Stanley Milgram’s work on obedience to authority is social psychology’s most influential contribution to theorizing about Holocaust perpetration. The gist of Milgram’s claims is that Holocaust perpetrators were just following orders out of a sense of obligation to their superiors. Milgram, however, never undertook a scholarly analysis of how his obedience experiments related to the Holocaust. The author first discusses the major theoretical limitations of Milgram’s position and then examines the implications of Milgram’s (oft-ignored) experimental manipulations for (...) Holocaust theorizing, contrasting a specific case of Holocaust perpetration by Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police. It is concluded that Milgram’s empirical findings, in fact, do not support his position-one that essentially constitutes an obedience alibi. The article ends with a discussion of some of the social dangers of the obedience alibi. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to apply the concept of synergy to the workings of memory in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell by focusing on the relationship between its two main characters, M...

R. Dr. Isaiah Aviad (Wolfsberg) (1893–1957) was one of religious Zionism’s main thinkers. This article seeks to examine his outlook regarding the Holocaust of European Jewry. Jewish thought contains three main approaches to dealing with the issue of evil in the world: the classic-causal approach, the teleological approach and the indifferent approach. The classic-causal approach explains the evil that exists in the world as occurring in a process of cause and effect; namely, the Israelites did not behave as God (...) expected of them and were therefore punished. The teleological approach does not explain present suffering and evil as a result of past sins but rather as having a future purpose; the indifferent approach attaches no religious meaning to human suffering. People are careless and are therefore negatively affected. R. Aviad manipulates between these three approaches regarding the Holocaust, whilst adding the Hegelian dialectic. His conclusion was that the State of Israel is the redemption and the teleological meaning of Jewish suffering and of the Holocaust.Contribution: This article helps to understand the theological approach of one of the religious Zionism’s main thinkers and contains issues both in Jewish theology and Holocaust studies. (shrink)

: In many discussions, whether general or academic, the Holocaust is used as a warning of how initially small corruptions can lead to terrible consequences. In particular, it has been seen as illustrating the ‘slippery slope’from euthanasia to murder, as showing the consequences of an exaggerated respect for law, and as showing the effects of a corrupt ideology. It is argued that these three points are all somewhat inaccurate, and that 1) the ‘slippery slope’occurred much earlier, the so‐called ‘euthanasia’programme (...) being already murder; 2) it was power rather than law that was excessively respected; and 3) it was the corruption of the sense of moral responsibility that did the real harm, rather than the establishment of any coherent ideology. (shrink)

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy (...) works well in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience. (shrink)

Robert Eaglestone argues that postmodernism is a response to the Holocaust. He offers a range of new perspectives, including new ways of looking at testimony and at recent Holocaust fiction; explores controversies in Holocaust history; looks at the importance of the Holocaust for recent philosophy; and asks what the Holocaust means for reason, ethics, and for being human.

The research is based on a study of short story collections by Israeli writer Ida Fink’s, All the Stories, and French writer Charlotte Delbo’s, Auschwitz and After, to reflect the impact of the Holocaust on autobiographical elements in their work. The authors are representatives of the first generation of Holocaust survivors, which means that the mass systematic genocide during World War II was a personal traumatic experience for them. The works of female writers are studied using the theory (...) of trauma at the genre level. Since autobiography has been considered a documentary genre with its own peculiarities, works about the Holocaust were seen as historical evidence of this event. However, based on the works of Juri Lotman and some principles of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”, we can conclude that autobiography is similar to fiction if it can meet certain aesthetic functions. Under the influence of trauma, the genre of autobiography can be modified in the literary text in such a way that the line between autobiography and fiction is blurred. Ida Fink and Charlotte Delbo write short stories with fictional narrators, but all the situations are certainly the experiences of the writers themselves, who turn to the autofiction and conventions of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” to transfer their memories to literary heroes. The aim of the study is to define the peculiarities of the autobiographical genre, analyze its functions in Holocaust literature, identify poetic elements of autobiography, and prove that there is no canonical form of narration about the Holocaust-Era, as the writers were searching for how to articulate their traumatic experience in experimental forms. (shrink)

Preface: Blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman beings -- Only one Holocaust? -- Evidence of things not seen -- The henmaid's tale -- Holocaust victimization imagery -- Procrustean solutions -- Scapegoats and surrogates : falsifying the fate of victims -- The 9/11 controversy -- An atrocity can be both unique and general.

"[Of] the 12 well-crafted essays in this volume...the most useful are those dealing with the Holocaust." —Choice "Especially recommended for college-level students of Jewish history and culture." —The Bookwatch This is a critical exploration of the most repercussive topics in modern Jewish history and thought. A sequel to Katz's National Jewish Book Award-winning study, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, this book identifies the main issues in the contemporary Jewish intellectual universe and outlines a larger, more synthetic understanding of contemporary Jewish existence.

Title: Modernity and the Holocaust Publisher: Wiley ISBN: 0745606857 Author: Zygmunt Bauman Title: Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465086365 Author: Paul Breines.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Tiantai Doctrine of Evil as the Good:A Response to David R. LoyBrook ZiporynIn a recent issue of this journal (vol. 54 [1]:99-103), David Loy has done me the honor of publishing his sympathetic and thoughtful review of my book Evil and/or/ as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Loy has done an (...) excellent job of bringing to the forefront some of the most troubling and distinctive aspects of the Tiantai Buddhist position on evil, as expressed in particular in the works of Siming Zhili, the focus of my book. Inevitably, with the nit-picky vanity that perhaps assails every reviewee, I feel some points have been imperfectly understood or represented, but in general I want before anything else to express my gratitude to Loy for the insight and acuity with which he has handled this material, the care he has taken in reading and responding to the book, and the candor, lucidity, and forcefulness with which he has expressed a very reasonable, non-Tiantai Mahāyāna response to some of the more radical and counterintuitive Tiantai ideas.But one particularly great service Loy has done is to present a very important and necessary challenge: what would these Tiantai writers, with their bizarre ideas about the interpenetration, nay, identity, of good and evil have to say about Hitler and the Holocaust? Putting this particular topic up as a casual example to be employed in an academic discussion, in effect "making use of" the mountains of corpses in the context of an ivory-tower discussion of subtle logical and ontological hairsplitting, perhaps will strike some as being in more than questionable taste. But there are points to be made here, and it is a valid question, one that needs to be addressed—indeed, that we cannot help addressing—even when it is played as a card all the meanings of which have already been determined. Loy is quite right: these mountains of corpses are always already in play in the background of our discussions of moral doctrines, perhaps even in the interstices of our casual entertainments, and we let ourselves off too easily if we leave them in the background, as unexamined, prepackaged moral tokens, or stock bugaboos whose "use-value" in the culture has already been nonnegotiably and comfortably mapped out. This is the extreme test case that anyone who wants to talk seriously about values and ethics must face head-on. For these reasons I want to take this opportunity to extend the thought experiment and respond to this challenge, speaking for the sake of argument in the name of the Tiantai doctrine, in the hopes that this will perhaps initiate a dialogue with specialists in other systems of moral theory, who might attempt a similar experiment.To do this, however, it will be necessary to take up a few of the more general theoretical questions raised in Loy's review. The first of these concerns the relation between ultimate truth and provisional truth. Loy acknowledges that, as argued in [End Page 329] the book, the Tiantai position gives a higher status to provisional or conventional truth than most Mahāyāna Two Truths doctrines, accurately paraphrasing the conclusion that "for Tiantai, however, the provisional ends up being equal to the ultimate truth." But, on the other hand, he wishes to point out as a potential shortcoming of the Tiantai position that it seems to overstress the "highest point of view." This assertion comes in the context of a grudging attempt to make sense of the Tiantai affirmation of evil from the point of view of the general Mahāyāna Two Truths theory, thereby, in my opinion, fatally distorting the point. Loy is willing to admit "the fact that from the highest point of view every possible apprehension—including evil ones—is neither a distortion of reality nor subject to invalidation by some other more privileged perspective." This strikes Loy as problematic, and he offers his own solution: it lies in "realizing that this 'ultimate' point of view is insufficient by itself—that it always needs... (shrink)

Is the Holocaust Vanishing? explores the ramifications of the passing of survivors for Holocaust studies, the removal of the Jew from Holocaust studies, and what all of this means for Jewish identity after the Holocaust. The book consists of years of reflection and wrestling with these issues on the part of a man who is a Holocaust survivor, a rabbi, and a professor of Holocaust studies.

The purpose of this article is to show that the current incineration techniques of corpses are directly related to the Holocaust itself and its purposes. It is the same technique which, in the inhuman years of Nazi atrocities, was developed to be applied massively against the Jewish people and the other groups, because as a method it served and expressed both politically and ideologically the plan of a “final solution:” the final “dis-solution,” the disappearance of the human body even (...) as a residue, because the human body, even as a corpse, still retains identity and value. The findings of this study suggest a different analysis of the Nazis’ choice to eliminate the corpses of the Jews, while, at the same time, exploring the original approach offered here helps to understand better the value that the human corpse retains. Many social and religious groups that currently refuse to accept this way of managing human corpses become more understandable in their choice not to accept what nature itself denies but modern technique imposes, namely perfect oblivion, extinction of the corpse. Initially, it is presented in historical and intercultural terms in which ways human societies mainly behave towards the human corpse along with the most prevalent funeral burial customs. Subsequently, the semiology of the human corpse is evaluated in terms of philosophical aesthetics and is included in the corresponding aesthetic categories. Finally, this work airs and analyzes new bioethical issues which arise considering this ever-increasing tendency towards the practice of those responsible for the Holocaust, namely the disappearance of the human corpse. (shrink)

Arguing against the prevailing view that Holocaust survivors have come forward only recently to tell their stories,Writing the Holocaust examines the full history of Holocaust testimony, from the first chroniclers confined to Nazi-enforced ghettos to today's survivors writing as part of collective memory. Zoë Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness changed immeasurably. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities (...) - secular or religious, male or female, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. In particular, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determined by the context in which they are remembering. (shrink)

This essay examines different viewpoints taken by historians and theorists in three important debates about the Holocaust and the Nazi past in Germany. Analysis shows that the content and form of historical judgment, the limits of historical narratives, and the referential connections between "facts," "representation," and "truth" are more problematic than historians and social theorists taking part in these debates would like to believe. Examples show that attempts to represent past "reality" are closely related to the politically and socially (...) significant interplay between individual and communal search for legitimation, and the legitimation of the past by the authority of the present. A hidden similarity--the fundamental belief in the ability of representation to capture past "reality" and thus its universal validity--appears amid the seemingly antithetical opinions and theoretical assumptions in these debates. Even in cases of historical phenomena as morally, politically, and intellectually challenging as the Holocaust, understanding historical representation in the framework of the self-referentiality of historical texts, and accepting the propositional nature of historical writing, is crucial. (shrink)

SS ideology was the expression of an apparently philosophical self-containing system of thought, articulated around a systematic body of knowledge claiming to integrate humanity inside a global vision of Being. Using ontology and anthropology as foundations, SS thinking developed essentially in the field of ethics. It portrayed itself as a global approach to society and civilization, based on eugenics and ethnic cleansing. It accomplished the fusion of the modern biological paradigm with the cultural shock brought about by World War I (...) and promoted total war for the sake of total health. And since institutional philosophy largely ignores SS theory and praxis, Holocaust memorial institutions may represent an alternative for the development of understanding and reflection. Within the context of Nazism, SS thinking did much to work out the theory for which the Holocaust would be the ultimate accomplishment. It intended to provide the Holocaust with legitimacy, from the viewpoints of ontology, anthropology, politics, and ethics, whence the importance of studying the theoretical framework that gave sense to the most terrible form of SS praxis. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present the work of Emil Utitz, the Czech-German Jewish philosopher and psychologist, who was also a survivor of Theresienstadt. The power of the imagination and its i...

Zoë Waxman shows how the conditions and motivations for bearing witness changed immeasurably. She reveals the multiplicity of Holocaust experiences, the historically contingent nature of victims' responses, and the extent to which their identities - secular or religious, male or female, East or West European - affected not only what they observed but also how they have written about their experiences. In particular, she demonstrates that what survivors remember is substantially determined by the context in which they are remembering.

This paper considers whether we have any reason to forgive the perpetrators of the most terrible atrocities, such as the Holocaust. On the face of it, we do not have reason to forgive in such cases. But on examination, the principal arguments against forgiveness do not turn out to be persuasive. Two considerations in favour of forgiveness are canvassed: the presence of rational agency in the perpetrators, and the common human nature which they share with us. It is argued (...) that the presence of rational agency does not generate a reason to forgive. However, our common human nature may be sufficient to provide such a reason, and evidence for its general reason-giving power can be seen in phenomena such as vicarious shame, and the moral significance which we attach to the notion of crimes against humanity. A reason for forgiveness based on common human nature will not be a strong one, but a weak reason still has some force. (shrink)

Even though a gender perspective, in reference to various aspects of museums and their exhibits, permeates the reflection on museums, gender is not explicitly taken up as a category of knowledge within the self-reflective narratives about the core exhibition or the conceptualization of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewish, which opened in Warsaw, Poland in 2014. Building upon the research gendering the memory of the Holocaust, especially with regard to historical exhibitions, and (...) using a cultural studies framework to the study of representation, this article asks how femininities are framed by the representation of masculinities and how museum technologies work to produce gendered meanings. It concludes that most of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN problematically instrumentalizes gender relations to underpin a chronological historical narrative. In a dialogue with queer research on temporality, underscoring the coincidence of normative gender/sexuality and linear progressive narrative, it analyses this strategy as gender chronotechnology. (shrink)

This paper explores how the "environmental turn" for the last 25 years has been shaping remembrance of the destruction of Europe's Jewish populations. I argue that climate change is not just one more catastrophe to pass into the broad analogical field of the Holocaust. In fact, international Holocaust consciousness and understandings of what we now call the Anthropocene have long been intertwined and mutually constitutive. The paper starts in the 1990s with acclaimed writers Anne Michaels and W.G. Sebald, (...) who sought to recast the Holocaust's significance to modernity against a long backdrop of geologic time. Their memorial fiction, which grounds the history of the Holocaust in the eroding landscapes of Europe, reflects a growing and urgent global concern for the vulnerability of the environment and a sense of man's responsibility for preserving human and biological life. The paper then moves through more contemporary examples of the sublimation of Holocaust memory in discourse about global warming—evident in terms like "climate change denial" and calls to "bear witness" to mass extinction events. For better or worse, journalists and scholars who write about environmental activism frequently call on memory of World War II and genocide in order to redefine what constitutes "grievable life." Example authors include historian Timothy Snyder, who has predicted that climate change may lead to new genocidal wars over Lebensraum ; scientist James Lovelock, who has urged nation states to consider how to limit the coming influx of climate refugees; theorist Bruno Latour, who has argued, via Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, that we must "name our enemies" in the new climate wars; and essayist Ari Brostoff who has attempted to think climate catastrophe through Walter Benjamin's meditations on the angel of history. The implicit question in all of their work is this: What histories and philosophical traditions can help us redefine humanity's entangled relationship to nature in order to take political responsibility for saving life on Earth? In other words, the Anthropocene requires "a usable past"—but what will that usable past be? (shrink)

The Holocaust was a rupture in civilisation – a Zivilisationsbruch –, a shattering of ontological certainty. The perception of the event enshrined in the notion of “rupture in civilisation” is the result of both the historical and the conceptual engagement with the event. Its manifest content seeks to combine two ways of discerning which are in fact opposed to one another: a particular one and a universal one. The particular perspective reflects the experience undergone by Jews as Jews of (...) having been destroyed everywhere and solely because of their belonging, i.e. because of their alleged origin. It was hence the experience of being exposed to total extermination without any reason. Never before had anything of this kind taken place: a rupture in civilisation, carried out upon the Jews. The significance of the concept is further-reaching, however. The concept of rupture in civilisation seeks to denote the indeed singular circumstance of the extermination of human persons by human persons as the transgression of all the ethical and instrumental limits of comportment which had hitherto been considered as certain and secure. Transgression of this kind marks a rupture in civilisation that is carried out upon all humankind. The phenomenon of the crime against humanity experienced by the Jews can, however, be split and regarded from those two opposing perspectives: one that argues historically and that is above all adopted by the victims, while the other is an anthropologically inclined perception of the events which rather reaches further into a universal domain. The latter focuses on the significance of the events for the species as such. These perspectives are necessarily unequal. They may even work against other. (shrink)

This book traces the evolution of Holocaust memory through the prism of place as it passes from survivors to their children and grandchildren.

The murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children during World War II was an act of such barbarity as to constitute one of the central events of our time; yet a list of the major concerns of professional philosophers since 1945 would exclude the Holocaust. This collection of twenty-three essays, most of which were written expressly for this volume, is the first book to focus comprehensively on the profound issues and philosophical significance of the Holocaust.The essays, (...) written for general as well as professional readers, convey an extraordinary range of factual information and philosophical reflection in seeking to identify the haunting meanings of the Holocaust. Among the questions addressed are: How should philosophy approach the Holocaust? What part did the philosophical climate play in allowing Hitlerism its temporary triumph? What is the philosophical climate today and what are its probable cultural effects? Can philosophy help our culture to become a bulwark against future agents of evil? The multiple dimensions of the Holocaust-historical, sociological, psychological, religious, moral, and literary-are collected here for concentrated philosophical interpretations. Author note: Alan Rosenberg is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Queens College of the City University of New York. Gerald E. Myers is Professor of Philosophy at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. (shrink)

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust is an important contribution to the longstanding debate concerning Martin Heidegger's association with National Socialism. Although a difficult topic, this ambitious new work moves the entire debate on the Heidegger controversy forward. -/- Following Being and Time Heidegger expands on his notion of authenticity and related notions such as historicity and discusses the possibility of an authentic Dasein of a people along structurally consistent lines to his account of authenticity in Being and Time. O'Brien (...) argues that the same difficulties which appear to hamstring the early account of authenticity further affect the notion of an authentic Dasein of a people; Heidegger's political myopia in the thirties can thus be attributed to an underlying failure to come to terms with some of the difficulties discussed in this study. O'Brien concedes that Heidegger's philosophy is influenced by its historical period and context but argues that, however inflammatory, Heidegger's rhetoric cannot be simply reduced to crude Nazi jingoism. -/- This book is a genuinely philosophical approach to the Heidegger controversy and a much-needed re-examination of his ideas and influences. (shrink)

For many, the Holocaust made thinking about ethics in traditional ways impossible. It called into question the predominance of speculative ontology in Western thought, and left many arguing that Western political, cultural and philosophical inattention to universal ethics were both a cause and an effect of European civilization's collapse in the twentieth century. Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein respond to this problem by insisting that ethics must be Western thought's first concern. Unlike previous thinkers, they locate humanity's (...) source of universal ethical obligation in the temporal world of experience, where human suffering, rather than metaphysics, provides the ground for ethical engagement. All three thinkers contend that Judaism’s key lesson is that our fellow human is our responsibility, and use Judaism to develop a contemporary ethics that could operate with or without God. _Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust_ explores selected works of Levinas, Wiesel, and Rubenstein for practical applications of their ethics, analyzing the role of suffering and examining the use each thinker makes of Jewish sources and the advantages and disadvantages of this use. Finally, it suggests how the work of Jewish thinkers living in the wake of the Holocaust can be of unique value to those interested in the problem of ethics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presenting a thorough investigation of the work of Levinas, Wiesel and Rubinstein, this book is of key interest to students and scholars of Jewish studies, as well as Jewish ethics and philosophy. (shrink)

Holocaust education is important for learning how healthcare has been leveraged to influence social change in the past and how it can be used to advocate for ethical social change in the future. By understanding how medical professionals became the social and political leaders of Nazi Germany, today’s health professionals can learn how to avoid unethical politicization. By understanding how early twentieth century discourse on medico-social issues used terms and language that are similar, if not the same, as today’s (...) debates, proponents of different sides of these debates can understand the troubling subtexts and potential consequences of their – and the opposing side’s – positions. (shrink)

A striking aspect of the so-called "Goldhagen debate" has been the bifurcated reception Hitler's Willing Executioners has received: the enthusiastic welcome of journalists and the public was as warm as the impatient dismissal of most historians was cool. This article seeks to transcend the current impasse by analyzing the underlying issues of Holocaust research at stake here. It argues that a "deep structure" necessarily characterizes the historiography of the Holocaust, comprising a tension between its positioning in "universalism" and (...) "particularism" narratives. While the former conceptualizes the Holocaust as an abstract human tragedy and explains its occurrence in terms of processes common to modern societies, the latter casts its analysis in ethnic and national categories: the Holocaust as an exclusively German and Jewish affair. These narratives possess important implications for the balance of structure and human agency in the explanation of the Holocaust: where the universalism narrative emphasizes the role of impersonal structures in mediating human action, the particularism narrative highlights the agency of human actors. Although historical accounts usually combine these narratives, recent research on the Holocaust tends in the universalist direction, and this bears on the sensitive issue of responsibility for the Holocaust by problematizing the common-sense notion of the perpetrators' intention and responsibility. Goldhagen is responding to this trend, but by retreating to the particularism narrative and employing an inadequate definition of intention, he fails to move the debate forward. It is time to rethink the concept of intention in relation to events like the Holocaust. (shrink)

How does one represent the Holocaust? What does it mean to visualize it? Despite Theodor Adorno's famous injunction that there can be no poetry after the Holocaust, the past half century has produced repeated attempts to impart that which has been considered beyond the limits of representation. From Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary project _Shoah_, to Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, the visual domain has emerged as a fruitful venue for representing those horrible times. _Visual Culture and (...) the Holocaust_ takes that domain as its focus. It considers the increasing number of works that claim to give us access to the Holocaust, asking for whom these images are intended and how effective they are at promoting remembrance and understanding. Barbie Zelizer has gathered essays from a group of internationally renowned scholars representing a broad range of disciplines to consider both the traditional and the unconventional ways in which the Holocaust has been visually represented. In addressing film, painting, photography, museum exhibits, television, the Internet, and the body itself as venues for these representations, the essays explore the abilities of these different genres to testify to the tragedy, particularly in relation to the horrific historical fact they seek to translate. _Visual Culture and the Holocaust_ substantially enhances what we know of the visual representation of the Holocaust. An introduction by the editor provides an important historical and theoretical overview of these efforts as well as a context in which these accomplishments may be understood. (shrink)

How will the Holocaust be remembered as its survivors disappear? In this article Janina Bauman reflects upon her own work on the Holocaust in the context of the Holocaust's broader reception. She offers her own views about the genre with reference to contemporary documents and testimonials, secondary work, scholarly work, fiction and film. These observations and stories all circulate around her own 1986 landmark text, Winter in the Morning.

A powerful work of moral and political philosophy.The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley and I was reading a book about the death camp at Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey... had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features (...) of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me. In The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. In a bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, he focuses on the figure of the bystander -- the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocities -- to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active response at persecution and great suffering. Geras argues that the tragedy of European Jewry, so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others, has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a somber conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid. The Contract of Mutual Indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress and for certain types of Marxist explanation. (shrink)

Dating back to the very beginning of our knowledge of the events that constituted the Holocaust, some historians, social scientists, philosophers, theologians and public intellectuals argue that it was a unique historical, or even trans-historical, event. The aim of this article is to clarify what the uniqueness question should be about and to ascertain whether there are good reasons for judging that the Holocaust is unique. It examines the core meanings of ‘unique’ that feature in the literature and (...) identifies which of these is most apt for considering the possible uniqueness of the Holocaust. It then works out what it would take for the Holocaust to be unique in the appropriately rigorous sense, which is facilitated by inquiring into the nature of genocide. The key question turns on the relation of the Holocaust to genocide: was the Holocaust more than, or different from, genocide? (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop the foundations of a contemporary Jewish moral theory. It treats the Jewish legal and moral tradition as the object of an act of interpretive recovery that is carried out by contemporary Jews who are sensitive to the demands of their historical situation, a situation defined by the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and by the reestablishment of the Jewish state. In the course of the paper I develop an approach to post-Holocaust Jewish experience that (...) derives from the work of Emil Fackenheim and try to show how Jewish moral imperatives arise within Fackenheim's account of the Jewish situation. The Jew's understanding of the role of God in moral obligation, his appreciation of the demands of the historical moment, and his interpretive recovery of the Jewish moral tradition-all are shown to depend upon and emerge from a reflective examination of Jewish moral and legal resistance during the Holocaust. (shrink)

This article analyzes the distinctive forms that collective memories take in the age of globalization. It studies the transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. Cosmopolitanism refers to a process of `internal globalization' through which global concerns become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people. Global media representations, among others, create new cosmopolitan memories, providing new epistemological vantage points and emerging moral-political interdependencies. The article traces the historical roots of this transformation and outlines the theoretical foundations for (...) the emergence of cosmopolitan memories through an examination of how the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel and the USA in the course of the last fifty years. It is precisely the abstract nature of `good and evil' that symbolizes the Holocaust, which contributes to the extra-territorial quality of cosmopolitan memory. As such, memories of the Holocaust contribute to the creation of a common European cultural memory. (shrink)

An examination of some of the abuses of philosophical technique in Steven Katz's book _The Holocaust in Historical Context_.