Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations

This collection of essays arises from a conference held at the University of Cape Town under the auspices of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research. Leading international Holocaust scholars met to reflect on the ways their personal experiences influenced their professional trajectories over many decades of immersion in studies of the Holocaust. Participants examined changes and developments in the field within the context of their own personal odysseys, including shifting cultural milieus and robust academic conflicts. Meeting in South Africa provided a special ambience as the country had emerged only two decades earlier from a race-based system defined by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. The massive corpus of scholarly engagement with the Holocaust - with reverberations across the globe - has ensured that its study today is paradigmatic for scholars exploring genocide, as well as perpetrators and victims of antisemitism, racism, and the Second World War.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Autobiography, Experience and the Writing of History; Steven E. Aschheim 2. From Johannesburg to Warsaw: An Ideological Journey; Antony Polonsky 3. The Personal Contexts of a Holocaust Historian: War, Politics, Trials, and Professional Rivalry; Christopher R. Browning 4. Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust, and Hairdressing; David Cesarani 5. On the Holocaust and Comparative History; Steven T. Katz 6. Historiosophy as a Response to Catastrophe: Studying Nazi Christians as a Jew; Susannah Heschel 7. Pastors and Professors: Assessing Complicity and Unfolding Complexity; Robert P. Ericksen 8. Protestants, Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews: Identities and Institutions in Holocaust Studies; Doris L. Bergen 9. My Wrestling with the Holocaust; Karl A. Schleunes 10. 'Lessons' of the Holocaust and the Ceaseless, Discordant Search for Meaning; Michael R. Marrus 11. Apartheid and the Herrenvolk Idea; David Welsh 12. Echoes of Nazi Antisemitism in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s; Milton Shain

About the Author :
Christopher R. Browning taught at Pacific Lutheran University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA before his retirement in May 2014. He is the author of eight books, including Ordinary Men, The Origins of the Final Solution, and Remembering Survival. Susannah Heschel is Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, USA and is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Currently a Guggenheim Fellow, she is writing a book on the history of Jewish scholarship on Islam. Michael R. Marrus is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of eight books: among which are Vichy France and the Jews (with Robert O. Paxton), The Holocaust in History and Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s. Milton Shain is Isidore and Theresa Cohen Professor of Jewish Civilisation in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where he is also Director of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research. He has written and edited several books on South African Jewish history and the history of antisemitism, including The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa and, co-authored with Richard Mendelsohn, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History.