Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies

Description

This volume provides an in-depth discussion of Saul Friedlander's landmark two-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews. It brings together a range of internationally acclaimed historians to address the manifold conceptual and historiographical issues raised in Friedlander's monumental work. It includes a major essay by Friedlander himself on the challenges of producing an integrated history of the Holocaust. The aim of this book is not simply to evaluate Friedlander's work on its own merits, but rather to use his text as a means of exploring the contours and future of Holocaust historiography. The central concern is to situate his work within the broader terrain of Holocaust studies and European history, as well as to explore the ways in which his book opens up new directions in the knowledge, study and understanding of the Shoah in particular and twentieth century genocide in general.

Christian Wiese holds the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the editor, together with Cornelia Wilhelm, of American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? (Bloomsbury, 2016). Paul Betts is Reader in History at the University of Sussex. His publications include Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth Century Germany (with Alon Confino and Dirk Schumann, 2008).

This collection of essays provides an exceptional compendium of informed and thought-provoking commentaries both justifiably honoring and critically assessing a masterwork of history, memory, and mourning that will, for the foreseeable future, be crucial in shaping the study and prompting newer understandings of the "final solution" and extreme historical processes in general. The reader...will be consistently challenged to rethink pre-existing approaches and interpretations. -- Dominick LaCapra, Bryce and Edith M.Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies, Cornell University Saul Friedlander is rightly regarded as one of the very most important scholars of the Holocaust, a superb narrative historian and a hugely sensitive theoretician of his discipline. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts are to be congratulated on constructing a fitting monument to his influence, bringing together a wonderful cast of scholars who have achieved prominence in their own right...Wide-ranging and intelligent, the volume is coherent and its essays concise: it demands a wide audience because it will benefit a spectrum of disciplines, and readers from the uninitiated to the expert. -- Donald Bloxham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Edinburgh, UK 'This is a rich collection on the state of Holocaust studies.' -- thejc.com