Dan Michman rejects the “traditional administrative and organizational perspective” of the ghetto in World War II as flawed by promoting a “Polish model” that links the ghetto to a defined space and a Jewish self-administration (Jewish Council, or Judenrat) and embeds its establishment in a system-wide process of Nazi annihilation policy. Michman's “combined cultural, linguistic, and semantic approach” defines Nazi ghettos as diverse phenomena aimed at 1) segregating the Jews, physically and legally; 2) containing east European Jewry in “its natural habitat” until a “final solution” evolved; 3) addressing security and labor issues presented by Jews permitted to survive; and 4) transporting Jews to killing centers (pp. 148–149). His multifaceted definition includes potentially any location (including metaphoric locations, e.g., outside the protection of German law) in which Jews lived under Nazi rule. A linguistic approach supports this all-inclusive concept, since contemporary documents, survivor literature, and scholarship used the term in an elastic fashion (p. 151).

From the Reformation to the Napoleonic Wars, “ghetto” evoked images of compulsory residential restriction isolating the Jews. In the nineteenth century, Jewish emancipation discourse generated a metaphoric use of the term. “Ghetto” became a state of mind: negatively reflecting isolation, superstition, and repression, but positively symbolizing a “vital Jewish life” (p. 26). In antisemites, this “ghetto” evoked terror of an equally mythical east Jewry (Ostjudentum) as a breeding ground of Jewish “racial” leadership and a base from which Jews penetrated, corrupted, and controlled the non-Jewish world. Fear of Ostjudentum fueled Nazi occupation policy; Michman places great—perhaps unduly great—emphasis on the impact of Peter-Heinz Seraphim's Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum (Jewry in East European Space) as a population policy textbook and intellectualized codification of prejudicial panic (pp. 45–60) that engendered initiatives of local administrators in 1939–1940 seeking “solutions” to the “Jewish problem,” not as rational responses to security or labor issues, but to fear of east European Jewry as an existential threat to German existence. Appearing prior to determination of “final solution” policy, the “Polish model” was never applied systemically and hence should not define the term “ghetto” (p. 85).

Establishment of ghettos in impoverished sections of east European cities was no accident. These neighborhoods already served as incubators of the Jewish “spirit”; German officials merely demarcated their boundaries and forced Jews who had left to “return home” (pp. 74–75). Whereas “ghetto” in Nazi parlance initially evoked the traditional ghetto of early modern Europe, ghetto-creation in 1939 reflected a more modern racist-population oriented concept, “catalyzed by this encounter with Eastern European Jewry.” Michman discounts internal Security Police discussions in late September 1939 as a system-wide instruction to establish ghettos; he cites evidence of haphazard and diverse-circumstantial ghetto-building thereafter. This might have had less to do with Security Police intent, however, than constraints on its capacity to establish and control ghettos, as Peter Klein has demonstrated with the example of Łódź.

Michman divorces “ghettoization” sharply from Final Solution policy: he notes Hitler's disinterest in discussions about ghettos in contrast to his determination of Final Solution policy. While this makes sense, the author's rejection of the “Polish model” and its associated characteristics expands the definition of ghetto to whatever people chose—or choose—to label a ghetto. Michman identifies ghettos established after the regime initiated Final Solution policy as a step in Final Solution implementation: once the Germans decided to annihilate, ghettos became part of that policy (pp. 119–120). But are “final solution ghettos” in places such as Zhytomyr and Berdychiv really ghettos, rather than concentration and detention facilities to hold Jews until the Germans mobilized the forces to kill them? Economic exploitation belonged to final solution policy; hence “ghettos” east of Minsk were labor camps run by the Security Police, the Wehrmacht, or the civilian occupation authorities. Michman concedes that the “linguistic-cultural” perspective changes “the term ‘ghetto’ . . . taking on in part the sense of ‘camp’” (p. 120). Scholars frequently refer to facilities established under Romanian administration in Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria as ghettos. These actually functioned as transit camps in the former and colonies in the latter—or, the author elaborates, “concentrations of Jews in defined residential areas . . . without walls or fences” (pp. 130–131). In neither case was there a Jewish administration: the Jewish community leadership in Bucharest ministered the Jews of Transnistria. Though frequently identified as “ghettos,” neither Theresienstadt nor Salonika functioned primarily as such, although each had a Jewish self-administration. Theresienstadt had multiple functions—it served as a concentration camp and as police transit camp (e.g., such as Westerbork or Drancy). Similarities to ghetto structure existed, particularly in Theresienstadt, but Salonika and, later, “ghettos” in the Hungarian provinces functioned as holding pens pending deportation to killing centers and concentration camps.

Though accurately identifying ideological motivations, Michman underestimates practical considerations encouraging ghetto-building in Poland and the U.S.S.R. The ghetto facilitated monitoring the Jews, reducing contacts with non-Jews, exploiting Jewish manual labor, and in some cases—such as Łódź—extorting Jewish assets. The author also overemphasizes practical and administrative problems that ghettos presented to city managers. Ground down for decades by state-sponsored antisemitism in Poland, poor urban Jewish neighborhoods suited ghetto establishment: fewer people required “relocation.” Moreover, transferring middle-class Polish Jews into ghettos justified and facilitated property theft. Finally, impoverished ghettos reinforced stereotypes of a dirty, diseased, dishonest, and dangerous Ostjudentum.

Michman rightly attributes to Jewish victims ownership of the term ghetto in postwar accounts, but regardless of linguistic imprecision, the Germans were not unmindful of differences between the Warsaw or Łódź ghettos and forced labor or transit camps for Jews. Moreover, the author misses the salient difference between ghetto and camp: the measure—however limited—of individual and group autonomy, rendering the social, economic, and civic culture of the ghetto fundamentally different from camps, killing centers, transit camps, and colonies. At the end, readers may wonder whether the imperative to abandon the “Polish model” leads Michman to a history of the term “ghetto” rather than of the phenomenon itself, and whether this infusion of linguistic-cultural perspective at the expense of administrative-organizational history confuses more than clarifies.