Search

During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Res Historica is the property of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This is the second installment of a three-part contribution that highlights the achievements of Jewish dermatologists as reflected by eponyms that honor their names. It covers the period 1933-1945 when the Nazis took over Germany and how the lives of 14 notable Jewish physicians, mostly in Germany, were impacted during the Holocaust. Many of them fled from the persecution, bringing their academic talents to other lands such as the United States. At least one committed suicide (Fritz Juliusberg), and three others perished in the Holocaust (Abraham Buschke, Lucja Frey-Gottesman, and Karl Herxheimer). They are remembered by eponyms including Neisser-Juliusberg pityriasis lichenoides chronica, Buschke-Ollendorff syndrome, Frey syndrome, and Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction. It made little difference to the Nazis that several of the 14 physicians had converted to Christianity. All were persecuted by the Nazis and had their professional careers destroyed. Two of the 14 physicians lived outside of the Third Reich (Bruno Bloch and Emanuel Libman) and were spared the suffering endured by the other 12. This tragic account of Jewish dermatologists during the Holocaust, and the eponyms that honor them, will continue in part three of this contribution., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This article compares German Holocaust reparations with reparations regarding slavery and the slave trade in the United States and beyond. I review many historical reparations measures (proposed and realized) making them comparable in 2016 U.S. dollars. Based on slave-ship manifests, I investigate how reparations for the slave trade may be distributed. I propose that European slave-trade reparations could be used in Africa and the New World to indemnify the descendants of the formerly enslaved. Total and per-recipient amounts provide a wide range for possible negotiations. They range from only US$71.08 per recipient demanded by James Forman in 1969 to US$3.6 million per recipient actually paid by the descendants of Haiti’s enslaved to the descendants of their former oppressors. The German example suggests that a political solution can be worked out if the representatives of the perpetrating side reach out to the representatives of the victimized side for negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Romanian-American Ramona Ausubel's 2012 No One Is Here Except All of Us. Written in English by a second-generation immigrant to the United States, the World War II story unfolds dramatically as a fable that relies upon community, memory and imagination. It revolves around the protagonists' shared belief that by erasing and reinventing their past, by starting their lives anew via reshuffled creation myths, their small assembly of forgotten individuals might survive in an enclave of its own, fantastic. This makes Ausubel's unique approach to the Holocaust and its pogroms part of a compelling series of trauma narratives, as a biographically-informed fictional account of factual circumstances. By emphasizing the crucial, cathartic dimension of storytelling and employing it textually and meta-textually, the book blurs the boundaries between genres. The author's mediated insight into community stereotyping, persecution, solidarity and, ultimately, migration, and its skillful integration into a postmodern (counter) fairytale, will be scrutinized as valuable and effective contemporary awareness-raising tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The purpose of this study was to examine the incidence of malignant diseases among Holocaust survivors in Israel compared with European and American immigrants who did not experience the Holocaust. Methods Study subjects included Holocaust survivors born in European countries under Nazi occupation before 1945, who immigrated to Israel after 1945 and were alive as of the year 2000. Living survivors were identified based on recognition criteria in accordance with the Holocaust Survivor Benefits Law. The comparison group consisted of Clalit enrollees who were born before 1945 in European countries not under Nazi occupation and were alive in 2000 or were born in any European country or America, immigrated to Israel before 1939 and were alive in 2000. The incidence of malignant diseases was compared in univariate and Poisson regression models analyses, controlling for age, smoking, obesity, diabetes and place of residence. Results The study included 294,543 Holocaust survivors, and the mean age at the beginning of follow-up was 74 ± 8.7 years; 43% males. In multivariable analyses, the rate ratio (RR) values for males and females were 1.9 and 1.3 for colon cancer, 1.9 and 1.4 for lung cancer, 1.6 and 1.4 for bladder cancer and 1.2 and 1.3 for melanoma, respectively. For prostate cancer in males, the RR was 1.4, while for breast cancer in females, it was 1.2. Conclusions The incidence of malignant diseases among Holocaust survivors residing in Israel was higher than that among non-Holocaust survivors. These associations remained statistically significant in a multivariable analysis and were stronger for males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My grandfather was a prominent Jewish physician in Nazi Germany who escaped the Holocaust with his family but nevertheless came to a tragic end. As I, an American family physician, learned more about him, I was surprised by how much I identified with him. I was struck by how his success in his career had not been matched in other areas of his life, leaving him little to fall back on when his professional status was taken away. My grandfather's story has given me insights about him, my family, and myself and has taught me important lessons about the balance between professional and personal life., (© 2023 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.)

This article argues that representations in popular culture of the Holocaust of World War II are being used to reframe issues of racism in the United States. It critically examines three major discourse formations: contemporary Western thought on fascism, critical scholarship on the US collective memory of the Holocaust, and popular culture's use of the Holocaust for racial instruction. The Americanization and de-Judification of the Holocaust shows how fascist racism is constructed through institutional discourses and practices and functions as an archetype for understanding race and racism in the United States. Exploring the emergence of Holocaust references in US public culture following Barack Obama's election, this article proposes that the analogy gains its efficacy because the Americanization of the Holocaust articulates the relationship between institutional practices and race for racist whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1930's, Dietrich Bonhoeffer fought against the Nazi threat and the genocide it produced. In the 1960's, Martin Luther King Jr. faced off against the spectre of racial discrimination. King was a self-proclaimed advocate of non-violence. Bonhoeffer was publically affiliated with the pacifists. Both men were strongly influenced by the nonviolent activism of Gandhi. Gandhi used the term 'satyagraha' to describe his version of resistance, since it is not strictly a form of pacifism. Both Bonhoeffer and King faced an existential crisis within their careers that led them to modify their thought and practice of non-violent resistance. In 1930 Bonhoeffer had left Germany to study in the United States at Union Theological Seminary. He chose to return to Germany to engage in active resistance of the Nazi autocracies. For King the crisis came in 1961 in Albany when he came to believe his reliance on non-violent tactics was not successful in bringing about the Damascene conversion of his opponents. Working with the Southern Christian leadership Conference King began to employ non-violent tactics that aimed to provoke and manipulate opponents. In Birmingham King was jailed for his part in the peace marches to combat discrimination. In Berlin Bonhoeffer was condemned to death for his complicity in a plot to kill Hitler. Did King take the high road? Did Bonhoeffer take the low road? In this essay I compare the commitments of Bonhoeffer and King to the ideal of non-violent resistance and their practical applications of that ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aboriginal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of disparate forms of violence by emphasizing presumptively universal aspects of trauma response. Many proponents of this construct have made explicit analogies to the Holocaust as a way to understand the transgenerational effects of genocide. However, the social, cultural, and psychological contexts of the Holocaust and of post-colonial Indigenous "survivance" differ in many striking ways. Indeed, the comparison suggests that the persistent suffering of Indigenous peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. The comparative study of genocide and other forms of massive, organized violence can do much to illuminate both common mechanisms and distinctive features, and trace the looping effects from political processes to individual experience and back again. The ethics and pragmatics of individual and collective healing, restitution, resilience, and recovery can be understood in terms of the self-vindicating loops between politics, structural violence, public discourse, and embodied experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delineates and critically juxtaposes the differential public commemorations of the Vietnam War and the Holocaust in the US. We elucidate how the tragedies of the Holocaust have been integrated into US public memory as a central part of the American story, solidifying the image of the United States as a powerful and moral nation that rescues desperate people from tyranny. In contrast, public commemorations of the highly divisive Vietnam War are sparse, if at all, in great part because they would re-ignite questions about the role of the US in Vietnam and in the suffering of its victims. While the Holocaust enables the United States to re-narrate national glory, the Vietnam War calls attention to US defeat and upsets the narrative of rescue and liberation. Through a critical juxtaposition of these two public memories, we assert that the moral and political divisiveness of the Vietnam War constitutes one unacknowledged source of the ascendancy and centrality of the Holocaust in American memory. Through our relational analysis of differential public memories, we draw on and contribute to the field of memory studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks why a popular bar named after a criminal Soviet secret police organization has not provoked the outrage of the developed world's intellectual and artistic elites, who would surely condemn an SS Bar. It attributes this moral blindness to the Holocaust's centrality in Israeli, German, and American national discourse and the resultant binary morality that ascribes collective innocence to all Jews at all times and in all places and collective guilt to all Germans -- and potentially to all non-Jews -- at all times and in all places. The moral logic of the Holocaust thus transforms Jews into victims and non-Jews into victimizers; the moral logic and reality of the Gulag transform everybody into both victim and victimizer. The binary morality of the Holocaust insists that all human beings be heroes; the fuzzy morality of the Gulag recognizes that all humans are just humans constantly confronted by moral ambiguity. But because the Gulag's moral ambiguity concerns non-Jews and Jews, the Gulag undercuts binary morality. The Holocaust and the Gulag are not just incompatible moral tales; they are incompatible and intersecting moral tales. As a result, they cannot co-exist. We therefore fail to respond to the KGB Bar because to recognize the Gulag as a mass murder worthy of categorical moral condemnation would be to challenge the sacred status of the Holocaust. Ironically, the KGB Bar is possible precisely because an SS Bar is impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is museum space religious space? Do strategies of display, i.e., the ways certain objects such as human remains and ritual items are presented and/or experienced, make them into sacred objects? Who or what determines whether or not a particular object may be appropriately displayed in a museum context? In focusing on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and on a series of staged encounters there with spaces, objects, and other people, this article considers the possibility that the USHMM serves as a contemporary Jewish reliquary as well as the implications of such a notion, especially in relation to the performance of different types of Jewish identity at the museum. Using archival sources, it examines the debates over the treatment and display of selected artifacts and how those decisions impact the Museum's Jewish character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, Australia introduced a new immigration policy based on the concept of 'populate or perish'. Through the International Refugee Organization (IRO), 170,000 DPs migrated to Australia between 1947 and 1950, funded by the United Nations and the Australian government. Jews were largely excluded from this programme and the Minister for Immigration even prohibited the IRO from continuing to support the migration to Australia, based on family reunion, of individual Jewish survivors. In addition, the Australian government introduced other discriminatory policies that ensured that Jews remained only 0.5 per cent of the overall population. Based on archival research in the files of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society and the American Joint Distribution Committee, Rutland and Encel analyse the entrenched racism in Australian society that contributed to these policies, and the reactions of the American Jewish leadership to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1970s, children of Holocaust survivors utilized feminist and therapeutic ideas to develop a collective identity as the "second generation." Emphasizing self-disclosure and storytelling designed to break the silence around the Holocaust, this cohort devised an identity linked to their parents but possessing separate needs and interests. The second-generation movement has been criticized for being overly introspective. This article, which draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, takes a more sympathetic approach. By forming a collective identity and speaking openly about their experiences, children of survivors engaged in a therapeutic politics that contributed to the growing public consciousness of the Holocaust in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that analyzes the interviews with Holocaust survivors who migrated in the U.S. conducted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It highlights the silencing of Holocaust victims to tell their wartime experience to their relatives or acquaintances during their first two decades stay in the U.S. It notes there were many potential storytellers about their experience after the war, but there are only few audiences or no one wants to listen to the stories. It examines the interactional dynamics of conspiracy of silenced that arose between the survivors and the people around them through Erving Goffman's analysis of stigma. It explores how the silenced has stigmatized the survivors, their strategies to cope up with the situation and their social interaction.

The end of the second world war saw the Allied occupation authorities faced by substantial problems of malnutrition, refugees and crime. The military and Allied occupation authorities lacked the resources to resolve these problems, and had to rely on a range of external assistance organizations to cope with malnutrition and the refugee problem. Assistance came from a complicated array of organizations, including international agencies associated with the new United Nations, bilateral assistance from neutral countries, and religious and welfare organizations. While the Allies would have been happier working with organizations that they could exert leverage on, for example, the Red Cross, such was the enormity of the problems that they had to admit a broad range of relief organizations. This article will consider the politics of assistance, as organizations steered a course between the Allied authorities, local Germans and Displaced Persons. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, the Americans recognized that to maintain the legitimacy of the occupation, it was politic to keep the Vatican and Catholic organizations sympathetically. On the other hand, the Church saw that it could gain support by supporting German dissent and complaints about the inadequacy of provision. I will consider the tense political relations surrounding relief through a number of such case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research conducted within a Lubavitch girls' yeshivah in the United States, this article describes in detail how the Holocaust was taught and learned about in an eighth grade, secular studies classroom. The article describes the yeshivah, its site and students, and the teacher and the unit she taught. Special attention is given to the meaning the students made of their learning. The article concludes by arguing that the Shoah was rendered mysterious in this classroom, that the teaching of history was compromised, and that both the students' historical understandings and religious growth opportunities were shortchanged in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article points to the key role of the child victim in the representation of the Holocaust, especially in mainstream American life. Developing Peter Novick's claim that the Holocaust has been transformed into an "American memory," the author notes that virtually all breakthrough moments in non-Jewish American awareness of the Holocaust ( The Diary of Anne Frank, Wiesel's Night, the NBC television movie Holocaust, Spielberg's Schindler's List, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.) have highlighted the role of children, whose defenselessness serves as a metaphor for the general plight of Holocaust victims. While rhetorically effective, the figure of the child victim can also distort, personalize, and dehistoricize the Holocaust, providing a false sense of solidarity and understanding in mainstream American audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ways that the Holocaust (Shoah) has been memorialized in Europe, the United States, and Israel. The author examines the ways that the social construction of this genocide as "particular" has made it a model for other groups to utilize in trying to remember other crimes against humanity. However, the construction of the memory of the Shoah is also controversial, according to the author, among critics who evoke the possibility of a competition among victims of genocides.

This is an interview with Christian Parenti hosted by Christopher Sprinkle for Flashpoints, a daily news magazine show heard on KPFA 94.1 FM, Berkeley, California, and other Pacifica Radio stations including affiliates, and produced by Dennis Bernstein, which aired on October 29, 2003. The subject of the interview is Parenti's (2003) book, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror. In his book, Parenti applied sociological analysis to the history of surveillance and the industry of dataveillance. He traced the history of surveillance in America back to its early use in monitoring slaves through World War II when the Nazis used IBM computers to help implement the final solution. In this interview, Parenti concisely described key aspects of his book while applying traditional sociological theoretical analysis to his findings. This compact and insightful interview neatly and sociologically extends traditional debates beyond public collective memory issues into a discussion about how private intelligence industries, which own, "mine," and sell collected "commodity memory," are affecting American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the whiteness in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer The author argues that the show's overwhelming whiteness is a product of a generalized white anxiety about the numerical loss of white dominance across the United States and, in particular, in California. The article goes on to think through the role that Jewishness plays in the program, discussing the relationship between the apparently Anglo-American Buffy, played by a Jewish actor, and her sidekick, Willow, who is characterized as Jewish but is played by a non-Jewish actor. The evil master in the first series is given Nazi characteristics and the destruction that he wants to inflict carries connotations of the Holocaust. Structurally, Bully is produced as the Jew who saves the United States from this demonic destruction. In this traumatic renarrativising, the Holocaust comes to stand for the white-experienced crisis of the loss of white supremacy in the United States. With this reading we can begin to understand the show's popularity among early adult, predominantly white Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German psychiatrists actively engaged in the forced sterilization and killing of psychiatrically disabled children and adult patients. Academic psychiatrists embraced the Nazi philosophy and led the way in the “final solution” for psychiatric patients. This took place in a climate of widespread racism, virulent anti-Semitism, disillusionment with utopian social reforms, loss of medical confidentiality, devaluation of autonomy, intoxication with collectivism, injured national pride, and economic crisis. In this paper I review the impact on the physician–patient relationship of scientific, socio-economic, and political developments in the fifty years leading up to Hitler's rise to power, and explore potential implications for health care in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: American adults overwhelmingly agree that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, yet few studies investigate the potential benefits of Holocaust education., Objectives: We evaluate the impact of a Holocaust education conference on knowledge of the Holocaust and several civic outcomes, including "upstander" efficacy (willingness to intervene on behalf of others), likelihood of exercising civil disobedience, empathy for the suffering of others, and tolerance of others with different values and lifestyles., Research Design: We recruit two cohorts of students from three local high schools and randomize access to the Arkansas Holocaust Education Conference, where students have the chance to hear from a Holocaust survivor and to participate in breakout sessions led by Holocaust experts., Results: We find evidence that the conference increased participants' upstander efficacy, but fail to reject the null hypothesis that the conference would increase participants' knowledge or other civic attitudes.

The anti-war movement of the 1960s against the Vietnam war has its roots in the collective experiences of the two world wars and the Great Depression. Parents of the worst period of scarcity in U.S. history gave birth to children raised during the most affluent age the country has ever known. Two world wars opened the doors of employment for blacks and women only to have those doors close shortly thereafter. Disillusionment over the results of the two wars brought a re-examination of American values. Hiroshima and the Holocaust produced bomb scares and an arms race along with serious questions of Jim Crowism. Colonialism was doomed by World War II and African-Americans were inspired, to fight for their liberation also. The Baby Boom lead to megaversities, and alienating bureaucracies became insensitive to student needs. The Cold War and red scares at the end of both world wars gave birth to new questions about democracy and civil liberties. The wars and depression spawned a "beat generation" refusing to conform to mainstream American values. This "beat generation" in turn lead to a counterculture of hipies. Folk and rock music protested the status quo. Materialism was called into question. The anti-war movement became part of a protest against traditional American values and attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on medical trials performed by Dr. Albert Kligman on the inmates of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison between 1951 and 1974, which have been widely criticized as exploitative. I seek to investigate the mechanics behind the "ethical blind spot" that enabled the American medical community to laud Kligman for his efforts while simultaneously condemning the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and supporting the development of the Nuremberg Code. I argue that this nonrecognition hinges on a colonial logic by which certain populations are produced as waste, both rhetorically and materially. Drawing on the incarcerated men's accounts included in Allen Hornblum's books on the subject, I trace the process by which human beings come to be reclassified as natural resources and their exploitation recast as industrious cultivation., (© 2020. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

The use of graphic imagery, including PowerPoint and film, is an invaluable tool when teaching the Holocaust. Care must be taken to warn students in advance about the content of this material in order to maintain a safe, trusting learning environment. Based on a class survey, students responded in a positive manner to such material. Moreover, they felt the material greatly enhanced their learning experience. Allowing students to leave the classroom without penalty is essential. Opening dialogue and teaching students how to read images must be carefully planned and controlled by the instructor. Allowing students to voice their emotional responses to graphic images tends to stimulate a more thorough intellectual understanding, as well as facilitating peer interaction. Instructors who teach the Holocaust should not shy away from using these pedagogical tools, as the benefits far outweigh the risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harry Sicher (1889-1974), longtime professor at Loyola University Chicago, went down in medical history as a pioneering figure in the area of oral anatomy. His groundbreaking textbook "Oral Anatomy" (1949) was published in numerous languages and editions, becoming the most widely read standard work in its area internationally. This was also true for various other works Sicher authored: orthodontists sought his knowledge about cranial and facial growth, oral surgeons used his pioneering work on anatomy for practicing dental block anesthesia, and his work "Bone and Bones" was read by surgeons and orthopedists. By the end of his life, Sicher had accumulated an array of high-profile awards and honors that brought him a great deal of posthumous fame. One aspect of Sicher's life that remains largely unknown is that the Vienna native was forced to flee the National Socialist regime on account of his Jewish ancestry, which took him to the United States via England. The present article investigates this facet of his life: What were the factors behind Sicher's forced migration? How did this process unfold? Which factors were decisive for allowing him to develop an illustrious career in the United States despite facing adverse conditions? We approach these questions on the basis of comprehensive archival sources and contemporary printed material. What comes to light is that Sicher was forced to overcome significant setbacks before starting anew in the United States. This included his dismissal from the University of Vienna and subsequent dispossession in 1938, a failed attempt to find a position after settling in England in 1938/39, and the painful loss of his mother, who was deported to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. After assuming a new position at Loyola University in 1942, Sicher's career in anatomy started an upward path of ever-increasing success. Four factors proved to be decisive in this development: Sicher's strong motivation to learn, his exceptional teaching skills, the unique qualities of his research, and the dense academic network that he was able to connect with, which included other representatives of the "Vienna School"., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.)

Two concerns about information from unethical experimentation are its legitimacy and trustworthiness. This article explores guidance about information use from the AMA Code of Medical Ethics ., (© 2021 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved.)

Objectives: To compare the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and risk factors in Holocaust survivors with that of Jewish immigrants from Europe and America., Design: Population-based, cross-sectional study., Setting: Clalit, a large Israeli healthcare provider., Participants: Holocaust survivors (n=83,971) and a comparison group of Jewish individuals born in North or South America or European countries not under Nazi occupation or who immigrated to Israel before 1939 (n=16,058) (mean age 84±7, 61% female) MEASUREMENTS: Univariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses of cardiovascular diseases and risk factors. Matching the comparison group to Holocaust Survivors on propensity scores for exposure., Results: The prevalence of ischemic heart disease (38.7% vs 31.3%), congestive heart failure (10.9% vs 9.1%), past stroke (15.7% vs 13.4%), and peripheral vascular disease (9.5% vs 7.9%) was higher in Holocaust survivors (p<.001 for all comparisons). Similar results were found for cardiovascular risk factors (diabetes mellitus (14.4% vs 13.6%), hypertension (89.3% vs 86.4%), dyslipidemia (75.9% vs 74.0%) (p<.001 for all comparisons). In multivariable analysis, matched on propensity scores and controlled for confounders, odds ratios for men and women were higher for diabetes (1.23, 1.55), dyslipidemia (1.53, 1.51), hypertension (1.56 , 1.94), stroke (1.18, 1.17), and ischemic heart disease (1.18, 1,40), but not congestive heart failure (0.95, 1.02). A Positive association was noted for peripheral vascular disease in males (1.20) but not females (0.96)., Conclusion: Prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and risk factors was higher in Holocaust survivors. These associations were stronger in women in most cases., (© 2018, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation © 2018, The American Geriatrics Society.)

Both Dr. Kuriloff's initial contribution to the Roundtable, and her later response to her fellow discussants focus on the social construction of psychoanalytic theories of therapeutic action. She notes the promise of the enlightenment/ modern era as impetus for an initially positivist "science" of psychoanalysis, and then implicates the scourge of the Shoah as that which galvanized the largely Jewish seminal community to cling to universal, versus contextual theories and technique. That the deconstruction of truth and authority, beginning with the post-war "baby boom" and student movements in the United States and Europe, put an end to one metapsychology is yet another example of the power of context upon ideas and praxis. This seemingly haphazard pairing of context and content determines the degree to which theories are embraced or ignored within any particular body politic, or within our tiny community at one time or another, prompting Kuriloff to warn against over valuing and/or excluding any theory, theorist, or technique from what we need to know and do to be helpful to people. This tension—between immersion in, and observation of the field—is what psychoanalytic theory and praxis ought to allow.

More than 20 years have passed since the American-Israeli medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky introduced his salutogenic theory 'sense of coherence' as a global orientation to view the world, claiming that the way people view their life has a positive influence on their health. Sense of coherence explains why people in stressful situations stay well and even are able to improve their health. The origin of salutogenesis derives from the interviews of Israeli women with experiences from the concentration camps of the Second World War who in spite of this stayed healthy. Sixty years after the Holocaust this paper aim to shed light on the salutogenic theory in the context of public health and health promotion. In addition, other approaches with salutogenic elements for the explanation of health are considered. A potential direction for public health of the early 21st century is proposed. The historical paradox is to honour the victims of the Holocaust and see the birth of post-modern public health and the salutogenic framework through the experience of its survivors in the ashes of Modernity.

The principle of informed consent, aimed at the lawfulness of health assistance, tends to reflect the concept of autonomy and of decisional autodetermination of the person requiring and requesting medical and/or surgical interventions. This legal formula, over the last few years, has gained not only considerable space but also importance in the doctrinal elaboration and approaches, as well as juridical interpretations, thereby influencing the everyday activities of the medical profession. Informed consent is still the object of continuous explorations, not only asfar as concerns the already confirmed theoretical profile but, instead, the ambiguous practical and consequential aspect. Analysing how the concept and role of consensus was born and developed with the more adequate and reasonable excursions to make it valid and obtain it, it is impossible not to take into consideration, on the one hand, the very ancient philosophical origins and, on the other, the fact that it was conditioned by religion with the moral aspects and the accelerated deontological evolution with pathways parallel to the needs and the progress offered by new forms of treatment and novel biotechnological applications. The principle of consent is a relatively new condition. In fact, already in the times of not only the Egyptian civilisation, but also the Greek and Roman, documents have been found which show how the doctor's intervention had, in some way, first to be approved by the patient. Plato (law IV) had already foreseen the problems, the procedures and the modes of information which are, in synthesis, at the root of the principles of the present formula of informed consent and correlated the practice of the information and consensus with the quality and social position of the patient. The only guarantee that the patient might have, derived from a fundamental principle of medicine of all times: "in disease, focus on two aims, to improve and not to cause damage". A figure can be recognised, in the Hippocratic physician, that cared about the patient's suffering, but never neglected looking after his own outcome, endeavouring to avoid becoming involved in lack of success and death of a patient. The concept of consensus is inexistent, albeit, there is an awareness of the presence of precautious and preventive information. In the behaviour of doctors, in ancient times, it is not difficult to recognize the true motives and the real reasons that, already in those days, give rise to the necessary "defensive medicine" particularly as far as concerns the social status of the patient. Already from the early origins, continuing the Hippocratic tradition, the relationship between doctor and patient was consolidated, based upon two very definite criteria, represented, on the one hand, by the professional duty of the physician to do what is bestfor the patient and, on the other, the duty of the patient to completely accept the physician's decisions and intervention. The Hippocratic physician respected a principle of professional responsibility which was more religious and of a moral type, but, from a legal point of view, very weak inasmuch as it depended upon regulations elaborated by human beings. The conviction and certainty that the physician acted, in the interest of his patient's well-being, has been passed down over the centuries endowing the physician with moral authority and a kind of legal impunity, conditions which corresponded, in an almost reflection-likefashion, with the duty of obedience and subjection, on the part of the patient. Christianity was grafted into this consolidated vision of the sacral character of medicine and medical practice, which did not substantially change the Hippocratic type of ethical behaviour. Non only the population but also the Christian physician was aware of the religious importance of his intense activity as a mission and compared to a special kind of priesthood in safe-guarding health, considered as a gift of God. Therefore, invested with this authority which derived from his professional role and from his very work, he felt it his duty to guide the patient, deciding and for him. The patient is an ignorant person who does not have the knowledge, the intellectual capacity or moral authority to oppose or disagree with the wishes and decisions of the physician who, instead, on account of his doctrine, knows exactly what is goodfor him. In this regard, if we were to speak of consensus concerning the physician's intervention, he would be considered useless in as much as obvious and understood when seeking help. The attitude of the patient towards the physician has always tended to one of strong faith and characterized by psychological subjection borne out by traditions thousands of years old. A patient who was sick, again, as an attitude of respect and gratitude, followed the treatment but never asked for any explanations regarding the therapeutic effects and the physician refrained from taking any initiative to inform the patient or his/her family. Each phenomenon, therefore, has a precise origin, a well-defined history and when its importance tends to significantly condition the activities concerning Man, a desire emerges to learn the origin and the history. As is well known, a trial commenced in Nuremberg, on December 19, 1946, of Nazi doctors and a code was defined in which the judges, all Americans, clearly emphasized a view of medical research and technology: science should never transform or consider human beings as an instrument to be employed for scientific purposes. In actual fact, documents exist providing evidence that a few decades before the drawing up of the Nuremberg Code, the need had been expressed, in Germany itself to somehow make medical interventions and actions legal by means of the use and practice of consensus. The moral and ethical principles in those documents, even if not available as bibliographic references in the English literature, certainly merit, from a historical viewpoint to be considered as conceptual elements and doctrinal and socio-cultural products, even if at that time, of little practical importance, which belong to the European culture and, in particular, and almost paradoxically, in the light of what happened, to the German culture. The United States of America is held to be the country of origin of informed consent, the initial aim of which was make sure that the correct dignity of the patient's independence be reserved at the time of decision making and choice of medical options. Reports on this topic, in fact, first appeared in the USA, at the beginning of the 18th Century, with problems focusing on and limited to only the simple rights of the patient in giving his/her approval of the health intervention later to be conceptually developed, along the lines of an itinerary with, at intervals, famous legal actions, until in the 20th Century, informed consent was reached, a criterion that, as is well known, foresees and includes not only the important and fundamental autonomy of the patient to decide, which stems ones personal rights, but also the essential objective element, which is, information. The expression informed consent has simply been transposed in Italian and roughly translated in an ambiguous fashion into "consenso informato" when, on the contrary, it should be referred to as "informazione per il consenso" "information for consensus" not only to respect the concept but, surely, for a more correct deciphering and a more precise interpretation related to the numerous concepts it presupposes and implies. Information and consent may be compared to the two sides of the same coin. These are the two important pillars that coincide and are joined giving weight to the medical responsibility, as far as concerns consent to the health intervention: on the one hand, having obtained consent,following correct and sincere information interpreted and deciphered as an important phase and an essential indicator of correct, scrupulous medico-professional procedure and, on the other, the consensus itself conceived as a duty aiming at the maximum respect of the rights to autodetermination, independence and autonomy of the patient, as a person. At the beginning of the Nineties, as we have seen, we were made aware of a series of legal actions regarding medical responsibility which was greatly conditioned by the Anglosaxon influence which initially induced many Italian magistrates and forensic physicians to adopt an extremely rigid attitude with no attempt to comply, in any way, with the culture and traditions of our country and our tradition which has always been inspired by good common sense, both medical and human. The American experience has been very rapidly adopted, by some, without a profound, complete and necessary historical and evolutional analysis aimed at those intertwined principles that have been motifs that have gradually led to the legal references in those emblematic cases referred to, the conclusions of which continue to attract a great deal of attention. In Italy, the legal and doctrinal evolution of informed consent, even if following a little more rapidly the traces, steps, problems and interpretations of the various aspects drawn up, characterized and applied in the United States, has not only occurred at a later time, but, despite reaching the same meaningful objectives, the same considerations, the same importance, and, unfortunately, the same inconveniences, has had quite different aims, approaches and articulations. In this respect, it is enough to focus attention on the different cultural traditions and religious routes, on the different doctrinal background, the particular historical origins and the individual legal aspects, all extremely different one from the other. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED)

The possibility that the experiences of the "hidden" child survivors of the Holocaust (those who survived outside of the concentration camps during the Nazi occupation) had a pathological effect on their offspring was examined by comparing volunteer, matched samples of adult children of "hidden" child survivors of the Holocaust with adult children of nontraumatized U.S.-born Jewish parents on personality variables measured by the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970). The MANOVA results indicated that there were no differences in the personality characteristics of the two groups.