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Since Theodor Adorno's attack on the writing of poetry "after Auschwitz," artists and theorists have faced the problem of reconciling the moral enormity of the Nazi genocide with the artist's search for creative freedom. In Holocaust Representation, Berel Lang addresses the relation between ethics and art in the context of contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. Are certain aesthetic means or genres "out of bounds" for the Holocaust? To what extent should artists be constrained by the "actuality" of history--and is the Holocaust unique in raising these problems of representation? The dynamics between artistic form and content generally hold even more intensely, Lang argues, when art's sub...
In honor of Berel Lang's five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the world to discuss Lang's impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as "the end of the Holocaust", the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy.
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 Nazi Genocide and pursued in Heidegger's Silence. Raising the question now of what the future of the Holocaust is, he addresses among other topics how history and memory together shape views of the Holocaust; how the concept of "intention"—which played a crucial part in the events of half a century ago—shapes history and memory themselves; and how future views of this genocide may alter those of today.In addition, Lang explores cultural repr...
Several prominent writers reflect on the degree to which the atrocities of the Holocaust have affected contemporary writing on the subject. a very extensive and well documented historiographical and literary analysis.
In 1943, twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi had just begun a career in chemistry when, after joining a partisan group, he was captured by the Italian Fascist Militia and deported to Auschwitz. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, he was one of fewer than 25 who survived the eleven months before the camp’s liberation. Upon returning to his native Turin, Levi resumed work as a chemist and was employed for thirty years by a company specializing in paints and other chemical coatings. Yet soon after his return to Turin, he also began writing—memoirs, essays, novels, short stories, poetry—and it is for this work that he has won international recognition. His first book, If This Is a Man, i...
A philosopher addresses conceptual and ethical questions that arise from historical accounts of the Holocaust.
Berel Lang's Genocide: The Act as Idea analyzes and defends the distinctiveness of the concept of genocide as a notable advance in the history of moral and political thinking and practice.
In What Is Called Thinking, Martin Heidegger wrote, "Man speaks by being silent." Berel Lang demonstrates that Heidegger's own silence spoke consciously and deliberately in response to what has been called the "Jewish Question." Posed simply, the Jewish Question, as it gained currency in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, asked how (or if) the Jews were to live among the nations. The Holocaust radically altered the significance of the Jewish Question and, still, the great philosopher did not speak. Lang interrogates Heidegger's silence for its possible meanings. He asks: What does it tell us about someone who prided himself on his ability to think that Heidegger ne...