Lessons and Legacies, Volume IV: Reflections on Religion, Justice, Sexuality, and Genocide (review)

The Lessons and Legacies Conference takes place biennially, rotating among American university campuses. Arguably the most intellectually rigorous of the various Holocaust conferences, it serves as a kind of bellwether in the field of Holocaust studies. The conference, which is co-sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation and Northwestern University, publishes a set of selected papers after each meeting. The volume under review here is from the 1996 conference, which was held at the University of Notre Dame. Sadly, the volume was seven years in preparation. Two volumes from later meetings have already appeared: Volume V (The Holocaust and Justice [Boca Raton, 1998]) and Volume VI (New Currents in Holocaust Research [Northwestern University, 2000]). Volumes from the conferences at the University of Minnesota in 2002 and Brown University in 2004 are in preparation.

Reviewing a text that is, in effect, nearly a decade old presents some curious challenges and provides some revealing moments. In what follows, I will comment on the usefulness of these articles to today's readers, and, in some cases, on how particular contributions serve as a preview of careers that have unfolded since the 1996 meeting.

Larry Thompson (United States Naval Academy) opens his introduction by stating that the volume will focus on "issues of propriety, morality, legality, sexuality, and proximity," and these serve as the text's organizing categories. The section entitled "Propriety" opens with an excerpt from Lawrence Langer's book Pre-empting the Holocaust, a text that is familiar to most Holocaust scholars. The excerpt is followed by a thoughtful and persuasive essay by Robert Melson (Purdue University), one that bears the marks of having been written while the "uniqueness" debate was still raging. Melson states that his goal is "to advance the scholarly comparison of genocide" (p. 25), which he does by comparing the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. The author argues that problems of definition, typology, theory, and fallacy should be considered in making such comparisons. Along the way, he suggests that the United Nations' definition of genocide needs to be amended. He wisely notes that "as scholars, we seek theories, underlying patterns that explain events," (p. 24) and he cautions the reader to remember that "comparison does not imply equivalence" (p. 35). Professors of comparative genocide courses will find Melson's essay useful in stimulating discussion on how to make such comparisons appropriately.

Section II, which covers morality, contains articles by well-recognized scholars Doris Bergen, Michael Phayer, and Robert Krieg. In her contribution, Bergen (University of Notre Dame) examines the extent to which a focus on religion enriches our understanding of the Holocaust. In a dense, closely argued essay with extensive and helpful footnotes, she asserts that a focus on religion allows us to avoid the voyeuristic, titillating approach to the Holocaust that, regrettably, we see in our students and even in certain scholarly treatments. Bergen went on to write the splendid short textbook War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2002). (This was the text most frequently recommended by educators who responded to a query posted on the H-Net Holocaust Listserv in May 2005.) One of the book's many welcome features is a fuller analysis of gender than may be found in any other short history of the Holocaust.

The articles by Phayer (Marquette University) and Krieg (University of Notre Dame) deal with the papacy and the impact of Catholic doctrine on the Cold War. Phayer excoriates Pope Pius XII for exonerating German Catholics of any culpability, for apparently supporting—through various means—perpetrators of war crimes, and for failing to work for the restitution of property stolen from Jews. If, as historians have postulated, the absence of moral integrity was a marker of the Cold War, then Pius's attitude toward the Holocaust can be counted as a factor in that war and in the delay for twenty years of the encyclical Nostra...