Laura Jockusch

Revenge, argues award-winning author Laura Jockusch, was a ubiquitous coping reaction among European Jews during the Holocaust. It manifested as some acts of violence against Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators as well as revenge fantasies expressed in diaries, letters, last wills, wall inscriptions, songs, and poems. Jockusch reveals how Holocaust survivors-alongside other Europeans-continued this multifaceted engagement with revenge after their liberation from Nazi rule, though some survivors claimed in the decades that followed that revenge was absent among Jews.

Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust examines the complexities of Jewish revenge during and after the Holocaust. It shows that, since revenge is a universal human response to atrocity and injustice, neither the claim that Jews were particularly vengeful (as Nazi perpetrators commonly held) nor the idea that Jews did not engage in revenge, are accurate. Rather, revenge had many expressions and it fulfilled various functions for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust: a last resort act in face of death; or a coping response in utter powerlessness and despair; or a means to confront and commemorate the traumatic past and to go on living after destruction and loss. Jockusch convincingly contends that, even if most survivors chose to forgo violent revenge for ethical reasons, they nevertheless engaged with the idea of vengeance. This book analyses that engagement and integrates revenge into the spectrum of Jewish responses to the Holocaust, placing it in the wider context of postwar retribution for Nazi crimes in the process.

The aftermath of the Holocaust has been long and wide-reaching. Any act of mass murder and genocide leaves powerful traces: the trauma of the survivors, the challenge of punishment for the perpetrators and justice for the victims, and questions of how to properly commemorate and memorialize the loss and how to rebuild and restore. This is all the more true for the Holocaust, which has come to serve as a global cultural touchstone for evaluating mass violence. The legacy of the Holocaust has impacted every area of political and cultural life in many different countries since 1945. What is the state of aftermath studies for the Holocaust? How do we periodize the post-Holocaust landscape? Where are there continuities and where are there changes? How, when, and where has the Holocaust been globalized? In what areas did the Holocaust generate a fundamental rethinking of human relations and state institutions? And where did it not? This volume offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the impact and legacy of the Holocaust around the world and demonstrates its enduring significance, from the postwar period to the present day.

Provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, global account of the aftermath and legacy of the Holocaust
Contextualizes the history of the Holocaust with the much longer history of its aftermath
Harnesses a global scope to emphasize the ways the Holocaust matters in areas far removed from the actual killing fields

This volume explores how individuals, groups and societies in a variety of cultural contexts, political settings and time periods respond to the perpetration of injustices. Approaching the concepts of revenge, retribution and reconciliation from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, it opens a fruitful discussion among scholars of history, literature, psychology, biology, political science, communications, religious studies, law and philosophy. The book investigates how social groups reach and maintain an equilibrium between an emotional thirst for an immediate and unmediated response to injustices and societies' need to adjudicate measures and sanctions that seem proportional to the breech of justice.

In the aftermath of World War II, virtually all European countries struggled with the dilemma of citizens who had collaborated with Nazi occupiers. Jewish communities in particular faced the difficult task of confronting collaborators among their own ranks--those who had served on Jewish councils, worked as ghetto police, or acted as informants. European Jews established their own tribunals--honor courts--for dealing with these crimes, while Israel held dozens of court cases against alleged collaborators under a law passed two years after its founding. In Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust, editors Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder bring together scholars of Jewish social, cultural, political, and legal history to examine this little-studied and fascinating postwar chapter of Jewish history.--Provided by publisher

This book tells the story of Jewish survivors who pioneered Holocaust research in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Just liberated from Nazi terror, amidst political turmoil and privation, physically exhausted and traumatized women and men founded historical commissions and documentation centers throughout Europe to chronicle the Nazi Final Solution. By comparing the cases of France, Poland, and the Displaced Persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy, the book explores the motivations and methods which guided survivors in compiling archives of tens of thousands of Nazi documents, eyewitness accounts and questionnaires, ghetto and camp literature, wartime diaries, and artifacts, and in publishing dozens of historical works. Its comparative method illuminates the transnational dimension of Jewish Holocaust research and its place within the larger context of twentieth-century Jewish historiography. It argues that these documentation initiatives not only perpetuated certain Jewish cultural traditions of history writing and memory that predated the Holocaust but that collecting, recording, and researching the Jewish catastrophe had a vital function in survivors’ posttraumatic recovery. In their use of victim and perpetrator sources and social-science-oriented research methods and their focus on the history of the everyday life and death of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers anticipated methodological questions and debates over the use of victim testimony and the writing of history “from below” which entered academic Holocaust historiography only toward the end of the twentieth century. It also takes issue with the widespread misconception that all Holocaust testimony was belated, due to survivors’ decades-long silence, and that systematic Holocaust historiography began only in the 1960s.