Part I, "The Final Solution", describes the Holocaust as a Nazi German undertaking aiming to "solve the Jewish question" by systematic mass murder of the Jews. Dwells on the personality of Hitler and on the formation of his antisemitic worldview; argues that Hitler contemplated a mass annihilation of Jews already in the early 1920s, when he joined the Nazi Party and when he became its leader. Surveys the transformation of antisemitic ideology in Germany in the 19th-early 20th centuries. Describes the evolution of the Nazi anti-Jewish policies - from the anti-Jewish legislation to the death camps. Part II, "The Holocaust", portrays it from the viewpoint of its victims, the Jews. Dwells on the reactions of German Jews to the escalation of anti-Jewish policies in the Reich in 1933-38. Describes the ghetto system in wartime Poland and Lithuania, dwells on the functioning of the Nazi-installed Jewish councils ("the official community"), of the traditional Jewish self-organization in the ghettos ("the alternative community"), and on the Jewish anti-Nazi underground ("the countercommunity"). Discusses the reactions of all these communities to the deportations of Jews from the ghettos to the killing centers. Deals with the Jewish resistance - uprisings in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Białystok, and some smaller ghettos. Appendix A presents data on the Holocaust from country to country.

What does it mean to be a Jew? In the twenty essays included here, best-selling author Lucy S. Widowhood examines many aspects of modern Jewish life, concentrating on the central experiences of our era- the search for meaning of one's existence as a Jew;bridging the past and the present; reconciling tradition and the Holocaust. While she describes the evolution of American Judaism and surveys its present condition, the author also shows us the continuities between Old world and New World Judaism as she evokes the modern Jew's struggle between faith and secularism