Michael Berenbaum is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute and a professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.
Persecution is something that religious groups have known elsewhere. Religious freedom has allowed them to flourish in the United States — religious freedom and tolerance.
\”A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair\” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. (Knopf, 2002). $25
After provoking a furious debate over the role of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust with his book, \”Hitler\’s Willing Executioners\” (Vintage, 1995) Daniel Goldhagen tackles an even more explosive subject, the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust, in his new book, \”A Moral Reckoning.\” The power of the book is neither in the answers it gives nor the evidence it marshals, but in the questions it poses. None is more central than the one that frames the book: \”What must a religion of love and goodness do to confront its history of hatred and harm, to make amends with its victims and to right itself so that it is no longer the source of a hatred and harm that, whatever its past, it would no longer endorse?\” Goldhagen approaches the question in three parts: Clarifying the Conduct, Judging the Culpability and Repairing the Harm.
One of the most depressing of the many depressing aspects of the second year of the new millennium has been the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the importation into Islam of anti-Semitic motifs that were abandoned and discredited in the post-Holocaust Christian world.
The announcement that Richard Joel has been named as president of Yeshiva University (YU) is an important and salutary development in American Jewish life. Joel is a gifted leader, able spokesman and prolific fundraiser. He has been able to establish the national Hillel organization which he heads as a \”big tent\” for American Jews — one that embraces unaffiliated and under-affiliated Jews at a vital stage in their lives (college), while also serving the most committed Jews who enter its buildings to eat, study, pray and socialize with other Jews.
\”The Holocaust: A History\” Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, $27.95).
There is great modesty — appropriate to the subject and to the stage of our knowledge — in the title of this work: \”The Holocaust: A History.\” Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt recognize that with a subject so complex there are many ways of writing the history of the Holocaust — they have chosen but one way — but their choice is certainly defensible and comprehensive. Their history of the Holocaust is not only worthy of note; it is worthy of the subject.
A new president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) was inaugurated in a moving ceremony held Oct. 13 in the ornate Plum Street Temple in downtown Cincinnati.
While not every piece is to my liking, every work in the show has a point.
Edwin Black\’s new book, \”IBM and the Holocaust\” (Crown) has generated significant interest. Full-page advertisements in the New York Times and other prestigious newspapers and interviews on the \”Today Show\” and other prominent television programs have all been part of its marketing program. Despite its many substantial problems, the work is important.
The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust: The Activities of Vaad-Ha-Hatzala Rescue Committee, 1933-1945, Efraim Zuroff, Yeshiva University Press, 316 pages, $39.50
There is an eerie consistency to the mishandling of the David Irving story in the Los Angeles Times, which again on May 30, as on January 7, allowed itself to be used as a propaganda instrument for Holocaust denial.
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