The major question I wanted to answer: why do people think that Jews are cowards and try to get out of the military? Where is the history of Jews and the military? I present these five books as proof that Jews do fight and have fought ever since the days of King Saul and David, Bar Kochba, the Maccabeus, and every war ever fought in history.
I wrote
Jewish Partisans of the Soviet Union during World War II
This is the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jewish involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600s to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history and Zionism at Harvard University and a colleague of mine there.
We are both proud and progressive Zionists, yet critical of certain policies when we have to be. It’s a densely written book; one needs to read it slowly and carefully. Very few Jews are pacifists; the image of the Jew as the shy, bookish scholar or tailor (stereotyped by the images of popular culture like Fiddler on the Roof) is wrong and misleading.
If Jews did not want to fight in certain wars, it was for self-preservation or due to anti-Semitism—they were not allowed to be farmers, own land, hunt, fish, use a gun, even join the army, or were forced to fight in wars that were deadly and unnecessary, but Israel was different: there Jews fought for their homeland, their own people, and to survive as a nation.
Jews and the Military is the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jews' involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600s until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Derek Penslar shows that although Jews have often been described as people who shun the army, in fact they have frequently been willing, even eager, to do military service, and only a minuscule minority have been pacifists. Penslar demonstrates that Israel's military ethos did not emerge from a vacuum and that long before the state's establishment, Jews had a vested interest in military affairs. Spanning…
Ainsztein’s book heavily influenced me but also honored my parents’ otryad, the Kruk-Max Group, by describing their fighting force (pp. 353-360). He should be more well-known, and his book should be reprinted in paperback to make it more available to a wider audience.
While his opening chapter is a historical survey of the Jews as fighters and soldiers in the Diaspora, most of the book details the rise of partisans and soldiers in the Polish and Soviet armed forces during the Holocaust 1941-1944.
It is extensive and comprehensive, at nearly 980 pages. But that should not deter the reader, especially the lover of military history—Ainsztein writes beautifully. Like Penslar, he addresses the myth of Jewish pacifism and reluctance to fight militarily.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
This is the book, first published in 1967, that got me interested in Jewish resistance. Yuri was a gamin-looking man with delightful eyes and personality. He was also a novelist, poet, biographer, and friend, but being a Communist limited his influence and impact in America except in progressive Jewish circles.
His book is a first-hand account of resistance during the Shoah in the forests, camps, ghettos, and military in all areas of Europe—Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Belgium, and Italy. It was highly praised by both Elie Wiesel—“Read Yuri Suhl's book and you will never again ask why they went to the slaughter like sheep” and Saul Bellow—“A profoundly stirring book”.
It’s a short, only 300-page, easy-to-read book with excellent translations and a good introduction to the subject. I highly recommend the reader to start with this book.
Vividly describes the courage, strategy, and loyalty of the Jews in accounts of the activity of resistance groups in the ghettos and labor and concentration camps. Bibliogs
I have chosen this book despite the author being a somewhat obscure academic, a professor of history at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and the publisher, a somewhat little-known publisher (University Press of Kansas), because it gives a different picture of the Jewish resistance.
The other books are from the point of view of Jews and by mostly Jewish authors. This book is written by a Ukrainian-American and gives a fresh insight from the Ukrainian and Soviet perspectives. Writing about World War II is akin to interpreting Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which tells the tale of murder and rape from several perspectives.
World War II history is also like Rashomon; each country will tell its history from a different perspective. It is refreshing to hear from a Ukrainian point of view when most of my books are written from a Jewish perspective.
When the Wehrmacht rolled into the Soviet Union in World War II, it got more than it bargained for. Notwithstanding the Red Army's retreat, Soviet citizens fought fiercely against German occupiers, engaging in raids, sabotage, and intelligence gathering - largely without any oversight from Stalin and his iron-fisted rule. Kenneth Slepyan provides an enlightening social and political history of the Soviet partisan movement, a people's army of irregulars fighting behind enemy lines. These insurgents included not only civilians - many of them women - but also stranded Red Army soldiers, national minorities, and even former collaborators. While others have documented…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
When people hear that I'm a child of Holocaust survivors, they ask what concentration camp or ghetto I or my parents were in. When I tell them that they were partisans, fighting the Nazis in the forest with guns, they don't believe me. They think Jews went to their deaths like sheep to slaughter passively. But Jews fought back like my parents did in the Kruk-Max otryad, Soviet fighting force.
Peter Duffy's book is an easy read, not an academic tome. I hope people will read about the heroism of Jews fighting back against fascism and evil.
In 1941, three brothers witnessed their parents and two other siblingsbeing led away to their eventual murders. It was a grim scene that would,of course, be repeated endlessly throughout the war. Instead of running orgiving in to despair, these brothers -- Tuvia, Zus, and Asael Bielski -- foughtback, waging a guerrilla war of wits against the Nazis.
By using their intimate knowledge of the dense forests surrounding theBelarusan towns of Novogrudek and Lida, the Bielskis evaded the Nazis andestablished a hidden base camp, then set about convincing other Jews to jointheir ranks. As more and more Jews arrived each day,…
I started working on this book over 45 years ago when I saw a picture of my father and his Ukrainian partisan commander in a book in Hebrew in 1970.
I got the book, had it translated into English, then got other scarce Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian books and sources and had them translated into English; that was the first half of the book; the second half I went to Israel, Canada, and parts of the USA and interviewed Jewish partisans, including my own mother and father, Irving and Faye Porter, members of the Kruk-Max Otryad—“Fighting Group” in Russian—the third largest in Russia during World War II. Luckily, I did this early since nearly all of them have died, but their heroism lives on.
