Civil Society And The Holocaust

This book analyzes postwar Germany to show how social movements shape public memory and influence democratization through cooperation and conflict with government.

Holocaust Education in Lithuania is based on a six-year, multi-sited ethnographic research project that was conducted to analyze the effects of the controversial policies of Holocaust education which were introduced as conditions of membership for access into post-Soviet western alliances. In order to understand how individuals take up transnational policies and programs intended to support democratization, Beresniova delves into rarely discussed issues. She looks at the means through which inherent cultural and political assumptions have had an impact on the ways in which memory and history are used in educational programs. She also scrutinizes the motivating factors for involvement in Holocaust education, such as the importance of community building, civic activism beyond the topic of the Holocaust, and the perceived power of the international community in dictating domestic education policy guidelines. Beresniova contends that educators must acknowledge the political and cultural elements in Holocaust education programs and policies, or risk undermining their own efforts. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, education, history, political science, and European studies.

Human Rights and Private Wrongs breaks new ground by considering a series of fascinating issues that are normally ignored by human rights specialists because they are too "private" to consider as policy issues: children's labor migration; refugee policy towards unaccompanied minors; financial matters of investor and business responsibility; and complex questions involving access to the benefits of pharmaceutical research, transnational organ trafficking, and the control over genetic research.

A consideration of twentieth-century German social history and the legacies of the two dictatorships

Everyday Silence and the Holocaust examines Irene Levin’s experiences of her family’s unspoken history of the Holocaust and the silence that surrounded their war experiences as non-topics. A central example of what C. Wright Mills considered the core of sociology – the intersection of biography and history – the book covers the process by which the author came to understand that notes found in her mother’s apartment following her death were not unimportant scribbles, but in fact contained elements of her mother’s biographical narrative, recording her parents’ escape from occupied Norway to unoccupied Sweden in late 1942. From the mid-1990s, when society began to open up about the atrocities committed against the Jews, so too did the author find that her mother and the wider Jewish population ceased to be silent about their war experiences and began to talk. Charting the process by which the author traced the family’s broader history, this book explores the use of silence, whether in the family or in society more widely, as a powerful analytic tool and examines how these silences can intertwine. This book provides insight into social processes often viewed through a macro-historical lens by way of analysis of the life of an "ordinary" Jewish woman as a survivor. An engaging, grounded study of the biographical method in sociology and the role played by silence, this book will appeal to readers with an interest in the Holocaust and World War II, as well as in social scientific research methods. It will be of use to both undergraduate and postgraduate scholars in the fields of history, social science, psychology, philosophy, and the history of ideas.

Sheds new light on the relationship between tolerance and religion, concluding that local religious minorities are most likely to protect pluralism.

The book narrates the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Focusing on the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki, this book maps the reactions of the authorities, the Church and the civil society as events unfolded. In so doing, it seeks to answer the questions, did the Christian society of their hometown stand up to their defense and did they try to undermine or object to the Nazi orders? Utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes, this book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway, seeking to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honour the victims of the Holocaust. The first study to examine why 95 percent of the Jews of Thessaloniki perished—one of the highest percentages in Europe—this book will appeal to students and scholars of the Holocaust, European History and Jewish Studies. Recipient of the 2021 Vashem Yad International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. "In view of the important contribution that this study makes to the understanding of the Holocaust in Thessaloniki in particular and, more broadly, in Greece, [...] the International Committee for the Yad Vashem Book Prize decided to award the 2021 prize to Dr. Leon Saltiel."