Digital Reading Room 2.0 -- MAIS 752: Special Topics Graduate Seminar

MAIS 752: Special Topics Graduate Seminar—The Holocaust (Rev. 15) Report a Broken Link

Week 1: Definition of Genocide—Situating the Holocaust in the Colonial Context

Moses, A. Dirk. “Introduction: The Problems of Genocide.” In The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, 1–46. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Burzlaff, Jan, John K. Roth, Annette Weinke, Itamar Mann, and A. Dirk Moses. “Security, Genocide, and the Holocaust: A forum.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 29, no. 3 (2023): 317–40.

Lawson, Tom. “Coming to Terms with the Past: Reading and Writing Colonial Genocide in the Shadow of the Holocaust.” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 20, no. 1-2 (2014): 129–56.

Segal, Raz, and Luigi Daniele. “Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change.” Journal of Genocide Research (2024): 1–10.

Week 2: From the “German Catechism” Debate to the Holocaust and Nakba

Moses, A. Dirk. “The German Catechism.” In The New Fascism Syllabus: The Catechism Debate, 1–8. 2021.

Note: For the purposes of this topic, you are asked to read only the first eight pages of the document. The link here also offers readings that respond to Dirk Moses’s essay. You are welcome to read more if interested; however, the additional readings are not obligatory.

Urban, Susanne. “The Shoah, Postcolonialism, and Historikerstreit 2.0: Germany’s Past in Its Present.” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 16, no. 1 (2022): 83–97.

Bashir, Bashir, and Amos Goldberg. “Introduction: The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Syntax of History, Memory, and Political Thought.” In The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, 1–42. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Rothberg, Michael. “Holocaust Remembrance and the Ethics of Comparison.” The Massachusetts Review (blog), January 26, 2024.

Week 3: Victims of a Racial State—From Imperial Germany to the Third Reich

Evans, Richard J. “Blueprint for Genocide?” In The Third Reich in History and Memory, 3–13. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Evans, Richard J. “Social Outsiders.” In The Third Reich in History and Memory, 59–84. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Friedlander, Henry. “The Handicapped Victims.” In The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, 175–95. University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Lacková, Elena. “The Second World War.” In A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia, 87–101. University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000.

Note: You are only required to read pages 87–101. However, if you wish, you can finish reading the rest of the chapter, which goes to page 116.

Week 4: Antisemitism—Origins, Paradigms, and Problems of Definitions

Hayes, Peter. “Targets: Why the Jews?” In Why? Explaining the Holocaust, 3–35. W. W. Norton, 2017.

Sutcliffe, Adam. “Whose Feelings Matter? Holocaust Memory, Empathy, and Redemptive Anti-Antisemitism.” Journal of Genocide Research 26, no. 2 (2024): 222–42.

Bakan, Abigail, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban. “Anti-Palestinian Racism, Antisemitism, and Solidarity: Considerations Towards an Analytics of Praxis.” Studies in Political Economy 105, no. 1 (2024): 107–22.

Week 5: Jewish Victims’ Agency Within the Power Structure of the Nazi Regime—An Intersectional Approach

Kaplan, Marion A. “In Public: Jews Are Turned into Pariahs, 1933–1938.” In Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, 17–49; 241–44. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kaplan, Marion A. “In Private: The Daily Lives of Jewish Women and Families, 1933–1938.” In Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, 50–73; 244–47. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Vendrell, Javier Samper. “The Case of a German-Jewish Lesbian Woman: Martha Mosse and the Danger of Standing Out.” German Studies Review 41, no. 2 (May 2018): 335–53.

Week 6: Colonization, Resettlement, and Expulsion—Nazis as Demographers

Aly, Götz, and Susanne Heim. “The ‘General Plan for the East.’” In Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, 253–82. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002.

Lower, Wendy. “A New Ordering of Space and Race: Nazi Colonial Dreams in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, 1941–1944.” German Studies Review 25, no. 2 (2002): 227–54.

Browning, Christopher R., and Jürgen Matthäus. “The Search for a Final Solution Through Expulsion.” The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942, 36–110. University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Note: Skip the section in this chapter titled “The Army: From Abdication to Complicity,” pp. 72–81.

Week 7: Ghettoization and the Failure of Nazi Resettlement Policies

Horwitz, Gordon J. “A City Without Jews.” In Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City, 30–61. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Horwitz, Gordon J. “The Ghetto Will Endure.” In Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City, 91–112. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Horwitz, Gordon J. “Banishment.” In Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City, 143–58. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Week 8: Nazi-Soviet War—Radicalization and the Final Solution

Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.

Please read the following chapters:
o Chapter 5: The Economics of Apocalypse
o Chapter 6: Final Solution

Week 9: From Auschwitz to Lety—Dehumanization and Desexualization in L’Univers Concentrationnaire

Levi, Primo. “The Drowned and the Saved.” In Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, 87–100. Collier Books; Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993.

Sommer, Robert. “Camp Brothels: Forced Sex Labour in Nazi Concentration Camps.” In Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, edited by Dagmar Herzog, 168–96. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Polansky, Paul. “The Lety Story.” In Black Silence: The Lety Survivors Speak, 11–22. Cross Cultural Communications, 1998.

Please read the following chapters:
o Outline of the Story
o The Outbreak of the Russo-German War and the Pogrom in Radziłów
o Preparations
o The Murder

Week 13: The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century—Anxious Histories, Multidirectional Memory, and Settler Colonial Forgetting

Neiman, Susan. “On the Use and Abuse of Historical Comparison.” In Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, 23–39. Picador, 2020.

Rothberg, Michael. “Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transnational Age.” In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, 1–29. Stanford University Press, 2009.

Silverstein, Jordana. “‘There Is No Doubt That It Was a Jewish Experience’: The Forgetfulness of a Haunting Settler Colonialism.” In Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, 142–77. Berghahn Books, 2015.