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- Title
Holocaust Ethics: Difficult Histories and Threatening Memories.
- Authors
Seidler, Victor Jeleniewski
- Abstract
On the seventieth anniversary of the destruction of the Vilna ghetto I explore ambivalences in Holocaust memory in the Baltic states and troubling notions of a 'double genocide' while tracing train journeys of death that connected Vienna, Vilna and Tallinn and so western and eastern Europe. Exploring how memories are connected to place and investigating how family legacies of Litvak identity also travel, I show how Musar ethical traditions also journeyed as far as South Africa to influence the ethical politics of the African National Congress. Framing questions about the relationship between ethics and memory across generations I return to the painful warnings in the words of Elchanan Elkes at the destruction of the Kovno ghetto. I trace the possibilities that they help to frame a post-Shoah ethics and a vision of 'the human' that questions the rational self that informed Enlightenment thinking and that proved incapable of resisting the brutalities of Nazism.
- Subjects
VILNIUS (Lithuania); AFRICAN National Congress; HOLOCAUST (Jewish theology); ELKES, Elchanan, 1879-1944; CRUELTY in literature; AMBIVALENCE in literature; HISTORY
- Publication
European Judaism, 2014, Vol 47, Issue 1, p76
- ISSN
0014-3006
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3167/ej.2014.47.01.09