Description: The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s--covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag...
Brief description: Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French at Yale University. She is the author of several books, including The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust and Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust, both from Cornell, and The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France.
Review Quotes:
Dean has provided a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the emergence of "the witness" as a moral symbol and pervasive icon of suffering and surviving genocide and mass atrocities.... The book will be valuable to students and scholars who study genocide, testimony, victimhood, and social and cultural trauma in the aftermath of mass atrocities.
-- "Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books"