Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach (Social Problems & Social Issues)

Fathoming the Holocaust represents the culmination of a singular effort to attempt to explain the Final Solution to the "Jewish Problem" in terms of a general theory of social problems construction. The book is comprehensive in scope, covering the origins and emergence of the Final Solution, wartime reaction to it, and the postwar memory of the genocide. It does so within the framework of a social problems construction, a perspective that treats social problems not as a condition but as an activity that identifies and defines problems, persuades others that something must be done about them, and generates practical programs of remedial action. Berger holds that social problems have a "natural history," that is, they evolve through a sequence of stages that entail the development and unfolding of claims about problems and the formulation and implementation of solutions. Fathoming the Holocaust is therefore a book that aims to advance sociological understanding of the Holocaust, not simply to describe its history, but to examine its social construction, that is, to understand it as a consequence of concerted human activity. In doing so, Berger hopes to encourage the teaching of the Holocaust in the social scientific curricula of higher education. In contrast to the extensive historical literature on the Holocaust, Berger offers a distinctly sociological approach that examines how the Holocaust was constructed--first as a social policy designed by the Nazis, implemented by functionaries, and resisted by its victims and opponents; later as several varying layers of historical memory. The scope of this book extends from the prewar through the contemporary periods, focusing on the societal issues governing the interpreting of these events in Israel, the German Federal Republic, and the United States. Berger's is a text with both large general interest and essential material for courses in social problems, European history, and Jewish studies.

History

Berger, Ronald J.

Americas

Routledge

Feminists do not present a united front on either the legal and political remedies they propose, or definitions of sexuality and appropriate standards representing it. This study is the first to treat pornography within the context of the debate among feminists, also examining nonfeminist views embodied in popular opinion and social policy. Presenting an in-depth review of feminist and nonfeminist literature, it explores influential feminist ideologies as well as those that are only beginning to be voiced.
The authors first review the femininst movement in relation to the pornography debate among both feminists and nonfeminists. Divisions over questions of sexuality, censorship, and sexual roles and lifestyles are highlighted in an analysis of radical and libertarian feminist viewpoints. Liberal, Marxist, socialist, and black approaches to feminism are also evaluated. Feminism and Pornography also addresses the male perspective on pornography and men's responses to the feminists' debate. The final chapters assess this debate in terms of empirical research on pornography, and legal and nonlegal strategies for regulating pornography. Providing an understanding of a broad range of feminist viewpoints, this balanced, even-handed discussion may prove helpful in moving beyond the current impasse. Feminism and Pornography is an important new work for research or courses in women's studies, politics, sexuality, social problems, deviance, and law.

Feminism and Pornography:

Politics & Social Sciences

Searles, Patricia

Cottle, Charles E.

Social Sciences

Praeger

Surviving the Holocaust: A Life Course Perspective (Sociology Re-Wired)

Surviving the Holocaust is a compelling sociological account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. One brother, the author’s father, endured several concentration camps, including the infamous camp at Auschwitz, as well as a horrific winter death march; while the other brother, the author’s uncle, survived outside the camps by passing as a Catholic among anti-Semitic Poles, including a group of anti-Nazi Polish Partisans, eventually becoming an officer in the Soviet army. As an exemplary "theorized life history," Surviving the Holocaust applies concepts from life course theory to interpret the trajectories of the brothers’ lives, enhancing this approach with insights from agency-structure and collective memory theory. Challenging the conventional wisdom that survival was simply a matter of luck, it highlights the prewar experiences, agentive decision-making and risk-taking, and collective networks that helped the brothers elude the death grip of the Nazi regime. Surviving the Holocaust also shows how one family’s memory of the Holocaust is commingled with the memories of larger collectivities, including nations-states and their institutions, and how the memories of individual survivors are infused with collective symbolic meaning.

Surviving the Holocaust (Sociology Re-Wired)

Middle East

Disability and Qualitative Inquiry: Methods for Rethinking an Ableist World (Interdisciplinary Disability Studies)

This groundbreaking text makes an intervention on behalf of disability studies into the broad field of qualitative inquiry. Ronald Berger and Laura Lorenz introduce readers to a range of issues involved in doing qualitative research on disabilities by bringing together a collection of scholarly work that supplements their own contributions and covers a variety of qualitative methods: participant observation, interviewing and interview coding, focus groups, autoethnography, life history, narrative analysis, content analysis, and participatory visual methods. The chapters are framed in terms of the relevant methodological issues involved in the research, bringing in substantive findings to illustrate the fruits of the methods. In doing so, the book covers a range of physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments. This work resonates with themes in disability studies such as emancipatory research, which views research as a collaborative effort with research subjects whose lives are enhanced by the process and results of the work. It is a methodological approach that requires researchers to be on guard against exploiting informants for the purpose of professional aggrandizement and to engage in a process of ongoing self-reflection to clear themselves of personal and professional biases that may interfere with their ability to hear and empathize with others.

Reference

This ethnic and racially diverse text traces the growth and development of the juvenile delinquent field, with historical essays and contemporary research that show how a sociological perspective can be insightful, interesting, and relevant. The material has been selected from a wide range of sources using a variety of approaches: from social science surveys to ethnographic and gripping journalistic accounts that portray the day-to-day life experiences of delinquent youths and the gritty realities of life on the streets. The reader will come away with a thorough understanding of the contributions of sociology to the sutdy of juvenile delinquency, and a firm grounding in the essential issues of the field.

The Sociology of Juvenile Delinquency (Nelson-Hall Series in Sociology)

Wadsworth Publishing

Berger uses his father's and uncle's life histories as the basis for this cross-generational study combining personal narrative and sociological analysis. While Michael Berger was interned at SS camps in Poland, his brother Shlomo escaped the camps by passing as a Christian with a Polish construction crew and as a member of the Polish Partisans and the Soviet Army. The brothers' stories of success through luck, daring, and skill help explore a central problem of social theory: the relationship between human agency and social structure. Berger addresses the influences of prewar conditions on wartime adjustment and offers observations on memories of suffering and the implications for contemporary victimization politics and postmodern social thought. Portions appeared first in The Sociology Quarterly (v.36, no.1). Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Constructing a Collective Memory of the Holocaust: A Life History of Two Brothers' Survival

Biographies & Memoirs

Univ Pr of Colorado

Sociology and the Holocaust

For some time the conventional wisdom in the interdisciplinary field of Holocaust studies is that sociologists have neglected this subject matter, but this is not really the case. In fact, there has been substantial sociological work on the Holocaust, although this scholarship has often been ignored or neglected including in the discipline of sociology itself. Sociology and the Holocaust brings this scholarly tradition to light, and in doing so offers a comprehensive synthesis of the vast historical and social science literature on the before, during, and after of the Holocaust--a tour d'horizon from an explicitly sociological perspective. As such, the aim of the book is not simply to describe the chronology of events that culminated in the deaths of 6 million Jews but to draw upon sociology's "theoretical toolkit" to understand these events and the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust sociologically.

World

The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory: Beyond Sociology

The program of extermination Nazis called the Final Solution took the lives of approximately six million Jews, amounting to roughly 60 percent of European Jewry and a third of the world’s Jewish population. Studying the Holocaust from a sociological perspective, Ronald J. Berger explains why the Final Solution happened to a particular people for particular reasons; why the Jews were, for the Nazis, the central enemy. Taking a unique approach in its examination of the devastating event, The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory fuses history and sociology in its study of the Holocaust. Berger’s book illuminates the Holocaust as a social construction. As historical scholarship on the Holocaust has proliferated, perhaps no other tragedy or event has been as thoroughly documented. Yet sociologists have paid less attention to the Holocaust than historians and have been slower to fully integrate the genocide into their corpus of disciplinary knowledge and realize that this monumental tragedy affords opportunities to examine issues that are central to main themes of sociological inquiry. Berger’s aim is to counter sociologists who argue that the genocide should be maintained as an area of study unto itself, as a topic that should be segregated from conventional sociology courses and general concerns of sociological inquiry. The author argues that the issues raised by the Holocaust are central to social science as well as historical studies.

Europe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Berger, Ronald J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Berger, Ronald J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Berger, Ronald J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach (Social Problems & Social Issues)

Feminism and Pornography:

Surviving the Holocaust (Sociology Re-Wired)

Disability and Qualitative Inquiry: Methods for Rethinking an Ableist World (Interdisciplinary Disability Studies)

The Sociology of Juvenile Delinquency (Nelson-Hall Series in Sociology)

Constructing a Collective Memory of the Holocaust: A Life History of Two Brothers' Survival

Sociology and the Holocaust

Sociology and the Holocaust

The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory: Beyond Sociology

The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory: Beyond Sociology