Imagine five variously aged Jewish individuals from different walks of life, whose common ground is living under the Nazi regime. Unlike so many contemporaneous Jews who, in suffering and hopelessness, endured Nazi persecution, these five refused to accept it and bravely defended themselves. The stories of these courageous five people—a merchant, a homemaker, a real estate broker, and two teenagers—are the subject of Wolf Gruner’s compelling new book, Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany (Yale University Press, 2023). These stories have never been told, and each case is just one of many, as the author shows based on twelve years of meticulous research in dozens of archives in Austria, Germany, Israel, and the U.S. The book challenges the traditional portrayal of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust and reframes our understanding of German Jewish attitudes during the decade 1933–43. Resisters was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (Holocaust category). As a reviewer for the Library Journal observes, “these are the stories that longtime readers of Holocaust literature have been waiting to read: evidence of small, covert acts of resistance (often by individuals working on their own initiative) against a fanatically coordinated genocidal force.”
Author of ten books on the Holocaust, Wolf Gruner is the Shapell Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History at the University of Southern California, and is founding director of USC’s Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research.
Sunday, January 12, 2025 3:00 p.m. PT
Bronfman Family Jewish Community Center/Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, 524 Chapala Street