re: WW2 Question

apart from some of the reasons already mentioned (lack of outside support, lack of arms, and a lack of knowledge about precisely where they were going), typically jews had accommodated gentiles and relied on the authorities to protect them from pogroms and other forms of popular anti-semitism. in the case of the holocaust, it was the authorities themselves who were doing the persecuting (of course, with plenty of help from individuals in germany and the german east).

but even then there were uprisings in berlin (the rosenstrasse protests), and in the warsaw, lvov and bialystock ghettos. and there were uprisings in the camps themselves. there were several revolts by sonderkommandos in auchwitz and sobibor, where they blew up one of the crematoriums and killed ss men. that's to say nothing of the jews who were parts of underground resistance movements against the nazis.