Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust

The American-Jewish philosopher Berel Lang has left an indelible impression on an unusually broad range of fields that few scholars can rival. From his earliest innovations in philosophy and meta-philosophy, to his ground-breaking work on representation, historical writing, and art after Auschwitz, he has contributed original and penetrating insights to the philosophical, literary, and historical debates on ethics, art, and the representation of the Nazi Genocide.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. Readers will find original and provocative essays on topics as diverse as Nietzsche’s reputed Nazi leanings, Jewish anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, wartime rescue in Poland, philosophical responses to the Holocaust, hidden diaries in the Kovno Ghetto, and analyses of reactions to trauma in classic literary works by Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Plath, and Derek Walcott.

This remarkable collection of fourteen essays, generated by ‘the Nazi genocide of the Jews,’ exceeds expectations at nearly every turn for both its deeply personal voice and its analytic acumen. Taken as a whole, Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust is global in scope, historically rich and philosophically diverse. It rarely abandons its Jewish perspective on a range of nearly intractable issues and in that respect alone, it is a fitting tribute to Berel Lang.

Simone Gigliotti is a senior lecturer in the History Programme, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.Jacob Golomb is Ahad Ha-am Professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the philosophical editor of the Hebrew University Magnes Press.Caroline Steinberg Gould is Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, where she established the Classical Studies Program and was instrumental in founding the Jewish Studies Program.