is a German educationalist and co-publisher of Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.
The polemic intention of the ‘German catechism’ argument – that Holocaust memory serves a quasi-theological function and is therefore policed – has distracted from the empirical claims on which it rests. So how strong is the evidence of continuity between the colonial and the Nazi genocides? And does a direct connection need to be established in order to justify reconsideration of the ‘singularity theory’?
The Left in Israel has been decimated. Some believe that the only chance for meaningful opposition is for the Left to drop the doctrine that Zionism requires a Jewish State. The Zionist Left, so this argument goes, should abandon the two-state solution in favour of a federal arrangement with Palestine. A discussion.
In public perception, eastern European Jewish thought is shrouded in mysticism. The intellectuals Martin Buber, Joshua Heschel, and Emmanuel Levinas shared the eastern European Jewish experience, an education in existential philosophy in Germany, and the ordeal of witnessing the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. They share a universalistic ethic aimed at promoting direct human responsibility. Above all, it is Levinas to whom we owe an appreciation of what one could call “eastern European Jewry”.
