Book Talk: Jewish Resistance against the Nazis
By Patrick Henry, Editor

Free and open to the public

This volume puts to rest the myth that the Jews went passively to the slaughter like sheep. Indeed, Jews resisted in every Nazi-occupied country – in the forests, the ghettos, and the concentration camps. Resistance could be armed revolt; flight; the rescue of targeted individuals by concealment in non-Jewish homes, farms, and institutions; or by the smuggling of Jews into countries where Jews were not objects of Nazi persecution. Other forms of resistance include every act that Jewish people carried out to fight against the dehumanizing agenda of the Nazis — acts such as smuggling food, clothing, and medicine into the ghettos, putting on plays, reading poetry, organizing orchestras and art exhibits, forming schools, leaving diaries, and praying.

Contributors to this volume are among the most renowned Holocaust authorities in Israel, Europe, Canada, and the United States. The essays treat Jewish resistance in France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Yishuv, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Poland, Romania, the Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, and Hungary.

Patrick Henry is the Cushing Eells Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Literature and Foreign Languages at Whitman College. He is the author of: We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Catholic University of America Press, 2007) and the editor of Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis (Catholic University of America Press, 2014).