Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide by John K. Roth (review)

John K. Roth, Emeritus Professor, Claremont Mckenna College, has added to his important list of publications with his latest offering Sources of Holocaust Insight, which affords his readers an awareness of the writings, teachings, and conversations that have influenced his own intellectual journey grappling with the Shoah. The book is comprised of eleven chapters, each devoted to a well-known scholar on the Holocaust—including Richard Rubenstein, Elie Wiesel, Franklin Littell, Raul Hilberg, Sara Kofman, Charlotte Delbo, Phillip Hallie, Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Jean Améry—though chapters three, six, and nine more generally cover "Friends and Teachers" of the field. Each of these colleagues influenced the direction of his intellectual journey, broadening his understanding of a genocide whose effects still resonate more than seventy-five years after the conclusion of World War II.

Bookending these chapters are questions raised, and, by way of conclusion, insights gathered and learned. Early on in his Prologue "Acts of Recognition," he highlights the questions that propelled him forward:

Who are we? What is right and what is not? What is good and what is most important? Are we doing the best we can? What about God, or is that question absurd? How can we forestall despair and resist injustice? Where are we or should we be going? What are we or should we be doing? What must change or curb and heal the wasting of the world? Are our judgments true? Can our responses to such questions withstand scrutiny, or do they require further inquiry and evidence to support them? (p. 6) How did the Holocaust happen? Who is responsible for it? How can we best remember that history? What about God and religion after Auschwitz? What about human rights and ethics in a post-Holocaust world? What can I know, what should I do, for what may I hope in the shadow of Birkenau?

(p. 9)

To this reviewer, these are the very questions that have framed Roth's teachings, writings, and inquiries. His work has added greatly to our own awareness of the moral imperative not only to preserve the historical evidence of the Holocaust, but also to recognize the necessity of serious and sustained reflections on the meaning of the events themselves and their implications and consequences for both present and future. Roth, over the course of his long career, has more than met this challenge and proven himself up to the task in his countless publications and presentations.

Readers of Roth's book may be familiar with the writings of the "authorities" citied above. Uniquely, each chapter in Sources of Holocaust Insight includes a meaningful summary of not only their contributions, but also the impact of their work in shaping, expanding, and influencing Roth's own contributions.

In his Epilogue, "Take Nothing for Granted," Roth thus brings his journey to its logical conclusion sharing the following:

The Holocaust targeted a particular people, the Jews, for utter destruction. Much is known about how the Holocaust happened and why. Much remains unknown and arguably unknowable about the Holocaust, its vastness, and reverberations. No event has more power to raise the right questions, the ones that we need to pursue to help make life worth living. The Holocaust was wrong—or nothing could be. The Holocaust signifies immense failure—ethical, religious, political. The Holocaust and its reverberations reveal "the fatal interdependence of all human actions". The Holocaust shattered trust in the world. The Holocaust did not have to happen. The Holocaust fractured and fragmented what we hold dear when we are at our best. The Holocaust is a warning. The Holocaust can be a much-needed compass. Seeing differently, seeing better—sound learning and teaching about the Holocaust aim for what may be the most important Holocaust insight of all: Take nothing for granted.

(pp. 258–59)

Throughout his text, Roth is careful to remind his readers that he is a committed Christian, a...