Books & ideas

A pope's silence

Annette Becker — 2025-12-16T08:50:48Z

Long the subject of myth, Pius XII's attitude towards the Holocaust and Jewish persecution can now be evaluated with the help of the archives. Nina Valbousquet makes a convincing case: the issue was not impartiality, but tepidness.

The Era of Victims

David El Kenz — 2025-12-09T07:37:00Z

Since the two World Wars, the victim has been raised to the status of a sacred and predominant figure in historical memory. The victim has become the new figure of the hero, thus setting a new and controversial example.

An awareness of danger

Emmanuel Droit — 2025-07-01T21:06:29Z

How did French Jews view Nazism? Beginning in 1933, they organized and prepared for war with a lucid yet often resigned outlook on Hitler's Germany.

Pius XII, the Holy See, and the Jews

Charlotte Canizo — 2025-03-06T09:00:00Z

The Vatican's attitude during the Holocaust and the persecution of the Jews has been at the heart of numerous debates and controversies. Nina Valbousquet analyses the ambivalent position of the papacy during the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) and provides a sensitive history of the Holocaust through the archives.

The Jews and Bulgaria's “rescue” narrative

Mathilde Zederman — 2023-06-13T07:00:00Z

During the Second World War, 48,000 Bulgarian Jews avoided being deported. By analyzing a wide-range of previously unavailable sources, Ragaru shows how a collective narrative was constructed around this fact—one that has been used for political purposes down to the present.

They Did Witness

Nick Underwood — 2019-03-28T06:30:00Z

When did Holocaust survivors start speaking about their experiences? Were their voices heard? A prevailing myth states that witnesses remained silent during the postwar years. However, Judith Lindenberg's edited volume argues that the “urgency to say and make known was present from the beginning of the genocide”.

The Moral of Historical Fiction

Judith Lyon-Caen — 2017-11-27T08:00:00Z

Since Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, cinematographic representations of the extermination of the European Jews have seemed impossible. Son of Saul has challenged this assumption. Nonetheless, the aesthetic and narrative choices this film makes are problematic.

An American Jewish Resistance during World War II

Laura Hobson Faure — 2016-07-04T07:00:00Z

Against the widespread idea that the American population remained indifferent to the genocide of European Jews, Catherine Collomp traces the history of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) and its action to raise awareness on Nazism, but also to save many Jewish lives in France and Poland.

“Cinema is more authoritarian than literature”

Marie-Pierre Ulloa — 2016-01-07T08:00:00Z

Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitaï discusses the relationship between cinema and literature, memory, space, and language. In particular, he tells us about his screen adaptation of Jérôme Clément's autobiographical novel, which portrays the story of a son's quest in search of his Jewish mother's painful past.

Time and Collective Memory

Lucie Campos — 2013-12-05T09:00:00Z

Historical episodes of collective violence in the 20^th century have given rise to a series of debates which can be seen as “crises of memory”, according to Susan Rubin Suleiman. As these crises of memory unravel, they have an impact not only on collective memory but also on literature and the public sphere.