Historicism, the Holocaust, and Zionism: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish History and Thought

This volume offers a challenging, critical exploration of several of the most elemental and repercussive topics in modern Jewish history and thought. A sequel to Katz’s National Jewish Book Award-winning study, Post-holocaust dialogues , the work assesses the contemporary Jewish situation by examining three fundamental issues: the problem of historicism, the historical, theological and phenomenological investigation of the Holocaust, and the contemporary meaning of Zionism. Specifically, Katz focuses on such matters as the role of racial antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, the oft-suggested comparison between the Gulag and Auschwitz, the role of technoloy in the Holocaust, and the internal dialectic and subtleties of Zionist ideology, among many other subjects. The volume identifies the main issues in the contemporary Jewish intellectual universe and outlines the contours of a larger, more synthetic understanding of contemporary Jewish existence.