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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter presents Ambassador vanden Heuvel's views on American immigration policies towards Jews before and during WWII. In response to a documentary by the historian David Wyman criticizing Roosevelt and his administration, vanden Heuvel began his own research to set the record straight. He demonstrates that American policy toward refugees was more generous than any other country at the time and that efforts by FDR to encourage Congress to revise refugee quotas would have resulted in a reduction of those quotas by an isolationist Congress. He refutes the idea that the exact details of the death camps were widely known at the time and thus could have prompted a military plan to save the Jews. He also recalls his intervention with President Jimmy Carter to challenge such claims by Elie Wiesel and others.

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.

In Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Sunflower: On the Possibility and Limits of Forgiveness, Wiesenthal tells the story of a dying German soldier who was guilty of horrendous evil against Jewish men, women, and children, but who desperately wanted forgiveness from and reconciliation with at least one Jew before his death. Wiesenthal, then a prisoner in Auschwitz, was brought to hear the German soldier’s story and his pleas for forgiveness. As Wiesenthal understands his own reaction to the German soldier, he did not grant the dying soldier the forgiveness the man longed for. In The Sunflower, Wiesenthal presents reflections on this story by numerous thinkers. Their responses are noteworthy for the highly divergent intuitions they express. In this chapter, I consider the conflicting views about forgiveness on the part of the respondents in The Sunflower. I argue that those respondents who are convinced that forgiveness should be denied the dying German soldier are mistaken. Nonetheless, I also argue in support of the attitude that rejects reconciliation with the dying German soldier. I try to show that, in some cases of grave evil, repentance and making amends are not sufficient for the removal of guilt, and that reconciliation may be morally impermissible, whatever the case as regards forgiveness.