Author Description

From the end of World War II until the late 1950s, the most prominent and productive Holocaust scholar was Philip Friedman (1901-1960). He acquired a reputation among Jewish historians worldwide as a scholar of Polish Jewry even before the war. He survived the Holocaust in German-occupied Lvov, hidden by friendly Poles, but his wife and daughter perished. Friedman was among the creators of the Jewish Central Historical Commission in liberated Poland, and until 1946 was its head. He then left communist Poland and settled in the USA. His were the first monographs written on the Holocaust. Friedman criticized research of the Holocaust from the perpetrators' perspective only (which was characteristic of early postwar historiography) and called for use of Jewish documentary sources which give a Jewish perspective of events. Friedman's greatest interest in the 1950s was in research on the Jewish councils and Jewish resistance. Having begun with a negative assessment of the Judenräte, he became more aware of the complexity of this phenomenon. He promoted a broader conception of Jewish resistance, regarding armed struggle as only part of the battle for survival.