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New book explores role of Jewish councils during the Holocaust

By Cindy Mindell

 

Dr. Bernard Wasserstein writes to “breathe life into dry bones.” The scholar of modern Jewish history eschews the ahistorical, instead digging unflinchingly into the twilight of European Jewry and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His 2012 book, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War (2012), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize, was widely hailed as a substantive and perceptive look at a lost world. His 1996 book, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945, was the first comprehensive social and political history of the experience and fate of European Jews in the second half of the 20th century, described by Publishers Weekly as “a provocative source for everyone concerned with the fate of European and indeed American Jewry.”

Wasserstein will discuss his latest book, The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Harvard University Press, 2014) at Yale University on Wednesday, April 23, as part of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.

book coverIn The Ambiguity of Virtue, Wasserstein tells the story of German-Jewish social worker Gertrude van Tijn and her work to save fellow Jews from the Nazis. Between 1933 and 1940, van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, enabling many Jews to escape to safety.

After the war, van Tijn’s role on the Jewish Council was widely debated. “Some later called her a heroine; others denounced her as a collaborator,” Wasserstein writes. “Was she merely a pawn of the Nazis, or should she be commended for taking advantage of such opportunities as offered themselves to save Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity?”

Wasserstein first learned about van Tijn while researching his 1979 book, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945.

“I decided to tell her story because I felt that it exemplified the moral dilemmas that confronted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War,” he says. “I wanted to test the arguments presented in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she violently criticized Jewish leaders in occupied Europe during the war. I found her ideas gravely wanting.” In fact, Wasserstein says, The Ambiguity of Virtue is a “deliberate echo” of Arendt’s subtitle, [A Report on] the Banality of Evil.

“I try to present all the evidence in my book and I try to explain Gertrude’s actions in the context of her own times and to understand her in the light of her own moral outlook,” Wasserstein says. “I came to very clear conclusions, as, I think, readers of my book will appreciate. In general, I found Gertrude van Tijn a shining example of courage, energy, and compassion in the face of almost impossible challenges.”

Van Tijn’s story resonates with readers and audiences trying to grasp how one behaves humanely in a time of unimaginable inhumanity, he says. “Above all, people want to understand what kind of moral compass guided Gertrude, or any Jewish leader, in confronting evil,” he says. “What kinds of compromises were necessary in order to save lives? Was there a point at which compromise had to stop if one were not to topple over the edge into collaboration? My book tries to address these questions by examining the life of a singular woman leader.”

Born in London, Wasserstein is a professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Chicago. He has taught throughout the world, including Smith College, Brandeis University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford, where he was also president of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He held a decade-long tenure at the University of Chicago until 2013.

In addition to The Ambiguity of Virtue, his many books include The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict (1978), Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 (1979), The Jews in Modern France (1985), Divided Jerusalem (2001), Israelis and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight? Can They Stop? (2003), and Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (2007).

His current research and writing focuses on Jewish intellectuals in Israel and the diaspora post-1945, and a revisionist history of British rule in Palestine between 1917 and 1948.

 

Dr. Wasserstein will speak on Wednesday, April 23, 5 p.m. at Yale University, Whitney Humanities Center, Room 208, 53 Wall St., New Haven. For information visit www.ypsa.yale.edu or email ypsa@yale.edu.

 

Comments? email cindym@jewishledger.com.

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