The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust

The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust identifies the Yiddish historians who created a distinctively Jewish approach to writing Holocaust history in the early years following World War II.Author Mark L. Smith explains that these scholars survived the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe, yet they have not previously been recognized as a specific group who were united by a common research agenda and a commitment to sharing their work with the worldwide community of Yiddish-speaking survivors. These Yiddish historians studied the history of the Holocaust from the perspective of its Jewish victims, focusing on the internal aspects of daily life in the ghettos and camps under Nazi occupation and stressing the importance of relying on Jewish sources and the urgency of collecting survivor testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and memoirs.With an aim to dispel the accusations of cowardice and passivity that arose against the Jewish victims of Nazism, these histor