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historian

Briefs: UCLA’s Friedlander awarded Pulitzer Prize, Rabbi Weil to head O.U.

UCLA historian Saul Friedlander, a child Holocaust survivor, has been awarded a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his definitive account of \”The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.\”\n\nThe $10,000 award in the general nonfiction book category honors the 75-year-old scholar and Israeli citizen for his remarkable ability to evoke the entire Nazi era through a combination of meticulous research and a novelist\’s eye for personal, human detail.

Saving Lives in a Time of Murder

\”The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust\” by Sir Martin Gilbert (Henry Holt and Company, $35).

On Jan. 19, 1942, Rabbi Jacob Schulmann of Grabow Synagogue wrote to his community in Lodz:

\”Alas, to our great grief, we now know all. I spoke to an eyewitness who escaped. He told me everything. They\’re exterminated in Chelmno, near Dombie, and they are all buried in the Rzuszow forest.\”

Noir Fiction Fills in the Babel Blanks

\”King of Odessa\” by Robert Rosenstone (Northwestern, $24.95).

In an impressive effort of literary boldness, historian Robert Rosenstone fills in some of the blanks in Issac Babel\’s life and work in a first novel, \”King of Odessa.\” He writes as though he has recovered a lost Babel manuscript, imagining what one of Babel\’s final years might have been like. Other than a few postcards sent to his family, no records remain of the summer and autumn of 1936, when Babel, then 42, returned to Odessa, the city of his birth.

Irving Gets the Bill

Holocaust denier David Irving has come a step closer to financial ruin now that a British judge has ordered him to start paying millions of dollars in legal costs.

Will Truth Prevail?

Emerging from the Royal Courts of Justice here on the evening of March 15 was like leaving a musty 17th-century ecclesiastical battle for the fresh air of the 21st century.

Conflicting Stories

During World War II, did an anti-Semitic Swiss government split up Jewish refugee families, require the men to perform back breaking work in forced labor camps, and treat Jews markedly worse than Christian refugees?

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