Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

The Holocaust in American Life. By Peter Novick. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Pp. 1, 373. Cloth, $27.00) In this engaging and important study, Peter Novick undertakes two primary tasks: to offer an historical account of how the Holocaust became such a prominent feature of American cultural and political life, and to question the widely held assumption that this prominence is an inherently good thing. In addition to these goals, Novick seeks to debunk the claim that the Holocaust stands apart from other atrocities as a unique purveyor of moral lessons. Indeed, he takes his case one step further by contending that, in the end, the Holocaust may actually offer no moral lessons at all. In tracing the history of the Holocaust in American life, Novick is largely successful. Like other recent scholarship on this themes, Novick argues that, while Americans were not silent about Nazi atrocities during and immediately after the war, the "Holocaust" was not recognized as a discrete historical event until decades later. In contending that the Holocaust became more ubiquitous in American cultural and political life after 1968 than it had been in the postwar years, Novick rejects psychoanalytically informed accounts that explain this lag in terms of "trauma" or "repression." Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, Novick argues that in the years following World War II, public discussion of the Holocaust was muted because it ran counter not only to the aims of organized American Jewry, but to the broader cultural and political climate of postwar America. The demands of the Cold War and the new alliance between Germany and the United States required that Stalinism, rather than the Holocaust, be cast as the most damning crime of the modern age. Leaders of the American Jewish community promulgated this view and were largely silent about the Holocaust in an attempt to dispel stereotypes that identified Jews with both Bolshevism and eternal victimhood. An excessive public preoccupation with the Holocaust was seen as incompatible with a rapidly assimilating American Jewish community, determined to participate fully in euphoric postwar prosperity. While the destruction of European Jewry was surely a "widely shared Jewish sorrow" during these years, it was, according to Novick, a sorrow shared largely in private. By the mid-1960s, this had begun to change. Novick cites the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and the subsequent publication of Hannah Arendt's controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem as two of the major catalysts for a growing public discussion of the Holocaust. A less obvious claim is that the heightened public preoccupation with the Holocaust in the late 1960s and 1970s coincided with the birth of identity politics, reflecting both a broader shift away from an integrationist ethos to a particularist one, and the growth of a "victim culture" that increasingly valorized oppression and suffering over heroism. While not everyone may agree with Novick's implicitly critical definition of identity politics, this is an important dimension of his argument, for it offers a compelling, if only partial explanation for the ubiquity of the Holocaust in contemporary American life. It was only within a political culture that valorized victimization that the Holocaust could become the locus of so many strong and contradictory feelings, including possessiveness, proprietariness, envy, and resentment. Novick is also interested in how, by the late 1960s, a growing public Holocaust discourse reflected the shifting priorities of organized American Jewry, and here, too, he offers an illuminating account of how Jewish leaders once reticent about the Holocaust were now placing it at the top of their political agendas. In their concern over escalating rates of intermarriage and waning interest in organized Judaism, leaders now seized on the Holocaust in order to shore up a sense of American Jewish identity and to caution American Jews against the dangers of complacency. …

The Holocaust in American Life

Ideology-An Introduction

The Concept of History

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The Advancement Of Learning

Drawing its examples from the case of the former Yugoslavia, the paper explores the difficult intersections of justice, memory and forgiveness where the present bears the traces of a violent past o...

Memory, Forgiveness and Unfinished Justice in the Former Yugoslavia

The Kosovo–Holocaust analogy is normally examined either as a rhetorical tool of deception and propaganda, or as an argumentative device employed to serve diverse purposes with often conflicting meanings. Political objections are thus normally limited to disclosing the distortions that served the national interests of the intervener. Following Paul Ricoeur, the paper moves beyond mere distortion to the ideological functions (social integration, legitimization and distortion) of a wider social imaginary, a Holocaust metanarrative for understanding the war, evaluating the facts and ethically assessing the proper US response. Findings are based on exhaustive research into (a) public remarks and statements made by Secretary Albright and leading figures of the Department of State (1997–2001), (b) the Congressional Record during the Clinton and G. W. Bush's administrations, and (c) the public papers of the US Presidents during the same period (1993–2009).

Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis

Papers

Memory, Forgiveness and Unfinished Justice in the Former Yugoslavia

Metaphors Matter: The Ideological Functions of the Kosovo–Holocaust Analogy