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University of California Press

About the Book

Denying History takes a bold and in-depth look at those who say the Holocaust never happened and explores the motivations behind such claims. While most commentators have dismissed the Holocaust deniers as antisemitic neo-Nazi thugs who do not deserve a response, historians Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in the minds and culture of these Holocaust "revisionists." In the process, they show how we can be certain that the Holocaust happened and, for that matter, how we can confirm any historical event. This edition is expanded with a new chapter and epilogue examining current, shockingly mainstream revisionism.


Denying History takes a bold and in-depth look at those who say the Holocaust never happened and explores the motivations behind such claims. While most commentators have dismissed the Holocaust deniers as antisemitic neo-Nazi thugs who do not dese

About the Author

Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Alex Grobman is President of the Institute for Contemporary Jewish Life and the Brenn Institute.

Reviews

“Should be required reading for everyone!”
Martyrdom & Resistance
“Their book offers a crash course in dialectics, a rogue’s gallery of deniers, and refutation to claims the premeditated Nazi genocide of six million Jews is history’s greatest hoax.”
International Jerusalem Post
"Shermer and Grobman have written a very useful book." 
History and Theory
"Whether you have never had an interest in the Holocaust, or have always been passionately interested in it, or are sick and tired of hearing about it, you won’t be able to stop reading this great, gripping story."—Jared Diamond, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel

"Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman provide the necessary ammunition to confront one of the basest phenomena in today’s academic world: the attempt to deny obvious historical facts surrounding one of the greatest tragedies of our time — the Holocaust. They show how any historical fact is verified and proven, and they deal with the specifics of the deniers’ falsifications. In so doing they are filling a vacuum — the need of people who are not experts on the Holocaust, and who have no easy access to the wealth of documentation about it, to answer those who, usually motivated by pro-Nazi sympathies and antisemitism, deny or corrupt facts."—Yehuda Bauer, author of The Holocaust in Historical Perspective and Rethinking the Holocaust

"An excellent and timely book that not only maps the unseemly quagmire inhabited by Holocaust deniers and other pseudohistorians, but also equips the user with the critical tools and historical information that, in distinguishing acknowledged fact from insidious fabrication, recovers the road to a civic dominion of common sense and common decency."—Robert Jan van Pelt, co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present