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Jewish liturgy helps develop new forms of discourse and theology to respond to the two central events of the contemporary Jewish era: the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel. Peter Ochs argues that modern philosophical logic is limited and must be augmented with a “logic of scripture.” This chapter argues for the power of the “logic of liturgy.” To address the Shoah, the chapter focuses on the liturgical theodicy of the Passover Seder and the synagogue sermon. The State of Israel revives issues of sacred space for Judaism. Part two of the chapter explores the notion of liturgical space as a response to idolatrous and messianic claims by some Zionists for the present State of Israel. Liturgy preserves the messianic character of Israel as a future and not a present reality.

This chapter examines, justifies, and elaborates on the cinematic document entitled Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann as it records several accounts of events participated in and witnessed with long shots of natural landscapes and sites of human engineering. It explains that in the movie, the referent is lost. In composing the conditions for the indication of a referent that no longer exists, Lanzmann records the enormity of inalternable loss.

This chapter examines some legal responses to the dangerous phenomenon of Internet-based Holocaust Denial. Legal regulations in Canada and Australia provide two frameworks under which Holocaust Denial can be outlawed. Canada has chosen to proceed by way of complex analyses of the content of the ‘speech’ and its reception by an intended audience. Australia, conversely, has adopted a legal framework which examines the possible adverse impact of the ‘speech’ on an identified victim group. What unites the two, and the aspect which is perhaps most troubling from a variety of perspectives, is a distinct rejection of any claim that the Holocaust actually happened, as an underlying normative basis for legal regulation. The chapter concludes that a political decision that denial of the Shoah is a malum in se approach would be preferable.

Every being is implicated in the devastation that took place in the twentieth century: Nazism, the bomb, genocides, mass deportations. When trauma occurs, it defeats the very possibility of being a subject within it—except in rare exceptions when lucid witnesses can confront it for what it is without being crushed. Something devastating falls upon us. And yet that is when it is most crucial to summon gentleness. W. H. R. Rivers demonstrated this in his regeneration of WW I soldiers.

More than forty years have passed since the promulgation of Nostra Aetate and thirty years since the creation of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. These events mark one of the most surprising developments of the twentieth century, which changed to a great extent the two-thousand-year history of relations between Christians and Jews, with momentous consequences for the whole world. Both Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II strove to demonstrate that conversion, a new beginning, and reconciliation were possible. Among the new endeavors to be undertaken by the Pontifical Commission, two are worth mentioning: the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel, and the dialogue and reflection on the Shoah. This chapter also looks at the future tasks and challenges of the Pontifical Commission.

At first glance, Primo Levi's Lilìt appears to be a loosely connected collection of stories divided into three unequal parts. The first section contains autobiographical material from Auschwitz and descriptions of other Shoah victims that Levi discovered in literature. The next two sections are a hodgepodge of fictional stories that range from fantasy tales and science fiction to musings on literature and stories about apparently everyday people. Lilìt is a more unified collection than it appears to be, and, as is argued in this chapter, this work deserves to be examined as a cohesive work. The three section titles frame their content, orienting an encounter of some kind toward a crisis or catastrophe. Taken as a whole, the collection makes an interconnected statement on the nature of writing and communication.

This chapter presents a case study of a survivor for whom the Shoah is indeed central. The subject is Jake, a Polish Hasid, for whom a bitter taste of galut, rather than an empowering diaspora, is pivotal to his sense of himself as a Jew. It argues that collective memory—the product of the transmission of a group's history and culture from one generation to the next—is crucial to individuals' identities as members of the group and products of its culture and history. Since the Shoah figures centrally in recent Jewish history, it has become a crucial component in the transmitted collective memory. The chapter draws on Jake's postwar life to accomplish two goals. First, to illustrate the difficulties that characterize the lives of many survivors. For Jake the end of the war marked the beginning of injustices created by family members. Second, to demonstrate that the methods used in Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation can undermine the richness of survivors' stories, while perhaps encouraging a Jewish identity based on victimization. A more nuanced oral history, one that examines the reactions of Jewish kin and the Jewish community, might yield a richer set of images.

When Pope Paul VI established the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews (CRRJ) on October 22, 1974, a so-called International Catholic–Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC) had already been in place for four years, having been instituted in Rome on December 23, 1970. The work of the ILC up to the present day can be summarized by distinguishing three different stages: the years 1971–3, 1974–93, and 1994–2006. During the second stage, thirteen sessions were held, focusing on the theme of education, as well as human rights, mission and witness, antisemitism, and the Shoah. The third stage, whose beginning coincides with the establishment of regular diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel on December 30 and 31, 1993, includes meetings fifteen through nineteen. Today, among the challenges that the ILC finds itself obliged to face, we also find the one expressed by the Sheikh Abdullah Bin Khalifa al-Thani, prime minister of Qatar, who wishes for conversation between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

It is not an exaggeration to claim that the Shoah, or Holocaust, inasmuch as it represents the climax of a long history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism of Christian Europe, constitutes the most painful issue and the most unsettling problem among those Jews and those Christians who are involved in a serious and sincere interreligious dialogue. Christians can and must listen to the critique of Christianity that some important thinkers of contemporary Judaism have developed in light of the tragedy of the Shoah. The Shoah was the climax of a long history of anti-Judaism and it is perhaps necessary to stop and reflect upon the religious significance of that attempt of total extermination of the Jewish people. Religious authorities, and especially the pastoral and theological leadership of the churches, must ensure that a new awareness is developed of the deep link between Jews and Christians in the wake of that terrible attempt to cut forever, at the root, the plant of Israel.

Brazil declared war on Germany and was a member of the Allied powers during World War II. No immovable property—private, communal, or heirless—was confiscated from Jews or other targeted groups in Brazil during the war. As a result, no immovable property restitution laws were required. Brazil endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.

This section argues that Tom uniquely feels history in the making. Because he is at once so allegorically prone and so resistant to capture, Tom is still happening. The chapter begins by showing how Tom both absorbs and escapes his source in Harsnett’s exorcism pamphlet. It then offers a series of alternative historical frames in which to understand Tom—past, contemporary, and future—each of which Tom speaks or embodies: 1) Plotinus’s concept of privational matter; 2) child mortality; 3) existing without any latency, purely present; 4) a dinosaur-world, before law or contract or family; 5) a primal condition of war; 6) original sin or law; 7) subjecthood waiting to possess the sublime body of sovereignty; 8) bare life becoming political life; 9) on the cusp of temptation and fall, at once before and after; 10) constitutionally anachronous, prone to futures; and 11) Holocaust, as sacrifice or as witness, dying or surviving to be an example.

Canada declared war on Germany and was a member of the Allied powers during World War II. No immovable property—private, communal, or heirless—was confiscated from Jews or other targeted groups in Canada during the war. As a result, no immovable property restitution laws were required. Canada endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.

Cyprus was a British Crown colony during World War II. Cyprus was a haven to refugees escaping Nazi persecution during World War II, and after concentration camps in Europe were liberated, detention centers were set up on the island by the British in an effort to curtail survivors from entering British Mandate Palestine. No immovable property—private, communal, or heirless—was confiscated from Jews or other targeted groups in Cyprus during the war. As a result, no immovable property restitution laws were required. Cyprus endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.

Between 1939 and 1944, Finland fought two separate wars against the Soviet Union. In 1941, Finland entered World War II aligned with Nazi Germany in its fight against the Soviet Union. Finland was never conquered or occupied by Germany, nor were any anti-Jewish laws passed in the country. No immovable property—private, communal, or heirless—was taken from Jews or other targeted groups in Finland during the war. As a result, no immovable property restitution laws were required. Finland endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that the patterns developed before World War II were vital to the reconstruction of Jewish communities after the Shoah, especially in Paris and Berlin. By this time, the Jewish public had come to expect a wider social and cultural program that would cater to different guises of Jewish belonging beyond strict religious definitions. Individuals wanted Jewish sociability based not only on the synagogue but also on youth groups and children’s summer camps and on social groups that met at local cafés or restaurants. At the same time, this chapter assesses the vast and critical changes wrought by the Holocaust and explores its repercussions in the postwar communities. Beyond pointing to these important historical continuities, however, this final chapter explores why these patterns were not replicated in Leningrad, despite periodic attempts to recreate public Jewish sociability in the former capital along similar models.

With the book’s claim that literary work can be viewed in retrospect to have had a prophetic ability to foreshadow future events, this chapter first suggests that Kafka’s work foreshadows Guantánamo Bay’s current situation. The chapter explores Shosana Felman’s classic essay on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The film itself is made of a metonymic series of videoed testimonies by victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of the Shoah, evading any form of complete or total understanding. Der Process is also examined in this chapter, exploring the case of Josef K., who suffered from the lack of a fair trial and was instead sentenced to execution. Josef K.’s life experience of this unjust social structure, in a way, also anticipates the situation of Guantánamo Bay’s detainees today. This chapter examines these works as well as Kafka’s own The Trial and investigates in detail one salient feature of their foreshadowing of Auschwitz.

Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale are all discussed in this chapter in relation to the Shoah. It begins with the intended presumption that all these works bear witness in an honorable and honest way to the Shoah, or at least seek to give inheritance to the facts about it to readers. The chapter performs a “rhetorical reading” on the texts, studying the way this sort of reading operates its performative magic of testifying to the Holocaust. The question of community is also looked at with regards to these works. These works, however, are subject to the double obstacle, a complex “aporia”: the facts of the Holocaust might be inherently unthinkable and unspeakable by any means of representation and “aestheticizing” the Holocaust creates suspicion in that the more successful a novel, the further it may be from the actual experience of the Holocaust.