Laura Jockusch

The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide is a cultural history of an iconic figure in twentieth-century Western discourse—the “witness to genocide.” Using a broad historical trajectory, Carolyn J. Dean analyzes the performance, narratives, and representations of victims who took the witness stand in trials related to crimes of mass violence from the 1920s through the 1960s, and explores more recent debates over global victimhood and humanitarian intervention. Using a number of case studies, she traces the paths by which victims, survivors, and witnesses of mass atrocities moved from the culture’s sidelines to its moral center—hence her use of the term “moral witness.” Dean convincingly shows that the figure of the witness has become the barometer of moral consciousness across the West.

Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg, and seventeen contributors have produced a powerful and incisive book that deserves the attention of everyone interested in central European history. Bashir and Goldberg's volume engages readers methodologically as well as intellectually, politically, ethically, and personally. It challenges us to think, write, and do things differently, to take risks, and to welcome the invigorating and disruptive presence of people in every aspect of our work.

Before 1993 no European country had an official commemoration ceremony devoted to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. In the decade that followed, several European states institutionalized such a ceremony. By the turn of the century Holocaust recognition had become what Tony Judt called the “entry ticket” into Europe (Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 [2005], p. 803). Rebecca Clifford's book seeks to explain why and how this happened. By looking at public Holocaust commemoration in post-Cold War France and Italy, Clifford explores the conflicts and debates that drove the creation of official commemorations in those two countries, both of which struggled with the memory of collaboration and occupation, and muffled their wartime traumas and responsibilities with myths of collective resistance.

In recent years, historical scholarship has paid due attention to the lives of Holocaust survivors and the rebuilding of Jewish communities in postwar Europe, and a great number of articles, edited volumes, and monographs has been published. While Jewish Displaced Persons - Jews who could not or did not want to return to their countries of birth, citizenship, or prewar residence but waited to leave Europe forever - have become a focal point, Jews who did return to their countries of origin have received comparatively little attention.