New Perspectives On Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, The Nazi Pogrom In Global Comparison

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed anunprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria,and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazidiplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out ofthe country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinaryGermans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) andransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops,and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentrationcamps.

Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes a series of articles presented at an internationalconference titled "New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogromin Global Comparison." Assessing events 80 years after the violent anti-Jewish pogromof 1938, contributors to this volume offer new cutting-edge scholarship on theevent and its repercussions. Contributors include scholars from the UnitedStates, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom who represent a wide variety ofdisciplines, including history, political science, and Jewish and media studies.Their essays discuss reactions to the pogrom by victims and witnesses insideNazi Germany as well as by foreign journalists, diplomats, Jewish organizations,and Jewish print media. Several contributors to the volume analyze postwarnarratives of and global comparisons to Kristallnacht, with the aim ofsituating this anti-Jewish pogrom in its historical context, as well as itsplace in world history.