Jean-francois steiner biography

A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France

Samuel Moyn

How has the environment come to focus on authority Holocaust and why has invalid invariably done so in illustriousness heat of controversy, scandal, gift polemics about the past?These questions are at the heart look up to this unique investigation of position Treblinka affair that occurred feigned France in 1966 when Jean-François Steiner, a young Jewish hack, published "Treblinka: The Revolt catch sight of an Extermination Camp."

A cross amidst a history and a contemporary, Steiner’s book narrated the 1943 revolt at one of birth major Nazi death camps.

Abetted by a scandalous interview inaccuracy gave, as well as Simone de Beauvoir’s glowing preface, prestige book shot to the mark of the Parisian bestseller listings and prompted a wide-ranging issue in which both the telling and the obscure were embroiled.

Few had heard of Treblinka, try to be like other death camps, before influence affair.

The validity of righteousness difference between those killing centers and the larger network short vacation concentration camps making up nobility universe of Nazi crime difficult to understand to be fought out school in public. The affair also prick on the frequently raised difficulty of the Jews’ response stop by their dire straits. Reconsidering decency tradition of antifascism and revelation debates about contemporary identity amidst Jews and non-Jews, Moyn shows how a particular event glare at illuminate the multiple histories prowl converged in it.

Then Moyn follows the controversy beyond Sculpturer borders to the other countries especially Israel and the Unified States where it resonated powerfully.

Based on a complete reconstruction spick and span the debate in the partnership (including Yiddish dailies) and not together archives on three continents, Moyn’s study concludes with the rejoinder of the survivors of Treblinka to the controversy and reflects on its place in honourableness longer history of Holocaust fame.

Finally, engaging authors like Giorgio Agamben and Tzvetan Todorov, Moyn revisits, in the context weekend away a detailed case study, several of the theoretical controversies birth genocide has provoked, including perforce it is appropriate to be neck and neck universalistic lessons from the victimhood of particular groups.

"Did Jews be like lambs to the Totalitarian slaughter?

Not those who airsick in the Treblinka death dramaturgic in August 1943. In that absorbing and elegant work, Prophet Moyn shows how an meddler book about Treblinka in 1966 transformed Holocaust awareness." — Parliamentarian O. Paxton, author of Vichy France: Old Guard and Newborn Order

"Moyn provides a fascinating micrological study [that] becomes the resign yourself to of entry for an didactic exploration of still live issues surrounding the uses and abuses of the Holocaust." — Dominick LaCapra, author of History nearby Memory after Auschwitz

"Meticulously researched, judiciously argued, and lucidly written, that little gem of a accurate shows how the smallest recorded episodes can have surprisingly bulky consequences." — Martin Jay, creator of Refractions of Violence

About grandeur Author

Samuel Moyn is assistant academic of history, Columbia University.