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In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that weighed expediency over ethical considerations and ignored individual acts of moral courage. 

Maxine Lowy draws upon hundreds of first-person testimonials and archival resources to explore Chilean Jewish identity in the wake of Pinochet's coup, exposing the complex and sometimes contradictory development of collective traumatic memory and political sensibilities in an oppressive new context. Latent Memory points to processes of community gestures of moral reparation and signals the pathways to justice and healing associated with Shoah and the Jewish experience. Lowy asks how individuals and institutions may overcome fear, indifference, and convenience to take a stand even under intense political duress, posing questions applicable to any nation emerging from state repression.

As the best-selling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers could not put down. Uris's thirteen novels sold millions of copies, spent months on the best-seller lists, appeared in fifty languages, and have been adapted into equally popular movies and TV miniseries. Few other writers equaled Uris's fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and celebrity author tours. Beloved by the public, Uris was, not surprisingly, dismissed by literary critics. Until now, his own life—as full of drama as his fiction—has never been the subject of a book.

In Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, Ira Nadel traces Uris from his disruptive youth to his life-changing experiences as a marine in World War II. These experiences, coupled with Uris's embrace of his Judaism and desire to write, led to his unprecedented success and the lavish excesses of a career as a best-selling author. Nadel reveals that Uris lived the adventures he described, including his war experiences in the Pacific (Battle Cry), life-threatening travels in Israel (Exodus), visit to Communist Poland (Mila 18), libel trial in Britain (QB VII), and dangerous sojourn in fractious Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (Trinity). Nadel also demonstrates that Uris's talent for writing action-packed, yet thoroughly researched, novels meshed perfectly with the public's desire to revisit and understand the tumultuous events of recent history. This made him far more popular (and wealthy) than more literary authors, while paving the way for writers such as Irving Wallace and Tom Clancy.

A man who shares his name with a famous singer must grapple with his identity, purpose, and love.
 
The Leonard Cohen at the center of Leonard Cohen: A Novel is an everyman, a would-be artist, a would-be lover, a would-be tragic figure, yet a man haunted by the greatness of his namesake. He struggles to compete. He struggles to be more than a punchline in his own mind. He struggles, in particular, to write one song as great as the least of the great Leonard Cohen's songs.

At the center of Leonard's life is Daphne. In their meeting on a Greek island, a contemporary fable of Daphne and Apollo plays out. But even with Daphne, Leonard is shadowed by the other Leonard Cohen, whom he fears is the real Apollo. The ancient myth haunts the fated lovers, and the nobody Leonard Cohen’s life becomes at once a mystery, a miracle, and a myth on its own terms. 

Once upon a time, Apollo fell hard for Daphne, who turned herself into a laurel tree. No less a fate awaits the protagonists of this slender yet universal novel, where art, love, and fame all fatefully intertwine.

The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age challenges a number of key themes in Holocaust studies with new research. Essays in the section “Tropes Reconsidered” reevaluate foundational concepts such as Primo Levi’s gray zone and idea of the muselmann. The chapters in “Survival Strategies and Obstructions” use digital methodologies to examine mobility and space and their relationship to hiding, resistance, and emigration. Contributors to the final section, “Digital Methods, Digital Memory,” offer critical reflections on the utility of digital methods in scholarly, pedagogic, and public engagement with the Holocaust.

Although the chapters differ markedly in their embrace or eschewal of digital methods, they share several themes: a preoccupation with the experiences of persecution, escape, and resistance at different scales (individual, group, and systemic); methodological innovation through the adoption and tracking of micro- and mezzohistories of movement and displacement; varied approaches to the practice of Saul Friedländer’s “integrated history”; the mainstreaming of oral history; and the robust application of micro- and macrolevel approaches to the geographies of the Holocaust. Taken together, these chapters incorporate gender analysis, spatial thinking, and victim agency into Holocaust studies. In so doing, they move beyond existing notions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to portray the Holocaust as a complex and multilayered event.

The contributions to this volume not only indicate the intellectual vibrancy and diversity of cutting-edge research in Holocaust studies but also reflect multiple approaches to the necessary work of expanding the canon of research in the field and of adopting varied disciplinary perspectives, engaging with global perspectives as well as local studies.

This collection’s chapters manifest three broad categories: history, literature, and memory; at the same time, however, as the interdisciplinary nature of these chapters indicate, these categories should not be regarded as mutually exclusive or discrete. On the contrary, they overlap and intersect in compelling ways, demonstrating the dynamic character of contemporary Holocaust studies, which views history, narrative representation, and commemoration as mutually informative. Further, the contributors continue the recent trend in Holocaust studies whereby specific regional and national narratives are integrated into a more global approach to the event: Newer studies have continued to incorporate what was once termed the periphery into a more global examination of the experiences of Jewish refugees in flight to Latin America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, very specific local studies deepen our knowledge of the mechanics of genocide, along with the experiences of refugees in flight, and the subsequent dimensions of Holocaust memory and representation. 

Bringing forth new perspectives previously unrepresented in Holocaust studies

Lessons and Legacies, Volume XVI: Rethinking Paradigms does the difficult but crucial work of thinking through new methods and modes of representation that speak to where we find ourselves in Holocaust studies today, responding to—and developing new tools to analyze—the shifting shape of Holocaust memory: spatially, temporally, and in and across diverse media. The collection foregrounds the challenges visual sources pose to how we think about the Holocaust, including how it is represented differently in visual media, from photography to graphic novels, and establishes translation as a crucial concept for reframing Holocaust testimony and memory. The contributing authors also model ethical, nuanced ways to conduct comparative, connective work that challenges Eurocentric narratives of the Holocaust. The volume concludes with a section on memory work and activism that approaches the subject of post-1945 memory through different lenses to surface lesser-known aspects of Holocaust history.

Listening to Survivors presents the voices of nineteen Holocaust survivors and two witnesses who shared their personal experiences with audiences at Oregon State University over the past four decades as part of the university’s Holocaust Memorial Week observance. The speakers recount revolts in Nazi-run killing centers, intimate friendships with Anne Frank and her family, medical experiments endured at the hands of infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, and countless acts of defiance. Many of the individuals featured in this volume—including Eva Aigner, Les Aigner, Miriam Kominkowska Greenstein, Chella Velt Meekcoms Kryszek, and Alter Wiener—called Oregon home and served at the forefront of Holocaust commemoration in Oregon and public outreach to the state’s young people. By emphasizing the linkages between Oregon and the global tragedy of the Holocaust, this volume reaffirms the local and global relevance of efforts to prevent and redress persecution and mass violence against vulnerable populations. 
 
Historian Katherine Hubler has arranged these recollections thematically in chapters centered on discrimination, refuge, resistance, rescue, and transitional justice. These themes align with Oregon’s Holocaust and Genocide Education learning concepts, discussion questions accompany each chapter to facilitate use in classrooms, and the introduction situates the speakers’ diverse experiences within the broader context of World War Two and the Nazis’ genocidal project.
 
Intended to bring the history of the Holocaust to all Oregonians, Listening to Survivors honors the legacy of outreach work of local survivors and serves as a reminder of the state’s connection to the Holocaust and commitment to genocide education and prevention.
 

"Remember Lot’s wife," Jesus warned, yet the woman he refers to remains an enigmatic, nameless, speechless, biblical figure known only for being transformed into a pillar of salt. Who was she? What lessons were readers meant to take from her fate? Early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic interpreters, as well as readers today, have all wrestled with these questions. Josey Bridges Snyder analyzes examples from Second Temple literature, early rabbinic midrash, early Christian writings, and Islamic tradition to trace how the cultural, theological, and historical contexts of these interpreters influenced their understanding of the narrative. This book not only uncovers new insights into the ancient text and its many readers but reveals that interpretations are rarely as novel as they may seem.

A brilliant and engaging biography of one of the great modern Jewish thinkers.
 
Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) was one of the central figures of the Jewish cultural and intellectual renaissance in Weimar Germany. His masterwork, The Star of Redemption (1921), is a classic of existential thought and Jewish philosophy, and his considerable legacy also includes his collaboration with Martin Buber on a key translation of the Hebrew Bible into German and the establishment of an education center in Frankfurt that brought together the most important young German-Jewish intellectuals of its time.

Rosenzweig’s personal biography is no less fascinating than his ideas and accomplishments. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rosenzweig’s unpublished personal correspondence, Paul Mendes-Flohr skillfully weaves together the threads of Rosenzweig’s life to give us a moving portrait of this towering figure—from his near-conversion to Christianity to his tragic diagnosis with ALS. Mendes-Flohr also closely explores Rosenzweig’s relationship with Margrit Huessy, who was a vital intellectual partner for Rosenzweig, as well as a muse and lover. He worked out many of his ideas about love both in conversation and consort with her, and Mendes-Flohr shows the importance of intimacy—both romantic and platonic—in the development of Rosenzweig’s thought.
 
Love Is Strong as Death provides a unique and insightful look at one of the most important modern Jewish thinkers.