Indiana University Press blog

Reading selections for Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. To commemorate this occasion, we offer the following reading selections to further your understanding of the history of the Holocaust:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 - Volume II
Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe
Geoffrey P. Megargee, General Editor
Martin Dean, Volume Editor
Introduction by Christopher R. Browning
Read excerpt

Volume II offers a comprehensive account of how the Nazis conducted the Holocaust throughout the scattered towns and villages of Poland and the Soviet Union. It covers more than 1,150 sites, including both open and closed ghettos. This an indispensable reference work on the destroyed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.

Also available: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 - Volume I
Read excerpt

The End of the Holocaust
Alvin H. Rosenfeld
Read excerpt

"The End of the Holocaust is a model of critical intelligence, restrained in its judgments, never shrill or accusatory in its disagreements, always illuminating in its insights into the motives and achievements of the major Holocaust writers Rosenfeld discusses." —Forward

Last Folio

Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia

Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova

Photographs by Yuri Dojc
Read excerpt

"Books in these photographs . . . are possessed by spirits exorcised through Yuri Dojc's magical eye: as they disintegrate into dust, the camera illuminates how that moment of disintegration is also a moment of immense energy and movement, one last and glorious statement of defiance, resisting both death and oblivion." —Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Who Will Write Our History
Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive
Samuel D. Kassow
Read excerpt

"This may well be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read." —The New Republic

Who Will Write Our History tells the gripping story of Emanuel Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship and the collection of documents to resist Nazi oppression.

The Unknown Black Book
The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories
Edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman
Read excerpt

The Unknown Black Book provides a revelatory compilation of testimonies from Jews who survived open-air massacres and other atrocities carried out by the Germans and their allies in the occupied Soviet territories during World War II.

Author event: Alvin Rosenfeld to speak at the University of Minnesota

The End of the Holocaust author Alvin H. Rosenfeld will speak at the University of Minnesota on Sunday, April 15 at 7:30 p.m. as part of a symposium that will explore the mutation of academic ideals under National Socialism.

This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.

For more information, please visit the "Betrayal of the Humanities" homepage.

Book review: The End of Holocaust

"The End of the Holocaust is a stunning reconstruction of the way in which that event has lost much of its élan vital since 1945 because of diverse pressures." —Jewish Tribune 

Author event: Alvin Rosenfeld to speak about New-Antisemitism at Yale

Alvin Rosenfeld, author of The End of the Holocaust, will speak at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center Oct. 17 at 4 p.m. The topic of his talk will be “Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Approval: Two Sources of the New Anti-Semitism.” The lecture is co-sponsored by the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and the Whitney Humanities Center. For more information, visit the center's website.

Book review: The End of the Holocaust

"The End of the Holocaust is an illuminating exploration that offers a worried look at Holocaust representation in contemporary culture and politics, reminding us that the great works focus on the distinctive tragedy of extermination, killing, radical dehumanization, and continuing trauma." —H-Holocaust

Last Folio exhibit opens in Bloomington September 2

Last Folio: A Photographic Journey with Yuri Dojc opens Friday, September 2 at the Grunwald Gallery of Art (formerly the SoFA Gallery). This exhibit features stunning photographs of once-vibrant Jewish communities throughout Slovakia. Photographer Yuri Dojc will be in Bloomington for the opening of the exhibit along with Katya Krausova, who worked with Dojc on an accompanying book of photos from the exhibit, published this year by IU Press.

Several events are planned around the opening of the exhibit. A symposium on Last Folio will take place September 1 at the IU Cinema from 3 to 5 p.m. The symposium will begin with a screening of Katya Krausova's short documentary film, "The Last Folio: The Tales of Yuri's Pictures" followed by a panel discussion with Krausova, Dojc, and IU faculty members Ed Linenthal, Mark Roseman, Dov-Ber Kerler, and Jeff Veidlinger.

On September 2 at 5:30 p.m., Dojc and Krausova will participate in a discussion on "Art and Memory" at the Grunwald Gallery of Art. They will also sign copies of their Last Folio book from 7 to 8 p.m. during an opening reception at the gallery.

For more information on the exhibit and the events surrounding it, visit the gallery's website or read IU Media's news release.

Last Folio exhibit on display at the Grunwald Gallery this September

The Grunwald Gallery of Art will be exhibiting the work of photographer and IU Press author Yuri Dojc in a display entitled Last Folio: A Photographic Journey with Yuri Dojc. This exhibition will be on view Friday, September 2 through Saturday, October 1, 2011.

Accompanying the exhibit will be Dojc's book, Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia. The book includes portraits of aging Slovak Holocaust survivors and images of the poignant ruins of schools, synagogues, mikvahs, and cemeteries. With texts by Lucia Faltin, Katya Krausova, David G. Marwell, and Azar Nafisi, Last Folio presents a stirring tribute to a vanished culture.

Last Folio is the inaugural exhibition for the Grunwald Gallery and is made possible by a gift in memory of John Grunwald by Rita Grunwald.

Book reviews: The End of the Holocaust

"... an important and deeply sobering book ..." —Human Rights Service

"Alvin H. Rosenfeld has written an important book that deserves a wide audience, not only to help us maintain a clear picture of our troubled past, in order to come to terms with its historical reality—but indeed to help us avoid a future that will bring back the darkness and the fog." —New Compass

Six IU Press books recommended for public and secondary libraries

We are pleased to announce that six of our books were selected for this year's University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries. A popular and trusted acquisitions resource, the university press bibliography is the product of a longstanding and successful collaboration between the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), and the Public Library Association (PLA). The IUP titles are among 350 books by AAUP members included in this bibliography. Featuring many diverse subjects, the bibliography provides librarians with valuable scholarship to match any interest. Three of the IUP titles featured were given an "outstanding" rating, including:

Conversations with Great Teachers

“[A]n important reminder that all people have something to teach and everyone still has something to learn.” —Hilary Albert (PLA)

“This wonderful title is full of surprises for any reader interested in education in the broadest sense of the term.” —Judith Repman (AASL)

Life Lessons Through Storytelling

“I found [this book] very engaging. The basic idea of drawing children’s ideas out through storytelling may not be new, but discussing their ethics, getting them to think about right and wrong in the context of stories and their own communities can have such a lasting impact on how they grow as citizens.”—Hilary Albert (PLA)

Extraordinary Circumstances

“This was not only thoroughly researched but it was well written. The text actually reads more like a story than the chronicle of a war. ... This book is a great asset to any collection.”—Elizabeth Willoughby (AASL)

Other books listed in the bibliography are Wreck of the Carl D., Guard Wars, and Bush on the Home Front.

Book review: The End of the Holocaust

"Rosenfeld is never shrill and often eloquent. But his book, now the indispensable study of its subject, cannot be read with pleasure, even by people who believe that 'in the destruction of the wicked, there is joy.'” —Scholars for Peace in the Middle East