Focus­ing on the choic­es and actions of Jews dur­ing the Holo­caust, Ordi­nary Jews exam­ines the dif­fer­ent pat­terns of behav­ior of civil­ians tar­get­ed by mass vio­lence. Rely­ing on rich archival mate­r­i­al and hun­dreds of sur­vivors’ tes­ti­monies, Evge­ny Finkel presents a new frame­work for under­stand­ing the sur­vival strate­gies in which Jews engaged: coop­er­a­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion, cop­ing and com­pli­ance, eva­sion, and resis­tance. Finkel com­pares Jews’ behav­ior in three Jew­ish ghet­tos – Min­sk, Kraków, and Białys­tok – and shows that Jews’ respons­es to Nazi geno­cide var­ied based on their expe­ri­ences with pre­war poli­cies that either pro­mot­ed or dis­cour­aged their inte­gra­tion into non-Jew­ish society. 

Finkel demon­strates that while pos­si­ble sur­vival strate­gies were the same for every­one, indi­vid­u­als’ choic­es var­ied across and with­in com­mu­ni­ties. In more cohe­sive and robust Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties, cop­ing – con­fronting the dan­ger and try­ing to sur­vive with­out leav­ing – was more orga­nized and suc­cess­ful, while col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Nazis and attempts to escape the ghet­to were min­i­mal. In more het­ero­ge­neous Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties, col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Nazis was more per­va­sive, while cop­ing was dis­or­ga­nized. In local­i­ties with a his­to­ry of peace­ful intereth­nic rela­tions, eva­sion was more wide­spread than in places where intereth­nic rela­tions were hos­tile. State repres­sion before WWII, to which local com­mu­ni­ties were sub­ject, deter­mined the via­bil­i­ty of anti-Nazi Jew­ish resis­tance. Explor­ing the crit­i­cal influ­ences shap­ing the deci­sions made by Jews in Nazi-occu­pied east­ern Europe, Ordi­nary Jews sheds new light on the dynam­ics of col­lec­tive vio­lence and genocide.