A companion to the Holocaust

"How we label things determines in part how we understand them. There is no name for the mass murder of European Jews in the 1940s that is not also simultaneously an interpretation. Final Solution, Holocaust, Shoah, Genocide: each of these implies a certain analysis of what happened and why. Thus the changing (and contested) names attached to the mass murder of European Jewry over the past seventy years also suggest shifts over time in how the event has been interpreted. Similarly, these names reflect a series of debates among historians about how best to analyze the destruction of Europe's Jews. Some of these debates have been more or less resolved, but many persist and seem likely to continue for the foreseeable future. It can thus hardly be the goal of this chapter to resolve these debates or to offer a definitive interpretation of the mass murder. Rather, I want to trace, in broad terms, the trajectory of Holocaust historiography from the first Jewish histories of the Holocaust to today in order to give a sense of where the historiography stands now and how it got here."-- Includes bibliographical references and index. xiv, 688 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.