Hope and Honor Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust

A powerful account of Jewish resistence in Nazi-occupied Europe and why such resistance was so remarkable.

Most popular accounts of the Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and other written materials produced both by survivors and those who perished to show how Jews living under Nazi occupation in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Lódz reached decisions about resistance. Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, Einwohner shows that decisions about resistance rested on Jews' assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival. Rather than ask the typical question of why Jews generally didn't resist, this powerful account of Jewish resistance seeks to explain why they resisted at all when there was no hope for success, and they faced almost certain death.

Rachel L. Einwohner is Professor of Sociology and (by courtesy) Political Science at Purdue University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of protest and resistance. Her work asks questions related to protest emergence and effectiveness, the role of gender and other identities in protest dynamics,
protesters' sense of efficacy, and the creation of solidarity in diverse movements. She has explored these topics with studies of a wide variety of cases, including the U.S. animal rights movement, the 2017 Women's March, and Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. She is also part of an
interdisciplinary research team that is using Twitter data to examine diversity and inclusion in contemporary social movements. Her work has been funded by the NSF and the NEH and has appeared in journals such as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Mobilization.
She has also co-edited two volumes: The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism (with Holly J. McCammon, Verta Taylor, and Jo Reger) and Identity Work in Social Movements (with Jo Reger and Daniel J. Myers). She recently served as Chair of the Section on Collective Behavior and
Social Movements in the American Sociological Association.