Jeffrey Gurock's New Book, "The Holocaust Averted"

I'm happy to promote fellow-historian Jeffrey Gurock's new book of counterfactual Jewish history, The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967.


I just heard him discuss the volume last night at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan (the talk was broadcast live on the Jewish Broadcast Service) and was impressed with how eloquently he explained the book's origins and how persuasively he hypothesized how Jewish history might have been different if the western Allies had stood up to Hitler in 1938 and the Holocaust had never happened.

Gurock's answer will surprise many readers.  But suffice it to say that the putative fantasy of a world without the Holocaust comes to resemble more of a nightmare.

Rutgers University Press deserves credit for lending further academic credibility to the genre of counterfactual history as it breaks into the field of Jewish Studies.  Moreover, the press should be congratulated for producing a brilliant cover for the book.

Finally, it is with no small amount of pride and gratitude that I can point out that Gurock contributed a chapter length version of his book to my own forthcoming edited volume, What Ifs of Jewish History, which should be appearing before the end of the year.

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