04 December 2023
Today, Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research awarded the winners of the prestigious International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, in memory of Benny and Tilly Joffe z"l. This year’s award goes to Dr. Laurien Vastenhout of the University of Amsterdam and Prof. Edward Westermann of Texas A&M University- San Antonio. The awards were officially presented in a virtual ceremony with Brian and Lee Joffe, congratulating the recipients on behalf of the Joffe family. For over two decades, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, has been awarding the prize to scholars and historians who have written important research on the subject of the Holocaust.
Prof. Edward Westermann is being recognized for his publication entitled, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Cornell University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021), while Dr. Laurien Vastenhout is noted for her book, Between Community and Collaboration: Jewish Councils in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation. (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
The winners were selected by an international panel of judges presided by Prof. Dan Michman, Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Incumbent of the John Najmann Chair for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem; Bar-Ilan University. Other judges serving on the panel this year included Prof. Laura Jockusch, (Brandeis University, Boston), Prof. Elizabeth Harvey, (University of Nottingham; and Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Munich and Berlin), Dr. David Silberklang (Yad Vashem, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Haifa), Yad Vashem Senior Academic Advisor Prof. Dina Porat, Dr. Sharon Kangisser-Cohen, editor-in-chief of Yad Vashem Studies, and Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem.
Noted finalists in the International Book Prize competition were Dr. Yechiel Weizman: Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces After the Holocaust and Dr. Anne-Christin Klotz: Warsaw’s Yiddish Daily Press and its Fight Against National Socialism, 1930-1941.
Remarks from the Judges:
“Edward Westermann’s Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany examines an important and hitherto barely researched factor in understanding the perpetrators of the Holocaust: alcohol consumption. The book demonstrates that the common understanding of the SS and police as ice-cold killers is a misconception. Westermann shows that alcohol consumption and drinking rituals were integral to the murder of the Jews. Moreover, the murderers were intoxicated with the act of murder itself. We agreed that Edward Westermann’s book “is a stellar contribution to Holocaust and perpetrator studies.”
“The issue of the Jewish Councils has been—and still is—one of the most sensitive topics in the history of the Shoah. Laurien Vastenhout's Between Community and Collaboration is a pioneering, compelling, and challenging work, comparing the Jewish organizational bodies imposed by the Nazis in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. It examines the behavior and mindset of members of the different Councils, their contacts with the Germans, the local authorities, the underground, and other organizations. Using sources in many languages, the historical protagonists are transformed from two-dimensional subjects to complex, individual characters, creating a sophisticated and more nuanced interpretation of the motivations and behaviors of the members."
