The War Against the Jews
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Lucy D. Dawidowicz, in The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, tells the story of the evolution of the Nazi campaign led by Adolf Hitler to destroy the Jews in Europe. Dawidowicz was inspired by Rabbi David Mirsky, Dean of Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University, who encouraged the author to expand to book form the subjects covered in a course she taught at the University. Her education was acquired at Hunter College, Columbia University in New York, and the Yivo Institute of Jewish Research in Poland where she became intimately acquainted with East European Jewish life and culture. She has also taught at Stanford University and the State University of New York at Albany. She has written three earlier book related to the Holocaust and Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. Based on the author's introduction, the reader can expect to learn about the nature and development of Hitler's efforts to eliminate the Jewish population from Germany and Europe, the responses of the Jews themselves, and effects on the Jews of the Holocaust. The author succeeds in accomplishing these goals. Dawidowicz first shows how Hitler's anti-Jewish ideology developed. From the beginning of his career, the idea to murder the Jews was just an inchoate phantom inhabiting Hitler's mind. But after he came to power and began to carry out the blueprint for Germany that he had drafted in Mein Kampf, that idea began to develop in stages, synchronized with his other notions for the restoration of racial pu
. . .
uddenly appear out of nowhere. To the contrary, "National Socialism was the consummation which the omnifarious anti-Semitic movements had striven for 150 years" (47).
Of course, Hitler, upon taking power in 1933, could not simply begin to murder the Jews en masse. He gradually acclimated the willing German people to a way of thinking and governing based on hatred of Jews. The first two years of Hitler's rule focused on passing laws establishing the inferiority of Jews under the law. The Jews were stripped of their rights, one by one, until they were "at the mercy of the secret police, without access to law or courts" (Dawidowicz 68).
From 1936 on the German people had come to see the Jew as a "parasite. . . . Elimination of the Jew from our community is to be regarded as an emergency defense measure" (70). This view of Jews as enemy and parasite served as the basis for the Final Solution.
The special argument made by the author is that the murder of all Jews was not merely an afterthought of Hitler's plan to rule Europe and perhaps the world. To the contrary, as Dawidowicz seems to argue, the elimination of Jews was the central policy of Hitler, with world war to be used as a tool for that end. The slaughter of Jews in war wa
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1350
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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