"Winner of the Ernst Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Holocaust Library" "Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Holocaust Category" "A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year" Ari Joskowicz is associate professor of Jewish studies, history, and European studies at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France.
A major new history of the genocide of Roma and Jews during World War II and their entangled quest for historical justice
Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe's Roma went largely ignored. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering.
Ari Joskowicz vividly describes the experiences of Hitler's forgotten victims and charts the evolving postwar relationship between Roma and Jews over the course of nearly a century. During the Nazi era, Jews and Roma shared little in common besides their simultaneous persecution. Yet the decades of entwined struggles for recognition have deepened Romani-Jewish relations, which now center not only on commemorations of past genocides but also on contemporary debates about antiracism and Zionism.
Unforgettably moving and sweeping in scope, Rain of Ash is a revelatory account of the unequal yet necessary entanglement of Jewish and Romani quests for historical justice and self-representation that challenges us to radically rethink the way we remember the Holocaust. "An astonishing breadth of interviews of survivors and their relatives. . . . Of profound interest to serious students and readers of history." "Joskowicz offers a fascinating and often heartbreaking account of the Roma struggle for justice and restitution in the face of persecution. . . . The great virtue of Joskowicz's book, alongside the comprehensiveness of its research, is its refusal to reduce any of the weighty issues it discusses to abstractions, or to stray from the complex and often contradictory human experiences at stake. Instead, Joskowicz grounds his account in the lives of the people whose suffering and whose activism animate his scholarship."---Daniel Kraft, Slate "A clear, flowing portrait of this understudied but deeply violated population that fundamentally alters our perception of the Holocaust, enlarging it to include the Romani victims and bringing to the fore their quest for historical justice and self-representation. . . . [An] illuminating new book."---Linda F. Burghardt, Jewish Book Council "Remarkable. . . .At a time when Holocaust parallels have become once again contentious and politicised, Joskowicz's book builds a refreshing case for careful and nuanced historical comparison."---Dr Christine Schmidt, BBC History Magazine "[Joskowicz] brings new focus to the testimonies of victims of the Nazi regime, especially the stories of long-ignored Romani victims, often gathered from the witness testimonies of and interviews with Jewish survivors of the camps. . . . A deeply important book for the questions it raises about the ways in which historians collect and analyze history." "It is rare for an academic text to be highly readable, accessibly written, and an important work of historical scholarship, but Ari Joskowicz's Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust ticks all three of these boxes. . . . This book is an absolute must-read. Ultimately, Rain of Ash is a completely novel achievement, a real boon to multiple fields of study, and well worth your time."---Claire Greenstein, Ethnic and Racial Studies "Incisive. . . . Joskowicz grapples with fundamental
