The Double Binds Of Ethics After The Holocaust

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust advances the idea that the Holocaust undermined confidence in basic beliefs about human rights and shows steps of salvage and retrieval that need to be taken if ethics is to be a significant presence in a world still besieged by genocide and atrocity.

Elie Wiesel said that all ethical values "must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau." According to Primo Levi, the Holocaust leaves ethics grey-zoned, i.e. makes it dysfunctional, losing its appeal. For the French philosopher Sarah Kofman, the Holocaust put into question the essence of human community (which, after all, can unite victims and perpetrators) and demands a "new humanism." Notes Michael Berenbaum's theory that the Holocaust has become a "negative absolute, " since everyone agrees that it was "wrong." However, the Holocaust signifies an immense human failure. It did ethics harm by showing how ethical teachings could be overridden, rendered dysfunctional, or even subverted to serve the interests of genocide.

This volume is inspired by the pioneering work of John T. M. Pawlikowski in social ethics, Jewish-Christian relations, and Holocaust studies and intends to explore the cutting-edge of these areas in his honor.

Sources of Holocaust Insight maps the odyssey of an American Christian philosopher who has studied, written, and taught about the Holocaust for more than fifty years. What findings result from John Roth’s journey; what moods pervade it? How have events and experiences, scholars and students, texts and testimonies—especially the questions they raise—affected Roth’s Holocaust studies and guided his efforts to heed the biblical proverb: “Whatever else you get, get insight”? More sources than Roth can acknowledge have informed his encounters with the Holocaust. But particular persons—among them Elie Wiesel, Raul Hilberg, Primo Levi, and Albert Camus—loom especially large. Revisiting Roth’s sources of Holocaust insight, this book does so not only to pay tribute to them but also to show how the ethical, philosophical, and religious reverberations of the Holocaust confer and encourage responsibility for human well-being in the twenty-first century. Seeing differently, seeing better—sound learning and teaching about the Holocaust aim for what may be the most important Holocaust insight of all: Take nothing good for granted.

This volume documents the still-rare encounter of moral-philosophical, historiographic and medical-ethical research on National Socialism, and looks at the ethical aspects of the National Socialist ideology, as well as at the moral convictions of National Socialist perpetrators, some of whom acted as “perpetrators with a good conscience”. It furthermore discusses questions such as the content and rationale of Nazi race ethics, the “euthanasia” killings and the Nazi ethics of racial warfare and the role of the SS as the vanguard of the National Socialist race state, the moral conditioning of Nazi perpetrators and their self-exoneration strategies after the defeat of Nazism, and German Holocaust memory politics. Due to the broad range of topics covered and methodologies discussed, this book will interest academic readers of various disciplines of the humanities, including German history, Holocaust studies, Jewish studies philosophy and medical ethics. It will also appeal to the common public interested in Nazi ideology and ethics, and their implications for current ethical issues and challenges, such as the consequences of moral indifference as well as the debate on euthanasia and mercy killing.

Questions shape the Holocaust's legacy. 'What happened to ethics during the Holocaust? What should ethics be, and what can it do after the Holocaust?' loom large among them. Absent the overriding or moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust could not have happened. Its devastation may have deepened conviction that there is a crucial difference between right and wrong; its destruction may have renewed awareness about the importance of ethical standards and conduct. But Birkenau, the main killing center at Auschwitz, also continues to cast a disturbing shadow over basic beliefs concerning right and wrong, human rights, and the hope that human beings will learn from the past. This book explores those realities and the issues they contain. It does so not to discourage but to encourage, not to deepen darkness and despair but to face those realities honestly and in a way that can make post-Holocaust ethics more credible and realistic. The book's thesis is that nothing human, natural or divine guarantees respect for the ethical values and commitments that are most needed in contemporary human existence, but nothing is more important than our commitment to defend them, for they remain as fundamental as they are fragile, as precious as they are endangered.

The contributors to this book investigate Morality's failures during the Holocaust and raise questions about ethics afterwards.

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.