#holocaust and genocide studies

[notaplaceofhonour]

Gentile leftists, this is a PSA, and I am begging you to listen. Sharing claims that Jews aren’t indigenous to the land of Israel, that Jews don’t come from the Middle East, and/or that the Zionist movement wasn’t created in response to centuries of antisemitism & genocide is fringe revisionist history with a long antisemitic history. These aren’t anti-imperialist or anti-colonial stances. They are just antisemitic conspiracy theories.

And on the flip side, acknowledging the simple fact that Jews are indigenous to the region currently occupied by Israel & Palestine does not imply any opinion about the modern states of Israel & Palestine, their governments, or the conflict in the region. This post is not voicing support for Zionism or the state of Israel. This is literally just historical fact: both Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to the region where modern day Israel & Palestine are.

If you make this about the politics or conflicts of the modern states of Israel or Palestine—if you comment or send me asks to that effect—you will be blocked.

[burgundysludge]

Life update:

I started heavily participating at temple again. I’m now volunteering there on Friday afternoons to prepare food for oneg after services. I’ve made some good friends. We’re getting a new rabbi in July. Haven’t met him yet, but have met his wife, father-in-law, and kids, and they’re all cool.

I’m almost done writing my masters thesis. I sent in a draft today actually, and I’m supposed to be defending it end of June/early July. So I’ll be graduating in August! This is great but also sucks because I’ll be needing a new job. My part time gig and living week to week isn’t gonna work forever. I’m really hoping to find a job in holocaust history or history in general. Don’t have the qualifications to teach and not sure I wanna teach anyways. Have been scouring the internet for jobs and haven’t found too much. I currently live in Omaha, NE, but I am open to leaving. If I move, it would have to be on the East Coast or New Orleans or Atlanta, so I can stay closer to family. Anyone magically happen to have a Holocaust history position they’re needing to fill???? Lol

[historicity-was-already-taken]

someone in my circle said the holocaust was the biggest genocide in history and I'm like? was it? and by what metric? body count? effect on european history?

Such a vague hyperbolic statement regardless

Look dude, this is ask giving Holocaust denial. And after all the shit I’ve put up with on this website since October, I don’t trust that you’re not trolling me.

Hitler was directly responsible for the murder of approximately six million Jews across Eurasia and Northern Africa. It was and still is the largest, most industrialized, most effectively, bureaucratically organized genocide in history.

But also, and most importantly, it’s not a contest! All genocide is bad! It’s not like The Jews (tm) are winning anything over here by having a claim to the “biggest” genocide. We lost millions of our own and saw our ancient civilizations, languages, and cultures across Eurasia and Northern Africa destroyed, probably forever, as a direct result of this cataclysmic event you’re so bothered by.

Also, read this post, it might help you work out some of your….weird attitude here:

[notetaeker]

Raz Segal is an Israeli historian residing in the United States who directs the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Stockton University.

[article]

[koshka-sova]

it's absolutely insidious that zionism uses judaism as a shield and motive for their colonial actions. isnt it so horrible that they can villify any opposition by labelling them antesemitic, when we've seen jews openly deny zionist values as equal to that of jewish ones

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Mary Chastain 

The University of Minnesota is in hot water after it appointed an anti-Zionist as director of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Raz Segal worked as a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.

But Segal has spent his career bashing Israel, equating everything it has done to survive and defend itself as genocide.

Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat resigned from the department’s advisory board in protest of Segal’s appointment:

“Dr. Segal has positioned himself on an extreme end of the political and ideological spectrum with his publications on Israel and Gaza, including an essay in which he accused Israel of genocide a week after the October 7 terrorist attacks,” Painter wrote in her Friday night resignation email to Provost Rachel Croson and Interim President Jeff Ettinger. “The CHGS director is ideally a scholar whose principal area of research and public commentary is the Holocaust itself, and certainly should not be an individual publicly identified with extremist positions on the present Middle East war,” she wrote. “We need a center director who will bring our community together to understand how the Holocaust and other genocides occurred, not someone who blames Israel for the rape and murder of 1,200 civilians, and kidnapping of hundreds more.”

Six days after the October 7 massacre, Segal wrote “A Textbook Case of Genocide” in Jewish Currents.

You’d think it’s a piece about the massacre, describing it as the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Nope!

The piece is a sympathetic piece towards Gaza, criticizing Israel’s treatment of it. In other words, “Can you blame Hamas for attacking, murdering, and kidnapping Jews?” He also brags about his anti-Zionist studies and works throughout his career.

Israel defending itself is textbook genocide.

[musings-of-a-lit-student]

Between The Lines

When you read literature you get to see the work of someone else, and interpret it. Our experiences shape our understanding of people relationships. The same way we note the information from newspapers, facts like those influence how we read other forms of media like reels, or videos.

Acknowledging the importance of absorbing information we come in contact with and the way it influences what we read in the future plays a big part in how we see the world. Maus is perhaps my favourite books simply for way Spiegelman encourages us to question what's going on at each point of the work.

The media we consume is important because be it the news or stories, we note that someone has an intent behind the things they say. Just as Vladek presents himself as more preferable in his retelling, we see Spiegelman discredit himself in order to sate his guilt. Maus is the perfect example of why things are shown the way they are, and it encourages us to question the motives of the writers.

When you read a news article, the writers may want to influence you in thinking poorly about one country, or candidate, or procedure. Even in this day and age, propaganda can be widespread, and it was often used in the wars to boost morale, sharing selective information about victories and less information about defeats.

Remembering that all the media you consume has a secondary purpose is important. Be it Tiktok- where people want to monetise their views, or movies where certain thoughts are propositioned. In analysing this book, I don't just hope to point out cool facts, and techniques used, but rather encourage you to consider the motivations for authorial choices in a narrative.

Crash Course Series

[withbriefthanksgiving]

Disability in Nazi Germany was portrayed primarily as a financial concern, and it was fundamentally a question of economic utility that lead to the program of extermination in 1939. However, it was the particular ideology of racial hygiene that provided the basis for the euthanasia program. The ideological justification for euthanasia in Nazi Germany has its roots in the eugenic science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

[…]

These racial hygiene precepts were also at the heart of Nazi anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitic discourse shares commonalities with that surrounding disability in Nazi Germany. Nazi racial hygiene has its origins in the radicalization of a distinctly German eugenics that was intertwined with Völkisch ideals and Aryan mysticism to embody a pseudo-science into which biology emerged as a religious idealization. Under this idealization, the disabled were depicted as a malevolent and costly sickness in the German body politic for which the state was obliged to provide a remedy.

—Jill Mitchell Nielsen, “Ballast Existences”: the Disabled, Jews and Nazi Genocide, 2012, Chapter 2: Ideological and Economic Dimensions of the Construction of Disability in Nazi Germany

Emphasis added (bolding) is my own.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

WPTV is learning more about some of the social studies textbooks the Florida Department of Education did not recommend for students.

Last week, WPTV education reporter Stephanie Susskind told you about 66 books that were accepted or modified to meet state approval. Now we've uncovered that, of the dozens rejected, two of them were for high school Holocaust education classes.

33 social studies textbooks submitted for review to the Florida Department of Education were rejected for not meeting state standards. Those textbooks cover everything from civics to financial literacy to the Holocaust.

Marc Hopin leads the Alpert Jewish Family Service in West Palm Beach, providing care to people throughout the community, including 200 Holocaust survivors. He said highlighting that point in history is critical to prevent it from happening again.

"The Holocaust, it didn't start with guns and death camps. It started with words. It started with, sadly, some of the words we are hearing in Palm Beach County today. Some of these antisemitic leaflets and projections of swastikas," Hopin said.

Hopin is impressed with the level of Holocaust education in Palm Beach County schools. "We are asked all the time by high schools and sometimes elementary schools, can we bring a survivor to speak to the students? And the survivors love it," Hopin said.

But the Florida Department of Education brought some new Holocaust educational material into question as it adopts new social studies textbooks.

Last week, the state released several examples of textbook material that was rejected, including a description of the Black Lives Matter movement.

While we don't know exactly what was in the Holocaust textbooks that landed them on the not recommended list, the state said the "History of the Holocaust" book received a 3.7 score out of 5 for aligning with subject specific standards. A book needs at least a 4 to be accepted.

A textbook titled "Modern Genocide" received a 2 out of 5.

"There are many textbooks and other approved instructional materials that support our efforts to make sure our students never forget about the horrific annihilation of Jews by Nazi Germany," said Alex Lanfranconi, the director of communications of the Florida Department of Education, in a written statement to WPTV.

Lanfranconi added that Florida requires instruction on the Holocaust for all students beginning in fifth grade.

According to Lanfranconi, "reviewers evaluate each instructional material based on its alignment to state standards," and "this process ensures instructional materials on the adoption list are of the highest quality and align to Florida's state academic standards."

"Florida has many materials and resources available to support high-quality teaching of Holocaust education, including comprehensive Holocaust education standards," Lanfranconi said. "The textbooks are evaluated based on these standards. If the activities and lessons within a textbook do not help students learn the content and master the standards, then the textbook would receive a low rating for standards alignment, as did the two textbooks in question."

"I would hope that at the end of the day — and I don't know when that day is — that we have enough Holocaust education materials and a way of presenting it to put some of the other issues aside," Hopin said.

Hopin added that while the books are important, there's no substitute for hearing from someone who survived it all first-hand.

"As much as we can offer opportunities to have survivors come and present, we should be trying to do that. We're running out of time," Hopin said.

The Florida Department of Education said it's working with the publishers to address concerns so the books can be added to the adopted list.

A bill signed in 2020 also designated the second week in November as "Holocaust Education Week" in Florida schools.

[oneshortdamnfuse]

One of many pieces of information rarely discussed that has stuck with me in studying the Holocaust in a literacy class is that people who survived the death camps often did not survive starvation. It is very difficult for a severely malnourished body to recover from starvation. A severely malnourished body will struggle to process food at all, and many people die in the process of “refeeding.” This is called refeeding syndrome for this reason. Reintroducing food can and often is fatal without careful, medical guidance.

Starvation is one of the most common and effective forms of genocide. What makes it effective is that past a certain point, even if aid has been delivered, it is not enough to save someone from death by starvation. What also makes it effective is that withholding food is viewed as a passive consequence of political turmoil rather than an intentional act of violence among a people. You will see more people die from starvation in genocides across history because it is an effective way to kill many people without the use of state resources.

The starvation of Gaza is intentional. The United States and Israel may gesture that they are delivering or allowing aid into Gaza, but in reality they are active participants in the starvation of Gaza by destroying medical infrastructure, limiting the amount of aid “allowed” in, and blocking aid trucks from entering. Throwing food into Gaza by airdrop at this point in the genocide will not be enough without medical infrastructure to refeed a severely malnourished population. Many will die anyways. Many have already.

[umabloomer]

I got a job at a Ukrainian museum.

On the first day someone asks me if I have any Ukrainian heritage. I say I had ancestors from Odesa, but they were Jewish, so they weren’t considered Ukrainian, and they wouldn’t have considered themselves Ukrainian. My job is every day I go through boxes of Ukrainian textiles and I write a physical description, take measurements, take photographs, and upload everything into the database. I look up “Jewish” in the database and there is no result. 

Some objects have no context at all, some come with handwritten notes or related documents. I look at thick hand-spun, hand-woven linen heavy with embroidery. Embroidery they say can take a year or more. I think of someone dressed for a wedding in their best clothes they made with their own hands. Some shirts were donated with photographs of the original owners dressed in them, for a dance at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, in 1935. I handle the pieces carefully, looking at how they fit the men in the photos, and how they look almost a hundred years later packed in acid-free tissue. One of the men died a few years later, in the war. He was younger than I am now. The military archive has more photographs of him with his mother, his father, his fiancé. I take care in writing the catalogue entry, breathing in the history, getting tearful. 

I imagine people dressed in their best shirts at Easter, going around town in their best shirts burning the houses of Jews, in their best shirts, killing Jews. A shirt with dense embroidery all over the sleeves and chest has a note that says it is from Husiatyn. I look it up and find that it was largely a Jewish town, and Ukrainians lived in the outskirts. There is a fortress synagogue from the Renaissance period, now abandoned. 

When my partner Aaron visits I take him to an event at the museum where a man shows his collection of over fifty musical instruments from Ukraine, and he plays each one. Children are seated on the floor at the front. We’re standing in a corner, the room full of Ukrainians, very aware that we look like Jews, but not sure if anyone recognizes what that looks like anymore. Aaron gets emotional over a song played on the bandura. 

A note with a dress says it came from the Buchach region. I find a story of Jewish life in Buchach in the early twentieth century, preparing to flee as the Nazis take over. I cry over this.

I’m cataloguing a set of commemorative ribbons that were placed on the grave of a Ukrainian Nationalist leader, Yevhen Konovalets, after he was assassinated. The ribbons were collected and stored by another Nationalist, Andriy Melnyk, who took over leadership after Konovalets’ death. The ribbons are painted or embroidered with messages honouring the dead politician. I start to recognize the word for “leader”, the Cyrillic letters which make up the name of the colonel, the letters “OYH” which stand for Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN in English). The OUN played a big part in the Lviv pogroms in 1941, I learn. The Wikipedia article has a black and white image of a woman in her underwear, running in terror from a man and a young boy carrying a stick of wood. The woman’s face is dark, her nose may be bleeding. Her underwear is torn, her breast exposed. I’m measuring, photographing, recording the stains and loose threads in the banners that honour men who would have done this to me. 

Every day I can’t stop looking at my phone, looking up the news from Gaza, tapping through Instagram stories that show what the news won’t. Half my family won’t talk to the other half, after I share an article by a scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, who says Israel is committing a genocide. My dad makes a comment that compares Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. This gets him in trouble. My aunt says I must have learned this antisemitism at university, but there is no excuse for my dad. 

This morning I see images from Israeli attacks in the West Bank, where they are not at war. There are naked bodies on the dusty ground. I’m not sure if they are alive. This is what I think of when I see the image from the Lviv pogrom. If what it means for Jews to be safe from oppression is to become the oppressor, I don’t want safety. I don’t want to speak about Jews as if we are one People, because I have so little in common with those in green uniforms and tanks. I am called a self-hating Jew but I think I am a self-reflecting Jew.

I don’t know how to articulate how it feels to be handling objects which remind me of Jewish traumas I inherited only from history classes and books. Textiles hold evidence of the bodies that made them and used them. I measure the waist of a skirt and notice that it is the same as my waist size. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Jewish homes during pogroms. I think of clothing and textiles that were looted from Palestinian homes during the ongoing Nakba. Clothes hold the shape of the body that once dressed in them. Sometimes there are tears, mends, stains. I am rummaging through personal belongings in my nitrile gloves. 

I am hands-on learning about the violence caused by Ukrainian Nationalism while more than nine thousand Palestinians have been killed by the State of Israel in three weeks, not to mention all those who have been killed in the last seventy-five years of occupation, in the name of the Jewish Nation, the Jewish People — me? If we (and I am hesitant to say “we”) learned anything from the centuries of being killed, it was how to kill. This should not have been the lesson learned. Zionism wants us to feel constantly like the victims, like we need to defend ourself, like violence is necessary, inevitable. I need community that believes in freedom for all, not just our own People. I need the half of my family who believes in this necessary “self-defence” to remember our history, and not just the one that ends happily ever after with the creation of the State of Israel. Genocide should not be this controversial. We should not be okay with this. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and keep cataloguing banners that honour the leader of an organization which led pogroms. I will keep checking the news, crying into my phone, coordinating with organizers about our next actions, grappling with how we can be a tiny part in ending this genocide that the world won’t acknowledge, out of guilt over the ones it ignored long ago. 

[soon-palestine]

In a statement that was shared with The Nation, a group of 25 HLR editors expressed their concerns about the decision. “At a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication,” they wrote. “The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision. We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. “ When asked for comment, the leadership of the Harvard Law Review referred The Nation to a message posted on the journal’s website. “Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece…” the note began. ”Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors. A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.” Today, The Nation is sharing the piece that the Harvard Law Review refused to run. Some may claim that the invocation of genocide, especially in Gaza, is fraught. But does one have to wait for a genocide to be successfully completed to name it? This logic contributes to the politics of denial. When it comes to Gaza, there is a sense of moral hypocrisy that undergirds Western epistemological approaches, one which mutes the ability to name the violence inflicted upon Palestinians. But naming injustice is crucial to claiming justice. If the international community takes its crimes seriously, then the discussion about the unfolding genocide in Gaza is not a matter of mere semantics. The UN Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as certain acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These acts include “killing members of a protected group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Numerous statements made by top Israeli politicians affirm their intentions. There is a forming consensus among leading scholars in the field of genocide studies that “these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent,” as Omer Bartov, an authority in the field, writes. More importantly, genocide is the material reality of Palestinians in Gaza: an entrapped, displaced, starved, water-deprived population of 2.3 million facing massive bombardments and a carnage in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Over 11,000 people have already been killed. That is one person out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands are injured, and over 45% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. The United Nations Secretary General said that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children,” but a cessation of the carnage—a ceasefire—remains elusive. Israel continues to blatantly violate international law: dropping white phosphorus from the sky, dispersing death in all directions, shedding blood, shelling neighborhoods, striking schools, hospitals, and universities, bombing churches and mosques, wiping out families, and ethnically cleansing an entire region in both callous and systemic manner. What do you call this? The Center for Constitutional Rights issued a thorough, 44-page, factual and legal analysis, asserting that “there is a plausible and credible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust and genocide studies, calls the situation in Gaza “a textbook case of Genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”

[historicity-was-already-taken]

hi! on the historical mystery poll you mentioned a difference between mass murder vs ethnic cleansing re: the Final Solution - what is the difference? thanks and thanks for the public history work you do!

Hi! Thank you for your kind words.

Ethnic cleansing is the forced removal of an ethnic minority from a region/country, and its forced settlement in another area. While the end goal of ethnic cleansing, ostensibly, is not mass murder, the power perpetrating the ethnic cleansing is generally unbothered by any deaths which take place during or as a result of the ethnic cleansing process.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis considered having the Jews deported to Madagascar and Siberia at various intervals. The Madagascar plan failed because the Nazis could not defeat the British Empire: the power which controlled the seas. As for Siberia, first Stalin told Hitler that he couldn't deport all of the Reich's Jews into the USSR, and then the Nazis failed to conquer the USSR within three months of June 22, 1941. Meaning, that they still had nowhere to send their unwanted Jews. As a result of the failure of his plans for ethnically cleansing the Jews from Europe, Hitler determined that the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem was to be one of mass murder, or genocide.

Now, ethnic cleansing can often act as a shield for what is actually genocide. This took place during the Armenian genocide, and the Nazis used the language of "population resettlement," ie, ethnic cleansing, long after the first extermination camps became operational.

There are some instances of what we can term a "long genocide," such as Indonesian treatment of the indigenous population of West Papua since 1962. "Long genocides" in active conflict zones can involve ethnic cleansing and mass murder; sometimes at the same time, sometimes separately, and sometimes after long periods of inaction.

Let me know if you have follow-up questions!

[determinate-negation]

the amount of completely inaccurate and borderline offensive versions of holocaust history ive seen lately, mostly for the repulsive purpose of defending western civilization, makes me feel like physically sick sometimes lmao. i can not believe i just saw someone say that unlike other genocides there were no economic incentives for the holocaust. im going to fucking scream. i hate to be this way but please if you never fucking studied this just shut the fuck up. cause its really obvious a lot of you guys havent. jsyk i think maybe around 15% or less of property and assets stolen from jews was ever returned

[pwrn51]

What was the connection to Ukraine

  Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Department of History at Brown University in  Rhode Island, a Historian, Speaker, Writer, and Author of several books. Dr.Omer Bartov discusses his new book, “The Butterfly and The Axe”. Omer Bartov discusses the book cover, the significance of the title, his writing process, and why he wrote the book which is…

[ahaura]

some quick resources with vital information and context about or related to Palestine (compiled Oct. 15)

[Video] Why Israel Deliberately Targets Civilians

[Thread] Zachary Foster, a Ph.d historian of Palestine, posted about the real history of Hamas

[Video] Double Down News covering the myth of "self defense"

[Video] Mohammed El-Kurd on 75 years of violence and oppression

[Thread] Abby Martin debunks the "human shield" excuse used by Israel to bomb civilians

[Video] Mohammed El-Kurd on media literacy, "DO NOT BE COMPLICIT IN GENOCIDE"

[Article] "Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed." - Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, in @JewishCurrents.

[Video] Mohammed El-Kurd on ABCNews

[Tweet] Reminder that just a few months ago Netanyahu brought a map to the UN of the “New Middle East” that effectively showed Israel annexing all of Palestine.

[Video] Michael Brooks breaking down how the situation with Palestine and Israel is "not complex"

[Video] Paul Murphy, Irish Parliment Member for People Before Profit, on Israel and Gaza

[Statistics] The Human Cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

[Video] Husam Zomlot: “It’s the Palestinians that are always expected to condemn themselves.”

[Map] An interactive map that details the history of "Conquer and divide", from 1967 onwards, via B'Tselem.

[Documentary] The Actions of Settlers in Hebron (Tel Rumeida)

[Video] Former CIA admit to lying about atrocities committed by Cubans. They admit they didn't know of a single atrocity done by the Cubans. "It was pure raw false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast."

[Documentary] Gaza Fights For Freedom (covers the IDF assassinating and maiming Palestinians in the peaceful March for Return in 2019)

[Video] Ghassan Kanafani’s famous interview

[Documentary] How Palestinians were expelled from their homes