Drawing on a wealth of primary materials such as recently released archival material, letters, newspapers, internal army magazines, and personal interviews, historian Hanna Yablonka examines, from all sides, the fascinating meeting between survivors of the Holocaust and the veteran Jewish population in Israel. The survivors of the Holocaust did not arrive in Israel a passive, unassertive people. Many were dynamic, enterprising, and determined to rehabilitate themselves in the new state.

Yablonka details the role they played in the War of Independence, their settlement of towns and villages abandoned by Arabs during the war, and the ways in which Israeli society accepted - and often did not accept - them into the armed forces, the kibbutz movements, and the trade unions.

Survivors of the Holocaust illuminates the ways in which Israeli society grew and developed through its emotional and sometimes contentious relations with the arriving survivors and how, against all odds, the survivors of the Holocaust and their offspring became pillars of the modern Israeli society.