The Holocaust and the Nonrepresentable
The Holocaust and the Nonrepresentable

Author: David Patterson

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2018-05-23

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1438470053

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Argues that Holocaust representation has ethical implications fundamentally linked to questions of good and evil. Many books focus on issues of Holocaust representation, but few address why the Holocaust in particular poses such a representational problem. David Patterson draws from Emmanuel Levinas’s contention that the Good cannot be represented. He argues that the assault on the Good is equally nonrepresentable and this nonrepresentable aspect of the Holocaust is its distinguishing feature. Utilizing Jewish religious thought, Patterson examines how the literary word expresses the ineffable and how the photographic image manifests the invisible. Where the Holocaust is concerned, representation is a matter not of imagination but of ethical implication, not of what it was like but of what must be done. Ultimately Patterson provides a deeper understanding of why the Holocaust itself is indefinable—not only as an evil but also as a fundamental assault on the very categories of good and evil affirmed over centuries of Jewish teaching and testimony. “This book commands respect, both for the author’s immense and intimate knowledge of what has become a vast body of work and for his unconditional commitment to the subject. I am in awe of what I have just read.” — Dorota Glowacka, coeditor of Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries

Holocaust Graphic Narratives
Holocaust Graphic Narratives

Author: Victoria Aarons

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2019-12-19

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1978802552

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Holocaust Graphic Narratives examines Holocaust graphic novels and memoirs, analyzing the genre as one that enables intergenerational transmission of trauma and memory. Here, the graphic novel becomes a medium uniquely positioned to create a sense of felt immediacy, urgency, and authenticity at the intersection of history and the imagination.

Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust
Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust

Author: David Patterson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-31

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1009100033

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David Patterson offers original insights into the dynamics that underlie the phenomenon of endemic antisemitism.

Evangelization as Interreligious Dialogue
Evangelization as Interreligious Dialogue

Author: John C. Cavadini

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2019-08-21

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1532652119

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What does Jesus have to do with Buddha? What does Muhammad have to do with Krishna? One of the most important tasks for theology in the twenty-first century is interreligious dialogue. Given the rapid process of globalization and the surge of information via the Internet, travel, and library networking today, interreligious dialogue has become a necessary element within Christian theology that no longer can be avoided. Evangelization as Interreligious Dialogue features eleven essays, plus an extensive introduction, that exercise a live conversation between religious others. Divided into four thematic sections--(1) Catholic approaches to interreligious dialogue, (2) dialogues between Judaism and Christianity, (3) dialogues between Islam and Christianity, and (4) dialogues between Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity--this volume conducts a sustained theological reflection on the current state of interreligious dialogue by signaling its hopeful promises and unrelenting challenges. The reader will be invited to encounter the religious other firsthand and put his or her most cherished theological assumptions to the test. This book aims to provoke an expansion of horizons for theological imagination as it exposes the basic dialectic of identity and difference as played out in the interaction between diverse religious beliefs, practices, and experiences.

The Auschwitz Sonderkommando
The Auschwitz Sonderkommando

Author: Nicholas Chare

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-02-15

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 3030114910

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This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.

Facing Death
Facing Death

Author: Sarah K. Pinnock

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0295999284

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What do we learn about death from the Holocaust and how does it impact our responses to mortality today? Facing Death: Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves brings together the work of eleven Holocaust and genocide scholars who address these difficult questions, convinced of the urgency of further reflection on the Holocaust as the last survivors pass away. The volume is distinctive in its dialogical and introspective approach, where the contributors position themselves to confront their own impending death while listening to the voices of victims and learning from their life experiences. Broken into three parts, this collection engages with these voices in a way that is not only scholarly, but deeply personal. The first part of the book engages with Holocaust testimony by drawing on the writings of survivors and witnesses such as Elie Wiesel, Jean Améry, and Charlotte Delbo, including rare accounts from members of the Sonderkommando. Reflections of post-Holocaust generations—the children and grandchildren of survivors—are housed in the second part, addressing questions of remembrance and memorialization. The concluding essays offer intimate self-reflection about how engagement with the Holocaust impacts the contributors’ lives, faiths, and ethics. In an age of continuing atrocities, this volume provides careful attention to the affective dimension of coping with death, in particular, how loss and grief are deferred or denied, narrated, and passed along.

Levinas and the Torah
Levinas and the Torah

Author: Richard I. Sugarman

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2019-08-23

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 1438475748

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The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) was one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. This book interprets the Hebrew Bible through the lens of Levinas's religious philosophy. Richard I. Sugarman examines the Pentateuch using a phenomenological approach, drawing on both Levinas's philosophical and Jewish writings. Sugarman puts Levinas in conversation with biblical commentators both classical and modern, including Rashi, Maimonides, Sforno, Hirsch, and Soloveitchik. He particularly highlights Levinas's work on the Talmud and the Holocaust. Levinas's reading is situated against the background of a renewed understanding of such phenomena as covenant, promise, different modalities of time, and justice. The volume is organized to reflect the fifty-four portions of the Torah read during the Jewish liturgical year. A preface provides an overview of Levinas's life, approach, and place in contemporary Jewish thought. The reader emerges with a deeper understanding of both the Torah and the philosophy of a key Jewish thinker.

Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel

Author: Alan L. Berger

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2018-11-08

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1532649509

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Elie Wiesel, plucked from the ashes of the Holocaust, became a Nobel Peace laureate, an activist on behalf of the oppressed, a teacher, an award-winning novelist, and a renowned humanist. He moved easily among world leaders but was equally at home among the disenfranchised. Following his Nobel Prize, Wiesel established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity; one of their early initiatives was the founding of the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay Contest. The reflections in this volume come from judges of the contest. They share their personal and professional experiences working with and learning from Wiesel, providing a glimpse of the person behind the public figure. At a time when the future seems ominous and chaotic at best, these reflections hold on to the promise of an ethically and morally robust possibility. The students whose essays prompt this sense of hope are remarkable for their insight and dedication. The messages embedded in the judges’ reflections mirror Wiesel’s convictions about the importance of friendship, the need to interrogate (without abandoning) God, and the power of remembrance in order to fight indifference.

Conceptualizing Mass Violence
Conceptualizing Mass Violence

Author: Navras J. Aafreedi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1000381315

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Conceptualizing Mass Violence draws attention to the conspicuous inability to inhibit mass violence in myriads forms and considers the plausible reasons for doing so. Focusing on a postcolonial perspective, the volume seeks to popularize and institutionalize the study of mass violence in South Asia. The essays explore and deliberate upon the varied aspects of mass violence, namely revisionism, reconstruction, atrocities, trauma, memorialization and literature, the need for Holocaust education, and the criticality of dialogue and reconciliation. The language, content, and characteristics of mass violence/genocide explicitly reinforce its aggressive, transmuting, and multifaceted character and the consequent necessity to understand the same in a nuanced manner. The book is an attempt to do so as it takes episodes of mass violence for case study from all inhabited continents, from the twentieth century to the present. The volume studies ‘consciously enforced mass violence’ through an interdisciplinary approach and suggests that dialogue aimed at reconciliation is perhaps the singular agency via which a solution could be achieved from mass violence in the global context. The volume is essential reading for postgraduate students and scholars from the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, World History, Human Rights, and Global Studies.

Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life
Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life

Author: David Patterson

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2023-06-26

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1666750956

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In the Jewish tradition, going back to Jacob, many fathers have written down whatever wisdom they might have attained in their lives in order to pass along that wisdom to their heirs. It is called an ethical will. Written as a testimony and a testament, in an epistolary format, this book is a compendium of the wisdom of a father, who has spent a lifetime studying the teachings of the Jewish tradition, as well as literary and philosophical traditions of the West. The insights taken from those traditions, which explore the life of the soul, are intended for anyone who has a soul. The book is organized around eighteen words that form the foundations of human life. The number eighteen is taken from the Hebrew word for "life," chai, which has a numerical value of eighteen. Among the words at the heart of these reflections are faith, goodness, responsibility, meaning, gratitude, prayer, love, and others.