Israeli Society, the Holocaust and its Survivors, Dina Porat (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), xii + 459 pp., cloth $75.00, pbk. $35.00.

Abstract

Over the past two or three decades, Israeli public discourse has been dominated by a number of historiographical debates. These controversies have become foundational questions in Israeli identity-formation and self-perception. The Holocaust stands at the heart of a number of these debates, with the question of the pre-state Yishuv's reaction to the destruction of European Jewry taking center stage. Israeli Society, the Holocaust and its Survivors brings together many of Dina Porat's contributions to this ongoing historiographical discussion. Debate regarding the Zionist leadership's response to the Holocaust—as well as accusations and mutual recriminations—began during the war itself, when it seems to have emerged (as some of Porat's work suggests) as a partial reaction to the Yishuv's acute sense of helplessness. Under the twin influences of a new body of scholarship on the Allies' record on rescue and a changing Israeli self-image, the issue of Jewish responses to the Holocaust emerged in the 1980s as a central question for a new generation of historians. The picture of the Zionist leadership presented in some of this scholarship has been an unflattering one. The Yishuv and its leadership have been portrayed as shockingly indifferent to the fate of European Jewry, focused on narrow interests and desensitized by a negative view of Diaspora Jewry. The pieces collected in this volume reflect Porat's efforts over two decades to counter these views.