“[A] close, conscientious and absorbing examination of Jewish life from the time of Jesus onward … Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust deserves a place in any Holocaust student's library, since it makes crystal clear just how and why the Holocaust happened. This volume would also make a marvelous textbook for any course on anti-Semitism or Jewish history.

Martyrdom & Resistance

As a textbook, Antisemitism and the Holocaust comes with a number of pedagogical tools. Most importantly, every chapter contains two primary document excerpts each of which has a short, helpful introduction as well as very useful questions for the reader to consider.

EuropeNow

[A] great introduction to the subject matter and a good choice for undergraduates.

CHOICE

For any student or member of the broader public who would like to have a thoughtful and well written introduction to how the most extraordinary horror of the 20th Century came to be, this book offers precisely that. Here the reader can track beliefs and myths, policies and deeds, over the centuries on the path from the split of Christianity from Judaism to the termination of all moral values in the Holocaust.

Gerhard L. Weinberg, Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

In her study, Beth Griech-Polelle brings together both revelatory primary sources and cutting edge scholarship to offer a compelling and highly readable narrative that focuses on the central role that antisemitism played in nurturing the annihilative ideology of National Socialism. She convincingly shows the link between Christian antisemitism and Nazi racial antisemitism. Her prose is eloquent, insightful and engaging. The book will draw in students and readers alike to understand the complexity of the period surrounding the Holocaust and the Second World War. I highly recommend this immensely valuable work.

Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C, James J. Kenneally Distinguished Professor of History, Stonehill College, USA

This succinct yet remarkably comprehensive survey of the transformation of a long tradition of anti-Jewish stereotypes, rhetoric, and imagery into an antisemitic ideology, and its culmination in a vast genocidal undertaking, will serve as an outstanding tool for teaching and studying the history of prejudice, racial hatred, and violence. Using the most updated scholarly literature and carefully selected documents, Beth Beth Griech-Polelle's Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust successfully introduces an immensely complex episode from the darkest recesses of human history not only from the perspective of the ideologues and perpetrators but also by giving voice to the victims they had hoped to silence. A wonderful achievement.

Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of German Studies, Brown University, USA