Omer Friedlander's Books

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

Stories

By: Omer Friedlander

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The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

Stories

By: Omer Friedlander

From “a marvelous new voice” (Rebecca Makkai), these “extraordinarily imaginative” (Sigrid Nunez), “revelatory” (Nicole Krauss), “superb” (Kiran Desai) stories transcend borders as they render the intimate lives of people striving for connection. WINNER OF THE AJL JEWISH FICTION AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE WINGATE PRIZE The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land announces the arrival of a natural-born storyteller of immense talent. Warm, poignant, delightfully whimsical, Omer Friedlander’s gorgeously immersive and imaginative stories take you to the narrow limestone alleyways of Jerusalem, the desolate beauty of the Negev Desert, and the sprawling orange groves of Jaffa, with characters that spring to vivid life. A divorced con artist and his daughter sell empty bottles of “holy air” to credulous tourists; a Lebanese Scheherazade enchants three young soldiers in a bombed-out Beirut radio station; a boy daringly “rooftops” at night, climbing steel cranes in scuffed sneakers even as he reimagines the bravery of a Polish-Jewish dancer during the Holocaust; an Israeli volunteer at a West Bank checkpoint mourns the death of her son, a soldier killed in Gaza. These stories render the intimate lives of people striving for connection. They are fairy tales turned on their head by the stakes of real life, where moments of fragile intimacy mix with comedy and notes of the absurd. Told in prose of astonishing vividness that also demonstrates remarkable control and restraint, they have a universal appeal to the heart.

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Page Count

257

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

059324298X

ISBN 13

9780593242988

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

Stories

By: Omer Friedlander

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The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

Stories

By: Omer Friedlander

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257

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Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593242998

ISBN 13

9780593242995

Murder in Our Midst

The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation

By: Omer Bartov

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Murder in Our Midst

The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation

By: Omer Bartov

War endlessly tries to mask itself. The myth of the heroic soldier testing his individual courage stands in stark contrast to the reality of mass, anonymous death and the suppression of individual actions. Murder in Our Midst shows that this fundamental tension reached its natural conclusion in the Holocaust, and that disguising it has required an ongoing effort to misrepresent war and the Holocaust as something other than industrial killing. Examining a broad range of the representations of war's horrors, from scholarly depictions to those in popular literature, poetry, art, and the movies, Omer Bartov finds they have some things in common. Societies and cultures have attempted to form coherent images of horrific events, to draw didactic lessons from them, and to exploit them to legitimate ideological or political positions. Made up of interconnected essays, this book is both a scholarly and an often personal and passionate examination of the emergence, implementation, and representation of industrial killing. Bartov draws out the links between recent revisionist attempts to minimize and deny the Holocaust, and Hollywood's ongoing fascination with National Socialism and Hitler's "Final Solution." Arguing that the modern predicament reflects the effects of the Nazi genocide on current perceptions of war, history, and memory, this book is a plea for compassion and commitment in an increasingly violent and indifferent world.

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Page Count

262

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195344596

ISBN 13

9780195344592

Mirrors of Destruction

War, Genocide, and Modern Identity

By: Omer Bartov

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Mirrors of Destruction

War, Genocide, and Modern Identity

By: Omer Bartov

Mirrors of Destruction examines the relationship between total war, state-organized genocide, and the emergence of modern identity. Here, Omer Bartov demonstrates that in the twentieth century there have been intimate links between military conflict, mass murder of civilian populations, and the definition and categorization of groups and individuals. These connections were most clearly manifested in the Holocaust, as the Nazis attempted to exterminate European Jewry under cover of a brutal war and with the stated goal of creating a racially pure Aryan population and Germanic empire. The Holocaust, however, can only be understood within the context of the century's predilection for applying massive and systematic methods of destruction to resolve conflicts over identity. To provide the context for the "Final Solution," Bartov examines the changing relationships between Jews and non-Jews in France and Germany from the outbreak of World War I to the present. Rather than presenting a comprehensive history, or a narrative from a single perspective, Bartov views the past century through four interrelated prisms. He begins with an analysis of the glorification of war and violence, from its modern birth in the trenches of World War I to its horrifying culmination in the presentation of genocide by the SS as a glorious undertaking. He then examines the pacifist reaction in interwar France to show how it contributed to a climate of collaboration with dictatorship and mass murder. The book goes on to argue that much of the discourse on identity throughout the century has had to do with identifying and eliminating society's "elusive enemies" or "enemies from within." Bartov concludes with an investigation of modern apocalyptic visions, showing how they have both encouraged mass destructions and opened a way for the reconstruction of individual and collective identifies after a catastrophe. Written with verve, Mirrors of Destruction is rich in interpretations and theoretical tools and provides a new framework for understanding a central trait of modern history.

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Page Count

313

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190281944

ISBN 13

9780190281946

Germany's War and the Holocaust

Disputed Histories

By: Omer Bartov

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Germany's War and the Holocaust

Disputed Histories

By: Omer Bartov

Omer Bartov, a leading scholar of the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust, provides a critical analysis of various recent ways to understand the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime and the reconstruction of German and Jewish identities in the wake of World War II. Germany's War and the Holocaust both deepens our understanding of a crucial period in history and serves as an invaluable introduction to the vast body of literature in the field of Holocaust studies.Drawing on his background as a military historian to probe the nature of German warfare, Bartov considers the postwar myth of army resistance to Hitler and investigates the image of Blitzkrieg as a means to glorify war, debilitate the enemy, and hide the realities of mass destruction. The author also addresses several new analyses of the roots and nature of Nazi extermination policies, including revisionist views of the concentration camps. Finally, Bartov examines some paradigmatic interpretations of the Nazi period and its aftermath: the changing American, European, and Israeli discourses on the Holocaust; Victor Klemperer's view of Nazi Germany from within; and Germany's perception of its own victimhood.

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Page Count

272

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801468817

ISBN 13

9780801468810

Anatomy of a Genocide

The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz

By: Omer Bartov

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Anatomy of a Genocide

The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz

By: Omer Bartov

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Book Prize for Holocaust Research “A substantive contribution to the history of ethnic strife and extreme violence” (The Wall Street Journal) and a cautionary examination of how genocide can take root at the local level—turning neighbors, friends, and family against one another—as seen through the eastern European border town of Buczacz during World War II. For more than four hundred years, the Eastern European border town of Buczacz—today part of Ukraine—was home to a highly diverse citizenry. It was here that Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews all lived side by side in relative harmony. Then came World War II, and three years later the entire Jewish population had been murdered by German and Ukrainian police, while Ukrainian nationalists eradicated Polish residents. In truth, though, this genocide didn’t happen so quickly. In Anatomy of a Genocide, Omer Bartov explains that ethnic cleansing doesn’t occur as is so often portrayed in popular history, with the quick ascent of a vitriolic political leader and the unleashing of military might. It begins in seeming peace, slowly and often unnoticed, the culmination of pent-up slights and grudges and indignities. The perpetrators aren’t just sociopathic soldiers. They are neighbors and friends and family. They are also middle-aged men who come from elsewhere, often with their wives and children and parents, and settle into a life of bourgeois comfort peppered with bouts of mass murder. For more than two decades Bartov, whose mother was raised in Buczacz, traveled extensively throughout the region, scouring archives and amassing thousands of documents rarely seen until now. He has also made use of hundreds of first-person testimonies by victims, perpetrators, collaborators, and rescuers. Anatomy of a Genocide profoundly changes our understanding of the social dynamics of mass killing and the nature of the Holocaust as a whole. Bartov’s book isn’t just an attempt to understand what happened in the past. It’s a warning of how it could happen again, in our own towns and cities—much more easily than we might think.

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Page Count

459

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

145168455X

ISBN 13

9781451684551

Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine

First-Person History in Times of Crisis

By: Omer Bartov

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Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine

First-Person History in Times of Crisis

By: Omer Bartov

This book discusses some of the most urgent current debates over the study, commemoration, and politicization of the Holocaust through key critical perspectives. Omer Bartov adeptly assesses the tensions between Holocaust and genocide studies, which have repeatedly both enriched and clashed with each other, whilst convincingly arguing for the importance of local history and individual testimony in grasping the nature of mass murder. He goes on to critically examine how legal discourse has served to both uncover and deny individual and national complicity. Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine outlines how first-person histories provide a better understanding of events otherwise perceived as inexplicable and, lastly, draws on the author's own personal trajectory to consider links between the fate of Jews in World War II and the plight of Palestinians during and in the aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel. Bartov demonstrates that these five perspectives, rarely if ever previously discussed in a single book, are inextricably linked, and shed much light on each other. Thus the Holocaust and other genocides must be seen as related catastrophes in the modern era; understanding such vast human tragedies necessitates scrutinizing them on the local and personal scale; this in turn calls for historical empathy, accomplished via personal-biographical introspection; and true, open-minded, and rigorous introspection, without which historical understanding tends toward obfuscation, brings to light uncomfortable yet clarifying connections, such as that between the Holocaust and the Nakba, the mass flight and expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.

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Page Count

259

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1350332348

ISBN 13

9781350332348

The "Jew" in Cinema

From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust

By: Omer Bartov

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The "Jew" in Cinema

From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust

By: Omer Bartov

Explores cinematic representations of the "Jew" from film's early days to the present.

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Page Count

398

Publisher

Indiana University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0253345022

ISBN 13

9780253345028

Murder in Our Midst

The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation

By: Omer Bartov

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Murder in Our Midst

The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation

By: Omer Bartov

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Page Count

262

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

019028272X

ISBN 13

9780190282721

Book's by Omer Friedlander

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

Murder in Our Midst

Murder in Our Midst

Mirrors of Destruction

Mirrors of Destruction

Germany's War and the Holocaust

Germany's War and the Holocaust

Anatomy of a Genocide

Anatomy of a Genocide

Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine

Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine

The "Jew" in Cinema

The "Jew" in Cinema

Murder in Our Midst

Murder in Our Midst

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