The growing field of Holocaust studies confronts a world wracked by antisemitism, immigration and refugee crises, human rights abuses, mass atrocity crimes, threats of nuclear war, the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, and environmental degradation. What does it mean to advance Holocaust studies—what are learning and teaching about the Holocaust for—in such dire straits? Vast resources support study and memorialization of the Holocaust. What assumptions govern that investment? What are its major successes and failures, challenges and prospects? Across thirteen chapters, Advancing Holocaust Studies shows how leading scholars grapple with those tough questions.

Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars. The handbook is thematically divided into five broad sections. Part One, Enablers, concentrates on the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust. Part Two, Protagonists, concentrates on the principal persons and groups involved in the Holocaust and attempts to disaggregate the conventional interpretive categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. It examines the agency of the Nazi leaders and killers and of those involved in resisting and surviving the assault. Part Three, Settings, concentrates on the particular places, sites, and physical circumstances where the actions of the Holocaust's protagonists and the forms of persecution were literally grounded. Part Four, Representations, engages complex questions about how the Holocaust can and should be grasped and what meaning or lack of meaning might be attributed to events through historical analysis, interpretation of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection. Part Five, Aftereffects, explores the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights.

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust advances the idea that the Holocaust undermined confidence in basic beliefs about human rights and shows steps of salvage and retrieval that need to be taken if ethics is to be a significant presence in a world still besieged by genocide and atrocity.

A professor of philosphy whose short-lived appointment to Director of Advanced Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum sparked controversy critiques holocaust politics, divisions between holocaust scholars, and disputes over commemorative projects.

The contributors to this book investigate Morality's failures during the Holocaust and raise questions about ethics afterwards.

European Mennonites and the Holocaust is one of the first books to examine Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust, sometimes as rescuers but more often as killers, accomplices, beneficiaries, and bystanders.

Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.