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Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland serves as an effective guide to some of the most complex and controversial issues of Poland's troubled past. Fourteen original essays by a team of distinguished Polish and American scholars explore the different meanings, forms of expression, content, and social range of antisemitism in modern Poland from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors focus on both the variations in antisemitic sentiment and those Poles who opposed such prejudices. Central themes of this significant, balanced, and timely contribution to a contentious and often emotional debate include the deterioration of Polish-Jewish relations in the era of national awakening for both the Poles and the Jews, the meaning of the various forms of violence against the Jews, intellectual movements in opposition to antisemitism, the role of the Catholic Church in promoting antisemitism, and the prospects for the Church to atone for this shameful chapter in its recent history.
This book analyses four case studies of Holocaust memory activism in Poland, contextualized within recent debates about Polish-Jewish relations and approached through a theoretical framework informed by critical theory. Three cases are advocacy groups, each located in a different region of Poland—Lublin, Kraków, and Sejny—and each group is presented with attention to the local context and specific dynamics of its vision and strategy. The fourth case study is the state, which has emerged as a powerful memory actor. Using research based on extensive fieldwork, including interviews and direct observation, the author argues that memory activism must grapple with emotional attachments to identity if it is to move beyond a reconciliation paradigm. Drawing on works from semiotics and critical trauma studies, the volume analyzes the assumptions each memory actor makes about three dimensions of Holocaust memory: 1) the relationship of the individual to Polish national identity; 2) the possibility of a reconciled Polish-Jewish history; and 3) the assignment of traumatic suffering to a particular group or event.
One woman’s national, political, ethnic, social, and personal identities impart an extraordinary perspective on the histories of Europe, Polish Jews, Communism, activism, and survival during the twentieth century. Tonia Lechtman was a Jew, a loving mother and wife, a Polish patriot, a committed Communist, and a Holocaust survivor. Throughout her life these identities brought her to multiple countries—Poland, Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel—during some of the most pivotal and cataclysmic decades of the twentieth century. In most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while working to promote Communism and trying to create a safe space for her sma...
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Arendt in Jerusalem: The Eichmann Trial, the Banality of Evil, and the Meaning of Justice Fifty Years On -- 1 Judging the Past: The Eichmann Trial -- 2 Eichmann in Jerusalem: Conscience, Normality, and the "Rule of Narrative" -- 3 Banality, Again -- 4 Eichmann on the Stand: Self-Recognition and the Problem of Truth -- 5 Arendt's Conservatism and the Eichmann Judgment -- 6 Eichmann's Victims, Holocaust Historiography, and Victim Testimony -- 7 Truth and Judgment in Arendt's Writing -- 8 Arendt, German Law, and the Crime of Atrocity -- 9 Whose Trial? Adolf Eichmann's or Hannah Arendt's? The Eichmann Controversy Revisited -- Contributors -- Index
In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit of Jewish memory" is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds.She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It de...
Jesus instructed his followers to "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you" (Luke 6:27-28). Not only has this theme long been among the Church's most oft-repeated messages, but in everything from sermons to articles in the Catholic press, it has been consistently emphasized that the commandment extends to all humanity. Yet, on numerous occasions in the twentieth century, Catholics have established alliances with nationalist groups promoting ethnic exclusivity, anti-Semitism, and the use of any means necessary in an imagined "struggle for survival." While some might describe this as mere hypocrisy, Faith and Fatherland analy...
Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance explores interconnected testimonies of four Holocaust survivors who were members of the Akiva youth group in Cracow, Poland, who participated in the ghetto resistance. Drawing on literary and photographic discourse, Jelen extracts the contours of personal narrative from the collective voice present in these interconnected testimonies. Attuned to stories of lost youth, sexual exploitation, and the dissolution of community and family, Jelen approaches Holocaust testimonies as one would members of a family with their shared experiences and common background, but also as individuals with their own unique voices. Departing from historical methodologies, Jelen models a different, wholistic approach to Holocaust testimonies, one which seeks to make sense of testimonies in the full breadth of their unfolding, across time, across space, and across genre.
This publication, from Edinburgh University Press, is conceived as the premier source of material on a comprehensive range of topics in contemporary liberalism. It surveys some of the most important topics relating to liberal theory including nationalism, citizenship, multiculturalism, feminism, Marxism, environmentalism, human rights, pluralism, and post-communism. There are also chapters on such key thinkers as Habermas, Weber, Foucault, and Rawls, and chapters that explore the critical challenges that liberalism now faces. Companion to Contemporary Liberalismwill allow students to explore liberalism's contemporary relevance and to look to its likely future developments: each essay-entry, by a notable scholar in the field, has been commissioned to provide analysis of a specific issue, topic or key thinker within contemporary liberal theory.
Philosophers have almost always relegated the topic of revision to the sidelines of their discipline, if they have thought about it at all. This book contends that acts of revision are central and indispensable to the project of philosophizing and that philosophy should be construed essentially as a practice of rereading and rewriting. The book focuses chiefly on Heidegger’s highly influential interpretation of Nietzsche, conducted in lectures during the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1961. The author closely analyzes the rhetorical means by which Heidegger repositions Nietzsche’s thinking within a broad history of metaphysics, even as Heidegger positions his own reinterpretation as th...