The Swastika's Darkening Shadow ― Voices Before the Holocaust

In the years leading up to the Second World War, the Jews of Europe faced unprecedented fear and anguish as the noose of anti-Semitism gradually tightened around them. The convulsive spasm of murderous violence that would overtake them, later called the Holocaust, has been impressively examined by historians in the past several decades, as has the steady persecution of the pre-war Jewish community under the Third Reich. Yet the spread of Jew-hatred across the Continent - and the murky but undeniably alarming picture that journalism and first-hand accounts brought to other nations - has thus far eluded serious, comprehensive inspection. Drawing on newspapers, magazines, diaries, diplomatic correspondence, organizational reports, and a wide variety of other sources, this history shines a lucid spotlight on the years between Adolf Hitler's rise to become Chancellor of Germany and his unleashing of the Second World War. It gives a striking portrait of the ways in which imperiled European Jews navigated their world as darkness closed about, even as individuals and organizations tried fervently to command the world's attention and mobilize other powers to action.

Monty Noam Penkower is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Machon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel. His numerous publications include The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (1983); The Emergence of Zionist Thought (1986); The Holocaust and Israel Reborn: From Catastrophe to Sovereignty (1994); Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy, 1939-1945 (2002); and Twentieth Century Jews: Forging Identity in the Land of Promise and in the Promised (2010). The Jews Were Expendable received the B'nai B'rith A.D.L. Merit for Educational Distinction and, together with The Emergence of Zionist Thought, garnered the second Samuel Belkin Memorial Literary Award from Yeshiva University. Professor Penkower has been a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the A & E History Channel, the Destiny Foundation, and the National Jewish Book Council. He has received grants from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Littauer Foundation, the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Hoover and Truman presidential libraries, the American Philosophical Society, the NEH, and the American Council of Learned Societies.