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

Prompted by recent historiographical debates between Polish and German historians over the roles that citizens of countries occupied by or allied with Nazi Germany played in the Holocaust, this chapter explores how Jewish and German historians have written about the complex division of labour between German and local perpetrators. It shows that while Jewish historians—building on their own experiences of persecution—strongly advocated the study of local perpetrators alongside Nazi perpetrators, German historians have long ignored the subject as they focused on German perpetrators, institutions, and sources. Finally it examines how Saul Friedländer’s concept of ‘integrated history’ and the turn to wartime and post-war Jewish sources prepared the ground for a transnational history of the Holocaust that integrates the roles of non-German perpetrators into the historical narrative.

Some contemporary observers of Israel’s 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann linked the proceedings in Jerusalem to the Allied war crime trials that took place in Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion called the Eichmann trial the “Nuremberg of the Jewish people,”¹ while the political philosopher Hannah Arendt considered it “the last of the numerous Successor trials which followed the Nuremberg Trials.”² That both Ben-Gurion and Arendt, whose worldview and overall stance on the Eichmann trial were diametrically opposed, nevertheless saw a direct link between Nuremberg and Jerusalem raises the question: What were the historical ties between

This chapter discusses the evolution of “Holocaust survivor diasporas” in the aftermath of World War II by examining how the experience of survival under Nazi occupation created a distinct and shared identity for those who would emerge from the war. In the early postwar period, survivors formed transnational networks on the basis of shared wartime experience, common geographical origin, and shared political agendas that were far more specific than the more general category of “Holocaust survivors” that would develop later, in the last decades of the twentieth century. Survivors and the distinct organizations they formed came to play a prominent role in both defining the categories of “Holocaust” and “survivor” and in shaping subsequent efforts at Holocaust education and memorialization.

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.