New from Wayne State University Press:
Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (June 2015), edited by
Laura Jockusch (Hebrew University) and
Gabriel N. Finder (University of Virginia). The Press explains:
In
the aftermath of World War II, virtually all European countries
struggled with the dilemma of citizens who had collaborated with Nazi
occupiers. Jewish communities in particular faced the difficult task of
confronting collaborators among their own ranks—those who had served on
Jewish councils, worked as ghetto police, or acted as informants.
European Jews established their own tribunals—honor courts—for dealing
with these crimes, while Israel held dozens of court cases against
alleged collaborators under a law passed two years after its founding.
In Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust,
editors Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder bring together scholars of
Jewish social, cultural, political, and legal history to examine this
little-studied and fascinating postwar chapter of Jewish history.
The volume begins by presenting the rationale for punishing wartime
collaborators and purging them from Jewish society. Contributors go on
to examine specific honor court cases in Allied-occupied Germany and
Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, and France. One essay also considers
the absence of an honor court in Belgium. Additional chapters detail the
process by which collaborators were accused and brought to trial, the
treatment of women in honor courts, and the unique political and social
place of honor courts in the nascent state of Israel. Taken as a whole,
the essays in Jewish Honor Courts illustrate the great caution
and integrity brought to the agonizing task of identifying and punishing
collaborators, a process that helped survivors to reclaim their agency,
reassert their dignity, and work through their traumatic experiences.
For many years, the honor courts have been viewed as a taboo subject, leaving their hundreds of cases unstudied. Jewish Honor Courts
uncovers this forgotten chapter of Jewish history and shows it to be an
integral part of postwar Jewish rebuilding. Scholars of Jewish,
European, and Israeli history as well as readers interested in issues of
legal and social justice will be grateful for this detailed volume.
Contributors include Veerle Vanden Daelen, Dan Porat, Ido de Haan, Nico Wouters, Katarzyna
Person, Helga Embacher, Rivka Brot, Gabriel N. Finder, Laura Jockusch,
David Engel, Simon Perego, Ewa Kozminska-Frejlak, and Gali Drucker Bar-Am. More information is available
here.
