At first glance, the cover of Wolf Gruner's Resisters is somewhat confusing. While the book's title usually brings to mind partisans and ghetto fighters, its cover image—a black and white photograph of smiling young woman in a flowered dress sitting on a park bench—portrays something seemingly different. How can sitting on a park bench be thought of as resistance? Taking a closer look at the photograph and the corresponding information in the back jacket flap, we learn the answer: the bench is marked Nur für Arier (“Only for Aryans”), the photograph was taken in Vienna on August 30, 1938, and the woman sitting on the bench is Lizi Rosenfeld, a Jewish teenager. By sitting on that bench, in that place and at that time, Lizi Rosenfeld defied Nazi law—a clear act of resistance. This seemingly innocuous photo actually illustrates three offenses at once, as Gruner notes: “sitting on a forbidden bench, allowing someone to take the picture, and smuggling the negative out of Germany” (4).

Kudos to the art department at Yale University Press and whoever else had input in designing the book's cover, because it illustrates the book's point beautifully. Beyond the well-known, collective acts of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust (e.g., the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), there were numerous incidents of individual Jews acting defiantly against the Nazi regime. The book, therefore, broadens our view of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

As important as that contribution is, however, it is not novel. Others (most notably, the eminent Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer) have also argued for broader treatments of Jewish resistance, and Gruner recognizes this point. What is tremendously valuable about this book is Gruner's use of German archives to uncover the individual-level resistance. His research shows that the records kept by the perpetrators themselves contain a great deal of evidence of Jewish resistance, showing that German Jews were not as passive as many may have thought. As Gruner writes, “It was never a lack of sources, but our wrong assumptions, that prevented us from detecting traces of individual Jewish resistance” (ix). Importantly, Gruner does not rely solely on the state archives. He also turns to oral testimonies from survivors and private archives to round out his data collection.

Mining these sources in minute detail, Gruner provides an array of examples of individual Jewish resisters, or what Nazi officials referred to as “impudent Jews.” Their actions fall into five broad categories: vandalizing Nazi posters and logos; verbally criticizing Nazis (a punishable offense even if done in the privacy of one's home); defying laws (e.g., holding on to radios illegally and refusing to wear the required yellow star); writing in protest (e.g., creating flyers protesting unfair treatment of Jews and writing protest postcards denouncing Hitler); and acting in self-defense in response to physical attacks. Not surprisingly, all of these actions were repressed, with fines, jailings, deportations to concentration camps (which usually led to death) and in at least one case, capital punishment: seventy-one-year-old Munich native Benno Neuberger, the author of fourteen protest postcards, who was executed by guillotine in 1942.

Speaking or acting out against a regime is always an act of resistance but thanks to the arrests of these “impudent Jews,” we have a historical record of their acts. What Gruner has uncovered is, therefore, different from political scientist James C. Scott's influential concept of “everyday resistance” (mentioned in the book but not explored fully) or resistance that flies under the radar of the authorities. For Scott, “everyday resistance” is intended to go unrecognized by its targets so that the resisters can avoid being repressed. In contrast, the “impudent” acts described in Gruner's book were noticed and repressed. That, in fact, is the point: if unnoticed, these acts of defiance would not have made it into the archival record and therefore might remain unknown.

Still, archives cannot contain everything, and Gruner takes care to recognize some potential silences in the sources he uses. For instance, with regard to resistant acts of self-defense, he says these instances were not recorded in state archives because they were not considered political offenses. Turning to survivor testimonies, however, he is able to find numerous examples of Jews acting in self-defense. One such example is Daisy Gronowski, a Holocaust survivor who, as a teenager, fought back against a German attacker who stabbed her in the hand, ultimately wresting the knife from him and stabbing him before fleeing.

With his findings, Gruner also brings to light some debates in the study of resistance in general. For example, Chapter 1 opens with the story of David Bornstein, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish man who was accused in 1936 of using his walking stick to deface the swastika in the logo on the side of a public bus in Hamburg. Despite claiming his innocence, Bornstein was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to five weeks in prison. The German officials clearly saw his actions as resistance, but it is not clear whether Bornstein intended them as such. Does that matter? Intentionality is one of the key points of contention among resistance scholars, a point my colleague Jocelyn Hollander and I introduced some twenty years ago in a paper in Sociological Forum. The example of David Bornstein usefully illustrates a situation in which power asymmetries shape the contextual definition of resistance.

The biggest contribution of the book, to my read, is not simply to show that individual acts of Jewish resistance happened, but that they happened a lot. As Gruner notes, he can only report on evidence he uncovers in archives and testimonies; it is likely that more people resisted similarly. Thus, not only does this work further debunk the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust, it shows just how common resistance was.

In sum, Wolf Gruner's Resisters is a detailed and compelling text that is useful both for addressing questions about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and for the study of resistance as a whole. Scholars need more analyses like Gruner's to continue to theorize about this important topic.