Introduction
The Transnational Community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
Summary
Mir zaynen nit kayn stade eynzame geshlogene yekhidim,
Mir zaynen a kibuts, a folk.[We’re not a herd of isolated and battered individuals – we’re a collective, we’re a people.]
Idisher Kemfer, June 24, 1942Scholars who undertake to describe and analyze the Jewish Holocaust using historical methodology have been doing so – to this day – on the basis of a diverse spectrum of sources: copious state and institutional archives; personal memoirs of victims and their executioners; literary works; and the daily press, foremost the international one.
This study discusses how the Jews’ plight in the Nazi-occupied countries during World War II (1939–1945) was reflected in the Jewish press in Palestine, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. What I mean by “reflect” is the information that these newspapers presented in its various forms and the awareness that the information generated. It was this awareness that shaped the stances that this press took on what was happening in continental Europe as the Jewish society there was being destroyed. This awareness also influenced the way overt Jewish public action for the rescue of European Jewry was assessed in state diplomatic echelons and at the grassroots political level – for example, in protest demonstrations and rallies – and at the level of public morality, especially when it came to direct assistance for those interned in ghettos in Eastern Europe and refugees who had managed to escape from the occupied countries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939–1945Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011