Yair Auron
The Open University of Israel
The special significance of the attitude of the Yishuv (the Jewish Community in Palestine, before the constitution of Israel in 1948), toward the Armenian calamity is mentioned and even emphasized, as well as the attitudes of the Zionist Movement, and the State of Israel. These attitudes have not been researched and discussed systematically until this study. The present study refers to documents and eye witness accounts from the period of the First World War that have never before been published, and reveals chapters in the history of the Zionist Movement that have been overlooked -- even though Hebrew literature does include a few reminders of a supportive and empathic identification of the Nili Group with the Armenian tragedy. The present study includes among others an analysis of the diary of Mordecai Ben-Hillel Hacohen, the memoirs of Moshe Smilansky, and the eye witness accounts of the member of the Nili group: Levi Yitzchak Schneorson, Avshalom Feinberg, Alexander Aaronsohn, Sara Aaronsohn, Eitan Belkind, and Nili's leader Aaron Aaronsohn.
Yair Auron is a professor in the field of genocide and contemporary Judaism at the Open University of Israel and the Kibbutzim College of Education.
Professor Auron has published numerous books and essays, mainly on genocide and on Jewish identity in Israel and Europe. He is the author of books in Hebrew such as Between Paris and Jerusalem (Selected Passages of Contemporary Jewish Thought in France); Jewish-Israeli Identity; Sensitivity to World Suffering: Genocide in the 20th Century; and We Are All German Jews: Jewish Radicals in France During the 60s and 70s (also in French). His book The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide was published in both Hebrew and English (Transaction Publishers, 2000). His book, The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide was published in Hebrew and English (Transaction Publishers 2003).
Most recently, Auron is co-author of A Perfect Injustice: Genocide and the Theft of Armenian Wealth (Transaction Publishers, 2009) with Hrayr S. Karagueuzian. He is currently editing for the Open University a series of twelve books in Hebrew entitled Genocide, which includes theoretical volumes concerning the phenomenon of genocide as well as an analysis of case studies such as the Holocaust, the genocide of the Gypsies, the Armenian genocide and other historical and contemporary genocides such as Rwanda, Tibet and Indian population of the Americas. In this series, he published in 2009 Reflections on the Inconceivable: Theoretical Aspects of Genocide Studies, and in 2007 The Armenian Genocide: Forgetting and Denying. In 2006, his book Genocide: So That I Will Not Be among the Silent, was also published in this series. His book Israeli Identities: Jews and Arabs Facing Mirror and the Other in 2010 is published in Israel by Resling and in a few months will be published in English in the United States by Berghahn Books.
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