The Jewish Bible After the Holocaust (review)

144 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 book of reflection on this issue is Joan Ringelheim's essay, in which she specifically confronts her own use of cultural feminism as a framework for understanding what women experienced in the Holocaust, and the limitations of that analysis. In calling for more interpretation from the authors and editor of this book, we are mindful of the pitfalls of reading the gender politics of today back into history. Yet, if we do none of this, we blunt religious and cultural criticism, and, in doing that, we fail to hold people accountable for the webs of oppression that they created. Because we have so few records ofwomen's own thoughts before the modern period, raising questions of choice in time is an admittedly difficult endeavor; despite this difficulty, a little more speculation is called for. Judith Glass, Ph.D. Academic Staff Institute of Industrial Relations UClA Norma Pratt, ph.D. Research Scholar Center for the Study of Women UClA The Jewish Bible After the Holocaust, by Emil Fackenheim. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1990. 122 pp. Few scholars have shaped a discipline as decisively as Emil Fackenheim . Philosophical and theological thinking about the Holocaust have been imprinted by the body of Fackenheim's work, and no serious scholar in these fields can write on the Holocaust without detailed reference to Fackenheim. All this means that Fackenheim has dramatically influenced the shape of Jewish studies insofar as they have centered around the Jewish world after the Holocaust, at least in America. Fackenheim's challenge to the post-Holocaust Jewish community (especially scholars) centered on the inability to return to reading and using Jewish tradition in the same way after Auschwitz. Thus, not only has Fackenheim influenced Jewish thinking on the Holocaust but he has also influenced Jewish thinking on the whole of Jewish tradition, thus, the whole of Jewish studies. Fackenheim is first and foremost a philosopher, however, and even though he has attempted to argue that he is a Jewish philosopher, craftsman of a unique discipline, his subject matter has been the full range of Western, especially Modern European, philosophy. His challenge to the post-Holocaust philosophical world has been equally dramatic, but his Book Reviews 145 influence on general philosophical studies has been far less sweeping. As a philosopher he has principally brought the factuality ofthe Shoah to bear on the possibility ofJewish tradition after Auschwitz. This corpus of Fackenheim's thought, even as it has consistently drawn on the Jewish philosophical and interpretive traditions, has until now only indirectly addressed the possibility of a post-Holocaust biblical theology. This small book, offered even apologetically, is Fackenheim's attempt to fill that void. In a sense, the book represents a concrete example ofwhat Fackenheim's lifelong work and critique have demanded. He, the philosopher, now applies the philosophical exigencies after Auschwitz to the use ofthe Jewish Bible for doing Jewish philosophy and theology. Seen as a part of Fackenheim's agenda, the book is a fitting addition to the whole of Fackenheim's work. But this text is really more than a next or even last step in Fackenheim 's life work. The first chapter on hermeneutics shares much of the same critique found in earlier material and rests within the same reading of modern thought. Still, the chapter ends with a challenge that moves beyond the general challenge felt by the survivors of the Shoah and passed on to any who would hear-never to forget the horror and the despair of Auschwitz. Fackenheim writes into a world, as he says, that has moved beyond the waiting stage in which Jews looked for a new Buber and Christians might have sought a new Tillich. Even those giants were inadequate to produce a new theology and a new hermeneutic after Auschwitz. But now we move into a world in which those who would write and think are not Job but Job's children (p. 26). Thus, the issue is not how we finish the work of the first voices after the Shoah but how we begin a new era in post-Shoah thought. This book is an effort to make a bridge between...