John K. Roth

Carol Rittner

"A range of contributions on rape in war and genocide for anyone coming to this subject for the first time. Each chapter deals very personally with the agony of rape and the challenges it poses to male behavior, international law, and political action"--Provided by publisher.

weapon of war and genocide

Rape

Richard L. Rubenstein

Political, and theological questions are thoroughly discussed by two authors, one Christian, one Jewish.

The Holocaust and Its Legacy

Approaches to Auschwitz

This collaborative effort by a number of the world's leading experts on the Holocaust examines the question: how should Vatican policies during World War II be understood? Specifically, could Pope Pius XII have curbed the Holocaust by vigorously condemning the Nazi killing of Jews? Was Pius XII really 'Hitler's Pope', as John Cornwell suggested? Or has he unfairly become a scapegoat when he is really deserving of canonization as a saint? In Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, scholars including Michael Marrus, Michael Phayer, Richard L. Rubenstein and Susan Zuccotti wrestle with these questions. The book has four main themes: (1) Pope Pius XII must be understood in his particular historical context. (2) Pope Pius XII put the well-being of the Roman Catholic Church, as he understood it, first and foremost. (3) In retrospect, Pope Pius XII's priorities, understandable though they are, not only make him a problematic Christian leader but also raise important questions about post-Holocaust Christian identity. (4) Jewish and Christian memories of the Holocaust will remain different, but reconciliation can continue to grow. On all sides, relations between Christians and Jews can be improved by an honest engagement with history and by continuing reflection on what post-Holocaust Christian and Jewish identities ought and ought not to mean.

Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

James M. Smith

Rittner (Holocaust and genocide studies, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey), Roth (philosophy, Claremont McKenna College), and Smith (Aegis Trust, a UK-based NGO devoted to genocide prevention) present an overview of the field of genocide studies. Twenty-nine short essays look at problems of definition, political and psychological facets of genocide, legal institutions that can prevent genocide, and a large number of other facets of this dark side of human history.

Will Genocide Ever End?

A professor of philosphy whose short-lived appointment to Director of Advanced Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum sparked controversy critiques holocaust politics, divisions between holocaust scholars, and disputes over commemorative projects.

Holocaust Politics

Defined by deliberation about the difference between right and wrong, encouragement not to be indifferent toward that difference, resistance against what is wrong, and action in support of what is right, ethics is civilization's keystone. The Failures of Ethics concentrates on the multiple shortfalls and shortcomings of thought, decision, and action that tempt and incite us human beings to inflict incalculable harm. Absent the overriding of moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities could not have happened. Although these catastrophes do not pronounce the death of ethics, they show that ethics is vulnerable, subject to misuse and perversion, and that no simple reaffirmation of ethics, as if nothing disastrous had happened, will do. Moral and religious authority has been fragmented and weakened by the accumulated ruins of history and the depersonalized advances of civilization that have taken us from a bloody twentieth century into an immensely problematic twenty-first. What nevertheless remain essential are spirited commitment and political will that embody the courage not to let go of the ethical but to persist for it in spite of humankind's self-inflicted destructiveness. Salvaging the fragmented condition of ethics, this book shows how respect and honor for those who save lives and resist atrocity, deepened attention to the dead and to death itself, and appeals for human rights and renewed spiritual sensitivity confirm that ethics contains and remains an irreplaceable safeguard against its own failures.

Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities

The Failures of Ethics

Identifies the most important works on the Holocaust by both first- and second-generation survivors as well as philosophers, novelists, poets, and playwrights reflecting on the Holocaust today. Essays are arranged alphabetically by title and cover the essential literature of the subject.

Holocaust Literature

David Patterson

More than fifty years after it ended, the Holocaust continues to leave survivors and their descendants, as well as historians, philosophers, and theologians, searching for words to convey the enormity of that event. Efforts to express its realities and its impact on successive generations often stretch language to the breaking point--or to the point of silence. Words whose meaning was contested before the Holocaust prove even more fragile in its wake. David Patterson and John K. Roth identify three such "after-words": forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice. These words, though forever altered by the Holocaust, are still spoken and heard. But how should the concepts they represent be understood? How can their integrity be restored within the framework of current philosophical and, especially, religious traditions? Writing in a format that creates the feel of dialogue, the nine contributors to After-Words tackle these and other difficult questions about the nature of memory and forgiveness after the Holocaust to encourage others to participate in similar inter- and intrafaith inquiries. The contributors to After-Words are members of the Pastora Goldner Holocaust Symposium. Led since its founding in 1996 by Leonard Grob and Henry Knight, the symposium’s Holocaust and genocide scholars--a group that is interfaith, international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational--meet biennially in Oxfordshire, England.

Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice

After-words

Jonathan Petropoulos

Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.

Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

Gray Zones

Presents a collection of interpretative essays on the themes, plots, characters, and techniques of works with a Christian theme.

Masterplots II.: Dru-Lif

Peter Hayes

Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. The persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subject of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines. Forty-seven contributors debate the key issues at the start of the twenty-first century.

The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies

Wendy Whitworth

In 1994, genocide put Rwanda on the map for most of the world. It also exposed one of the most shameful scandals of the Rwandan churches-the complicity of the Christian churches in the genocide. Rwanda is the most Christian country in Africa. More than 90% of its people are baptized Christians, with the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches having the greatest number of adherents. According to Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "The story of Rwanda shows both sides of our humanity. The churches were sometimes quite superb in what they did in the face of intimidation and at great cost to themselves. But there were other times when Ýthey ̈ failed dismally and seemed to be implicated in ways that have left many disillusioned, disgruntled and angry." Genocide In Rwanda provides a variety of perspectives through which to assess the complex questions and issues surrounding the topic, and, even raise some new questions that could provide some new insight into this historical event. They are questions we must ask - otherwise, how can the Church begin to make moral restitution, change structures and behaviors, and once again reveal the human face of God in our fragile world?

Complicity of the Churches

Genocide in Rwanda

Michael Berenbaum

Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications is an anthology specifically designed for use as a textbook for courses on the Holocaust in universities and adult study groups. It is a complilation of what are now "classic" pieces in the voluminous literature on the Holocaust - pieces by Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, George Steiner, Richard Rubenstein and Irving Greenberg - all organized around what the editors have found to be the most often asked questions by their students: (1) Is the Holocaust unique? (2) What really happened in the ghettos and death camps? (3) Who knew what was going on? (4) How could people do the things they did? (5) What about God? Governed by the thesis that the Holocaust left fundamental questions, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, in addition to being organized around the five themes identified above, addresses the multiple implications of complexities such as resistance during the Holocaust, and Jewish and Christian identity after Auschwitz. --

Religious and Philosophical Implications

Holocaust

Polls through the '90s show that many Americans believe the nation is in a period of spiritual decline, yet public religious display and discussion often is deemed politically incorrect. Philosopher John K. Roth feels that more outward sharing of religious beliefs, thoughts, and ideas would bridge the gap between our private needs and our public selves--and would give Americans of differing faiths a common identity.

Talk about Religion in America

Private Needs, Public Selves

Well-known scholars of the Holocaust reflect on why they began to study the Holocaust and how their thinking has changed over the years.

American Christian and Jewish Scholars Encounter the Holocaust

From the Unthinkable to the Unavoidable

More than half a century after Nazi Germany's genocidal assault on the Jewish people, the Holocaust grips our attention as never before, raising hotly-debated questions: How is the Holocaust best remembered? What are its lessons? Who gets to answer those questions? Who owns the Holocaust? Those issues provoke disagreements that can be cutthroat or constructive. Taking its point of departure from the controversy that swirled around John Roth's aborted appointment as director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, a senior post at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Holocaust Politics shows how contemporary attitudes and priorities compete to determine that all-important difference.

Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars. The handbook is thematically divided into five broad sections. Part One, Enablers, concentrates on the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust. Part Two, Protagonists, concentrates on the principal persons and groups involved in the Holocaust and attempts to disaggregate the conventional interpretive categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. It examines the agency of the Nazi leaders and killers and of those involved in resisting and surviving the assault. Part Three, Settings, concentrates on the particular places, sites, and physical circumstances where the actions of the Holocaust's protagonists and the forms of persecution were literally grounded. Part Four, Representations, engages complex questions about how the Holocaust can and should be grasped and what meaning or lack of meaning might be attributed to events through historical analysis, interpretation of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection. Part Five, Aftereffects, explores the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights.

No catastrophe challenges treasured beliefs and cherished hopes more than the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's genocide against the European Jews during World War II. Fueled by virulent, racist anti-Semitism, that disaster, which targeted Judaism as well as every Jewish life within the Third Reich's lethal grasp, still underlines the fragile status of human rights and ethics, still undercuts optimism about human "progress," and still undermines confidence about God's moral authority, providential engagement with human history, and even God's existence itself. Elie Wiesel, who died in 2016, was one of the relatively few Jews who survived Auschwitz. Before and after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he wrote profoundly in varied genres about the reverberations of the Holocaust. In A Consuming Fire, John K. Roth, a Christian philosopher transformed by Wiesel's writings and friendship, explores how to cope constructively with the daunting realization that Christianity and Western philosophy were deeply implicated in the Nazi genocide--so much so that, in the case of Christianity, one can credibly argue: No Christianity = No Holocaust. A Consuming Fire is not a biography, a literary analysis, a philosophical critique, or a history. Instead it offers a story all its own--one that seeks to enliven a post-Holocaust Christian humanism, an outlook that Roth shares by underscoring his own journey, his quest to be responsible and accountable, as he responds to Holocaust challenges intensified poignantly and insistently by Wiesel's testimony.

John K. Roth

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