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Numbered Days
Terrorist attacks regularly trigger the enactment of repressive laws, setting in motion a vicious cycle that threatens to devastate civil liberties over the twenty-first century. In this clear-sighted book, Bruce Ackerman peers into the future and presents an intuitive, practical alternative. He proposes an 'emergency constitution' that enables government to take extraordinary actions to prevent a second strike in the short run while prohibiting permanent measures that destroy our freedom over the longer run. Ackerman's 'emergency constitution' exposes the dangers lurking behind the popular notion that we are fighting a war on terror. He criticizes court opinions that have adopted the war fr...
The Existential Philosophy of Etty Hillesum
In The Existential Philosophy of Etty Hillesum Meins G.S. Coetsier breaks new ground by demonstrating the Jewish existential nature of Etty Hillesum’s spiritual and cultural life in light of the writings of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Hillesum’s diaries and letters, written between 1941 and 1943, illustrate her struggle to come to terms with her personal life in the context of the Second World War and the Shoah. By finding God under the rubble of the horrors, she rediscovers the divine presence between humankind, while taking up responsibility for the Other as a way to embrace justice and compassion. In a fascinating, accessible and thorough study, Coetsier dispels much of the confusion that assails readers when they are exposed to the bewildering range of Christian and Jewish influences and other cultural interpretations of her writings. The result is a convincing and profound picture of Etty Hillesum's path to spiritual freedom.
The Moral Witness
The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.
Extremely Violent Societies
In this groundbreaking book Christian Gerlach traces the social roots of the extraordinary processes of human destruction involved in mass violence throughout the twentieth century. He argues that terms such as 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities. From killings and expulsions to enforced hunger, collective rape, strategic bombing, forced labour and imprisonment he explores what happened before, during, and after periods of widespread bloodshed in countries such as Armenia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nazi-occupied Greece and in anti-guerilla wars worldwide in order to highlight the crucial role of socio-economic pressures in the generation of group conflicts. By focussing on why so many different people participated in or supported mass violence, and why different groups were victimized, he offers us a new way of understanding one of the most disturbing phenomena of our times.
On the Social History of Persecution
This multi-disciplinary volume is one of the few collections about social change covering various cases of mass violence and genocide. In life under persecution, social relations and social structures were not absent and not simply replaced by an ethno-racial order. The studies in this book show the influence of social structures like gender, age and class on life under persecution. Exploring practices in family and labor relations and of collective action, they counter claims of an atomization of society or total uprootedness of victims. Despite being exposed to poverty and want and under the permanent threat of political violence, persecuted people tried to develop their own agency. Case studies are about the Jewish and Armenian persecutions, Rwanda, the war of decolonization in Mozambique and civilian refuges in Belarus during World War II. The authors are a mix of experienced scholars and young researchers.
The Holocaust and Historical Methodology
In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust—and, by extension, any past event—as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.
The Waning of Emancipation
Explores the role of public memory and images of the past in the Jewish communities of Germany, France, and Hungary as they faced changing political and social conditions. With the rise of Fascism in Europe, and particularly the ascent of Germany’s Nazi Party, Jews in Germany and eastern and western Europe were forced to cope with an eroding civil and social status, increasing daily limitations, and a dark future on the horizon. This reality looked very different from the recent past of emancipation, in which Jewish citizens had enjoyed civic equality and the advance of social integration. In The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, an...
The Archive Thief
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered up tens of thousands of documents from Nazi buildings in Berlin, and later, public archives and private synagogues in France, and moved them all, illicitly, to New York. In The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity.
Collect and Record!
This volume tells the largely unknown story of Holocaust survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe immediately after World War II. Their initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents along with 20,000 testimonies, 10,000 questionnaires, and large numbers of memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered the development of a Holocaust historiography that used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime, while placing the experiences of Jews at the center of the story.
Disability in German-Speaking Europe
This collection reflects on the development of disability studies in German-speaking Europe and brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on disability in German, Austrian, and Swiss history and culture.
