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Life Is Beautiful, Or Not: The Myth Of The Good Italian, Shira Klein

History Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Life is Beautiful illustrates a popular misconception about Italy's role in the Holocaust. The film features the good Italian and the warped view that Italy treated Jews kindly in the late 1930s and during World War II. Historians have proven this claim to be grossly exaggerated, arguing that Italians persecuted Jews vigorously. Yet popular representations of the past-films, novels, museum exhibits, and websites-continue to give credence to the notion that Italians were overwhelmingly good to Jews. Although France and Germany cultivated similar self-acquitting myths in the decades immediately after the war, they eventually moved on to accept the more …

Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, The Jewish Plight, And The Founding Of Israel, John F. Sears

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Refuge Must Be Given details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt’s partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more refugees into the United States, and her relationship with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was sympathetic to the victims of Nazi persecution yet defended a visa process that failed both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees.

After the war, as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, Eleanor …

The Future Of The German-Jewish Past: Memory And The Question Of Antisemitism, Gideon Reuveni, Diana University Franklin

Purdue University Press Books

Germany’s acceptance of its direct responsibility for the Holocaust has strengthened its relationship with Israel and has led to a deep commitment to combat antisemitism and rebuild Jewish life in Germany. As we draw close to a time when there will be no more firsthand experience of the horrors of the Holocaust, there is great concern about what will happen when German responsibility turns into history. Will the present taboo against open antisemitism be lifted as collective memory fades? There are alarming signs of the rise of the far right, which includes blatantly antisemitic elements, already visible in public discourse. …

New Perspectives On Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, The Nazi Pogrom In Global Comparison, Wolf Gruner, Steven J. Ross

Purdue University Press Book Previews

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes …

Eva And Otto: Resistance, Refugees, And Love In The Time Of Hitler, Tom Pfister, Kathy Pfister, Peter Pfister

Purdue University Press Books

Eva and Otto is a true story about German opposition and resistance to Hitler as revealed through the early lives of Eva Lewinski Pfister (1910–1991) and Otto Pfister (1900–1985). It is an intimate and epic account of two Germans—Eva born Jewish, Otto born Catholic—who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940. After their improbable escapes from separate internment and imprisonment in Europe, Eva obtained refuge in America in October 1940 where she worked to rescue …

Finding Edith: Surviving The Holocaust In Plain Sight, Edith Mayer Cord

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Finding Edith: Surviving the Holocaust in Plain Sight is the coming-of-age story of a young Jewish girl chased in Europe during World War II. Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe. Edith was hunted in Western Europe and Vichy France, where she was hidden in plain sight, constantly afraid of discovery and denunciation. Forced to keep every thought to herself, Edith developed an intense inner life. After …

The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer And Militant Zionist, Julien Gorbach

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.

In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his …

Summer Haven: The Catskills, The Holocaust, And The Literary Imagination (Jews Of Russia & Eastern Europe And Their Legacy), Holli Levitsky

Faculty Pub Night

No abstract provided.

The Writers, Artists, Singers, And Musicians Of The National Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association (Omike), 1939–1944, Frederick Bondy

Purdue University Press Book Previews

In May 1938, Hungary passed anti-Semitic laws causing hundreds of Jewish artists to lose their jobs. In response, Budapest’s Jewish community leaders organized an Artistic Enterprise under the aegis of OMIKE Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület (Hungarian Jewish Education Association) to provide employment and livelihood for actors, singers, musicians, conductors, composers, writers, playwrights, painters, graphic artists, and sculptors.

Between 1939 and 1944, activities were centered in Goldmark Hall beside the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest. Hundreds of artists from all over Hungary took part in about one thousand performances, including plays, concerts, cabaret, ballet, operas, and operettas. These performances appealed …

A Boy In Hiding: Surviving The Nazis, Amsterdam 1940-1945, Stan Rubens

Zea E-Books Collection

A Boy in Hiding: Surviving the Nazis is a poignant, true-survival story of a young boy who hid for four years underground in Holland during World War II. A Boy in Hiding sheds a light on the difficult road that lay ahead for Anne Frank—had she survived. This book is written from the point of view of an eight-year-old boy growing up too fast during the five years of the war. Now, sixty years later, Rubens gives a voice to the young boy, who—despite the hard times and difficulties he encountered, never lost his positive view on life.

Sobrevivimos … Al Fin Hablo, Leon Malmed

Zea E-Books Collection

Esta es la historia real de Leon Malmed quien, junto a su hermana Rachel, escapó de Francia durante la época del Holocausto gracias a sus valientes y heroicos vecinos quienes, después de haber presenciado el arresto de los padres de nuestro protagonista en 1942, se ofrecieron a cuidarlo a él y a su hermana hasta que regresaran. Primero, los padres de Leon fueron llevados a Drancy, después a Auschwitz-Birkenau, y nunca volvieron. Mientras tanto sus vecinos, que vivían en el piso de abajo, Henri y Suzanne Ribouleau, los acogieron dándoles un hogar y una familia; protegiéndolos mientras la ocupación los …

We Survived … At Last I Speak, Leon Malmed

Zea E-Books Collection

This is Leon Malmed’s true story of his and his sister Rachel’s escape from the Holocaust in Occupied France. When their father and mother were arrested in 1942, their courageous and heroic French neighbors volunteered to watch their children until they returned. Leon’s parents were taken first to Drancy, then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they never returned. Meanwhile their downstairs neighbors, Henri and Suzanne Ribouleau, gave the children a home and family and sheltered them through subsequent roundups, threats, air raids, and the war’s privations. The courage, sympathy, and dedication of the Ribouleaus and others stand in strong contrast to the …

The Impact Of The Holocaust In America, Zev Garber

The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review

The contributions to this volume consider topics such as the immigrant experience in coming to America after the trauma of the Holocaust; how the Shoah has shaped more recent interpretation of the Hebrew Bible; the role that survivors have fulfilled in educating American youth not only about the Holocaust itself, but also about how values - especially in regard to tolerance - can and must be shaped by eye-witness testimony on the Shoah; the impact of Holocaust in film, especially in "third-generation" cinema; the issues and difficulties of presenting the Shoah in children's literature; the dialogue between Christians and Jews, …

Albert Einstein Letter To Lionel M. Ettlinger; 31 March 1940, Princeton., Albert Einstein

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

Albert Einstein, the renowned physicist and humanitarian, writes to Lionel M. Ettlinger in March of 1940, lamenting the present situation in Europe — and to thank him for the pipe he sent.