The Holocaust Averted

"This is an exciting, provocative, path-breaking book. It is complex, textured in historical detail, and full of literally hundreds of various scenarios and possibilities of 'what if.' Gurock has done a masterful job."

~Marc Dollinger, co-editor of American Jewish History: A Primary Source Reader

"Gurock’s book is a tour de force, on the cutting edge of an emerging genre. He has mastered American political history, European military and political history, and every aspect of American Jewry over a period of about three decades, and crafted an intelligent, entertaining, imaginative, and even suspenseful narrative. I cannot think of anyone who could have duplicated this superb book."

~Marc Lee Raphael, author of The Synagogue in America: A Short History

"With imagination and erudition, courage and wit—including a suddenly stalwart Neville Chamberlain defying Hitler at Munich and a Joseph P. Kennedy (Jr.) becoming Israel's most important friend—Jeffrey Gurock ponders how a fragile and skittish American Jewry might have evolved without Pearl Harbor and Auschwitz. His surprisingly dystopian vision, filled with familiar characters in unfamiliar and intriguing roles, is sure to challenge—and, quite possibly, to infuriate."

~David Margolick, author of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink

"Hot on the trail of surprise turns and eerie parallels in this 'what if' romp through the most momentous years of 20th century history, the reader ultimately confronts the dilemmas of Jewish life today."
 

~Jack Wertheimer, Jewish Theological Seminary

"If [Philip] Roth and [Quentin] Tarantino could rewrite the past, why not allow the historian - in this case Yeshiva University scholar Jeffrey Gurock - to play with facts and offer, with many of the trappings of scholarship, an imagined history?"

~Times Higher Education

"The Holocaust Averted shows how stimulating a counterfactual drawn from social history can be … Gurock's book takes a seemingly felicitous event as a divergence point, and draws dark conclusions."

~Aeon

"Gurock's emphasis on the contrast between the postwar American Jewry of his alternative Jewry and what Jews actually experienced after 1945 perhaps offers a clue as to why he wrote this engrossing volume. The book implicitly challenges those naysayers who have emphasized the deficiencies of post-war American Jewry. When placed alongside his somber alternate history of American Jews, what is noteworthy from his perspective is their actual accomplishments. For Gurock the glass of postwar American Jewry and of American Judaism is half full, not half empty."

~American Jewish History

"As magical, restorative, and nearly unconceivable it is for us, his audience, to read European Jewry back into existence, Gurock directs the readers attention elsewhere in this ambitious reimagining of twentieth-century history ... This book delivers frisson upon frisson as the world we know brushes up past its fraternal twin."

~The American Jewish Archives Journal

"Gurock has made a compelling contribution to the study of counterfactual history, relevant to both scholars and general reader alike."

~Religious Studies Review