New Perspectives on Kristallnacht

After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison

Steven J. Ross

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781557538703
• eBook ISBN: 9781612496160
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes a series of articles presented at an international conference titled "New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison." Assessing events 80 years after the violent anti-Jewish pogrom of 1938, contributors to this volume offer new cutting-edge scholarship on the event and its repercussions. Contributors include scholars from the United States, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom who represent a wide variety of disciplines, including history, political science, and Jewish and media studies. Their essays discuss reactions to the pogrom by victims and witnesses inside Nazi Germany as well as by foreign journalists, diplomats, Jewish organizations, and Jewish print media. Several contributors to the volume analyze postwar narratives of and global comparisons to Kristallnacht, with the aim of situating this anti-Jewish pogrom in its historical context, as well as its place in world history.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editorial Introduction: by Wolf Gruner and Steven J. Ross
• Chapter 1: Kristallnacht—Pogrom—State Terror: A Terminological Reflection: by Ulrich Baumann and François Guesnet
• Chapter 2: “Worse Than Vandals.” The Mass Destruction of Jewish Homes and Jewish Responses during the 1938 Pogrom: by Wolf Gruner
• Chapter 3: A Question of Gender! Spaces of Violence and Reactions to Kristallnacht in Jewish-Gentile Families: by Maximilian Strnad
• Chapter 4: Social Relations and Bystander Responses to Violence: Kristallnacht November 1938: by Mary Fulbrook
• Chapter 5: A Scream, Then Silence. Kristallnacht and the American Journalists in Nazi Germany: The “Night of Broken Glass” as an Unwanted Transnational Media Event: by Norman Domeier
• Chapter 6: Journalism as a Weapon: Jewish Journalists from Warsaw and the Production of Knowledge during Hitler’s Rise to Power in 1933 and the November Pogroms in 1938.: by Anne-Christin Klotz
• Chapter 7: What Did Soviet Jews Make of Kristallnacht? The Nazi Threat in the Soviet Press: by Jeffrey Koerber
• Chapter 8: The Absence of “Kristallnacht” and Its Aftermath in BBC German-language Broadcasts during 1938–1939: by Stephanie Seul
• Chapter 9: Orthodox Jewish Reflective Responses to Kristallnacht: by Gershon Greenberg
• Chapter 10: 1938: American Jews Respond to a Very Bad Year: by Hasia Diner
• Chapter 11: The Ambiguous Legacy of Kristallnacht: Nazis, Jewish Resistors, and Anti-Semitism in Los Angeles: by Steven J. Ross
• Chapter 12: Jewish Anti-Fascism? “Kristallnacht” Remembrance in the GDR between Propaganda and Jewish Self-Assertion: by Alexander Walther
• Chapter 13: “Kristallnacht in Tel Aviv”: Nazi Associations in the Contemporary Israeli Socio-Political Debate: by Liat Steir-Livny
• Chapter 14: The Kristallnacht Paradigm in Narratives by Survivors of the Rwandan and Rohingya Genocides: by Nathalie Ségeral
• Chapter 15: The Long Shadow of the “Kristallnacht” on the “Gujarat Pogrom” in India? A Comparative Analysis: by Baijayanti Roy
• About the Contributors
• The USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life