Judging 'Privileged' Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the 'Grey Zone'

Adam Brown

Jul 2013 · War and Genocide Book 18 · Berghahn Books

About this ebook

The Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called “privileged” positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi’s concept of the “grey zone,” this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on “privileged” Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of “representing the unrepresentable,” this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.

Ratings and reviews

I don't like the way you make me give you a credit card #! I don't think it's fair that I have to go through this stuff just to read a lousy book!

Mature and sophisticated language which depicts how the holocaust proceeded. A serious subject of it's era. one day a tale about the Russia/Ukrane conflict will have similar connotations.

About the author

Adam Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Deakin University, Australia, and a volunteer at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, where he initiated the digitization of the Centre’s survivor video testimony collection. He was awarded the Isi Leibler Prize for the best contribution to advancing knowledge of racial, religious or ethnic prejudice in any time or place for his dissertation, and has written widely on Holocaust representation across various genres, surveillance and film, mediations of rape, digital children's television, and gaming cultures.