Book launch of Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany

Join the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung for the Johannesburg launch of Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany.

Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still understood mostly in terms of rare armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East, for example ghetto uprisings or partisan activities. Resisters is based on a broader definition and countless hitherto untapped sources, including local police and court records as well as video testimonies of survivors. Introducing five new categories of resistance, the book shows how between 1933 and 1945 Jews performed countless resistance acts in Nazi Germany proper, by destroying Nazi symbols, publicly protesting against the persecution, disobeying Nazi laws and local restrictions, and defending themselves from verbal insults as well as physical attacks. The fact that so many German Jewish women and men of all ages, educations and professions defied the Nazis obliterates the common view of the passivity of Jews under Nazi persecution. Their courageous acts, however, still need to be incorporated into the general narrative of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in general.

Wolf Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles since 2008 and the Founding Director of the USC Dornsife Centre for Advanced Genocide Research (previously USC Dornsife Shoah Foundation Centre for Advanced Genocide Research) since 2014. He is a specialist in the history of the Holocaust and in comparative genocide studies. He received his PhD in History from the Technical University Berlin in 1994 as well as his Habilitation in 2006. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Women’s Christian University Tokyo, and the Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, as well as the Desmond E. Lee Visiting Professor for Global Awareness at Webster University in St. Louis. He is an appointed member of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (since 2017), the executive committee of the Consortium of Higher Education Centres of Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies (since 2018), the International Academic Advisory board of the Centre for the Research on the Holocaust in Germany at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, Jerusalem (since 2012), and the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Genocide Research (since 2010). He is the author of ten books on the Holocaust, coedited four books, and has published almost 80 articles and book chapters.

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