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.

Table of contentsForeword: As It Was (or at least, As It Might Have Been), by Berel LangAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: Art in Theory and Practice1. Morality and Narrative Unreliability: The Danger of Schlink's Der Vorleser, by Caroline S. Gould2. Body Double: Portraits, Memory and the Face of Evil, by Shelley Hornstein3. "Ethik und Aesthetik sind Eins": Poetic Philosophy on Auschwitz, by Sarah Liu4. Responding to the Holocaust: Fackenheim, Levinas, Cavell, by Michael Morgan5. Philosophical Fancies: Four Fantastic Fables, by Howard NeedlerPart II: The Particular and the Universal: A Narrow Bridge6. "On a 'Nietzschean' Dispute between Ahad Ha'am and Berdichevski, by Jacob Golomb7. Each of Us a Nation: Rethinking Nationalisms, by Bert Nepaulsingh8. Anti-apartheid exile: South African Jewish activists in Britain, 1948-1989, by Susan Dabney Pennybacker9. Speaking a Word for Nature: Thoreau's Philosophical Saunter, by Gary Shapiro10. Nietzsche, half a Nazi? A Response to Crane Brinton, by Weaver Santaniello11. Utopia Revisited, and Discarded: Post-Metaphoric Reflections on Israel, by Steven J. ZippersteinPart III: The Holocaust in History and Representation12. Memory, Conscience, and the Moral Weight of Holocaust Representation, by Victoria Aarons13. Vacating the homogeneity of the Socio-political: Sylvia Plath and the disruption of 'confessional poetry', by Michael Mack14. Daily Life of Polish Women, Dedicated Rescuers of Jews During and After the Second World War, by Joanna Beata Michlic15. Through the Lens of a Contemporary Historian: The History of the Jewish Police in Kovno Ghetto Written in the Ghetto (1943), by Dalia Ofer16. The Philosopher's Holocaust, by Elhanan Yakira17. The representation of death in exhibitions: the case of the State Museum at Majdanek, by Anna Ziebinska-WitekAppendix I: Berel Lang's Comprehensive BibliographyIndexAbout the Contributors