Two new books by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Alvin Rosenfeld on the return of global antisemitism.
« … The implicit or explicit motivation of those who, in one capacity or another, Jewish or non-Jewish, wrote about the Holocaust or recorded testimonies or reflections about it – eye witnesses, historians, philosophers, theologians, law experts, poets, novelists, journalists, movie or TV directors – was until recently : Never again. »
« … What however if the Never again ! imperative has just been a passing delusion and if, even more perversely, Holocaust memories and pieties, and even Holocaust studies, have been interwoven into the new antisemitic mantras ? What if Evil – if not the Devil itself – outsmarted morality, and succeeded to harness and manipulate it to its own ends ? Was it not utterly naive to believe, as so many people did, that an unprecedented emotional shock – caused in the Spring of 1945 by the images of the Nazi camps released in movie theaters in America and elsewhere on the personal orders of General Dwight Eisenhower – would provide for a lasting moral reset ? But here we are : antisemitism is back with a vengeance, and the longing for, or the actual planning of, a second genocide of the Jews has come true in the Islamic world and in other parts of the world. »
Just published in Commentary Magazine, January 2014.
The full story :
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-return-of-the-devil/