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Did Europe's Jews go passively to their deaths? How did Nazi anti-Semitism evolve into mass murder? How important was Hitler's own hatred of the Jews in creating the Final Solution? Why didn't the Allies aggressively try to save Jews before the war's end? Michael R. Marrus, in the first comprehensive assessment of the vast historical literature on the Holocaust, tackles explosive issues and tortured memories, handling them with judiciousness and sensitivity. Drawing on the entire range of historical literature on this subject, he comments upon the questions that have troubled observers over the years. By applying the tools of historical, sociological, and political analysis, he presents a balanced but eye-opening treatment of many highly charged topics on the Holocaust, including the role of collaborationist governments, the Roman Catholic Church, the local populations, Jewish ghetto leadership, and the Jews themselves. Book jacket.

Sixty years ago, the Holocaust had practically no visibility in examinations of the Second World War. Yet today it is understood to be not only one of the defining moments of the 20th century but also a touchstone in a quest for directions on how to avoid such catastrophes. This book challenges the notion that there are definitive lessons to be deduced from the destruction of European Jewry. Instead, it shows how its lessons are constantly challenged, debated, altered, and reinterpreted. -- Publisher description

An updated edition with decades’ worth of new archival material: “It remains the classic text on the Holocaust in France.” —Holocaust and Genocide Studies When Vichy France and the Jews was first published in France in 1981, the reaction was explosive. Before the appearance of this groundbreaking book, the question of the Vichy regime’s cooperation with the Third Reich had been suppressed. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton were the first to access closed archives that revealed the extent of Vichy’s complicity in the Nazi effort to eliminate the Jews. Since the book’s original publication, additional archives have been opened, and the role of the French state in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi death factories is now openly acknowledged. This new edition integrates over thirty years of subsequent scholarship, and incorporates research on French public opinion and the diversity of responses by French civilians to the campaign of persecution they witnessed around them. This classic account remains central to the historiography of France and the Holocaust, and in its revised edition, is more important than ever for understanding the Vichy government’s role in the darkest atrocity of the twentieth century.

The irascible son of a Jewish pioneer from Czarist Russia whose business acumen built an international company renowned for the quality of its products. Samuel Bronfman's father failed as a wheat farmer and then found success selling frozen fish, firewood, and horses. At this point young Sam observed to his father, "The bar makes more profits than we do. Instead of selling horses, we should be selling the drinks". And thus began what was to become the Seagram whiskey empire. Sam's insight and timing were right as Canada, and especially the United States, were coming under the influence of the temperance movement. While legend often places Sam in the thick of Prohibition era bootlegging and rum running, in fact he built for the long term and kept his operations within both the law and its loopholes as he supplied American bootleggers. Sam demonstrated his marketing genius by insisting on quality in a business notorious for cutting corners and thereby set the standard for the industry in the decades to follow. Sam's success in penetrating the American market was such that after Prohibition his competitors lobbied the federal government for protection. While Samuel Bronfman is a classic rags to riches tale, it is also the story of a Jew who remained in many ways outside business and social establishments even after becoming internationally famous. Commuting every week between his Montreal and New York office, his was a private life centered on his family and their home in Montreal and summer places such as Tarrytown, New York. In the 1950s Sam, under instructions from his daughter Phyllis Lambert, commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design a new corporate headquarters, the Seagram buildingat 375 Park Avenue, a landmark on the New York City skyline. As a leader of the Jewish community Sam was elected president of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1939, and went on to organize financial aid to the fledgling state of Israel, beginning decades long involvement in Jewish affairs and support for the Jewish state.

A World History of War Crimes provides a truly global history of war crimes and the involvement of the legal systems faced with these acts. Documenting the long historical arc traced by human efforts to limit warfare, from codes of war in antiquity designed to maintain a religiously conceived cosmic order to the gradual use in the modern age of the criminal trial as a means of enforcing universal norms, this book provides a comprehensive one-volume account of war and the laws that have governed conflict since the dawn of world civilizations. Throughout his narrative, Michael Bryant locates the origin and evolution of the law of war in the interplay between different cultures. While showing that no single philosophical idea underlay the law of war in world history, this volume also proves that war in global civilization has rarely been an anarchic free-for-all. Rather, from its beginnings warfare has been subject to certain constraints defined by the unique needs and cosmological understandings of the cultures that produce them. Only in late modernity has law assumed its current international humanitarian form. The criminalization of war crimes in international courts today is only the most recent development of the ancient theme of constraining when and how war may be fought.

Comprehensive and balanced history of the Reform Movement. The movement for religious reform in modern Judaism represents one of the most significant phenomena in Jewish history during the last two hundred years. It introduced new theological conceptions and innovations in liturgy and religious practice that affected millions of Jews, first in central and Western Europe and later in the United States. Today Reform Judaism is one of the three major branches of Jewish faith. Bringing to life the ideas, issues, and personalities that have helped to shape modern Jewry, Response to Modernity offers a comprehensive and balanced history of the Reform Movement, tracing its changing configuration and self-understanding from the beginnings of modernization in late 18th century Jewish thought and practice through Reform's American renewal in the 1970s.

In Neutrality as a Policy Choice for Small/Weak Democracies: Learning from the Belgian Experience, Michael F. Palo has three main objectives. First, he employs a counterfactual approach to examine the hypothesis that had permanent neutrality not been imposed on Belgium in 1839, it would have pursued neutrality anyway until war broke out in 1914. Secondly, he analyses why, after abandoning obligatory neutrality during World War I, the Belgians adopted voluntary neutrality in October 1936. Finally, he seeks to use the historical Belgian case study to test specific International Relations’ Theories and to contribute to Small State Studies, especially the behaviour of small/weak democracies in the international system.

The Nazis and their state-sponsored cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate a frequently unclear path to recover their property from governments and neighbors who had failed to protect them and who often had been complicit in their persecution. This book is about the less publicized area of post-Holocaust restitution involving immovable (real) property confiscated from European Jews and others during World War II.

Classic study of Jewish libertarian thought, from Walter Benjamin to Franz Kafka Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the “tikkoun”: redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of “elective affinity” to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács.

The purpose of this book is to introduce the Pentateuch to (under)graduate students by approaching it from the perspective of five theological polarities: chaos-creation (Genesis), slavery-freedom (Exodus), defilement-holiness (Leviticus), wilderness-homeland (Numbers), and conflict-covenant (Deuteronomy). It examines these polarities in light of other great texts from the ancient Near East (and Qur'an) in the hope of ushering the reader into a deeper understanding of the one God revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.