Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

The Holocaust remains a watershed in American history. Medoff, the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, has produced a masterful documentary record of US involvement in Hitler's racial war against European Jewry. Using a plethora of documentary evidence, he paints an accurate picture of American attitudes toward Jewry and Hitler's rise. Although Medoff explains the rationale for American anti-Semitism, it remains a painful reminder of how nativism blinded the American public and the administration from effectively responding to the international crisis Nazi Germany brought on. One of the volume's most illuminating accounts is that of Roddie Edmonds, an army sergeant captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Edmonds and his fellow POWs arrived at a POW camp where they were assembled. When the Germans wanted to delineate Jews from Gentiles, Edmonds told the Germans to assume they all were Jewish, at great risk to himself and the others. If only more Americans, both in and out of government, had acted as heroically, more Jews could have been saved from certain death. Medoff's documentary history is a valuable source for all readers seeking reference material on the Holocaust tragedy.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

If one has access to only a single volume on the history of the Weimar Republic, this should be it. Consisting of 33 chapters that cover the essential features of Weimar society, culture, and politics, this massive tome introduces readers to the German Republic's modern historiography. The contributors consistently and sometimes critically reference those academics who dominated the field from the 1950s through the 1980s, such as Karl Dietrich Bracher, George Mosse, and Detlev Peukert. If these earlier historians tended to portray a fragile Weimar Republic as the precursor to the inevitable Third Reich, the contributors to this volume aim to historicize Weimar and in doing so to examine its achievements (e.g., the establishment of a democratic state) and its post-1933 continuities (e.g., that Weimar remains a reference point for Germany's contemporary democracy). Those interested in jazz, cabaret, and film should look elsewhere; likewise for anyone interested in Weimar's educational system. Yet the coverage of Weimar's political development, its economic troubles, and its social contradictions more than compensates for these omissions, which are entirely understandable in an authoritative book that offers its academic audience so much.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals.