Holocaust Literature.

Catalog description

The word Shoah, a Biblical word that means “destruction,” has been in use since the Middle Ages; in the 1940s it became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of European Jewry. In the 1950s the word Holocaust became a corresponding term. For almost eighty years, the term has been associated viscerally with Hitler’s attempt to eliminate the entire Jewish race, as documented and chronicled by both survivors, rescuers, and second-generation voices. The void of what we call “Holocaust literature” in the Shoah’s immediate aftermath has since been filled by an outpouring of significant, poignant, instructive texts comprised mostly of memoirs, chief among which is Nobel Peace Prize winner Eliezer Wiesel’s "Night." We will begin our study with Wiesel and continue our scholarship through several other important voices in Holocaust literature and antisemitism studies. Although we will focus primarily on the Shoah in Germany, we will examine also genocides in countries such as Turkey, Bosnia, China, and Africa—all the while considering how God would have us expand our universe of moral obligation.