MetaFilter posts tagged with judaism and Shoah

Gray zone, schmay zone

timshel — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 08:50:44 -0800

Almost immediately upon my arrival in my first teaching job, I became the go-to guy for the Holocaust. Of course, this was partly due to my dissertation, but in larger part, I suspect, because of my Jewishness. This was fine with me for a number of reasons. First, as a junior faculty member, this identification, though merely professional, could only help in my quest for tenure. An expert on the Holocaust carried infinitely greater weight, I thought, than an expert on ministerial instability during the French Third Republic.

Dissolution: My life as an accidental Holocaust expert—and why I decided to quit

Poetry in Hell

zarq — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:37:01 -0800

Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish. Background on the Ringelblum Oneg Shabbat Archives During the Holocaust, dozens of Jewish men and women trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto chose a special form of resistance: they chronicled their path to doom for future generations. Led by Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, an historian, 35,000 paper documents were collected that showed how the Nazis had deprived Warsaw's Jews of their rights, then tormented and finally killed them in the death camps. On Aug. 2, 1942, while German soldiers combed the streets outside, two young men buried 10 metal boxes and several metal milk cans containing this extraordinary archive in the basement of an elementary school inside the ghetto. They were recovered from the rubble in 1946 and 1950. Approximately 25,000 of the documents survived and are now housed in the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the United States Holocaust Museum. "The Archives comprise government documents, materials concerning the ghetto resistance, testimonies of the fate of Jewish communities during the Holocaust, literature, works of art and private correspondence collected by victims of the Holocaust in order to pass on information about the Holocaust to future generations. This collection is absolutely unique, both in terms of its origin and its historic value. It mainly concerns the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe (approximately 500,000 inhabitants), but in fact it covers the whole of occupied Poland, documenting the Shoah, the fate of its Jewish community of 3.500,000 people. Nearly all the creators of the Ringelblum Archives perished, either in the ghetto or in the extermination camps."
The archive recovery and restoration efforts were documented in a 2007 book by American historian Samuel Kassow: "Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto". Some of it is available to view online at Google books, here. Book reviews and background on the recovery project: * Video: C-Span Book TV with Samuel Kassow * Los Angeles Times * Spiegel International * The Guardian * New Jersey Jewish News Background on the Poetry in Hell Project * Preface * Forward * Author's Note * Interview with Dr. Sarah Traister Moskovitz on J-Wire: "Warsaw Ghetto Poetry Now Online"

I Will Survive

andoatnp — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:08:42 -0800

Dancing Auschwitz
"Jewish artist defends YouTube video 'Dancing Auschwitz'"

Full Fathom Nine

matteo — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:09:22 -0800

Mahler performances were rare in Vienna in those days because Mahler's city had already been contaminated by the acolytes of Adolf Hitler. By their reckoning, Mahler's music was loathsome — a product of "Jewish decadence." To put Mahler's music on the program was therefore a political act. It was to protest and deny the hateful faith that blazed across the border from Germany. That much I understood quite clearly, even as a boy.
The New Yorker's Alex Ross reprints Hans Fantel's New York Times 1989 essay on Bruno Walter's 1938 performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony -- the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler invaded Austria.

From the Diary of Adam Czerniakow on the Eve of the Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942

matteo — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:22:29 -0800

"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"
On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis, Adam Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 -- Tisha B'Av, the "saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the most prominent Holocaust scholars, Raul Hilberg. More inside.