Between Auschwitz And Jerusalem: Jewish Collective Identity In Crisis (Parkes-Wiener Series On Jewish Studies)

“”Between Auschwitz and Jerusalem analyses the dialectic, and sometimes ambivalent, relationship between the two main components of the collective Jewish identity – the Holocaust and the State of Israel. The symoblic points for the beginning and the end of the research are the Eichmann trial, which took place in Israel in 1957, and the founding of the Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993. In 1961, the question was Has Israel the right to judge Eichmann in the name of Jewish people throughout the world?; and in 1993, the problem was whether the Memorial represented a unique tragedy of a universal moral phenomenon?”” Between these two points in time, Professor Gorny examines the intellectual and spiritual complexities in Public Thought, examining the topic of collective identity of the Jewish people throughout the world, focusing particularly on Jewish identity in the USA and Israel, and also touching on the Anglo-Jewish community. Taking a multi-dimensional approach, the author compares the thoughts and attitudes of various Jewish groups, and seeks to understand the ties that bind them through the prism of theological, academic, political and ideological discourse concerning the Holocaust and the State of Israel. This book raises an important issue: can the Jews, scattered around the free world, be a nation without their unique bipolar ethos? Can the Jewish people survive the trend towards universalism, which even now is undermining their unique ethnic status?