Description
Book SynopsisThis book discusses some of the most urgent current debates over the study, commemoration, and politicization of the Holocaust through key critical perspectives. Omer Bartov adeptly assesses the tensions between Holocaust and genocide studies, which have repeatedly both enriched and clashed with each other, whilst convincingly arguing for the importance of local history and individual testimony in grasping the nature of mass murder. He goes on to critically examine how legal discourse has served to both uncover and deny individual and national complicity.
Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine outlines how first-person histories provide a better understanding of events otherwise perceived as inexplicable and, lastly, draws on the author's own personal trajectory to consider links between the fate of Jews in World War II and the plight of Palestinians during and in the aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel. Bartov demonstrates that these five perspectives,
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction
Part I Writing Atrocity 1. Historical Uniqueness and Integrated History 2. Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide
Part II Local History 3. Reconstructing Genocide on the Local Level 4. Testimonies as Historical Documents
Part III Justice and Denial 5. The Holocaust in the Courtroom 6. Memory Laws as a Tool of Forgetting
Part IV First Person Histories 7. H. G. Adler’s (Un)Bildungsroman 8. Leaving the Shtetl to Change the World
Part V When Memory Comes 9. Return and Displacement in Israel-Palestine 10. My Twisted Path to Auschwitz, and Back 11. Building a Future by Telling the Past Bibliography Index
