New Books in Jewish Studies
New Books in Jewish Studies

Laura Jockusch on Jewish Revenge after the Holocaust (JP)

August 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

“Revenge is a deeply human response to atrocity,” Laura Jockusch says in this episode of New Books in Jewish Studies. But the story she tells in her book Jewish Revenge after the Holocaust: History, Memory, and Imagination is less about bloody acts of retribution than about the fantasies, moral debates, and historical silences that surround the idea of revenge. Jockusch, a historian at Brandeis, became interested in the topic after noticing a striking contradiction: prominent survivors like Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal insisted in later decades that revenge “didn’t matter” to Jews after the Holocaust, yet early postwar writings, diaries, and even Wiesel’s own earlier work are full of vengeful feelings and fantasies. “What are we to make of this contradiction?” she asks. Her answer is a nuanced exploration of revenge as a coping mechanism, a moral problem, and a historical phenomenon that has been largely overlooked.

Revenge as fantasy, not just violence

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:00) **Introduction & Guest Background** - Host John Plotz welcomes Laura Jockusch and introduces her previous work on Holocaust documentation and Jewish honor courts.
  • 2 (02:29) **Central Claims & The Pop Culture Puzzle** - Jockusch explains her motivation: the contrast between post-2009 pop culture obsession with Jewish avengers (e.g., Tarantino's *Inglourious Basterds*) and prominent survivors like Wiesel who later claimed revenge didn't matter.
  • 3 (05:25) **Revenge vs. Rebellion: Acts and Powerlessness** - Jockusch distinguishes violent revenge acts from acts of rebellion or self-defense during the war.
  • 4 (09:26) **Fantasy Revenge: Is It Real Revenge?** - Jockusch argues that the definition of revenge must be broadened beyond violent acts to include fantasies and symbolic forms.
  • 5 (14:40) **Revenge's Link to Justice** - Jockusch complicates the binary between revenge and justice, showing they were intertwined in the post-war period.
  • 6 (19:40) **The Historical Timeline of Revenge Discourse** - Jockusch traces the evolution of revenge talk from taboo to imperative and back.
  • 7 (24:30) **Violent Disobedience and Modern Retribution** - Plotz connects Jockusch's analysis to contemporary politics, citing Donald Trump's "I am your retribution" rhetoric.

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Show Notes

After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system?

To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust. Drawing on her great erudition and painstaking archival research, she explores how views changed during and after the war--and in following decades when justice and vengeance came to seem potentially compatible, especially if revenge could be rendered an aesthetic or imaginative phenomenon.

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