Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.
Paul's Pick for May is "Did the Paris Mosque Save Jews? A Mystery and Its Memories" by University of Cincinnati historian Ethan Katz. The article appears in the Spring 2012 issue of The Jewish Quarterly Review.
Katz's JQR article offers the first scholarly analysis of the collective memory and the history of the Grand Mosque of Paris as a haven for Jews during the Holocaust. The 2011 French feature film Les Hommes Libres brought unprecedented attention to the mosque’s efforts to save Jews during the Occupation. Many press accounts and even “expert” commentaries on the film conveyed an almost breathless enthusiasm and framed it as an invaluable pedagogical tool, but Katz reminds us of the conflicting historical evidence around this story. Katz sheds new light on how Jews, Muslims, and broader French society seek to confront the shifting stakes of the Holocaust and the Second World War in the twenty-first century.
To download this free article and learn more about The Jewish Quarterly Review, click here.
Check the Penn Press Log on June 15 for Paul's next pick.
