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Books

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.

Recent publications include:

  • By Renia Kukielka

    At the end of 1944, while World War II was still raging, nineteen-year-old Renia Kukielka published her Hebrew language memoir about the Holocaust. The account may well be the first of its kind. In her powerful and raw story, she portrays life in the ghettos and her three years of wandering in disguise as a Polish Catholic, trying to escape from the German onslaught. She also recounts how she served for almost a year as a courier between ghettos for the Zionist youth movement's underground cell in Bendzin, carrying weapons, money, and messages, until she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. She was tortured in a high-security prison, but, after a daring escape, she was able to flee to British Mandate Palestine with other members of the resistance.

    Following the book's initial publication in Hebrew in 1944, an unauthorized English-language edition was published in the United States in 1947. The present expanded text includes a scholarly introduction, notes, and a historical afterword, which help to explain and contextualize Kukielka's personal account.

  • By Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, translated from the original Polish publication into English by Ewa Wampuszyc.

    This meticulously researched new book investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. Cursed is a microhistory that recreates the events of the Kielce pogrom step by step and examines the dominant hypotheses about the pogrom through the prism of previously classified archival evidence. It offers readers a nuanced analysis that cuts across social and ideological divisions. The resulting narrative is filled with new discoveries not only about the Kielce pogrom but about the nature of antisemitism, hostility toward minorities, and collective violence.

  • Edited by Valerie Hébert

    In December 1941, German police and their local collaborators shot 2,749 Jews at the beach in Šķēde, near Liepāja, Latvia. Twelve photographs were taken at the scene. These now-infamous images show people in extreme distress, sometimes without clothing. Some capture the very moments when women and children confronted their imminent deaths, while others show their dead bodies. They are nearly unbearable to look at—so why should we? Framing the Holocaust offers a multidimensional response to this question.

    While photographs are central to our memory of modern historical events, they often inhabit an ambivalent intellectual space. What separates the sincere desire to understand from voyeuristic curiosity? Comprehending atrocity photographs requires viewers to place themselves in the very positions of the perpetrators who took the images. When we engage with these photographs, do we risk replicating the original violence? In this tightly organized book, scholars of history, photography, language, gender, photojournalism, and pedagogy examine the images of the Šķēde atrocity along with other difficult images, giving historical, political, and ethical depth to the acts of looking and interpreting.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • By Nadine Fresco

    Translated from the French by Sarah Clift With a Foreword by Dorota Glowacka

    In 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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.

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.