Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, with a New Afterword by the Author (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, , 1991, 2000) (If you only read one book on this list, please read this one. "Murderous motives in general, and motives for mass murder in particular, have been many and varied. They range from pure, coldblooded calculation of competitive gain, to equally pure, disinterested hatred or heterophobia. Most communal strifes and genocidal campaigns against aborigines lie comfortably within this range, If accompanied by an ideology, the latter does not go much further than a simple 'us or them' vision of the world, and a precept 'There is no room for both of us', or 'The only good injun is a dead injun'. The adversary is expected to follow mirror-image principles only if allowed to. Most genocidal ideologies rest on a devious symmetry of assumed intentions and actions." "Truly modern genocide is different. Modern genocide is genocide with a purpose. Getting rid of the adversary is not an end in itself It is a means to an end: a necessity that stems from the ultimate objective, a step that one has to take if one wants ever to reach the end of the road. The end itself is a grand vision of a better and radically different, society. Modern genocide is an element of social engineering, meant to bring about a social order conforming to the design of the perfect world." "To the initiators and the managers of modern genocide, society is a subject of planning and conscious design. One can and should do more about the society than change one or several of its details, improve it here or there, cure some of its troublesome ailments. One can and should set oneself goals more ambitious and radical: one can and should remake the society, force it to conform to an overall, scientifically conceived plan. One can create a society that is objectively better than the one 'merely existing'--that is, existing without conscious intervention. Invariably, there is an aesthetic dimension to the design: the ideal world about to be built conforms to the standards of superior beauty. Once built, it will be richly satisfying, like a perfect work of art; it will be a world which, in Alberti's immortal words, no adding, diminishing or altering would improve." "This is a gardener's vision, projected upon a world-size screen. . . . Some gardeners hate the weeds that spoil their design--that ugliness in the midst of beauty, litter in the midst of serene order, Some others are quite unemotional about them: just a problem to be solved, an extra job to be done. Not that it makes a difference to the weeds; both gardeners exterminate them. If asked or given a chance to pause and ponder, both would agree; weeds must die not so much because of what they are, as because of what the beautiful, orderly garden ought to be." Id. at 91-92.).
Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (New York: Times Books, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream--the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals--may die." "In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the center of the crisis: Barack Obama, America's first 'Jewish president,' a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people's special curse. The two men embody fundamentally different visions not just of American and Israeli national interests but of the mission of the Jewish people itself" "Beinart concludes with provocative proposals for how the relationship between American Jews and Israel must change and with an eloquent and moving appeal for American Jews to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late." Also see David Shulman, "Israel in Peril," NYRB, 6/7/2012.).
Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (New York: Times Books, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream--the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals--may die." "In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in chilling detail the looming danger to Israeli democracy and the American Jewish establishment's refusal to confront it. And he offers a fascinating, groundbreaking portrait of the two leaders at the center of the crisis: Barack Obama, America's first 'Jewish president,' a man steeped in the liberalism he learned from his many Jewish friends and mentors in Chicago, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who considers liberalism the Jewish people's special curse. The two men embody fundamentally different visions not just of American and Israeli national interests but of the mission of the Jewish people itself" "Beinart concludes with provocative proposals for how the relationship between American Jews and Israel must change and with an eloquent and moving appeal for American Jews to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late." Also see David Shulman, "Israel in Peril," NYRB, 6/7/2012.).
Joseph W. Bendersky, The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000) (From the backcover: "The 'Jewish Threat' gives us a shocking picture of the anti-Semitism that permeated the highest ranks of the U.S. military throughout much of the past century, having a very real effect on policy decisions. Through ten years of research in more than 35 archives, Joseph Bendersky has uncovered clear, compelling and irrefutable evidence of an endemic and virulent anti-Semitism throughout the army officer corps, from the turn of the century right up to the decades after World War II. His sources reveal that many officers were convinced of the physical, intellectual,, and moral inferiority of Jews, and fears that Jews threatened their Anglo-Saxon/Nordic culture, gene pool, government and national interests. Their fully-developed and clearly articulated perspectives had a direct effect on policy discussions and decisions, affecting such matters as immigration, Holocaust refugees, military strategy, and the establishment of Israel.").
Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006) (From the bookjacket: "With lacerating prose and exhilarating wit, Michaels takes on the many manifestations of our devotion to diversity, from companies apologizing for slavery, to a college president explaining why there aren't more women math professors, to the codes of conduct in the new 'humane corporations.' Our commitment to diversity is so complete, he argues, that we're no longer willing to take a stand against people with opposite religious or political beliefs, preferring to think of them as innocuously different rather than plain wrong. Looking at the books we read, the TV shows we watch , and the lawsuits we bring, Michaels shows that diversity has become everyone's sacred cow precisely because it offers a false vision of social justice, one that conveniently costs us nothing. The issues we love to fight over--affirmative action, sexism, and the preservation of English as our national language--mislead us about the real problems and distract us from the real solutions. Describing the left and the right more as collaborators than opponents, The Trouble with Diversity calls for us to pay less attention to the illusory differences of culture and more attention to the not-so-illusory differences of class and wealth. It's not just that class matters more than race, Michaels asserts, but that the logic of diversity encourages the acceptance of inequality.").
John R. Bowen, Blaming Islam (A Boston Review Book) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press, 2012).
Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).
Francois Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1989).
Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011) ("Heydrich's life . . . offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the emergence of the Nazi police state: the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust, the interconnections between anti-Jewish and Germanization policies; the different ways in which German occupation regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more person level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men from perfectly 'normal' middle-class backgrounds can become political extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian fantasies of racially transforming the world." Id. at xix-xx (italics added). In short, this is a good reminder that, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, it all could very easily happen here. We are not immune. For instance, think about many of the attitudes expressed, and the conduct engaged, by some opposed to immigrants from Latin America or toward Hispanics generally. East Haven, Connecticut. Hazelton, Pennsylvania. Arizona. Alabama.).
Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin (New York: Crown, 2011).
Anti-Hispanic Hate Crime Incidents
Source: FBI data
Phyllis Goldstein, A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism, with a Foreword by Sir Harold Evans (Brookline, Massachusetts: Facing History and Ourselves, 2012) (From Harold Evans's "Foreword": "Oppression is a commonplace fate of minorities. The Jews are hardly unique in this regard: the majority has often had a good cause to feat insurgency. Indeed, Jews, being not visibly different from the rest of the population, are generally exposed to less prejudice than members of more distinct minorities. What I had not appreciated, however, until I read A Convenient Hatred, is how long Jews have uniquely been the subject of campaigns of intimidation and discrimination--since long before the creation of Israel, long before the Holocaust, long before the Spanish Inquisition, even before the Romans crucified Jesus. As striking as the persistence of the pathology is how Jews have maintained their identity, and many of them their faith, in the face of unparalleled defamation and assault. There are heroes in the story as well; more of their stories should be known." Id.).
Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993) ("As a political doctrine, nationalism is the belief that the world's peoples are divided into nations, and that each of these nations has the right of self-determination, either as self-governing units within existing nation-states or as nation-states of their own." "As a cultural ideal, nationalism is the claim that while men and women have many identities, it is the nation that provides them with their primary form of belonging." "As a moral ideal, nationalism is an ethnic of heroic sacrifice, justifying the use of violence in the defense of one's nation against enemies, internal or external" "These claims--political, moral, and cultural--underwrite each other. The moral claim that nations are entitled to be defended by force or violence depends on the cultural claim that the needs they satisfy for security and belonging are uniquely important. The political idea that all peoples should struggle for nationhood depends on the cultural claim that only nations can satisfy these needs. The cultural idea in turn underwrites the political claim that these needs cannot be satisfied without self-determination." "Each one of these claims is contestable and none is intuitively obvious. . . ." Id. at 5-6. 'What's wrong with the world is not nationalism itself. Every people must have a home, every such hunger must be assuaged. What's wrong is the kind of nation, the kind of home that nationalists want to create and the means they use to seek their ends. Wherever I went, I found a struggle going on between those who still believe that a nation should be a home to all and race, color, religion, and creed should be no bar to belonging, and those who want their nation to be home only to their own. It's the battle between the civic and the ethnic nation. I know which side I'm on. I also know which side, right now, happens to be winning." Id. at 249.)
Peter Lonerich, Heinrich Himmler,translated from the German by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) (The platform of certain early twenty-first century Republican candidates for public office echo aspects of Himmler: "Apart from the pursuit of politically and ideologically defined enemies of Nazism--communists, Jews, Freemasons, Christians--and the preventive combating of crime, which was becoming increasingly part of 'labour deployment', during the years 1936-9 the Chief of the German Police was preoccupied above all with the regulation of sexual activity, that is to say, the fight against abortion and homosexuality." "Himmler made clear the extent of his commitment to this in January 1937 in a speech at the start of the German Police Day. This was a propaganda weeks in which the population was asked to support the work of the defenders of law and order under the motto: 'The Police are Your Friends and Helpers.' Himmler stated that 'homosexuality and the widespread practice of illegal abortion' were 'plagues', which 'would inevitably lead any nation into the abyss'. The police were, however, already involved in the 'merciless pursuit of these abominations'. In the spring of 1937, at a workshop in Berlin, he declared that in the future he would judge the effectiveness of the police according to their success in the fight against homosexuality and abortion." "For Himmler the fight against these two 'plagues' was an important personal concern. He told the Council of Experts on Population and Racial Policy on 15 June 1937: 'I have actually spent days and nights pondering about these two matters, which are among those of greatest concern to me. For someone who is normal and decent it's not that easy to look into these things and try to explain them. I have asked myself the question: is this the reason why our nation is no morally debased and bad?'" Id. at 231. "If we consider Himmler's empire and the plans and utopian fantasies he developed in their entirety, it is also evident that he had amassed a potential for destruction that far exceeded the catastrophes that Nazism itself actually caused: for the systematic murder of the European Jews, with which above all the name Himmler is connected today, was not in his eyes the ultimate goal of his policies but rather the precondition for much more extensive plans for a bloody 'new ordering' of the European continent." Id. at 748. Also, see Jacob Heilbrunn, "Pathological Ambitions," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/8/2012.).
Robert McKim & Jeff McMahan, eds., The Morality of Nationalism (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) (From the backcover: "The resurgence of nationalist sentiment in many parts of the world today, together with the erosion of national barriers through the continuing rapid expansion of globalizing technologies and economic structures, has made questions about nationalism more pressing than ever." " Collecting . . . works by some of the leading moral and political thinkers of our time, . . . this important volume seeks to illuminate nationalism from a moral and evaluative perspective rather than to provide policy prescriptions or predictive analysis. With discussion of issues such as the ideal of national self-determination, the permissibility of secession, the legitimacy of international intervention, and tolerance between nations, The Morality of Nationalism contains both pro- and anti-nationalist argument and concentrates throughout on matters of deep ethical and political significance. To what extent should people be permitted to act on the basis of loyalty to those to whom they are specially related? Are there benign forms of nationalism? Should liberal repudiate nationalism? What value should we attach to cultural diversity?").
Kristen Renwick Monroe, Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide: Identity and Moral Choice (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012)("I thus became conscious of what should have been obvious all along: the themes found in the Holocaust resonate with other periods of genocide, other instances of ethnic cleansing, other acts of prejudice, discrimination and group hatred, and animosity, just as they resonate with other instances of compassion, heroic altruism, and moral courage. The psychological forces at work during the Holocaust partake of the same political psychology underlying other political acts driven by identity. The same need for affirmation, and the relation such validation can have to group identity and to those who are different, lies at the heart of other important political behavior, from prejudice and discrimination to sectarian hatred and violence on the one hand and forgiveness, reconciliation, and amazing acts of grace on the other." Id. at 4.).
Steven Nadler, Rembrandt's Jews (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2003) (From the bookjacket: "There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's work devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries." "Rembrandt's Jews put this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. . . . Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarters of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. . . . Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented--far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictions of Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.").
Shiva Naipaul, North of South: An African Journey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
Eyal Press, Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamic of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, Beautiful Souls explores the flip side of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention. Through the dramatic stories of unlikely resisters who felt the flicker of conscience when thrust into morally compromising situations, Eyal Press shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by radicals seeking to overthrow the system but by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions." "On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. In the Balkans half a century later, a Serb from the war-blasted city of Vukovar defies his superiors in order to save the lives of Croats. At the height of the Second Intifada, a member of Israel's most elite military unit informs his commander that he doesn't want to serve in the occupied territories." "Drawing on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, Beautiful Souls culminates with the story of a financial industry whistleblower who losses her job after refusing to sell a toxic product she rightly suspects is being misleadingly advertised. At a time of economic calamity and political unrest, this deeply reported work of narrative journalism examines the choices and dilemmas we all face when our principles collide with the loyalties we harbor and the duties we are expected to fulfill.").
Deborah Scroggins, Emma's War (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
Deborah Scroggins, Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui (New York: Harper, 2012) ("The six years I had spent following these two women, both so ambitious and dramatic in their different ways, had come to an end. What had I learned?" "When I began, I felt that the control of women was as fundamental to radical Islam as racism was to the old American South or as anti-Semitism was to Nazi Germany. I learned that this was true, depressingly so. But I also learned that Westerners who want to keep the Muslims world under Western rule also have used Islamic attitudes towards women not so much to help free Muslim women as to justify the West's continued domination of Muslim men." Id. at 466. Also see Eliza Griswold, "Firebrands," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/29/2012.).
Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("The first message of this book is that there is a distinction between the faith of Islam and the religionized politics of Islamism, which employes religious symbols for political ends. Many will deny this distinction, including most prominent Islamists themselves. . . . In fact, however, Islamism emanates from a political interpretation of Islam: it is based not on the religious faith of Islam but on an ideological use of religion within the political realm. Islamism and Islam are thus different entities, not to be confused with each other, and in this book I aim to explain the difference." Id. at vii. "The second message of this book is that Islamism is a totalitarian ideology in Hannah Arendt's understanding of this term. Its totalitarian outlook is deeply linked to its antisemitism. Antisemitism is, as Arendt notes on the first page of here famous book The Origins of Totalitarianism, 'not merely the hatred of Jews' but a genocidal ideology. The distinction, too, is important: it is the difference between wishing to relegate Jews to a despised place in society and denying the Jewish people the right to exist." Id. at viii. From the bookjacket: "Tibi describes Islamism as a political ideology based on a reinvented version of Islamic law. In separate chapters devoted to the major features of Islamism, he discusses the Islamist vision of state order, the centrality of antisemitism in Islamist ideology, Islamism's incompatibility with democracy, the reinvention of jihadism as terrorism, the invented tradition of shari'a law as constitutional order, and the Islamists' confusion over the concepts of authenticity and cultural purity. Tibi's concluding chapter applies elements of Hannah Arendt's work to identify Islamism as a totalitarian ideology. The book concludes with a plea for a civil Islam.").
S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck, with an Afterword by David Shulman (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2008) ("True, it all happened a long time ago, but it has haunted me ever since. I sought to drown it out with the din of passing time, to diminish its value, to blunt its edge with the rush of daily life, and I even, occasionally, managed a sober shrug, managed to see that the whole thing had not been so bad after all, congratulating myself on my patience, which is, of course, the brother of true wisdom. But sometimes I would shake myself again, astonished at how easy it had been to be seduced, to be knowingly led astray and join the great general mass of liars--that mass compounded of crass ignorance, utilitarian indifference, and shameless self-interest--and exchange a single great truth for the cynical shrug of a hardened sinner. I saw that I could no longer hold back, and although I hadn't even made up my mind where it would end, it seemed to me that, in any case, instead of staying silent, I should, rather, start telling the story." Id. at 7. From the bookjacket: "This 1949 novella about the violent expulsion of Palestinian villagers by the Israeli army has long been considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, and it has also given rise to fierce controversy over the years.").
Saadi Youssef, Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002).
