Claudia Moscovici 
As I conclude this book on the Holocaust, it’s only natural to reflect about the main discipline such a project pertains to: namely, the field of Judaic Studies. In what follows I’d like to describe what “Judaic Studies” means to me and how it ties into the approach I pursued in presenting the Holocaust through a series of reviews of memoirs, novels and films on the subject.
Diversity. In my estimation, Judaic Studies is more about intellectual and artistic affinities, a wide-ranging cultural curiosity, and the willingness to learn from one another than about having a common religious or ethnic identity. The Jewish people themselves come from nearly every culture and civilization; speak almost every language on Earth; range widely in religious background (from deeply observant Orthodoxy to secular Judaism), and have no agreed-upon political views. And yet, for thousands of years they have felt affinities with each other and been united in a strong yet mysterious “family resemblance,” or a series of overlapping connections and similarities, to use Wittgenstein’s term.
Centripetal and centrifugal cultural forces. Judaic Studies therefore is not about manifesting or seeking an ethnic essence or unified cultural and religious identity. This makes sense, especially given the fact that, as history has shown, to be discriminated against on the basis of your “Judaism” you don’t have to have Jewish parents or religious beliefs. According to Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, a “Jew” was a person who had three or four Jewish grandparents. This tenet cast a wide net of discrimination. One of my favorite painters, Marc Chagall, was obliged between the years 1941-1948 to escape from occupied (Vichy) France to the United States once the Nazi regime occupied France. But so was Vladimir Nabokov, the prize-winning Russian author. Nabokov was not Jewish himself, but he expressed sympathy for the Jewish people. That was enough to endanger his life. I am drawn to what I’d describe as a simultaneous push and pull, or the centrifugal and centripetal forces, that exist in a hybrid field like Judaic Studies. There’s a force away from any set identity or even agreed-upon religious core yet, at the same time, an attraction to Jewish culture, religion and achievements in all forms and across countries and centuries.
Manifest curiosity about all fields without claiming to master them. To write a work pertaining to the field Judaic Studies, you don’t have to pretend to know everything about Jewish cultures and religion. Thank goodness, since that would be an impossible task! How can anyone know everything about thousands of years of such heterogeneous cultures and traditions? Besides, nowadays, nobody can become Encyclopedic in the way the philosophers were during the Enlightenment. There’s no way anyone can be familiar with thousands of years of Jewish history; the vast transformations in Judaism and its religious and cultural practices; the multiplicity of languages spoken (aside from Hebrew and Yiddish); the immense contributions that both Jews and those who were interested in Judaism have made in every field of human knowledge. Approaching the dark epoch of the history of European Jews during WWII through the prism of reviews has enabled me to interweave general historical information with the particular documents—memoirs, novels and films–about the Holocaust that I found most valuable and illuminating. In this way, I aim to offer an Encyclopedic approach to the Holocaust without claiming to have either the comprehensiveness or the strict, alphabetical, organization of an Encyclopedia. My approach in writing this book was inspired by the original sense of the 16th century notion of “enkuklios paideia: meaning an “all-around education”. By starting with individual works about the Holocaust and incorporating historical information about WWII, Holocaust Memory offers high school and college students, as well as teachers and the general reader, the starting point of a well-rounded education about this catastrophe; one that will hopefully be deepened and enriched by reading (or viewing) the sources I briefly presented here.
The Holocaust and Judaic Studies. Any study of the Holocaust is central to the field of Judaic Studies because it pertains to the darkest epoch in Jewish history, when the Jews were targeted for discrimination, deportation and eventually extermination precisely for being Jewish. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt emphasizes repeatedly that although other groups were also targeted by the Nazi regime for extermination—for example, the Gypsies, the Poles and Russian prisoners of war—it was not accidental that the extermination of Jews throughout Europe and, if possible, in the entire world was Hitler’s (and various Nazi regimes) number one priority. And yet, in these reviews, I also pointed out that the Holocaust is not a subject that is relevant only to the Jews or that pertains only to the discipline of Judaic Studies. While having particular relevance for the Jewish people, it is at the same time a subject with universal, human significance. As Primo Levi states in The Drowned and The Saved, “It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
Other genocides. Whatever complex historical conditions made it possible to dehumanize, ostracize and kill millions of people can occur again, in a similar manner, against the Jews or other groups. The only way to address these atrocities is by acknowledging them, learning about them and doing our best to avoid them now and in the future. This begins, on an existential level, with saying “No” to even the first step of dehumanizing groups of people in order to discriminate against and harm them.
Preserving collective memories of the Holocaust. The books and films I have reviewed in Holocaust Memory offer us vivid reminders about where the process of dehumanization can lead and how it impacts individuals, not statistics. It’s unfortunately quite easy to depersonalize suffering when considering it on such a massive, almost unfathomable scale. The way most of the victims perished–often shot en masse or gassed after being subjected to extraordinary cruelty and abuse–was in itself, quite deliberately, the most abject form of dehumanization. Each narrative and film I have reviewed in this book pays homage to, and helps us remember, the importance and the value of each of the millions of human beings who suffered and perished during the Holocaust.
Imagine de Paola Minekov
