Home After Fascism

Download or read book Home After Fascism written by Anna Koch and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Home after Fascism draws on a rich array of memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the stories of Italian and German Jews who returned to their home countries after the Holocaust. The book reveals Jews' complex and often changing feelings toward their former homes and highlights the ways in which three distinct national contexts--East German, West German, and Italian--shaped their answers to the question, is this home? Returning Italian and German Jews renegotiated their place in national communities that had targeted them for persecution and extermination. While most Italian Jews remained deeply attached to their home country, German Jews struggled to feel at home in the "country of murderers." Yet, some retained a sense of belonging through German culture and language or felt attached to a specific region or city. Still others looked to the future; socialist and communists of Jewish origin hoped to build a better Germany in the Soviet Occupied Zone. In all three postwar states, surviving Jews fought against persistent antisemitism, faced the challenge of recovering lost homes and possessions, struggled to make sense of their persecution, and tried to find ways to reclaim a sense of belonging. Wide ranging and moving, Home after Fascism enriches our understanding of Jews' homecoming experiences after 1945. It reveals the deep affection and persistent love people feel for their homes, the suffering that comes with losing them, and the challenges of a return.

Download or read book British Fascism After the Holocaust written by Joe Mulhall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the policies and ideologies of a number of individuals and groups who attempted to relaunch fascist, antisemitic and racist politics in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. Despite the leading architects of fascism being dead and the newsreel footage of Jewish bodies being pushed into mass graves seared into societal consciousness, fascism survived World War II and, though changed, survives to this day. Britain was the country that ‘stood alone’ against fascism, but it was no exception. This book treads new historical ground and shines a light onto the most understudied period of British fascism, whilst simultaneously adding to our understanding of the evolving ideology of fascism, the persistent nature of antisemitism and the blossoming of Britain’s anti-immigration movement. This book will primarily appeal to scholars and students with an interest in the history of fascism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, racism, immigration and postwar Britain.

Download or read book Benevolence and Betrayal written by Alexander Stille and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-04 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of Italy's Jews under the shadow of the Holocaust examines the lives of five Jewish families: the Ovazzas, who propered under Mussolini and whose patriarch became a prominent fascist; the Foas, whose children included both an antifascist activist and a Fascist Party member, the DiVerolis who struggled for survival in the ghetto; the Teglios, one of whom worked with the Catholic Church to save hundreds of Jews; and the Schonheits, who were sent to Buchenwald and Ravensbruck.

Download or read book Home after Fascism written by Anna Koch and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Home after Fascism draws on a rich array of memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival research to tell the stories of Italian and German Jews who returned to their home countries after the Holocaust. The book reveals Jews' complex and often changing feelings toward their former countries and highlights the ways in which three distinct national contexts—East German, West German, and Italian—shaped their answers to the question, Is this home? Returning Italian and German Jews renegotiated their place in national communities that had targeted them for persecution and extermination. While most Italian Jews remained deeply attached to their home country, German Jews struggled to feel at home in the "country of murderers." Yet, some retained a sense of belonging through German culture and language or felt attached to a specific region or city. Still others looked to the future; socialist and communists of Jewish origin hoped to build a better Germany in the Soviet Occupied Zone. In all three postwar states, surviving Jews fought against persistent antisemitism, faced the challenge of recovering lost homes and possessions, struggled to make sense of their persecution, and tried to find ways to reclaim a sense of belonging. Wide ranging and moving, Home after Fascism enriches our understanding of Jews' homecoming experiences after 1945. It reveals the deep affection and persistent love people feel for their homes, the suffering that comes with losing them, and the challenges of a return.

Download or read book Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism written by Kata Bohus and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reined into the service of the Cold War confrontation, antifascist ideology overshadowed the narrative about the Holocaust in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This led to the Western notion that in the Soviet Bloc there was a systematic suppression of the memory of the mass murder of European Jews. Going beyond disputing the mistaken opposition between “communist falsification” of history and the “repressed authentic” interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe, this work presents and analyzes the ways as the Holocaust was conceptualized in the Soviet-ruled parts of Europe. The authors provide various interpretations of the relationship between antifascism and Holocaust memory in the communist countries, arguing that the predominance of an antifascist agenda and the acknowledgment of the Jewish catastrophe were far from mutually exclusive. The interactions included acts of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing. Detailed case studies describe how both individuals and institutions were able to use anti-fascism as a framework to test and widen the boundaries for discussion of the Nazi genocide. The studies build on the new historiography of communism, focusing on everyday life and individual agency, revealing the formation of a great variety of concrete, local memory practices.

Download or read book Italy's Jews from Emancipation to Fascism written by Shira Klein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-18 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews' experience in the decades before World War II - during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture - led them later to bolster the myth of Italy's wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy's Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.

Download or read book We Fight Fascists written by Daniel Sonabend and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “inspiring,” little-known history of the Jewish vigilantes of the 43 Group, who fought fascism in Britain following World War II (Guardian). Returning to civilian life, at the close of the Second World War, a group of Jewish veterans discovered that, for all their effort and sacrifice, their fight was not yet done. Creeping back onto the streets were Britain’s homegrown fascists, directed from the shadows by Sir Oswald Mosley. Horrified that the authorities refused to act, forty-three Jewish ex-servicemen and women resolved to take matters into their own hands. In 1946, they founded the 43 Group and let it be known that they were willing to stop the far-right resurgence by any means necessary. Their numbers quickly swelled. Joining the battle-hardened ex-servicemen in smashing up fascist meetings were younger Jews, including hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, and gentiles as well, some of whom volunteered to infiltrate fascist organizations. The Group published its own newspaper, conducted covert operations, and was able to muster a powerful force of hundreds of fighters who quickly turned fascist street meetings into mass brawls. The struggle peaked in the summer of 1947 with the Battle of Ridley Road, where thousands descended on the Hackney market to participate in weekly riots. The history of the 43 Group is not just a gripping story of a forgotten moment in Britain’s post-war history; it is also a timely lesson in how to confront fascism—and how to win.