From the early efforts that emerged in the struggle against Nazism, and over the past half century, the field of genocide studies has grown in reach to include five genocide centers across the globe and well over one hundred Holocaust centers. This work enables a new generation of scholars, researchers, and policymakers to assess the major foci of the field, develop ways and means to intervene and prevent future genocides, and review the successes and failures of the past.The contributors to Pioneers of Genocide Studies approach the questions of greatest relevance in a personal way, crafting a statement that reveals one's individual voice, persuasions, literary style, scholarly perspectives, and relevant details of one's life. The book epitomizes scholarly autobiographical writing at its best. The book also includes the most important works by each author on the issue of genocide.Among the contributors are experts in the Armenian, Bosnian, and Cambodian genocides, as well as the Holocaust against the Jewish people. The contributors are Rouben Adalian, M. Cherif Bassiouni, Israel W. Charney, Vahakn Dadrian, Helen Fein, Barbara Harff, David Hawk, Herbert Hirsch, Irving Louis Horowitz, Richard Hovannisian, Henry Huttenbach, Leo Kuper, Raphael Lemkin, James E. Mace, Eric Markusen, Robert Melson, R.J. Rummel, Roger W. Smith, Gregory H. Stanton, Ervin Staub, Colin Tatz, Yves Ternan, and the co-editors. The work represents a high watermark in the reflections and self-reflections on the comparative study of genocide.

In The Genocide Contagion, Israel W. Charny asks uncomfortable questions about what allows people to participate in genocide—either directly, through killing or other violent acts, or indirectly, by sitting passively while witnessing genocidal acts. Charny draws on both historical and current examples such as the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, and presses readers around the world to consider how they might contribute to genocide. Given the number of people who die from genocide or suffer indirect consequences such as forced migration, Charny argues that we must all work to resist and to learn about ourselves before critical moments arise.

New areas of research are not the result of a snap of the finger. They are carved out of the marrow of human existence. The study of genocide well illustrates this raw fact. From the early efforts that emerged in the struggle against Nazism, and over the past half century, the field has now reached a point where there at least five genocide centers across the globe, and well over one hundred Holocaust centers. This work emerged out of an earlier effort at an oral history project; one that would enable a new generation of scholars, researchers and policy makers to assess the major foci of the field, efforts to develop ways and means to intervene and prevent future genocides, and review the successes and failures of the field. The editors of Pioneers of Genocide Studies emphasize that contributors should approach the questions of greatest relevance in a personal way, crafting a statement that reveals ones individual voice, persuasions, literary style, scholarly perspectives, and relevant details of ones life. The book succeeds admirably in the above aims, and, in so doing, epitomizes scholarly autobiographical writing at its best. The book also includes the most important works by each author on the issue of genocide. As a result, the collective portrait enhances the usefulness of the volume for those new to the field. Among the contributors are experts in the Armenian Bosnian, Cambodian genocides, as well as the Holocaust against the Jewish people. The contributors are Rouben Adalian, M. Cherif Bassiouni, Israel W. Charney, Vahakn Dadrian, Helen Fein, Barbara Harff, David Hawk, Herbert Hirsch, Irving Louis Horowitz, Richard Hovannisian, Henry Huttenbach, Leo Kuper, Raphael Lemkin, James E. Mace, Eric Markusen, Robert Melson, R.J. Rummel, Roger W. Smith, Gregory H. Stanton, Ervin Staub, Colin Tatz, Yves Ternan, and the co-editors. The work has been five years in the making and represents a high watermark in the reflections and self-reflections on the comparative study of genocide. Samuel Totten is professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the editor of First Person Accounts of Genocidal Acts and Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, and book review editor for the Journal of Genocide Research. Steven Leonard Jacobs is associate professor and Aaron Aronov Chair of Judaic Studies in the department of religious studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He is the author of Shirot Bialik: A New and Annotated Translation of Chaim Nachman Bialiks Epic Poems, Raphael Lemkins Thoughts on Nazi Genocide: Not Guilty? and Contemporary Christian and Contemporary Jewish Religious Responses to the Shoah.

The Nazi regime and local collaborators killed 800,000 Belorussian Jews, many of them parents or relatives of young Jews who survived the war. Thousands of young girls and boys were thus orphaned and struggled for survival on their own. This book is the first systematic account of young Soviet Jews' lives under conditions of Nazi occupation and genocide. These orphans' experiences and memories are rooted in the 1930s, when Soviet policies promoted and sometimes actually created interethnic solidarity and social equality. This experience of interethnic solidarity provided a powerful framework for the ways in which young Jews survived and, several decades after the war, represented their experience of violence and displacement. Through oral histories with several survivors, video testimonies, and memoirs, Anika Walke reveals the crucial roles of age and gender in the ways young Jews survived and remembered the Nazi genocide, and shows how shared experiences of trauma facilitated community building within and beyond national groups. Pioneers and Partisans uncovers the repeated transformations of identity that Soviet Jewish children and adolescents experienced, from Soviet citizens in the prewar years, to a target of genocidal violence during the war, to a barely accepted national minority in the postwar Soviet Union.

Presents the never-before-published autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, who immigrated to the U.S. during World War II and made it his life's work to fight genocide, a term he coined, with the might of the U.N. Genocide Convention.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Euro-American citizenry of California carried out mass genocide against the Native population of their state, using the processes and mechanisms of democracy to secure land and resources for themselves and their private interests. The murder, rape, and enslavement of thousands of Native people were legitimized by notions of democracy—in this case mob rule—through a discreetly organized and brutally effective series of petitions, referenda, town hall meetings, and votes at every level of California government. Murder State is a comprehensive examination of these events and their early legacy. Preconceptions about Native Americans as shaped by the popular press and by immigrants’ experiences on the overland trail to California were used to further justify the elimination of Native people in the newcomers’ quest for land. The allegedly “violent nature” of Native people was often merely their reaction to the atrocities committed against them as they were driven from their ancestral lands and alienated from their traditional resources. In this narrative history employing numerous primary sources and the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on genocide, Brendan C. Lindsay examines the darker side of California history, one that is rarely studied in detail, and the motives of both Native Americans and Euro-Americans at the time. Murder State calls attention to the misuse of democracy to justify and commit genocide.

The first ever study to combine a detailed re-appraisal of the development of the genocide of Europe's Jews with full consideration of Nazi policies against other population groups and a comparative analysis of other genocides from the twentieth century.