Asking Hard Questions
Marrus, Michael R.
Asking Hard Questions After Tragedy and Triumph Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience Michael Berenbaum Cambridge Univ., 1990.196 pp., S24.95 Reviewed by Michael R....
...Is there "too much" Holocaust in Jewish public life...
...Meditating on the Holocaust, Berenbaum feels, while supremely important, is hardly sufficient for demonstrating the value and relevance of Jewish tradition today...
...He is less clear, however, in proposing where we go from here...
...What balance should be struck in teaching about the massacre of European Jewry...
...A "vicarious Jewish existence through Israel is not sufficient to nurture another generation of American Jews," he observes...
...With such thinkers as Harold Schulweis and David Sperling, he favors a personal religion based on "relational approaches to the divine"—an echo of Martin Buber, whom Berenbaum\clearly admires...
...How different from his parent's experience: "Our tale is more anguished, less innocent, for now the Jewish people are divided, uncertain about the direction of their future...
...Berenbaum's hand is surest when criticizing parochialism in Jewish life, whether for an excessively restrictive approach to the Holocaust, an obsession with Jewish victimhood, a discomfort in understanding the Holocaust within a wider American context or an unwillingness to address modern categories when contemplating the Jewish past or present...
...How are Jews to contend with the Holocaust as "a symbol central to the identity of American Jewry...
...Old enough to have witnessed the passage of Holocaust themes into the mass media and some insalubrious precincts of Jewish politics, he is also young enough to have grown up with the unheroic complications of modern Zionism...
...The war in Israel that shaped our adult consciousness was the war in Lebanon," he writes, "followed by the Pollard affair and the Palestinian uprisings...
...Michael R. Marrus is professor of history at the University of Toronto and the author of The Holocaust in History (New American Library, 1989...
...As he grapples with the problems these writers pose, Berenbaum leaves no doubt about his own intellectual vitality...
...Self-consciously from a post-Holocaust generation, Berenbaum knows that time is eroding previous dependencies...
...Hesitant yet hopeful, he offers some theological suggestions...
...Can there be a modern American Jewish identity that does not depend unhealthily on antisemitism, Israel or the Holocaust...
...Asking Hard Questions After Tragedy and Triumph Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience Michael Berenbaum Cambridge Univ., 1990.196 pp., S24.95 Reviewed by Michael R. Marrus Michael Berenbaum, project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum being constructed in Washington, D.C., puts hard questions into these essays...
Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4
