Revising night : Elie Wiesel and the hazards of holocaust theology
2006; Wiley; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1939-3881
Autores Tópico(s)Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
Resumory to imagine the ideological gap that exists between those who struggle to find meaning in the Holocaust and those who deny its reality. Try to see the size of it: an A-Bomb crater, a city-shaped hole in the earth. On the one side we find survivors, clergy, scholars, and the simply concerned, engaged, whether they realize it or not, in a theology of destruction, taking measure of a darkness so vast it nearly looks like God. On the other we have the likes of David Irving, Michael Hoffman, Robert Faurisson—the kind of historians-on-the-side who assert that Zyklon B was merely a pesticide, that the number of Jews murdered was actually far less than is contended, that anyway they died of typhus, and that, really, nothing much happened at all. “These are morally sick individuals,” Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel has said of revisionists. “While I am able to fight against injustice, I have no idea how to go about fighting against ugliness.” For their part, Faurrisson and company refer to Wiesel—a man the Washington Post once referred to as “a symbol, a banner, a beacon, perhaps the survivor of the Holocaust”—as the “Prominent False Witness,” and, when good old-fashioned name-calling will do, “Elie Weasel.” When it comes to the Holocaust, theologians and revisionists shout at each other from across the expanse, openly despising what the other represents. Yet what is theology if not a kind of revisionism? In the landscape of human T REVISING NIGHT Elie Wiesel and the Hazards of Holocaust Theology
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