Description:
In The Future of the Holocaust, Berel Lang continues his inquiry into the causal mechanisms of decision-making and conduct in Nazi Germany and into responses to the genocide by individuals and nations--an inquiry that he began in Act and Idea in the...
Brief description: Berel Lang is Professor of Philosophy and Letters at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory, also from Cornell, Holocaust-Representation: Art with the Bounds of History and Ethics, and Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History. He is the editor of Race and Racism in Theory and Practice and coeditor of The Holocaust: A Reader.
Review Quotes:
Lang's philosophical reflections touch on many dilemmas that have been central to Holocaust studies. These include issues of uniqueness and comparability, intentionality and the continuation of guilt over time. To all of these, Lang brings a careful philosophical probing and, sometimes, fresh insight. While judicious and constantly mindful of the ethical dimensions of various positions, he is not afraid to work through their logical consequences and ramifications, to ask unexpected and unsettling questions or to make surprising analogies. The outcome is that sometimes he questions the whole way in which debates have been framed and the presuppositions on which they rest.
--Sharon MacDonald, University of Sheffield "Journal of Holocaust Education"