New Books In Jewish Studies

Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’ sigh. The community mourns the loss of its young. It’s a good story, and some of it’s even true. The reality, of course, was much more complex as we learn in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern‘s excellent Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917 (Cambridge UP, 2008). The drafting of Jews into the Russian army was not really an act of oppression, but, as Petrovsky-Shtern argues, integration. By calling up Jews, the government was de facto recognizing them as full-fledged subject of the empire, the equals of other imperial minorities and even Russians themselves. Of course they were subject to discrimination. But they were not simply victims: the Jewish soldiers changed the culture of the army just as the army changed what it meant to be Jewish within the empire. As Petrovsky-Shtern points out, all this was part and parcel of the process of making bot

Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calculated, systematic and horribly efficient as the Nazi murder of the Jews and other “Untermenchen.” One thing, however, is certain: the Holocaust is doubtless the best documented instance of mass murder in world history. The perpetrators were meticulous record keepers, and at the conclusion of the war many of their archives fell into Allied hands. The German record, however, is not the only record of the Holocaust. As Samuel Kassow shows in his moving Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana UP, 2007), the victims themselves made an concerted effort to document what was being done to them at the hands of the Nazis. Kassow tells the story of a group of Warsaw-based Jewish activists who built a secret organization–Oyneg Shabes–