On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics. Samantha Baskind explores seventy years’ worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind. Her study includes iconic works such as Leon Uris’s best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling’s teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff. In probing these works, Baskind pursues key questions of Jewish identity: What links artistic representations of the ghetto to the Jewish diaspora? How is art politicized or depoliticized? Why have Americans made such a strong cultural claim on the uprising? Vibrantly illustrated and vividly told, The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture shows the importance of the ghetto as a site of memory and creative struggle and reveals how this seminal event and locale served as a staging ground for the forging of Jewish American identity.

The German invasion of Poland in 1939 gave the Nazis the opportunity to implement their master plan to eliminate Europe's Jews. Part of the plan encompassed confining the Jews in a restricted area of Warsaw to make their survival difficult, followed by mass transportation of survivors to concentration camps, where they were killed. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did not go quietly to their deaths but engaged in armed resistance. This riveting volume describes the ghetto's daily life--the people's extraordinary efforts to survive under horrendous circumstances--and the events that led to the uprising and the ghetto's 1943 destruction.

"Examines the Warsaw ghetto uprising, including the roots of the resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, stories from the participants in the uprising, how the battle ended, and how the small group of fighters became heroes during the Holocaust"--Provided by publisher.

Based on years of archival research, ‘The Doctors of the Warsaw Ghetto’ is the most detailed study ever undertaken into the fate of more than 800 Jewish doctors who devoted themselves, in many cases until the day they died, to the care of the sick and the dying in the Ghetto. The functioning of the Ghetto hospitals, clinics and laboratories is explained in fascinating detail. Readers will learn about the ground-breaking research undertaken in the Ghetto as well as about the underground medical university that prepared hundreds of students for a career in medicine; a career that, in most cases, was to be cut brutally short within weeks of them completing their first year of studies.

Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during the 1940s were under increasing threat as they were stripped of their rights and forced to live in a guarded ghetto away from the non-Jewish Polish population. Within the ghettos, a small but distinct group existed: the assimilated, acculturated, and baptized Jews. Unwilling to integrate into the Jewish community and unable to merge with the Polish one, they formed a group of their own, remaining in a state of suspension throughout the interwar period. In 1940, with the closure of the Jewish residential quarter in Warsaw, their identity was chosen for them. Person looks at what it meant for assimilated Jews to leave their prewar neighborhoods, understood as both a physical environment and a mixed Polish Jewish cultural community, and to enter a new, Jewish neighborhood. She reveals the diversity of this group and how its members’ identity shaped their involvement in and contribution to ghetto life. In the first English-language study of this small but influential group, Person illuminates the important role of the acculturated and assimilated Jews in the history and memory of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The photographs of the unknown Warsaw Ghetto little boy and the well-known Anne Frank became famous documents worldwide, representing the Holocaust. Many artists adopted them as a source of inspiration to express their feelings and ideas about Holocaust events in general and to deal with the fate of these two victims in particular. Moreover, the artists emphasized the uniqueness of both children, but at the same time used their image to convey social and political messages. By using images of these children, the artists both evoke our attention and sympathy and our anger against the Nazis’ crime of killing one and a half million Jewish children in the Holocaust. Because they represent different sexes, and different aspects - Western and Eastern Jewry - of Holocaust experience, artists used them in many contexts. This book will complete the lack of comprehensive research referring to the visual representations of these children in artworks.

When the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto first went up in November 1940, Emmanuel Ringelblum was there. In the face of horrendous persecution and palpable danger, his goal was to create a written record of life in the Ghetto, not just the destitution and brutality of life under Nazi rule, but out of the shining acts of nobility and heroism by people under the most dire circumstances. From Inside the Ghetto, Ringelblum, a well-respected historian and archivist, compiled his journal recording daily life in the Ghetto, from its beginnings to the eve of the Ghetto uprising in April 1943. Using accounts and anecdotes from his many friends and neighbours, Ringelblum created a detailed, colourful, and emotional record of one of the most terrible epochs in human history. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto is an unflinching, first-hand account of history unfolding before your very eyes.

A Junior Library Guild Selection! The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of history's most powerful acts of resistance. Here, author Joshua M. Greene (Signs of Survival) tells the true story of a young Jewish woman who was instrumental in the uprising as a smuggler of messages and weapons into and out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Warsaw, Poland, 1940s: The Nazis are on the march, determined to wipe out the Jewish people of Europe. Teenage Vladka and her family are among the thousands of Jews forced to relocate behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, a cramped, oppressive space full of starvation, suffering, and death. When Vladka's family is deported to concentration camps, Vladka joins up with other young people in the ghetto who are part of the Jewish underground: a group determined to fight back against the Nazis, no matter the cost. Vladka's role in the underground? To pass as a non-Jew, sneaking out of the ghetto to blend into Polish society while smuggling secret messages and weapons back over the ghetto wall. Every move she makes comes with the risk of being arrested or killed. But Vladka and her friends know that their missions are worth the danger-they are preparing for an uprising like no other, one that will challenge the Nazi war machine. This astonishing true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, told through the lens of Holocaust survivor and educator Vladka Meed, introduces readers to a crucial piece of history while highlighting the persistence of bravery in the face of hate.

The powerful writings and art of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto Hidden in metal containers and buried underground during World War II, these works from the Warsaw Ghetto record the Holocaust from the perspective of its first interpreters, the victims themselves. Gathered clandestinely by an underground ghetto collective called Oyneg Shabes, the collection of reportage, diaries, prose, artwork, poems, jokes, and sermons captures the heroism, tragedy, humor, and social dynamics of the ghetto. Miraculously surviving the devastation of war, this extraordinary archive encompasses a vast range of voices—young and old, men and women, the pious and the secular, optimists and pessimists—and chronicles different perspectives on the topics of the day while also preserving rapidly endangered cultural traditions. Described by David G. Roskies as “a civilization responding to its own destruction,” these texts tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto in real time, against time, and for all time.

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