Group Psychotherapy in Israel: History and Main Trends.

In Israel, the sense of belonging carries special meaning for historical and contemporary reasons. Since its establishment, Israel, with a background of centuries of persecution of the Jews, has been subjected to a consistent threat of war and terror that makes it a traumatized society. On the one hand, this intensifies social cohesiveness, especially in times of war. Yet many of the threats pose existential, political, and ideological dilemmas. The trauma of the Holocaust coupled with the continuous existence of wars enhanced the development of special kinds of groups. No wonder group therapy in Israel flourishes, perhaps more than in any other Western country (Nuttman-Shwartz & Weinberg, 2002).

Severe caloric restriction in young women during World War II and subsequent breast cancer risk.

AIM: The objective of the study was to examine the impact of WWII-related caloric restriction (CR) on subsequent breast cancer (BC) risk based on individual exposure experiences and whether this effect was modified by age at exposure. METHODOLOGY: We compared 65 breast cancer patients diagnosed between 2005-2010 to 200 controls without breast cancer who were all members of various organizations for Jewish WWII survivors in Israel. All participants were Jewish women born in Europe prior to 1945 who lived at least 6 months under Nazi rule during WWII and immigrated to Israel after the war. We estimated CR using a combined index for hunger and used logistic regression models to estimate the association between CR and BC, adjusting for potential confounders. RESULTS: Women who were severely exposed to hunger had an increased risk of BC (OR=5.0, 95% CI= 2.3-10.8) compared to women who were mildly exposed. The association between CR and BC risk was stronger for women who were exposed at a younger age (0-7 years) compared to the risk of BC in women exposed at ≥ 14 years (OR= 2.8, 95% CI=1.3-6.3). CONCLUSIONS: Severe exposure to CR is associated with a higher risk for BC decades later, and may be generalized to other cases of severe starvation during childhood that may have long-term effects on cancer in adulthood.

Reporting on the Holocaust: the view from Jim Crow Alabama.

The press in Alabama covered major events taking place in Germany from the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933 through the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Journalists in the state provided extensive coverage, and editors did not hesitate to opine on the persecution of the Jews in Europe. Yet, Alabama's white-run press failed in the end to explain the events as a singularly Jewish tragedy. The state's black-run press, for its part, used the news of the mass killings of the Jews to warn against the dangers of conceptions of racial superiority­a primary concern for black southerners living in the Jim Crow South.

Constructing interethnic conflict and cooperation: why some people harmed Jews and others helped them during the Holocaust in Romania.

The authors draw on a natural experiment to demonstrate that states can reconstruct conflictual interethnic relationships into cooperative relationships in relatively short periods of time. The article examines differences in how the gentile population in each of two neighboring territories in Romania treated its Jewish population during the Holocaust. These territories had been part of tsarist Russia and subject to state-sponsored anti-Semitism until 1917. During the interwar period one territory became part of Romania, which continued anti-Semitic policies, and the other became part of the Soviet Union, which pursued an inclusive nationality policy, fighting against inherited anti-Semitism and working to integrate its Jews. Both territories were then reunited under Romanian administration during World War II, when Romania began to destroy its Jewish population. The authors demonstrate that, despite a uniform Romanian state presence during the Holocaust that encouraged gentiles to victimize Jews, the civilian population in the area that had been part of the Soviet Union was less likely to harm and more likely to aid Jews as compared with the region that had been part of Romania. Their evidence suggests that the state construction of interethnic relationships can become internalized by civilians and outlive the life of the state itself.

Europe, the final solution and the dynamics of intent.

The scale and scope of the "final solution" of the "Jewish question" were extreme even in the horrific annals of genocide. Bloxham attempts to shed light on the pattern of mass murder in its expansion and contraction by viewing the Holocaust in a set of temporally and culturally specific contexts. It places the Holocaust into a broader European framework of violent ethnopolitics and geopolitics from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The Holocaust is depicted as an only partially discrete part of a continental process of traumatic flux, and a part, furthermore, that can itself be partially disaggregated into national and regional components. Bloxham moves from a general consideration of patterns of ethnic violence in the period to a closer causal explanation that shows the different valences of Nazi policy towards Jews in the lands directly ruled by Germany and those of Germany's allies respectively. He shows that the peculiarly extensive ambitions of the "final solution" at its most expansive can only be explained when wider geopolitical and strategic contextual terms are factored in along with consideration of Nazi ideology and the internal dynamics of some of the key institutions of the perpetrator state.

Survival of Jews during the Holocaust: the importance of different types of social resources.

BACKGROUND: Of the Jewish inhabitants of Amsterdam 25.9% survived the Holocaust. However, different cultural and socio-economic groups within the Jewish community may have had different social resources and different chances of survival. METHOD: To determine social resources by studying a random sample of 7,665 Jews living in Amsterdam on the eve of the destruction of Dutch Jewry. Binary logistic regression models are used to test several hypotheses and express odds ratios. As some types of social resources may be interrelated, multivariable analyses are used. RESULTS: There were basically two ways of avoiding deportation to the death camps: going into hiding or acquiring protected status. The latter option was open chiefly to Jews having German nationality. In the analyses a higher survival rate correlates with holding German nationality, however is not significant when job status is included. Survival correlates strongly with having relations with non-Jews. The results were controlled for marital status, number of children, age below 15 years and gender. Standard errors and P-values were adjusted for family relationship by using robust standard error analyses. CONCLUSION: Survival correlates most strongly with having close social ties with non-Jews. Although Jews could sometimes acquire protected status, this was no more than temporary. In order to survive, Jews needed someone who was a non-Jew to hide them and provide support.

"Cattle car complexes": a correspondence with historical captivity and post-Holocaust witnesses.

This article explores critical complexes relating to the construction of historical captivity in deportation train journeys by examining fictional and testimonial accounts of that experience. Using Thane Rosenbaum's short story "Cattle Car Complex," the author shows that fiction is a prism through which to view victims' experiences of deportation-experiences that tend to be overlooked in interpretive literature about the Holocaust. Historians have examined deportations above all as a perpetrator narrative, utilizing contemporaneous documents and sources. Their treatment neglects the numerous testimonies about the debilitating effects of deportation travel, as well as the evocation of that traumatic transit in post-Holocaust texts and contexts such as fiction, film, art, and museological and commemorative practice. The author argues that sensory witness is a compelling paradigm that can reveal the silences and elisions in representations of historical captivity.

Multicultural education: Israeli and German adolescents' knowledge and views regarding the Holocaust.

This study probes a unique case of multicultural education of Israeli and German students regarding the Holocaust. Their knowledge level of German history leading to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party to power, knowledge about the Holocaust, the relation between their knowledge of attitudes toward the "other" (German/Israeli) group, and their reaction to a racist-dictatorial regime are explored. The findings were that German adolescents (high school students) knowledge regarding the events leading to the rise of the Nazi party was greater than that of the Israeli adolescents. However, the knowledge of Israelis was greater regarding the Holocaust. A positive correlation was found between the knowledge levels and their attitudes toward the other groups (German/Israeli) and toward resistance to the possible rise of a dictatorial regime. The findings point to the fact that multicultural education, which combines attitudinal, cognitive, and instrumental goals, can succeed in promoting nonracist views.

Written on the body: narrative re-presentation in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and after.

In "re-membering" the atrocities inflicted on her body and those of her comrades in the Nazi concentration camps, the French memoirist Charlotte Delbo avoids the linear time scheme and the metaphors for self that have traditionally defined autobiography as a genre. Instead, her depiction of time is circular, and the depiction of self and other is that of dismembered bodies and fragmented psyches. As conditions for the French political prisoners improved late in the war, numbed emotions thawed and Delbo's group began to recapture their pre-Auschwitz identity by reviving their pre-Auschwitz language. In recording testimonies garnered more than twenty years after the war, Delbo demonstrates that although the women were forever frozen in the time-space continuum of Auschwitz, they were also bonded into something larger than the sum of their once "dismembered selves."