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.

Using the work of a range of key thinkers, including Marx, Agamben, Nietzsche, Sartre, Adorno and Horkheimer, Arendt and Lyotard, this book examines the connections between legal rights as an expression of modern political emancipation and the emergence and development of the social phenomenon of antisemitism. Addressing, amongst others the topic of the Holocaust and its impact upon critical forms of thought and public life, this volume discusses the relationship between law and antisemitism.