The impact of technology-enhanced mass death in the twentieth century, argues Zachary Braiterman, has profoundly affected the future shape of religious thought. In his provocative book, the author shows how key Jewish theologians faced the memory of Auschwitz by rejecting traditional theodicy, abandoning any attempt to justify and vindicate the relationship between God and catastrophic suffering. The author terms this rejection "Antitheodicy," the refusal to accept that relationship. It finds voice in the writings of three particular theologians: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim. This book is the first to bring postmodern philosophical and literary approaches into conversation with post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Drawing on the work of Mieke Bal, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, and others, Braiterman assesses how Jewish intellectuals reinterpret Bible and Midrash to re-create religious thought for the age after Auschwitz. In this process, he provides a model for reconstructing Jewish life and philosophy in the wake of the Holocaust. His work contributes to the postmodern turn in contemporary Jewish studies and today's creative theology.

Religion After Auschwitz is a philosophical approach to the notion of revelation. Following such authors as A. Dulles, R. Swinburne, or K. Ward, Balazs Mezei investigates some of the main problems of revelation and connects them to the general problem of religion today. Religion is considered in the perspective of the age "after Auschwitz", an expression coined by Hans Jonas and further elaborated by J. B. Metz. Mezei develops the insights of these philosophers and investigates various aspects of religion and revelation "after Auschwitz": contemporary theistic philosophy, phenomenology, art, mysticism, and the question of university education today. A fascinating amalgam of subjects and approaches, Religion and Revelation After Auschwitz is an important contribution to contemporary discussions on the possibility of Catholic philosophy.

Writing the Holocaust provides students and teachers with an accessibly written overview of the key themes and major theoretical developments which continue to inform the nature of historical writing on the Holocaust. Holocaust studies is at a paradox: while historians of the Holocaust defend it as a legitimate and well-defined area of research, they write against a complex political and ideological background that undermines any claim for it as a normative field of historical study. Writing the Holocaust offers a lucid enquiry into this complex field by demonstrating the impact of current theories from the humanities and social sciences upon the treatment of Holocaust studies.

Good and Evil After Auschwitz is a compendium of the papers presented at an extraordinary symposium convened at the Vatican in 1998. It represents the views of more than thirty of the world's foremost theologians and religious thinkers on the inescapable moral question of our era, the problem of how, if at all, believers can reconcile their faith in a just and merciful God with the mass murder of millions of innocents during the Holocaust. Although the symposium took place in the Vatican, it gave voice to the thought and anguish of Jewish and Protestant thinkers as well as Roman Catholics. The participants came from many different countries and include many individuals well known in European intellectual and philosophical circles. The volume includes an interview with Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and excerpts from the writings of Moshe Flinker, Etty Hillesum, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Good and Evil After Auschwitz is a powerful and thought-provoking book. The profoundly moving contributions by the symposium participants can serve as signposts to guide us in the effort to confront the awesome questions posed by the Holocaust, even as they remind us that no human answer can possibly be adequate to its enormity.

Many argue that Christians must address their own culpability in the destruction of Europe's Jewry. If post-Holocaust Christians only lament Christianity's sin the tradition will be ultimately left with little to say and no credibility. Post-Holocaust Christians must emphasize positive differences that Christianity can make, including: -- Repentant honesty about Christianity's anti-Jewish history -- New appreciation for the Jewish origins of Christianity, the Jewish identity of Jesus, and the continuing vitality of the Jewish people and their traditions -- Welcome liberation from liturgies and biblical interpretations that promote harmful Christian exclusivism

"This book is a study of the Holocaust as problem in ethical theory. How could a whole society participate in an ethic of mass torture and genocide for over a decade without opposition from responsible political, legal, medical, or religious leaders? How does a society create and adopt its ethical norms? This is a study in narrative ethics at its best, yet the author's purpose is to discover how a people redefined evil to the degree that they committed heinous atrocities that were reprehensible under normal circumstances." --Guy Greenfield, Southwestern Journal of Theology "Peter Haas gives us a good overall description of the Holocaust, the way the Nazis and their myriad collaborators treated the Jews. The book . . . is well formulated and well written. It makes a good one-volume introduction to the Holocaust." --Frederick K. Wentz, Lutheran Quarterly "Peter Haas urges us to recognize ourselves in the perpetrators of the Holocaust. . . . In the course of setting forth his position, the author offers a concise and wonderfully accessible account of the formation of German political culture from Bismarck through Hitler. . . . Morality After Auschwitz is a serious book that should provoke long thoughts, and perhaps useful disputes, about the power of ethics to shape political cultures." --First Things

Distinctively coauthored by a Christian scholar and a Jewish scholar, this monumental, interdisciplinary study explores the various ways in which the Holocaust has been studied and assesses its continuing significance. The authors develop an analysis of the Holocaust's historical roots, its shattering impact on human civilization, and its decisive importance in determining the fate of the world. This revised edition takes into account developments in Holocaust studies since the first edition was published.

Ethics after Auschwitz? Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's Response demonstrates how, after their horrific experiences in Auschwitz, both Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel could have deservedly expressed rage and bitterness for the rest of their lives. Housed in the same barracks in the depths of hell, a dark reality surpassing Dante's vivid images portrayed in The Inferno, they chose to speak, write, and work for a better world, never allowing the memory of those who did not survive to fade. Why and how did they make this choice? What influenced their values before Auschwitz and their moral decision making after it? What can others who have suffered less devastating traumas learn from them? «The quest is in the question», Wiesel often tells his students. This book is a quest for hope and goodness emerging from the Shoah's deepest «night».

There is an old Jewish adage that pretty much sums up Israel’s experience among the nations for the last 2,000 years. “Scratch a gentile,” the saying goes, “and you’re sure to find an anti-Semite.” That notion is given credence by the fact that the first two millennia of the Jewish-Christian encounter culminated in the systematic slaughter of six-million Jews in the heart of Christendom. But Dr. Paul R. Carlson, author of Christianity After Auschwitz, is cautiously optimistic that the dawn of this new millennium may lead to Jewish-Christian amity as the Church faces up to its past sins and seeks to work with the Synagogue against those demonic forces which threaten civilization itself. However, as Carlson illustrates, the genocidal germ that gave birth to Hitler’s criminal regime still flourishes among countless Christians, many of whom would passionately deny they harbor any anti-Semitic notions or sentiments. While the book is addressed primarily to Carlson’s fellow evangelicals, both Jews and Christians will discover that it provides the general reader with an overview of those critical issues which scholars alone have in the past wrestled with in the post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian encounter. At the outset, Carlson is quick to concede that the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a scion of the great Chechnowa Rebbe, was certainly correct when he insisted that “Christians have never tried to penetrate the soul of the Jews. “They have read the Bible but neglected the oral tradition by which we interpret it,” he noted. “This makes a different Bible altogether. For example, says Rav Soloveitchik: “To equate Judaism with legalism the way Christian theologians are prone to do is like equating mathematics with a compilation of mathematical equations.” By the same token, old stereotypes die hard. “The Jew has been pictured as the arch-capitalist and the arch-Bolshevik and chastised for being both, whipsawed by contending forces,” says Nathan C. Belth. “The Soviet authorities [saw] Jews as a threat to the state, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who castigate[d] Soviet terror, sees Jews as libertarians who brought on socialism, after, of course, rejecting Christ.” Since time-immemorial, anti-Semites have also portrayed the Jew as the greedy, shady businessman or banker. But they conveniently forget stories such as that of Haym Salomon [1740-1785], the Jewish broker whose financial aid staved off starvation and desertion among American troops during our War for Independence. At one critical point, Robert Morris, the American financier and statesman, sent a messenger to alert Haym Salomon of the plight of the cash-strapped Colonial forces. The man brought the news to Salomon while he was attending Yom Kippur services at Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia. The congregation was shocked at the intrusion on the holiest day of the Jewish year; but Haym Salomon quietly informed the messenger: “Tell Mr. Morris our country’s appeal will not be in vain.” But that old canard about Jews and their money remains grist for the anti-Semite’s mill. By the same token, Jews have not been entirely blameless when it comes to their own stereotypes of Christians, particularly evangelicals. Nathan Perlmutter confessed as much during his tenure as national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith. “Our image of the fundamentalist and the evangelical is a kind of collage assembled out of bits and pieces from Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Erskine Caldwell . . . ,” he admitted. “Even after all this time memories of the great swarm of sex-ridden, Bible-thumping caricatures continue to exert a pervasive power.” But evangelicals would be among the first to admit that Jews have come a long way since the days of the infamous Toledot Yeshu, or Life of Jesus, which depicted the Galilean in scandalous terms. Indeed, the Israeli author Shalom Ben-Chorin is representative of those Jewish intellectuals who now believe that “it is time for Jesus to come home again.” Meanwhile, few Christians realize just how vulnerable many Jews feel in what they perceive to be “Christian America.” That perception is heightened by the 1992 American Jewish Year Book finding that “roughly 12 percent of Americans of Jewish heritage are now Christians.” “There is another way of looking at what I have called a disaster in the making,” says former US Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, author of Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America “Of the 6.8 million people who are Jews or of Jewish descent, 1.1 million say they have no religion and 1.3 million have joined another religion, adding up to 2.4 million,” Abrams observes. “This means that one-third of the people in America of Jewish ethnic origin no longer report Judaism as their current religion (Abrams italics). Such statistics illustrate why Jewish leaders unanimously condemn those Christian missionary agencies which specifically target Jews for conversion. They have been particularly incensed by one recent evangelical effort, known as Peace 2000, which aimed to convert every Jew in Israel to Christianity by the dawn of the new millennium. “Centuries of martyrdom are the price which the Jewish people has paid for survival,” says Brandeis scholar Marshall Sklare. “And the apostate, at one stroke, makes a mockery of Jewish history. “But if the convert is contemptible in Jewish eyes,” Sklare adds, “the missionary — all the more, the missionary of Jewish descent -- is seen as pernicious, for he forces the Jew to relive the history of his martyrdom, all the while pressing the claim that in approaching the Jew he does so out of love. “What kind of love is it, Jews wonder, that would deprive a man of his heritage,” Sklare asks. “Furthermore, given the history of Christian treatment of the Jews, would it not seem time at last to recognize that the Jew has paid his dues and earned the right to be protected from obliteration by Christian love as well as destruction by Christian hate?” The distinguished Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was even more pointed about the matter. “I had rather enter Auschwitz,” he once remarked, “than be an object of conversion.” All of this leads to the opening chapter of Christianity After Auschwitz, which introduces Christians to Emil Fackenheim’s “Eleventh Commandment” — or 614th Mitzvoth — which decrees that Jews are not permitted to grant Hitler any posthumous victories through intermarriage, assimilation, or conversion to a faith not their own. In a word, they are commanded to remain Jews. By the same token, Jewish scholars are quick to recognize that any “open and honest” dialogue will at some point involve a frank discussion of the similarities and differences between the Jewish and Christian perception[s] of the Messianic hope. With that understanding, the second chapter deals with the remarkable career of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and last Grand Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidim. Many of his talmidim, or disciples, believe he will ultimately be revealed as King-Messiah. His life and work are considered within the context of that of Jesus of Nazareth, as well as those of several pseudo-messiahs who have troubled Israel down through the centuries The author then makes it clear that Jesus himsel