Stephen S. Weinstein Series in Post-Holocaust Studies – serie

In Disappearing Traces, Dorota Glowacka examines the tensions between the ethical and aesthetic imperatives in literary, artistic, and philosophical works about the Holocaust, in a search for new ways to understand the traumatic past and its impact on the present. She engages with the work of leading 20th-century philosophers and theorists, including Levinas, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Derrida, to consider the role of language in the construction and transmission of traumatic memories; the relation between self-identity and the act of bearing witness; and the ethical implications of representing trauma.Glowacka's work draws on a wide range of discourses and disciplines, bringing into conversation various genres of writing and artistic production. It reveals the need to find innovative idioms and new means of engaging with the past, and to create alliances between different disciplines and modes of representing the past that transform and transcend existing paradigms of representation.

In an age when "collisions of faith" among the Abrahamic traditions continue to produce strife and violence that threatens the well-being of individuals and communities worldwide, the contributors to Encountering the Stranger--six Jewish, six Christian, and six Muslim scholars--takes responsibility to examine their traditions' understandings of the stranger, the "other," and to identify ways that can bridge divisions and create greater harmony.

In an age when "collisions of faith" among the Abrahamic traditions continue to produce strife and violence that threatens the well-being of individuals and communities worldwide, the contributors to Encountering the Stranger--six Jewish, six Christian, and six Muslim scholars--takes responsibility to examine their traditions' understandings of the stranger, the "other," and to identify ways that can bridge divisions and create greater harmony.

Different Horrors, Same Hell brings together a variety of essays demonstrating the breadth of contributions that feminist theory and gender analysis make to the study of the Holocaust. The collection provides new perspectives on central works of Holocaust scholarship and representation, from the books of Hannah Arendt and Ruth Klüger to films such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Interviews with survivors and their descendants draw new attention to the significance of women's roles and family structures during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and interviews and archival research reveal the undercurrents of sexual violence within the Final Solution. As Doris Bergen shows in the book's first chapter, the focus on women's and gender issues in this collection "complicates familiar and outworn categories, and humanizes the past in powerful ways."

Different Horrors, Same Hell brings together a variety of essays demonstrating the breadth of contributions that feminist theory and gender analysis make to the study of the Holocaust. The collection provides new perspectives on central works of Holocaust scholarship and representation, from the books of Hannah Arendt and Ruth Klüger to films such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Interviews with survivors and their descendants draw new attention to the significance of women's roles and family structures during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and interviews and archival research reveal the undercurrents of sexual violence within the Final Solution. As Doris Bergen shows in the book's first chapter, the focus on women's and gender issues in this collection "complicates familiar and outworn categories, and humanizes the past in powerful ways."

In July 1943, the Gestapo arrested an obscure member of the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Belgium. When his torture-inflicting interrogators determined he was no use to them and that he was a Jew, he was deported to Auschwitz. Liberated in 1945, Jean Améry went on to write a series of essays about his experience. No reflections on torture are more compelling.Améry declared that the victims of torture lose trust in the world at the “very first blow.” The contributors to this volume use their expertise in Holocaust studies to reflect on ethical, religious, and legal aspects of torture then and now. Their inquiry grapples with the euphemistic language often used to disguise torture and with the question of whether torture ever constitutes a “necessary evil.” Differences of opinion reverberate, raising deeper questions: Can trust be restored? What steps can we as individuals and as a society take to move closer to a world in which torture is unthinkable?