RESEARCH General History

HISTORY
Holocaust book examines theoretical responses to Nazi genocide

Andrea Lynn, Humanities & Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; andreal@uiuc.edu

8/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A giant of a book has just joined a crowded field – a field that already enjoys, according to its editors, "a vast range and profound depth of contributions that continues to grow exponentially."

However, the new 528-page anthology on the Holocaust should stand out, the editors say, since it is "the first book to collect theoretical responses to the Nazi Genocide in a comprehensive way."

One reviewer echoed that claim, describing the work as the first of its kind to address the relationship between the events of the Holocaust and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory.

"The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings" (Rutgers University Press) will be published in September. The editors of the anthology are Neil Levi, an English professor at Drew University, and Michael Rothberg, a professor of English and director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Many of the 62 readings are reprinted extractions from books and journals, the works of extremely influential theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida and Primo Levi.

Neil Levi and Rothberg wrote the general introduction, which maps out the field of Holocaust studies and offers a brief account of the emergence of scholarly and public interest in it. They also introduced all of the 11 sections and compiled bibliographies for each.

The book points out that Raphael Lemkin, a refugee Polish-Jewish lawyer in the United States, coined the term genocide in late 1942 or early 1943, defining it as the "destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" and the "practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups."

The last entries in the anthology deal with comparisons between the European and American holocausts and explore the debate over the exclusivity of the Nazi Holocaust as an unparalleled event in 20th century history. Yehuda Bauer argues that while some top members of the U.S. administration "expressed genocidal hopes and intentions," there was no governmental intention to exterminate the native population of North America. Lilian Friedman strongly disagrees, countering that "Even as early as 1763, the settler population and its sovereign representatives acted in full cognizance of the impact their introduction of disease would have on the Native populations." Moreover, the introduction of diseases to indigenous populations was accompanied by a "systematic destruction" of their agricultural base in order to trigger starvation and increase their susceptibility to epidemics.

About one third of the European Jewish population survived the Nazi Holocaust, Friedman writes, whereas 1 to 2 percent of the indigenous population survived the American Holocaust. "This certainly calls into question any notion of ‘unparalleled’ or ‘total extermination’ of the Jews in the Nazi Holocaust."