New Books in Genocide Studies

Yochai Ataria, an associate professor at Tel-Hai College and author of 'Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik: The Map and the Territory', dives into the profound impact of Holocaust survivors' narratives. He contrasts Levi's rational recounting of trauma with Ka-Tzetnik's intense emotional storytelling, revealing their shared mission to convey the horrors of concentration camps. Ataria discusses the moral complexities of survivor identities, the significance of memory in shaping cultural trauma, and the challenges of teaching this past to future generations.

Today I talked to Xabier Irujo about his book (co-authored with Queralt Solé) Nazi Juggernaut in the Basque Country and Catalonia (Center for Basque Studies, 2019)Hitler and Mussolini's decision to help General Franco with war materiel and troops brought war to the Basque Country and Catalonia. Between 1936 and 1939, the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria carried out a brutal campaign of terror bombings that resulted in thousands of air strikes against open cities. This caused innumerable casualties among the civilian population. Franco's victory in 1939 caused the exile of hundreds of thousands of Basque and Catalan civilians, but the beginning of World War Two and the subsequent occupation of the Northern Basque Country and Northern Catalonia by German troops gave rise to new forms of repression: concentration camps, forced labor, executions and imprisonment. As a consequence, the period from 1936 to 1945 is one of the bloodiest episodes in the contemporary history of Catalonia and the Basque Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell UP, 2022) tells the story of Alexander Laban Hinton's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton's attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony culminated in a direct exchange with Pol Pot's notorious right-hand man, Nuon Chea, who was engaged in genocide denial.Anthropological Witness looks at big questions about the ethical imperatives and epistemological assumptions involved in explanation and the role of the public scholar in addressing issues relating to truth, justice, social repair, and genocide. Hinton asks: Can scholars who serve as expert witnesses effectively contribute to international atrocity crimes tribunals where the focus is on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation? What does the answer to this question say more generally about academia and the public sphere? At a time when the world faces a multitude of challenges, the answers Hinton provides to such questions about public scholarship are urgent.Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Today I talked to Michael Eli Nutkiewicz about his translation A Ukrainian Chapter: A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir Of Sorrow (Slavica, 2022). Eli Gumener’s 1921 Yiddish memoir, A Ukrainian Chapter, is a rare historical source about relief work spanning the two most devastating years of the pogroms in the Russian Civil War. He concentrates on the collapse of Jewish communities in Podolia, a region in southwest Ukraine. Gumener worked for the major Russian and American organizations that were active in providing aid to Jewish victims during both World War I and the Russian Civil War. Thus, he presents a unique perspective on leaders, parties, and institutions struggling to respond to the suffering and dislocation that came with wild episodes of violence. This annotated translation serves as a roadmap for the reader by clarifying the social and political contexts in which the events took place. A Ukrainian Chapter is a contribution to the history of pogroms, relief work, and Jewish party politics, through the day-to-day experience of a witness “in the trenches.” Born in Marijampole (near Vilnius) in 1886 and trained for the law in St. Petersburg, Eli (Illia) Gumener (1886–1941?) was a representative and investigator for the Committee to Aid Jewish Pogrom Victims (EKOPO) and the Russian Red Cross. After the Civil War, he worked on behalf of Jewish war orphans for the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJC) in the Białystok region. A Ukrainian Chapter was published in Vilnius in 1921. In 1925 Gumener moved to Novogrudok, Poland (now in Belarus) where he continued to be engaged in communal affairs, including as a city councilman from 1929 to 1934. He and his wife and daughter were murdered during the Holocaust in late 1941 or early 1942. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Need help curating a list of Holocaust books for your students or library patrons? What’s on your shelf? What should be there? This podcast episode explores: The most commonly assigned Holocaust books. Why some of them are books you should never assign. Recommendations for books to assign, read, and share. Gaps in the literature. Gatekeepers of higher education. Susan’s wish-list. Our guest is: Susan Kusel, who is the Library Director at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Virginia. She is also an author, a children’s book consultant and a former independent bookstore buyer. She has served on multiple book award committees including the Caldecott Medal and as the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award. She is a former board member of the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut picture book, The Passover Guest won the Sydney Taylor Book Award.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Deborah Hopkinson, We Must Not Forget Dita Kraus, A Delayed Life: The True Story of the Librarian of Auschwitz Susan Kusel, The Passover Guest Primo Levi, The Periodic Table Doreen Rappaport, Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust David Safier, 28 Days: A Novel of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Hana Volavkova et al, I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 Liza Wiemer, The Assignment Elie Wiesel, Night Susan’s wish list The Blog: The Sydney Taylor Schooze The Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Book Award Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish a project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses have offered us a unique opportunity--a chance to see authors and editors in conversation with each other and themselves about the state and nature of Genocide Studies.Genocide: Key Themes (Oxford University Press, 2022) emerged out of an effort to update and slim down their earlier, larger volume The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. In the just more than a decade between the two, the field has pushed forward in a variety of directions.  Moses and Bloxham have used this opportunity to create a volume that interrogates both the field itself and the state of its emergence. Some of the chapters are revisions of essays originally written for the Handbook, allowing the authors to expand, reframe or even withdraw their original ideas. Others are commissioned for this volume and reflect the new directions taken over the past decade.It's a distinctive and compelling contribution to the field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood in Rhodes where she'd grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium.Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays over the course of six years that they would spend in each other's company. During these meetings Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possession in 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey--measured by both time and distance--of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival.Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time--and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (Simon and Schuster, 2022) is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship that develops between storyteller and listener as they explore the fundamental mystery of what it means to collect, share, and interpret the deepest truths of a life deeply lived.Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In March 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode, part two of a two-part series, Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination and the possible implications for Rohingya both within and outside post-coup Myanmar. Click here to listen to part one of the series covering the securitization of Rohingya and roots of the 2017 genocide.Kyaw Zeyar Win is a Project Coordinator at the International Republican Institute in Washington D.C. He is an expert in international relations and human rights with a focus on Myanmar. He holds a master’s in IR from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University where he was an Open Society Fellow. He is author of the chapter “Securitization of the Rohingya in Myanmar” from the book Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics. Terese Gagnon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen and the Nordic Institute of Asian studies researching Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty.You might also be interested in these related podcasts: --Karen Sanctuaries Memory, Biodiversity and Political Sovereignty--The Politics of Protest in Myanmar--What Remains: Textiles from Tuol SlengThe Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary - is it genocide or not? - a situation often influenced by powerful political pressures.Genocide addresses these tensions and tests the limits of the concept in cases ranging from the role of sexual violence during the Holocaust to state-induced mass starvation in Kazakh and Ukrainian history, while considering what the Armenian, Rwandan, and Burundi experiences reveal about the uses and pitfalls of reading history and conducting politics through the lens of genocide. Contributors examine the pressures that great powers have exerted in shaping the concept; the reaction Raphaël Lemkin, originator of the word “genocide,” had to the United Nations’ final resolution on the subject; France’s long-held choice not to use the concept of genocide in its courtrooms; the role of transformative social projects and use of genocide memory in politics; and the relation of genocide to mass violence targeting specific groups.Throughout, Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn edited volume Genocide: The Power and Problems of a Concept (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) offers innovative solutions to address the limitations of the genocide concept, while preserving its usefulness as an analytical framework.Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence.Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly?From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya’s generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present).This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies