The Choice of the Jews under Vichy

Between Submission and Resistance
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-268-04061-1
Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press

Buch, Englisch, 408 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 589 g

In The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, Adam Rayski buttresses his analysis of war-era archival materials with his own personal testimony. His research in the archives of the military, the Central Consistory of the Jews of France, the police, and Philippe Pétain demonstrates the Vichy government’s role as a zealous accomplice in the Nazi program of genocide. He documents the efforts and absence of efforts of French Protestant and Catholic groups on behalf of their Jewish countrymen; he also explores the prewar divide between French-born and immigrant Jews, manifested in cultural conflicts and mutual antagonism as well as in varied initial responses to Vichy’s antisemitic edicts and actions. Rayski reveals how these Jewish communities eventually set aside their differences and united to resist the Nazi threat.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Über Autor(innen)

Adam Rayski (1913–2008) left Poland in 1932 for Paris, where he became a fulltime journalist working for the Neie Presse, a leftist Yiddish-language daily newspaper. From July 1941 until the end of World War II he served as national secretary of the Jewish Section of the French Communist Party and headed the Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide, in which he played a major part in Jewish survival in France.