post Holocaust Politics

Between 1945 and 1948, more than a quarter of a million Jews fled countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and began filling hastily erected displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria. As one of the victorious Allies, Britain had to help find a solution for the vast majority of these refugees who refused repatriation. Drawing on extensive research in British, American, and Israeli archives, Arieh Kochavi presents a comprehensive analysis of British policy toward Jewish displaced persons and reveals the crucial role the United States played in undermining that policy. Kochavi argues that political concerns--not human considerations--determined British policy regarding the refugees. Anxious to secure its interests in the Middle East, Britain feared its relations with Arab nations would suffer if it appeared to be too lax in thwarting Zionist efforts to bring Jewish Holocaust survivors to Palestine. In the United States, however, the American Jewish community was able to influence presidential policy by making its vote hinge on a solution to the displaced persons problem. Setting his analysis against the backdrop of the escalating Cold War, Kochavi reveals how, ironically, the Kremlin as well as the White House came to support the Zionists' goals, albeit for entirely different reasons.

More than half a century after Nazi Germany's genocidal assault on the Jewish people, the Holocaust grips our attention as never before, raising hotly-debated questions: How is the Holocaust best remembered? What are its lessons? Who gets to answer those questions? Who owns the Holocaust? Those issues provoke disagreements that can be cutthroat or constructive. Taking its point of departure from the controversy that swirled around John Roth's aborted appointment as director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, a senior post at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Holocaust Politics shows how contemporary attitudes and priorities compete to determine that all-important difference.

Nine contributors tackle questions about the nature of memory and forgiveness after the Holocaust. This book - created out of shared concerns about forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice, and out of a desire to investigate differences between religious traditions - represents an effort to spark meaningful dialogue between Jews and Christians and to encourage others to participate in similar inter- and intrafaith inquiries.

Despite an outpouring of scholarship on the Holocaust, little work has focused on what happened to Europe’s Jewish communities after the war ended. And unlike many other European nations in which the majority of the Jewish population perished, France had a significant post‑war Jewish community that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955 offers new insight on key aspects of French Jewish life in the decades following the end of World War II. How Jews had been treated during the war continued to influence both Jewish and non-Jewish society in the post-war years. The volume examines the ways in which moral and political issues of responsibility combined with the urgent problems and practicalities of restoration, and it illustrates how national imperatives, international dynamics, and a changed self-perception all profoundly helped to shape the fortunes of postwar French Judaism.Comprehensive and informed, this volume offers a rich variety of perspectives on Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology. With contributions from leading scholars, including Edward Kaplan, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and Jay Winter, the book establishes multiple connections between such different areas of concern as the running of orphanages, the establishment of new social and political organisations, the restoration of teaching and religious facilities, and the development of intellectual responses to the Holocaust. Comprehensive and informed, this volume will be invaluable to readers working in Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology.

Harnessing the Holocaust presents the compelling story of how the Nazi genocide of the Jews became an almost daily source of controversy in French politics. Joan Wolf argues that from the Six-Day War through the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997-98, the Holocaust developed from a Jewish trauma into a metaphor for oppression and a symbol of victimization on a wide scale. Using scholarship from a range of disciplines, Harnessing the Holocaust argues that the roots of Holocaust politics reside in the unresolved dilemmas of Jewish emancipation and the tensions inherent in the revolutionary notion of universalism. Ultimately, the book suggests, the Holocaust became a screen for debates about what it means to be French.

This collection of essays explores the character and quality of the Holocaust’s impact and the abiding legacy it has left for social theory. The premise which informs the contributions is that, ten years after its publication, Zygmunt Bauman’s claim that social theory has either failed to address the Holocaust or protected itself from its implications remains true.

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time before justice is the moment to put evil in the past. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.