Bernard Schweizer
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199751389
- eISBN:
- 9780199894864
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751389.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
The trajectory of Elie Wiesel’s evolving religious views is the inverse of Rebecca West’s. While West started and ended her life as a misotheist, experiencing a more conventional phase of piety in ...
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The trajectory of Elie Wiesel’s evolving religious views is the inverse of Rebecca West’s. While West started and ended her life as a misotheist, experiencing a more conventional phase of piety in mid-life, Wiesel was a misotheist only during the middle part of his life. Starting out a devout Hasidic Jew, he lost his affirmative faith during the Holocaust. In his memoir, Night, he dramatized the protest against God in searing words: “I was the accuser, God the accused.” His accusations against God then moved into his novels, which are informed by an existentialist conception of a careless God. Wiesel’s case against God is most clearly stated in The Trial of God: “God is merciless…. He will not prevent me from letting my anger explode.” Wiesel eventually retreated from such radical positions and began to argue instead that God deserves man’s pity not his anger.Less
The trajectory of Elie Wiesel’s evolving religious views is the inverse of Rebecca West’s. While West started and ended her life as a misotheist, experiencing a more conventional phase of piety in mid-life, Wiesel was a misotheist only during the middle part of his life. Starting out a devout Hasidic Jew, he lost his affirmative faith during the Holocaust. In his memoir, Night, he dramatized the protest against God in searing words: “I was the accuser, God the accused.” His accusations against God then moved into his novels, which are informed by an existentialist conception of a careless God. Wiesel’s case against God is most clearly stated in The Trial of God: “God is merciless…. He will not prevent me from letting my anger explode.” Wiesel eventually retreated from such radical positions and began to argue instead that God deserves man’s pity not his anger.
Sarah K. Pinnock
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195335224
- eISBN:
- 9780199868810
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335224.003.0017
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter discusses the advantages of using religious literature in teaching about death, in order to relieve the topic of its morbid stereotype and approach it positively and holistically. The ...
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This chapter discusses the advantages of using religious literature in teaching about death, in order to relieve the topic of its morbid stereotype and approach it positively and holistically. The chapter uses the term “literature” broadly to encompass death narratives about religious persons that may be fictional, biographical, or scriptural. The use of literature intentionally disrupts student expectations for a survey textbook, which is used as ancillary. Reflecting on selected classics of death literature as examples, the chapter considers how these narratives situate religious perspectives historically and culturally without reducing death or religion to abstractions. Discussion centers on The Death of Ivan Ilyich By Leo Tolstoy, I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven, Night by Elie Wiesel, and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.Less
This chapter discusses the advantages of using religious literature in teaching about death, in order to relieve the topic of its morbid stereotype and approach it positively and holistically. The chapter uses the term “literature” broadly to encompass death narratives about religious persons that may be fictional, biographical, or scriptural. The use of literature intentionally disrupts student expectations for a survey textbook, which is used as ancillary. Reflecting on selected classics of death literature as examples, the chapter considers how these narratives situate religious perspectives historically and culturally without reducing death or religion to abstractions. Discussion centers on The Death of Ivan Ilyich By Leo Tolstoy, I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven, Night by Elie Wiesel, and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.
Michael L. Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195148626
- eISBN:
- 9780199870011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195148622.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
The views of various American liberal intellectuals and Jewish writers on the Nazi death camps are discussed, starting with Lionel Trilling, a postwar New York literary critic, who addressed the ...
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The views of various American liberal intellectuals and Jewish writers on the Nazi death camps are discussed, starting with Lionel Trilling, a postwar New York literary critic, who addressed the issue of the death of the novel and the impotence of the mind in relation to the horror of the Nazi camps. The main part of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of the testimonies of three death camp survivors – Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Jean Améry. Levi's viewpoint of the camps is not that of a religious Jew, but as a scientist and secular humanist, and he discusses the fact that normal prisoners (like Wiesel and Améry) were perhaps not in the best position to report on the camps, while those who held privileged positions (like himself) perhaps were.Less
The views of various American liberal intellectuals and Jewish writers on the Nazi death camps are discussed, starting with Lionel Trilling, a postwar New York literary critic, who addressed the issue of the death of the novel and the impotence of the mind in relation to the horror of the Nazi camps. The main part of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of the testimonies of three death camp survivors – Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Jean Améry. Levi's viewpoint of the camps is not that of a religious Jew, but as a scientist and secular humanist, and he discusses the fact that normal prisoners (like Wiesel and Améry) were perhaps not in the best position to report on the camps, while those who held privileged positions (like himself) perhaps were.
Jacob S. Eder
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190237820
- eISBN:
- 9780190237851
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190237820.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, World Modern History
This chapter explores the opposition of the Kohl government and its associates to the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Kohl and his advisors ...
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This chapter explores the opposition of the Kohl government and its associates to the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Kohl and his advisors perceived the USHMM as a state-sanctioned reduction of German history to the Holocaust and as an “anti-German museum.” For more than a decade, German intermediaries tried to persuade the museum planners to integrate postwar German history and the history of German anti-Nazi military resistance into the exhibition concept in order to show that not all Germans had been Nazis during the Third Reich and that the Federal Republic was distinctly different from Nazi Germany. However, museum representatives—many of them survivors of the Holocaust—considered the German requests for a modification of the Holocaust narrative illegitimate.Less
This chapter explores the opposition of the Kohl government and its associates to the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Kohl and his advisors perceived the USHMM as a state-sanctioned reduction of German history to the Holocaust and as an “anti-German museum.” For more than a decade, German intermediaries tried to persuade the museum planners to integrate postwar German history and the history of German anti-Nazi military resistance into the exhibition concept in order to show that not all Germans had been Nazis during the Third Reich and that the Federal Republic was distinctly different from Nazi Germany. However, museum representatives—many of them survivors of the Holocaust—considered the German requests for a modification of the Holocaust narrative illegitimate.
John K. Roth
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198725336
- eISBN:
- 9780191792663
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198725336.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
Christian understandings of Judaism—better identified as misunderstandings—have produced immense suffering and sorrow. Post-Holocaust Christian understandings of Judaism are much better than they ...
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Christian understandings of Judaism—better identified as misunderstandings—have produced immense suffering and sorrow. Post-Holocaust Christian understandings of Judaism are much better than they were before and during the Shoah. In some ways, relations between Christians and Jews have never been better. This chapter explores, first, the parts that Elie Wiesel has played in those developments. Exploration of Wiesel’s challenges to Christians and Christianity leads to considerations of the prospects and pitfalls that currently face Christian-Jewish relations. As the Holocaust recedes into the past, Christian urgency about attending to it diminishes, but especially when the seemingly intractable Palestinian–Israeli conflict looms large and divisive, keeping the failures of ethics at bay requires keeping the Holocaust pivotal in Jewish-Christian relations.Less
Christian understandings of Judaism—better identified as misunderstandings—have produced immense suffering and sorrow. Post-Holocaust Christian understandings of Judaism are much better than they were before and during the Shoah. In some ways, relations between Christians and Jews have never been better. This chapter explores, first, the parts that Elie Wiesel has played in those developments. Exploration of Wiesel’s challenges to Christians and Christianity leads to considerations of the prospects and pitfalls that currently face Christian-Jewish relations. As the Holocaust recedes into the past, Christian urgency about attending to it diminishes, but especially when the seemingly intractable Palestinian–Israeli conflict looms large and divisive, keeping the failures of ethics at bay requires keeping the Holocaust pivotal in Jewish-Christian relations.
Arthur J. Magida
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520245457
- eISBN:
- 9780520941717
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520245457.003.0016
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
This chapter describes the experince of Elie Wiesel and his experience with bar mitzvah. Wiesel is a Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust ...
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This chapter describes the experince of Elie Wiesel and his experience with bar mitzvah. Wiesel is a Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps, and is also the Advisory Board chairman of the Algemeiner Journal newspaper. While working as a journalist in Paris for an Israeli newspaper, Wiesel interviewed the French writer François Mauriac, who started talking about the suffering of Christ. He exploded: “Ten years ago, I knew hundreds of Jewish children who suffered more than Christ, and no one talks about it.” With that, Wiesel wept, and the decade-old dam inside him started crumbling. He began writing. Incessantly, first an 800-page memoir came. Wiesel winnowed that down to the 127 pages of Night, which contains the most widely quoted passage in Holocaust literature.Less
This chapter describes the experince of Elie Wiesel and his experience with bar mitzvah. Wiesel is a Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps, and is also the Advisory Board chairman of the Algemeiner Journal newspaper. While working as a journalist in Paris for an Israeli newspaper, Wiesel interviewed the French writer François Mauriac, who started talking about the suffering of Christ. He exploded: “Ten years ago, I knew hundreds of Jewish children who suffered more than Christ, and no one talks about it.” With that, Wiesel wept, and the decade-old dam inside him started crumbling. He began writing. Incessantly, first an 800-page memoir came. Wiesel winnowed that down to the 127 pages of Night, which contains the most widely quoted passage in Holocaust literature.
Naomi Seidman
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226745053
- eISBN:
- 9780226745077
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226745077.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This book reads translation history through the lens of Jewish–Christian difference, which, conversely, it views as an effect of translation. Subjecting translation to a theological-political ...
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This book reads translation history through the lens of Jewish–Christian difference, which, conversely, it views as an effect of translation. Subjecting translation to a theological-political analysis, the author asks how the charged Jewish–Christian relationship—and more particularly the dependence of Christianity on the texts and translations of a rival religion—has haunted the theory and practice of translation in the West. Bringing together central issues in translation studies with episodes in Jewish–Christian history, the book considers a range of texts, from the Bible to Elie Wiesel's Night, delving into such controversies as the accuracy of various Bible translations, the medieval use of converts from Judaism to Christianity as translators, the censorship of anti-Christian references in Jewish texts, and the translation of Holocaust testimony. It ultimately reveals that translation is not a marginal phenomenon but rather a crucial issue for understanding the relations between Jews and Christians, and indeed the development of each religious community.Less
This book reads translation history through the lens of Jewish–Christian difference, which, conversely, it views as an effect of translation. Subjecting translation to a theological-political analysis, the author asks how the charged Jewish–Christian relationship—and more particularly the dependence of Christianity on the texts and translations of a rival religion—has haunted the theory and practice of translation in the West. Bringing together central issues in translation studies with episodes in Jewish–Christian history, the book considers a range of texts, from the Bible to Elie Wiesel's Night, delving into such controversies as the accuracy of various Bible translations, the medieval use of converts from Judaism to Christianity as translators, the censorship of anti-Christian references in Jewish texts, and the translation of Holocaust testimony. It ultimately reveals that translation is not a marginal phenomenon but rather a crucial issue for understanding the relations between Jews and Christians, and indeed the development of each religious community.
Jacob S. Eder
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190237820
- eISBN:
- 9780190237851
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190237820.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, World Modern History
This book explores how Germans perceived and reacted to how Americans publicly commemorated the Holocaust. It argues that a network of mostly conservative West German officials and their associates ...
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This book explores how Germans perceived and reacted to how Americans publicly commemorated the Holocaust. It argues that a network of mostly conservative West German officials and their associates in private organizations and foundations, with Chancellor Kohl located at its center, perceived themselves as the “victims” of the afterlife of the Holocaust in America. They were concerned that public manifestations of Holocaust memory—e.g., museums, monuments, and movies—could severely damage the Federal Republic’s reputation in the United States and even cause Americans to call into question the Federal Republic’s status as an ally. The book uncovers the fears of German officials—some of whom were former Nazis or World War II veterans—about the impact of Holocaust memory on the reputation of the Federal Republic and reveals their at times negative perceptions of American Jews. Focusing on a variety of fields of interaction, ranging from the diplomatic to the scholarly and public spheres, the book unearths the complicated and often contradictory process of managing the legacies of genocide on an international stage. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, West German decision-makers realized that American Holocaust memory was not an “anti-German plot” by American Jews and acknowledged that they could not significantly change American Holocaust discourse. In the end, German confrontation with American Holocaust memory contributed to a more open engagement on the part of the West German government with this memory and eventually rendered it a “positive resource” for German self-representation abroad.Less
This book explores how Germans perceived and reacted to how Americans publicly commemorated the Holocaust. It argues that a network of mostly conservative West German officials and their associates in private organizations and foundations, with Chancellor Kohl located at its center, perceived themselves as the “victims” of the afterlife of the Holocaust in America. They were concerned that public manifestations of Holocaust memory—e.g., museums, monuments, and movies—could severely damage the Federal Republic’s reputation in the United States and even cause Americans to call into question the Federal Republic’s status as an ally. The book uncovers the fears of German officials—some of whom were former Nazis or World War II veterans—about the impact of Holocaust memory on the reputation of the Federal Republic and reveals their at times negative perceptions of American Jews. Focusing on a variety of fields of interaction, ranging from the diplomatic to the scholarly and public spheres, the book unearths the complicated and often contradictory process of managing the legacies of genocide on an international stage. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, West German decision-makers realized that American Holocaust memory was not an “anti-German plot” by American Jews and acknowledged that they could not significantly change American Holocaust discourse. In the end, German confrontation with American Holocaust memory contributed to a more open engagement on the part of the West German government with this memory and eventually rendered it a “positive resource” for German self-representation abroad.
John K. Roth
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198725336
- eISBN:
- 9780191792663
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198725336.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
Considering the failures of ethics and resistance against them, the question raised in this chapter’s title comes to mind. A sobering response to the question, “What has been learned from the ...
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Considering the failures of ethics and resistance against them, the question raised in this chapter’s title comes to mind. A sobering response to the question, “What has been learned from the Holocaust?” is not enough. Fortunately, if one not only recognizes but also takes to heart the fact that not enough has been learned, then it could be that the outcome is not entirely bleak. Knowing that we lack something, that we fall short, even that we might do better, is maybe something, which is the second response that governs the explorations that follow. They focus, first, on knowledge about the Holocaust and, second, on some of the implications of that knowledge that most need to be taken to heart if we are to protect and care for the natural world that is our home.Less
Considering the failures of ethics and resistance against them, the question raised in this chapter’s title comes to mind. A sobering response to the question, “What has been learned from the Holocaust?” is not enough. Fortunately, if one not only recognizes but also takes to heart the fact that not enough has been learned, then it could be that the outcome is not entirely bleak. Knowing that we lack something, that we fall short, even that we might do better, is maybe something, which is the second response that governs the explorations that follow. They focus, first, on knowledge about the Holocaust and, second, on some of the implications of that knowledge that most need to be taken to heart if we are to protect and care for the natural world that is our home.
