The author's denunciation of apocalyptic thinking provides a moral, philosophical, and literary challenge to the way most of us make sense of our worlds. In our search for coherence, Bernstein argues, we tend to see our lives as moving toward a predetermined fate. This "foreshadowing" demeans the variety, the richness, and especially the unpredictability of everyday life. Apocalyptic history denies the openness and choice available to its actors. Bernstein chooses the Holocaust as the prime example of our tendency toward foregone conclusions. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who depict the Holocaust as foreordained and its victims as somehow implicated in a fate they should have been able to foresee. But his argument ranges wider. From recent biographies of Kafka to the Israeli - PLO peace accords, from campus cultural diversity debates to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns against our passive acceptance of historical or personal victimization.
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"Mr. Bernstein writes as a post-modernist but not, he insists, as a deconstructionist, for unlike them, he does not deny the 'event-ness' or 'historicity' of the past, still less the 'unique specificity of the Holocaust.'"--"New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
"Reading this book makes us people of our own time and not passive figures swept along by time and history." (Yehuda Amichai)
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Early in The Brothers Karamazov, we are offered a series of speculations about the paternity of Smerdyakov, born after the rape of an impoverished and feeble-minded orphan, "Stinking Lizaveta." Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
man without qualities, communal memory Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
European Jewry, The Retreat, Collateral Campaign, Austro-German Jewry, Primo Levi, World War, Jews of Badenheim, Principle of the Insufficient Cause, Austrian Jews, Hebrew Bible, Robert Musil, Austro-German Jews, Crown Heights, Eretz Israel, European Jewish, European Jews, Franz Kafka, The Road, Walter Benjamin, Warsaw Ghetto, Yankel Rosenbaum, Aharon Appelfeld, Austria's Jews, Austro-German Jewish, Eastern Europe New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Early in The Brothers Karamazov, we are offered a series of speculations about the paternity of Smerdyakov, born after the rape of an impoverished and feeble-minded orphan, "Stinking Lizaveta." Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
man without qualities, communal memory Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
European Jewry, The Retreat, Collateral Campaign, Austro-German Jewry, Primo Levi, World War, Jews of Badenheim, Principle of the Insufficient Cause, Austrian Jews, Hebrew Bible, Robert Musil, Austro-German Jews, Crown Heights, Eretz Israel, European Jewish, European Jews, Franz Kafka, The Road, Walter Benjamin, Warsaw Ghetto, Yankel Rosenbaum, Aharon Appelfeld, Austria's Jews, Austro-German Jewish, Eastern Europe New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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73
books
cite this book:
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- The Man Without Qualities (2 volume set) by Robert Musil on 17 pages
- Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust) by Berel Lang on 6 pages
- Writing and the Holocaust by Berel Lang on 4 pages
- The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust by Tom Segev in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews With Yehuda Amichai, A.B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Applefeld, and Amos Oz (S U N Y Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture) by Joseph Cohen in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
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- Holocaust Fiction : From William Styron to Binjamin Wilkomirski by Sue Vice on 5 pages
- Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust by Gary Weissman on 5 pages
- Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society) by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi on 4 pages
- The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings by Neil Levi in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and page 346
- Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre) by Claude Schumacher on page 23, page 41, and Back Matter
See all 73 books citing this book
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