Hanna Yablonka – författare

This work deals with the integration of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust into Israeli society in the early years of the new State's existence. Among the issues discussed are: the ways in which the survivors were recruited into the defence forces and the role they played in the War of Independence, the settlement of the immigrants in towns and villages abandoned by Arabs during the war and the immigrant youth.

The Making of Martin Luther King and The Civil Rights Movement incorporates the changing focus of civil rights movement studies to focus on communities and leaders heretofore ignored or under-represented, and thereby challenges many of the agendas established by civil rights scholarship of the past twenty-five years. We learn from essays on communities in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Montgomery that key centers of black life, such as unions, schools, teachers, businessmen, and masonic lodges played important roles in the movement. We learn of the importance of influential local leaders such as W. H. Flowers in Arkansas and Edgar Daniel Nixon in Montgomery, who were tremendously effective at organizing on the local level.The volume also confronts paradigms of history such as the notion that the Civil Rights Movement can be traced from the reformist integration of King, to the revolutionary black nationalism of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Party. Clayborne Carson argues in a pathbreaking essay that there were radical undercurrents in mass black movements of the 1950s and early 60s, and that these undercurrents contained the seeds of the most significant mass movements of subsequent decades. In contrast, black power militancy of the late 1960's, according to Carson, was either readily suppressed or transformed into forms that did not threaten the dominant political and economic elites.

Survivors of the Holocaust accounted for fully one-half of the wave of immigration into Israel in the aftermath of World War II. These survivors were among the first to enter the gates of the new state following its founding in 1948. In this important addition to our understanding of the social integration of Holocaust survivors into postwar society, Hanna Yablonka draws on a wealth of primary materials such as recently released archival material, letters, newspapers, internal army magazines, and personal interviews, to examine, from all sides, the charged encounters between survivors of the Holocaust and the veteran Jewish population in Israel. Yablonka details the role the new immigrants played in the War of Independence, their settlement of towns and villages abandoned by Arabs during the war, and the ways in which Israeli society accepted-and often did not accept-them into the armed forces, the kibbutz movements, and the trade unions.Survivors of the Holocaust illuminates the ways in which Israeli society grew and developed through its emotional and sometimes contentious relations with the arriving survivors and how, against all odds, the survivors of the Holocaust and their offspring became pillars of modern Israeli society.