The History of the Jewish People

Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

This article introduces, and contextualises, the contributions to the collection The global crisis in memory. Since the 1980s, the idea of ‘coming to terms with the past’, shaped by the values of neoliberal economics and liberal politics, became part of a globally-powerful consensus over how societies should overcome violent and traumatic experiences. In the 2010s, in the context of the global rise of populist nationalisms, political hostility linked to global migration, and increasingly vocal criticisms of a neoliberal order, this consensus was powerfully challenged. Rather than rejecting memory politics, new political formations have in fact embraced them. The white resentment embodied in the ‘History Wars’ controversy in Australia; legislation such as the Polish ‘Holocaust Bill’; the growing scepticism of African states towards the International Criminal Court; or the rewriting of the histories of Indian independence by Hindu nationalists all reveal the ways in which diverse movements critiqued and reworked previous memory tropes. At the same time, attempts to decolonise western memory have engaged actively with previous manifestations of memory around which apparent consensus had been constructed. Moreover, these various new memory practices increasingly have their own alternative internationalisms too, reaching across or beyond regions in new transnational formations.

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Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation: How We Remember in the Twenty-First Century

The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848-1948, by P. R. MagocsiThe Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848-1948, by P. R. Magocsi. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, 1978. xiii, 640 pp.


 In research on ‘mass killings’ such as genocides and campaigns of state terror, the role of ideology is hotly debated. For some scholars, ideologies are crucial in providing the extremist goals and hatreds that motivate ideologically committed killers. But other scholars are sceptical, contending that perpetrators of mass killing rarely seem ideologically committed, and that rational self-interest or powerful social pressures are more important drivers of violence than ideology. In Ideology and Mass Killing, Jonathan Leader Maynard challenges both these prevailing views, advancing an alternative ‘neo-ideological’ perspective which fundamentally retheorizes the ideological foundations of violence against civilians and synthesizes an emphasis of ideologies, strategic interests, and social pressures. Integrating research from political science, political psychology, history, and sociology, the book demonstrates that ideological justifications are central to the explanation of mass killings, but in ways that go beyond committed belief. Such ideological justifications revolve, moreover, not around extraordinary political goals or hatreds, but radicalized versions of conventional, widely accepted ideas that underpin the politics of security in ordinary societies across the world. Ideology and Mass Killing then substantiates this account through four contrasting case studies of mass killing—Stalinist repression in the USSR 1930-38, the Allied area bombing of Germany and Japan 1940-45, mass atrocities in the Guatemalan civil war 1978-83, and the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. This represents the first volume to offer a dedicated, comparative theory of ideology’s role in mass killing, while also developing a powerful new account of how ideology affects violence and politics more generally.

Ideology and Mass Killing

Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945

This article argues that the ideological and emotional meanings of the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘antisemitism’ have obstructed their use as analytical concepts in Holocaust scholarship. It claims, specifically, that they frame the persecution and annihilation of Jews during World War II as unique, placing these events and processes apart from essential historical and political contexts. The destruction of Jews in wartime Hungary underscores how histories of state and nation building—in this case the drive to realize ‘Greater Hungary’ with a marked Magyar majority—generated multi-layered mass violence against non-Jews as well as Jews. Focusing on the multi-ethnic borderland of Subcarpathian Rus’ before the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 illuminates the links in the state's multi-layered attack against the region's society and sheds new light on the particular victimization of Jews, also after March 1944. Almost all the scholarship on the Holocaust in Hungary has addressed the period after the German...

Beyond Holocaust Studies: rethinking the Holocaust in Hungary

This review article asks: what defines mass violence in the twentieth century as particularly modern and how does the Holocaust figure in this history? The article compares the work of two path-bre...

The Modern State, the Question of Genocide, and Holocaust Scholarship

This article addresses the deterioration of relations in Subcarpathian Rus’ between Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians (the majority population in the region) in the interwar period and during the Holocaust. It presents an analysis of a range of archival material and survivors’ accounts through psychological and social psychological theories, mainly the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, in order to understand why and how Carpatho-Ruthenians assumed the role of indifferent bystanders as their Jewish neighbours fell victim to discrimination, persecution, and genocide between 1938 and 1944. The specific nature of collective bystander behaviour is illuminated, highlighting damaged self-image, indifference, envy, and war-related harshness. The analysis recasts terms previously considered self-explanatory such as ‘national awakening’ and ‘antisemitism’, and the specific contexts which shaped the emotions, positions, and relations at the core of group behaviour in Subcarpathian Rus’ are probed.

Becoming Bystanders: Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, and the Politics of Narcissism in Subcarpathian Rus’

Distributed computing has become a common practice nowadays, where recent focus has been given to the usage of smart networking devices with in-network computing capabilities. State-of-the-art switches with near-line rate computing and aggregation capabilities enable acceleration and improved performance for various modern applications like big data analytics and large-scale distributed and federated machine learning.In this work, we formulate and study the theoretical algorithmic foundations of such approaches, and focus on how to deploy and use constrained in-network computing capabilities within the data center. We focus our attention on reducing the network congestion, i.e., the most congested link in the network, while supporting the given workload(s). We present an efficient optimal algorithm for tree-like network topologies and show that our solution provides as much as an x13 improvement over common alternative approaches. In particular, our results show that having merely a small fraction of network devices that support in-network aggregation can significantly reduce the network congestion, both for single and multiple workloads.

Raz Segal

Papers

Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945

Beyond Holocaust Studies: rethinking the Holocaust in Hungary

The Modern State, the Question of Genocide, and Holocaust Scholarship

Becoming Bystanders: Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, and the Politics of Narcissism in Subcarpathian Rus’

Constrained In-network Computing with Low Congestion in Datacenter Networks