The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies publishes, in association with academic presses, a variety of books relating to Holocaust and genocide studies to fill gaps in scholarly literature. These may include translations, works by visiting scholars, or work that is closely linked to the Museum’s own research collections.
The Mandel Center seeks to cover topics not previously treated by a major study or subjects for which newly available information is likely to revise common misunderstandings or invite new scholarly interpretations. The Mandel Center also publishes first books from promising young scholars.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center’s mission is to ensure the long-term growth and vitality of Holocaust Studies. To do that, it is essential to provide opportunities for new generations of scholars. The vitality and the integrity of Holocaust Studies requires openness, independence, and free inquiry so that new ideas are generated and tested through peer review and public debate. The opinions of scholars expressed before, during the course of, or after their activities with the Mandel Center are their own and do not represent and are not endorsed by the Museum or its Mandel Center.
Recent publications include:
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La Roumanie et la Shoah: Destruction et survie des Juifs et des Roms sous le régime Antonescu, 1940-1944
By Radu Ioanid
French edition
In this book, Ioanid explores in great detail the physical destruction of Romania’s Jewish and Roma communities, including the pogroms of Bucharest and Iaşi as well as the deportations and the massacres from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. Based on thousands of archival documents and testimonies of survivors, The Holocaust in Romania sheds new light on Romania’s prefascist and fascist antisemitic legislation and its implementation. New chapters consider the forced labor of the Jews, persecution by the Protestant churches, and the decision-making process of the Antonescu government in its treatment of Jews and Roma. With this book, the Romanian Holocaust will no longer be forgotten.
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From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor: An SS Officer's Photo Collection
Edited by Martin Cüppers, Anne Lepper and Jürgen Matthäus
The mass murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany went hand in hand with the destruction of evidence attesting to this genocide. As Holocaust survivor Jules Schelvis puts it, "very few documents relating to Sobibor and the other death camps" remain. With its rich photographic imagery, the collection featured in From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor: An SS Officer's Photo Collection sheds new light on the Holocaust and other key aspects of Nazi extermination policy. The materials were compiled by Johann Niemann, an SS officer whose earlier participation in the Nazi "euthanasia" murders made him second-in-command at Sobibor and the first to get killed in the prisoner uprising of October 13, 1943. These documents allow crucial insights into the making of mass murderers, the evolution of the "final solution," and its consequences for the victims.
With its compilation of unique primary sources and skillful explication, From "Euthanasia" to Sobibor addresses under-researched aspects of Nazi mass violence beyond the Holocaust and offers a rich resource for researching and teaching.
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Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy (1948–1994)
By Roni Mikel-Arieli
The lens of apartheid-era Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust in South Africa reveals the fascinating transformation of a diasporic community. Through the prism of Holocaust memory, this book examines South African Jewry and its ambivalent position as a minority within the privileged white minority. Grounded in research in over a dozen archives, the book provides a rich empirical account of the centrality of Holocaust memorialization to the community’s ongoing struggle against global and local antisemitism. Most of the chapters focus on white perceptions of the Holocaust and reveals the tensions between the white communities in the country regarding the place of collective memories of suffering in the public arena. However, the book also moves beyond an insular focus on the South African Jewish community and in very different modality investigates prominent figures in the anti-apartheid struggle and the role of Holocaust memory in their fascinating journeys towards freedom.
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Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars
Edited by Kevin P. Spicer and Rebecca Carter-Chand
With case studies from the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Croatia, Ukraine, and Romania, Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars thoroughly explores the confluence of religion, race, ethnicity, and antisemitism that led to the annihilative destruction of the Second World War and the Holocaust, challenging readers to identify and confront the inherent dangers of narrowly defined ideologies.
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Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation
By Katarzyna Person
Translated by Zygmunt Nowak-Soliński
In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service.
Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made.
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On the Death of Jews: Photographs and History
By Nadine Fresco
Translated from the French by Sarah Clift
With a Foreword by Dorota GlowackaIn December 1941, on a shore near the Latvian city of Liepaja, Nazi death squads (the Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators murdered in three days more than 2,700 Jews. The majority were women and children, most men having already been shot during the summer. The perpetrators took pictures of the December killings. These pictures are among the rare photographs from the first period of the extermination, during which over 800 000 Jews from the Baltic to the Black Sea were shot to death. By showing the importance of photography in understanding persecution, Nadine Fresco offers a powerful meditation on these images while confronting the essential questions of testimony and guilt.
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Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany
By Edward B. Westermann
In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe.
Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence.
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European Mennonites and the Holocaust
Edited by Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen
During the Second World War, Mennonites in the Netherlands, Germany, occupied Poland, and Ukraine lived in communities with Jews and close to various Nazi camps and killing sites. As a result of this proximity, Mennonites were neighbours to and witnessed the destruction of European Jews. In some cases they were beneficiaries or even enablers of the Holocaust. Much of this history was forgotten after the war, as Mennonites sought to rebuild or find new homes as refugees. The result was a myth of Mennonite innocence and ignorance that connected their own suffering during the 1930s and 1940s with earlier centuries of persecution and marginalization.
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It Is Impossible to Remain Silent: Reflections on Fate and Memory in Buchenwald
By Jorge Semprun and Elie Wiesel
Translated by Peggy Frankston, Introduction by Radu Ioanid
On March 1, 1995, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, ARTE (a French-German state-funded television network) proposed an encounter between two highly-regarded figures of our time: Elie Wiesel and Jorge Semprún. These two men, whose destinies were unparalleled, had probably crossed paths—without ever meeting—in the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in 1945. This short book is the entire transcription of their recorded conversation.
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The Holocaust and North Africa
Edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein
The Holocaust is usually understood as a European story. Yet, this pivotal episode unfolded across North Africa and reverberated through politics, literature, memoir, and memory—Muslim as well as Jewish—in the post-war years. The Holocaust and North Africa offers the first English-language study of the unfolding events in North Africa, pushing at the boundaries of Holocaust Studies and North African Studies, and suggesting, powerfully, that neither is complete without the other.
