The trouble with many, if not most, documentary collections on this and other subjects is the failure of their editors to formulate clear objectives or to define selection criteria that will lend coherence to their efforts. Another common and related pitfall is to ignore a simple fact—every documentary collection is also an interpretation, the result of choices made consciously or unconsciously. The editors of the present volume avoid these errors, and in the process, make an important contribution to the study of the Holocaust.

Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1938, is the first in an ambitious series being undertaken by the USHMM as part of its larger project, Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context. Four further volumes, under the general editorship of Jürgen Matthäus, will focus exclusively on the Jewish experience, taking the documentation up to 1946 and expanding it to “reflect different forms of behavior by different strata, segments or subgroups within European Jewry at different points in time” (pp. xviii–xix). One of the series' aims is to provide the source material that will encourage scholarly treatments of the Holocaust to give greater attention to the victims' perspectives, instead of continuing to rely so heavily on those of the perpetrators. Plans are under way to publish more extensive documentation through the USHMM website, making sources in their original languages available to scholars. This initial collection of documents (almost all translated from German), however, targets nonspecialist readers, seeking to broaden and enrich the understanding of the Holocaust, specifically among university teachers, and thus to improve the way the subject is taught in institutions of higher education.

In pursuing these goals, the editors have established principles of selection that make a good deal of sense. The most important of these is to insist on immediacy, presenting evidence produced as Nazi anti-Jewish policies were put into place, not decades later after the perceptions of survivors had been altered by the passage of time. A second no less important principle of inclusion is apparent in the strenuous efforts made to present a representative sampling of German Jewry's reactions to official and popular antisemitism. Only antisemites were certain that Jews constituted a monolith. The reality, as the volume's approximately two hundred documents reveal, is that Jews were extraordinarily diverse in every conceivable way. Drawing from the museum's rich resources, as well as the holdings of the Leo Baeck Institute; the archives of several voluntary associations; and the diaries and letters of individual men and women, young and old, famous and anonymous, the editors make good on the promise to do justice to the variety and breadth of Jewish responses to oppression.

Recognizing that a great majority of those teaching Holocaust courses at the university level are not necessarily scholars with the language skills or the archival experience to do primary research, the editors have provided extensive explanatory material about the provenance of the documents, including when possible the fates of their authors, a chronology, an up-to-date bibliography, and a glossary of terms. The most important readers' aid, however, is a clear, scrupulously balanced, and highly informed narrative that supplies an interpretive framework in which to place the primary evidence. At times, the editors appear to do rather too much guiding, frequently telling readers what to find in the texts and how to understand them; they also avoid taking controversial stands, favoring instead a frank tentativeness when it comes to the vexed issues of this history. Yet, given the nonexpert audience being addressed and the complexities of the period, these are reasonable precautions. These documents cannot be left to speak for themselves. They can be too easily misread. To forestall the reaching of hasty conclusions, readers are admonished to distinguish between the official upbeat tone of Jewish leaders communicating to the members of their organizations and what they said in more private letters or memos; they are reminded that the extraordinary circumstances that generated this evidence require a close reading for nuance and unspoken fears and feelings, that what was not said can sometimes be as important as what was. Close reading will repay the effort. The witnesses, a number of them called upon repeatedly over the five-year period, give powerful accounts of a collapsing world, riddled with uncertainty, growing fear, and deepening despair.

This volume ought to put to rest many of the hoary clichés concerning the responses of Germany's Jews to their persecution. Along with the callow optimism, willful denial, and self-delusion on display in these documents, there is plenty of the opposite as well: hard-headed, intelligent analysis, an unflinching weighing of options, and clear recognition of just how dire the situation had become.