New Books in Genocide Studies

I remember working on my master’s thesis while at Ohio State. Hour after hour after hour I labored-writing, rewriting, formatting. Then the day of the defense arrived. Ninety minutes later, I exited the room with my degree assured. And no one ever looked at the master’s thesis again. I suspect this is true with most theses. For some this is clearly justified. But many others, while not of the depth and scale of a dissertation, represent a great deal of original thought and analysis. Ugur Umit Ungor’s collection of essays titled Genocide: New Perspectives on its Causes, Courses and Consequences (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), offers a number of examples of this. The book is composed of essays that present the original ideas and conclusions of a number of the best students at NIOD. The collection is wide-ranging–representing a variety of disciplines and time periods. Ungor divides them broadly into three different areas–the causes, courses and consequences noted in the title. Almost any reader will find something in the book to interest and enlighten them. It’s a laudable project, one that I’m sure many people will read and remember. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

At least twice in past interview descriptions I’ve used the famous phrase attributed to Hitler: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” To be honest, I couldn’t have told you much more about the extent of German knowledge of the Armenian genocide and its aftermath. After reading Stefan Ihrig’s wonderful new book Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Harvard University Press, 2016), that’s no longer true. The book is a comprehensive and insightful look at what Germans knew about the Armenian genocide, when they knew it, what they wrote and said about, and how what they wrote and said mattered. It’s a wonderful book, full of colorful quotations and insightful asides. It’s important, of course, for people interested in Armenia and/or the Holocaust. But it’s equally important in suggesting the ways in which genocides do not happen in isolation and in suggesting our need to see the phenomenon globally rather than separately. And it reminds us that the suffering of genocide doesn’t end with the conclusion of the conflict, but lingers on, as do the disputes about what really happened.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality of my life, not reminders of the fact that Native Americans have lived in and with the presence of settlers for centuries. Andrew Woolford has done much to help me recognize and understand this. Woolford is one of the preeminent scholars on the relationship between “natives” and settlers in the United States and Canada. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices in considering whether this relationship should be called genocidal. In my discussion with him, we tried to get at the essence of his ideas by looking at three of his works. We begin with the volume of essays he co-edited with Alexander Hinton and Jeff Benvenuto, titled Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. The book collects the contributions of a variety of authors researching the issue. The essays generally offer focused examinations of specific issues of events. But the editors also offer valuable reflections on what we know and don’t know about the subject. It’s an outstanding resource for people interested in the question broadly. We then move on to Woolford’s own work, titled This Benevolent Experiment:Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).The book is a wonderful examination of the Indigenous school systems in Canada and the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Woolford extracts from his research a wonderful new metaphor to illustrate the way in which genocide worked in North America, one that has much broader utility in the field. And he offers a careful, well-reasoned explanation for why he thinks genocide is indeed the most appropriate term for the cultural and physical violent that characterized the period. Both books are excellent. Finally, while we didn’t have much time to address it specifically, Woolford edited a recent special edition of the Journal of Genocide Research focusing on the topic. It’s also a rich source of information and insight. Put together, the three works offer perhaps the best way into the growing field of genocide studies in North America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person’s fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg‘s new book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography (MacLehose Press, 2016). A diplomatic envoy in Hungary, Wallenberg has been lauded throughout the world for his efforts to save Jews living during World War II. But, his fate following his arrest in 1945 remains unknown and, as a result, his story has no clear end. In her excellent biography, Carlberg excavates the details of Wallenberg’s end, but she also digs deeply into the story of his life- shedding light upon a time that is often eclipsed by all that came after. It’s a time which is essential to any understanding of the man Wallenberg was,the course he pursued, and the hero he’s remembered as.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellent new book Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). What Brown-Fleming makes clear in her work is that the archive is far richer and more interesting than that. The book is partly an extended discussion of the contents of the archive. But Brown-Fleming’s goals are broader than this. She hopes to help people recognize the new kinds of research questions the archive makes it possible to ask and answer. She tries to help researchers imagine how they might employ Big Data approaches to open new vistas on old questions. And she hopes to give people personal examples of the stakes of these questions by offering specific examples of stories, tragedies and conflicts drawn from the archive itself. Anyone who is interested in research about the Holocaust should read this book. And if you don’t do primary research, you should still read it–to get a better sense of how research is done, to get a better sense of places where our understanding of the Holocaust is still patchy, and to get a better understanding of one of the most important postwar institutions that dealt with refugees and displaced people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject. Joshua Zimmerman‘s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) shows how important and valuable books that adopt the latter approach can be. The book is an exceptionally rich account of the attitudes, politics, policies and actions of the Polish Underground regarding Polish Jews during the Second World War. Zimmerman, Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, spent years exploring archives, memoirs and secondary sources in preparing the book. Nearly every page of the book displays this research, with extensive quotes from newspapers, internal communications and leaders within the army. Zimmerman is well-aware of the historical and political stakes involved in his question. His answers are careful, nuanced and balanced. I can imagine people disagreeing with his conclusions (although I personally am convinced), but it’s hard to imagine a more thorough attempt to approach the question. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the interaction of Polish Jews and Polish institutions and individuals during the war. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. His research and teaching concentrates on the history of violence and human rights, focusing especially on the history of genocide.  His writing centers around a pedagogy titled Reacting to the Past.  Here he has written, among others, The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. He can be reached at mcfallk@newmanu.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels.” Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It, and Joe Sacco’s series Palestine, but she also introduces us to the long history of hand-drawn documentation of war-time trauma dating to Goya and Callot. Chute treats comics as a serious literary form that is especially efficacious for representing the act of witness-to-war and those who witness. It is through the power of graphic illustration combined with the written word–the comics-form–that the otherwise unspeakable atrocities of modern war can be conveyed. The book also serves as a primer to the language of comics–words like “gutter” and “tier”–and the craft of decoding comics as practiced by scholars such as Chute. In this interview Chute responded to questions about her path into comics as an academic pursuit, her thoughts on the newest trends in documentary comics, and her views from the college classroom on the pedagogy of comics. Jerry Lembcke can be reached at jlembcke@holycross.edu, Ellis Jones at ejones@holycross.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In his book, In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama’s Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust (University of Alabama Press, 2014), Dan J. Puckett, Associate Professor of History at Troy University, traces how Alabama’s Jews overcame community divisions to work together on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust.  Utilizing a variety of archival sources, Puckett shows how Alabama’s Jews lobbied policymakers and community leaders across the state and the nation in support of their cause.  The story helps us think about the regional importance of the South in American Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). He does so by boldly arguing that we don’t really understand what happened during the Holocaust. He argues in favor of an emphasis on ideology with Adolf Hitler at the center. But he also stresses the importance of the experience of occupation and the role of state structures, incentives and punishments. It was, he suggests, the persistence or disappearance of states that made all the difference in the way the Holocaust emerged over time. Because of our misunderstanding of the nature of the Holocaust, we’ve misunderstood the lessons that it should teach us. Because the world of our time rhymes with that of the Holocaust, this misunderstanding poses real threats to our world. It’s a tremendous book, fully worth of the extensive praise it has received. It will no doubt lead to many conversations among holocaust and genocide scholars alike. We only had time to touch on the big themes of the book in this interview. Hopefully you’ll get a feel for the flavor of his argument and why it’s so challenging to the discipline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Anniversaries are funny things. Sometimes, as with the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, they are accompanied by a flood of discussion and debate.  Other times they are allowed to pass in silence. The hundredth year anniversary of the Genocide of the Armenians has gotten somewhat lost amidst the outpouring of books about the war.  Still, we’ve seen a small number of excellent historical studies, mostly focused on the memory of the event. Ron Suny’s recent book ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’:  A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015) offers a different kind of contribution.  Suny offers a deep history of the Armenian genocide.  It is simultaneously a careful explication of how and why the Armenians were killed and a carefully-reasoned engagement with the prevailing attempts to explain the genocide. It’s a book everyone who cares about the genocide needs to read.  Suny writes well and has an eye for quotes both pithy and grim.  He fits well into the new imperial turn of historiography, seeing the emergence of the nation as a locus of identity that competed with and threatened more traditional, imperial states (for those of you interested in this, see my interview with Mark Levene).   And he masters the tricky task of balancing narration and analysis.  It’s a wonderful addition to our knowledge of the genocide, 100 years on.  It well deserves to reach a wide audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies