Bücher der Reihe New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History

Drawing onhitherto neglected materials,Zohar Segev sheds new light on the policy of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) during the Holocaust. Furthermore, in stark contrast to the Zionist movement, WJC leaders strove to establish a Jewish state and to rehabilitate Diaspora Jewish life, two goals they saw as mutually complementary.

Of all victims of Nazi persecution, German Jews had to suffer the Nazi yoke for the longest time. Throughout the Third Reich, they were exposed to anti-Jewish propaganda, discrimination, anti-Semitic laws and increasingly to outrages and offences by non-Jewish Germans. While the International Military Tribunal and the subsequent American Military Tribunals at Nuremberg dealt with a variety of Nazi crimes according to international law, these courts did not consider themselves cognizant in adjudicating wrongdoings against German citizens and those who lost German citizenship based on the so-called "e;Nuremberg laws,"e; such as Germany's Jews. Until recently, scholarship failed to explore this task of the German judiciary in more detail. Edith Raim fills this gap by showing the extent of the crimes committed against Jews beyond the traditionally known facts and by elucidating how the West German administration of justice was reconstructed under Allied supervision.

The study discusses the history of the Jewish refugees within the Shanghai setting and its relationship to the two established Jewish communities, the Sephardi and Russian Jews. Attention is also focused on the cultural life of the refugees who used both German and Yiddish, and on their attempts to cope under Japanese occupation after the outbreak of the Pacific War. Differences of identity existed between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, religious and secular, aside from linguistic and cultural differences. The study aims to understand the exile condition of the refugees and their amazing efforts to create a semblance of cultural life in a strange new world.