Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub both use family narratives to explore ontological and political relationships. In Los informantes, this chapter demonstrates that the father and son embody Nancy’s notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’ respectively. Their weaknesses reveal weaknesses of such systems of governance, which Vásquez examines in relation to the historic and contemporary Colombian political context. It is through tactile associations and ‘sharing’ emblematized in the character of a physiotherapist, that the possibility of a ‘horizontal’ politics of ‘interdependence’ is explored. Likewise, in Diário da Queda, a lack of touch and familial intimacy frustrates the happiness of a father and son who are the second and third generation, born to a Holocaust survivor who moved to Brazil. This chapter tackles the novel’s radical critique of Holocaust memory used to bind together a Jewish ‘operative’ community, and to justify violence in the present.

This chapter shows how the modern thought that has shaped the current intellectual landscape played a role in the extermination of the Jews. Very often the millennial history of Christian antisemitism is blamed for the Holocaust. It is not so often, however, that the speculative philosophical tradition, particularly in the modern period, is taken to task. This chapter examines the ways in which the modern philosophical period is characterized by a process of thinking God out of the picture. From here Martin Heidegger emerges as the culmination of modern philosophical thought. Levinas has observed, “Heideggerian philosophy precisely marks the apogee of a thought in which the finite does not refer to the infinite … in which every deficiency is but weakness and every fault committed against oneself - the outcome of a long tradition of pride, heroism, domination, and cruelty. Heideggerian ontology subordinates the relation with the other to the relation with the neuter, Being, and it thus continues to exalt the will to power, whose legitimacy the other alone can unsettle, troubling good conscience.” This chapter demonstrates the truth of Levinas’s statement.

Chapter 3, “Pawiak Prison,” places a spotlight on the main institution used to control the intelligentsia and their behavior: Pawiak prison. Nearly 100,000 “political criminals” – resisting elites, or those suspected of resistance – were held and tortured there between 1939 and 1944. The Warsaw Gestapo, working for Hans Frank’s General Government administration, utilized the former tsarist prison as a holding facility for Poles suspected of resistance to the occupation. It became symbolic of Nazi terror and hostility to the Polish national project, despite being confined behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto from fall 1940 on. The experience of confinement, mistreatment, and interrogation within the prison galvanized opposition projects for those who survived the experience. Nazi paranoia about potential Polish resistance kept Pawiak full and constant overcrowding demanded solutions: the mass execution of many prisoners, prisoner transfer to concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and the opening of a new concentration camp at Auschwitz to the southwest as an overflow facility. This chapter argues that Pawiak was both symbol and microcosm of how Warsaw’s German civilian and police administration attempted to control the Polish intelligentsia and its potential resisters after the killing campaigns concluded.

This chapter focuses on better-known examples of transitional justice’s interaction with cultural heritage law, as well as the literature on dissonant heritage. The chapter engages with the recognizable framework of the World Heritage Convention, examining it through the World Heritage Sites of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland), Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Japan), and the Cape Region Floral Area and Robben Island (both in South Africa). The chapter analyses law’s role in shaping the narratives around these sites, and their role in promoting transitional efforts. The chapter also engages with the uses of intangible cultural heritage (colloquially known as folklore) as a living culture in transitional societies, focusing particularly on the efforts to revitalize, through international listing, intangible cultural heritage in North Macedonia (Glasoechko, male two-part singing in Dolni Polog), which is under threat of disappearing because of the dispersal of the community of heritage practitioners during and in the aftermath of the wars that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. An example of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding arising from the Colombian conflict is also discussed.

The central theological questions raised for Jewish belief by the Holocaust concern the existence and nature of God. In this paper, I focus on four figures who addressed these theological questions in a serious way: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, and Hans Jonas. I show that Jonas’s argument for a limited and changing God is the most radical of these theological responses and that the radical character of his response can best be appreciated by contrasting his approach with the other three theological accounts, especially in terms of how the problem of theodicy functions in those accounts.

Best known for his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl was a prodigy who became interested in psychotherapy in his high-school years. He was briefly associated with Freud’s and Adler’s groups, but soon departed from both to develop his own treatment methods. During World War II he was incarcerated in various concentration camps, and narrowly escaped death in Auschwitz, only to face the reality that practically all of his family members had perished and he was utterly alone in the world. Writing about his Holocaust experiences saved him from despair and suicide, and helped him to develop a method of therapy based on man’s “will to meaning,” which he called “logotherapy.” Frankl’s insight on the primacy and indispensability of meaning and meaning-making in life has had profound influences on subsequent developments in existential-humanistic psychotherapy, as well as on understanding mental health issues in refugees and survivors of traumatic life experiences. The chapter ends with discussions on the importance of finding meaning in work, creativity, spiritual merging, and love, as well as in suffering (transcendental meaning).

But where did the story of Jewish deportees fit into all this? Isaac Schneersohn, a Russian immigrant who had survived the war in hiding, emerged at the Liberation to found the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, which undertook to write the history of the genocide of the Jews. Schneersohn was also the moving force behind construction of a monument completed in 1956, the Mémorial du Martyr juif inconnu, now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah. The object of all such efforts was at to evoke the specificity of Jewish suffering and to find a way to include Jews qua Jews in memorial events connected to the Deportation. Schneersohn had more success at this than is often appreciated.

This essay was originally published as an Opinion Editorial in the <italic>Los Angeles Times</italic> as “Free Speech, Even if it Hurts” on February 22, 2006. It was in response to the news that Holocaust denier David Irving, whom I wrote about in my co-authored 2000 book (with Alex Grobman) <italic>Denying History</italic> (2nd edition 2009), had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Austria for violating one of their “hate crime” laws, a misguided, impractical and, in my opinion, immoral attempt to combat hate speech with censorship (and punishment) rather than with free speech. Unbidden and unbeknownst to him, before Irving’s sentencing, I wrote a letter to the judge along the lines of what I argue here, asking not just for leniency in his sentencing but for Irving’s freedom. I have no idea if the judge ever read my letter, and unfortunately I no longer seem to have a copy of it in my archives. That Irving was arrested at the airport in Austria well before he was scheduled to deliver his speech means that this was worse than an assault on free speech; it was an assault on free thought – literally a thought crime. How Orwellian.