Some Jewish historians had no choice but to focus on the Holocaust, because they lived and died in it. Led by Emanuel Ringelblum, a team of historians within the Warsaw Ghetto assembled an astonishing set of testimonies, documents, and photographs, which they preserved in buried milk cans to be unearthed after the war. For a sense of the variety and scope of the materials contained within the archive, readers can consult The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg Shabes-Ringelblum Archive: Catalog and Guide (Indiana, December), edited by Robert Moses Shapiro and Tadeusz Epsztein, with an introduction by Samuel Kassow—while those more interested in the tale of the archive’s production and preservation should seek out Kassow’s important Who Will Write Our History? (2007).

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While Engel points out a surprising gap in Holocaust historiography, no one could call the overall amount of energy devoted by contemporary scholars to the Holocaust insufficient. Indeed, industrious historians are busily slicing up the enormity of the genocide into smaller and smaller chunks—narrowing their foci to one year, or city, or perpetrator—producing works that can at least aspire to comprehensive treatment of their subjects. Giles MacDonough describes a single eventful year in 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (Basic, November), for example, and if the book sells well, the author can be sure that at least six potential sequels (1939, 1940, 1941, etc) await him. Hans Safrian concentrates on one particularly assiduous Nazi (and his hardworking underlings) in Eichmann’s Men (Cambridge, January), while novelist and author of the acclaimed Lawrence and Aaronsohn (2007) Ronald Florence hones in on a single chilling episode from Eichmann’s career in Emissary of the Doomed: Bargaining for Lives in the Holocaust (Viking, January): Eichmann’s 1944 offer to trade the lives of a million doomed Hungarian Jews for 10,000 military trucks, which forced Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jew, into the awkward position of presenting this Faustian bargain to the Allied nations and Jewish organizations. Meanwhile Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation (Chicago, December), a collection of essays edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schutz—and, like Eichmann’s Men, translated from the German—focuses on the city called home by a third of German Jews before the Nazis seized power. In each case, the narrowed focus helps these volumes cover their subjects effectively.

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Other authors, in documenting the Nazis’ influence outside of Europe, reach beyond the traditional confines of what we think of when we think of the Holocaust. Jeffrey Herf, who has published before on the Nazi propaganda machine, turns to the Middle Eastern and North African diffusion of the Third Reich’s messages in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale, November). Herf unearths Arabic radio broadcasts produced by the Germans and explores the continuities between European anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s and the Judeophobia of contemporary fundamentalist Islam. The attempt to understand the links between these two poisonous, brutal ideologies also animates Boualem Sansal’s novel The German Mujahid (Europa, October), translated from French by Frank Wynne. In it, two Algerian brothers grapple with their German father’s war crimes as an officer with the Waffen SS, as well as with the rise of fundamentalist Islam in their French ghetto and in Algeria itself.

Such comparative, synthesizing approaches to Judeophobia reach their zenith, perhaps, with Robert Wistrich’s A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January), a 1,200-page tome covering virtually all historical instances of Judeophobia, whether perpetrated by pagans, Christians, Soviets, or Muslims. Technically anti-Semitism dates back only to the 19th century—that’s when the term was coined—but Wistrich, director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University, seeks the sources of this hatred throughout history.

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Is it too late now for Holocaust restitution? The ongoing trial of John Demjanjuk reminds us that many people abjure the notion of a statute of limitations on the Nazis’ crimes. Efraim Zuroff, for example, whose new book Operation Last Chance: One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, November) was reviewed by Tablet’s Adam Kirsch a couple of weeks ago, hunts down aged Nazis today in the hopes of convicting them before they die of natural causes. In Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (Wisconsin, October), historian Michael Marrus addresses the questions raised by financial reparations for Holocaust survivors. How much money would it take to redress the suffering of a single survivor, let alone the senseless destruction of a third of the world’s Jewish population?

Alongside legal and financial means of recourse, some seek to respond to the Holocaust through art. After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture (Rutgers, November), the latest of many academic studies of the ethics and aesthetics of representations of the genocide, includes contributions from some of the most impressive and influential academic thinkers on the subject, including Berel Lang, Geoffrey Hartman, James Young, and Sara Horowitz. Does the composition of rich and powerful literature by survivors, and by those meditating on the catastrophe from afar, provide as much comfort to the living or the dead as tracking down perpetrators or doling out reparation monies? Whether it does or not, and for better or worse, publishing books about the tragedy seems still to be among the most widespread responses to the it.

All this changed when he met the German. He doesn’t remember the man’s name, but still recalls the shock he felt when he learned his tall, genial neighbor was an escaped SS officer, wanted for crimes against humanity and living out his years working as a security consultant for various Arab governments. Sansal wanted to know more, to learn about the ghettos and the trains and the death camps, things he was increasingly convinced were not rumors at all. But in Algeria, there was no one he could ask.

As luck would have it, Sansal had an older brother studying in Paris, who, after some pleading, agreed to send over some books. Sansal read them all eagerly, but only one changed his life: Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, the book commonly known in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz. He declared himself a disciple of Levi’s, and devoted much of his life to thinking and writing about the same questions that troubled his mentor, most notably the question of memory.

Now, Arab and Muslim readers wishing to follow Sansal’s lead no longer have to depend on contraband copies in foreign languages: thanks to a new initiative called Project Aladdin, Levi’s memoir, along with Anne Frank’s diary and two other Holocaust-themed works, are available in Arabic as a free download, alongside editions in Turkish and Farsi.

The project, according to its founder, Abraham Radkin, was conceived in response to a steep rise in the volume of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying literature distributed in the Arab and Muslim world—and the rhetoric of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With hundreds of hateful tracts published each year, Radkin thought, the most effective response would be to provide reliable, informative, and evocative alternatives. The executive director of the British nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, Radkin had the necessary connections to attract high-level patrons to his project, putting together an advisory board that includes the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade; Princess Haya al-Khalifa of Bahrain; Prince Hassan bin-Talal of Jordan; former French president Jacques Chirac; and former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. With some help from the United Nations and other international organization, the project was ready to launch.

Its first hurdle was deciding which books to publish. “We were looking,” Radkin said in a recent interview, “to publish four books that gave a general public basically unaware of the historical facts an idea of the scale of the horror, that gave personal testimony, and that provided accurate descriptions of what happened to people.”

Anne Frank was a natural choice, as was Shlomo Venezia’s Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, a survivor’s account of the camp’s intricate machinery of death. Phillipe Burrin’s Hitler and the Jews: The Path to Genocide was added as a general, approachable primer on the basic historical facts of the Holocaust. This left room for one additional title; after much argument—some board members thought the book would prove too dense for a population with little education about the Holocaust—Radkin decided to publish Levi as well, the first time the author had been translated into Arabic or Farsi. In March 2009, all four titles were offered for free online.

While the project is still in its infancy, a few thousand copies of each book have already been downloaded, and the project’s staff received hundreds of encouraging emails from readers throughout the Arab world. Local publishers in Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and France will soon offer the translations in paperback, and publishers in other countries are slated to join in the coming months. Other initiatives, from student exchange programs to outreach efforts, are also in the works.

“I think the project has the potential to bring about real change on the ground,” Radkin said. “I have great faith in the importance of education and cultural interaction with people who are kept in the dark by those forces who benefit from ignorance.”

Those very forces, Sansal agreed, are not to be underestimated. “The situation in the Arab world is absolutely catastrophic,” he said, calling the abuse of women in particular “another Shoah.” It’s a theme that Sansal pushes to its extremes: his recent book, The German Mujahid, tells the story of two Algerian brothers who discover that their German father was a fugitive war criminal, and makes bold parallels between Nazism and fundamentalist Islam.

Speaking in a recent conference on Primo Levi, where he was seated next to Radkin and other intellectuals, Sansal expressed his pleasure with the new translations. Just like Levi had once delivered Sansal from ignorance, the Algerian writer said he hoped and believed If This Is a Man would now open the eyes of a new generation of Arab and Farsi readers. “Levi provides a clear vision,” he said. “It’s a vision of remembrance and responsibility.”

Levi’s is also a vision likely to appeal to Muslim audiences, said Natalia Indrimi, the director of the New York-based Primo Levi Center, which organized the recent conference, because of its ability to portray the Holocaust in terms that are universally understandable.

“Levi speaks and writes as a man,” she said. “I trust very much that he’ll speak to people as people. If This Is a Man does not make suffering or the mechanism of genocide a Jewish property. It desegregates the Shoah. It teaches us how to come close to the other without putting labels on ourselves or on the other.”