Unwelcome Exiles. Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 reconstructs a largely unknown history: during the Second World War, the Mexican government closed its doors to Jewish refugees expelled by the Nazis. In this comprehensive investigation, based on archives in Mexico and the United States, Daniela Gleizer emphasizes the selectiveness and discretionary implementation of post-revolutionary Mexican immigration policy, which sought to preserve mestizaje—the country’s blend of Spanish and Indigenous people and the ideological basis of national identity—by turning away foreigners considered “inassimilable” and therefore “undesirable.” Through her analysis of Mexico’s role in the rescue of refugees in the 1930s and 40s, Gleizer challenges the country’s traditional image of itself as a nation that welcomes the persecuted. This book is a revised and expanded translation of the Spanish El exilio incómodo. México y los refugiados judíos, 1933-1945, which received an Honorable Mention in the LAJSA Book Prize Award 2013.

This book focuses on the history of the Holocaust and Latin America. It is estimated that about 100,000 Jewish refugees immigrated to the region between 1933 and 1945. While the role of Latin America was crucial in the rescue of Jewish refugees from Nazism, the region has remained largely on the margins of Holocaust studies.

This special issue focusses on refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in British colonies, dominions and overseas territories. It deals with aspects like internment, identity and cultural representation in not well-known destinations of forced migration like India, New Zealand, Canada or Kenya.

This book provides the first dedicated study of the Evian Conference of July 1938, an international initiative called by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While on the surface the conference appeared as an attempt to alleviate the distress faced by Jews being forced out of Germany and Austria, in reality it only served to demonstrate that the nations of the world were not willing to accept Jews as refugees. Since the Holocaust, a generally-held assumption has been that the Evian Conference represented a lost opportunity to save Germany’s Jews, and that the conference failed to rescue the Jews of Europe. In this study, Paul Bartrop argues that in fact it did not fail when measured against the original reasons for which it was called. Exposing many of the myths surrounding the meeting, this work addresses a glaring lacuna in the literature of the Holocaust, and places the so-called 'failure' of the Evian Conference into its proper context.

Conceptualizing Mass Violence draws attention to the conspicuous inability to inhibit mass violence in myriads forms and considers the plausible reasons for doing so. Focusing on a postcolonial perspective, the volume seeks to popularize and institutionalize the study of mass violence in South Asia. The essays explore and deliberate upon the varied aspects of mass violence, namely revisionism, reconstruction, atrocities, trauma, memorialization and literature, the need for Holocaust education, and the criticality of dialogue and reconciliation. The language, content, and characteristics of mass violence/genocide explicitly reinforce its aggressive, transmuting, and multifaceted character and the consequent necessity to understand the same in a nuanced manner. The book is an attempt to do so as it takes episodes of mass violence for case study from all inhabited continents, from the twentieth century to the present. The volume studies ‘consciously enforced mass violence’ through an interdisciplinary approach and suggests that dialogue aimed at reconciliation is perhaps the singular agency via which a solution could be achieved from mass violence in the global context. The volume is essential reading for postgraduate students and scholars from the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, World History, Human Rights, and Global Studies.

“In this rich and resonant study, Joanna Newman recounts the little-known story of this Jewish exodus to the British West Indies...”—Times Higher Education In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe. Nearly the New World tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue—and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option. From the introduction: This book is called Nearly the New World because for most refugees who found sanctuary, it was nearly, but not quite, the New World that they had hoped for. The British West Indies were a way station, a temporary destination that allowed them entry when the United States, much of South and Central America, the United Kingdom and Palestine had all become closed. For a small number, it became their home. This is the first comprehensive study of modern Jewish emigration to the British West Indies. It reveals how the histories of the Caribbean, of refugees, and of the Holocaust connect through the potential and actual involvement of the British West Indies as a refuge during the 1930s and the Second World War.