GSA ANNOUNCES 2009 MILTON PRIZE WINNER

2009 Sybil Halpern Milton Prize Winner Announced

    The German Studies Association is pleased to announce the 2009 winner of the Sybil Halpern Milton Book Prize for the best book in Holocaust Studies published in 2007-2008.   The prize has been awarded to Professor Ben Kiernan (Yale University) for his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2007).    The prize committee included Professors Nathan Stoltzfus (Florida State University, chair), Catherine Epstein (Amherst College), and Samuel Moyn (Columbia University).   In the words of the committee’s announcement:

"Treatments of cases of genocide throughout recorded history and around the globe have been the territory of social scientists. With his latest book, Blood and Soil, Ben Kiernan takes a place alongside Leo Kuper as a pioneering scholar of genocide. The breadth and depth of this history confronts us with the sense that mass slaughter is in fact “our” own history rather than just the sporadic outbreak of fringe lunatics or “bad apples.” Kiernan sifts through a formidable world history of genocide in its multifarious guises and varying degrees of completion to find the common ideological features in historical cases of genocide. He also discovers additional common elements, including that perpetrators frequently compromise the purity of their ideology or spare certain members of the targeted group if this helps them toward their goals, helps them maintain power, or defuses dissent. Most original is the study’s identification of an agrarian obsession, from the books of Moses to the twentieth century, as a primary motivation of perpetrators, who presume that cultivation is the morally superior use of land that justifies their expansionist territorial drive, often accompanied by self-righteous annihilation of the inhabitants.

"Like social scientists, but on the basis of a formidable depth of information from a range of societies with varying cultures, Kiernan proposes that understanding the common features of genocide his study discloses could increase the possibility of preventing genocide.  This book may not change history, but it has changed historiography already, as a leap forward in the trend to broaden the historical cases we know as genocide and to place the Holocaust in comparative context. The effort to strengthen the comparative perspective on the Holocaust was especially important to Sybil Milton, and Blood and Soil establishes many interpretive and investigative paths along which future historians may go forward."

    The GSA congratulates Professor Kiernan and thanks the committee for its wonderful service.