Holocaust, History 

The Jewish people, argues Rabbi Friedlander, have to move out of the shadow of the Holocaust. But what the world has not understood is that the Jewish emphasis upon the Holocaust is not a plea for sympathy; rather, as George Steiner has said, "We are our own remembrancers." What Jews want the world to remember is the evil that caused those deaths and which is still endemic in the world. Now there is a new generation, living in the time after the Holocaust, entering the twenty-first century. Jews must move beyond the trauma of a suppressed past which endures within the dark corners of the psyche. But, argues Dr. Friedlander, we must listen to the messengers who come out of the darkness and are their own message even when they are silent. In this book he enters into a dialogue with the great Jewish thinkers and writers of our time - with Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim, Elie Wiesel - and tries in his exploration to move toward a concept of humanity which includes evil as a component of our makeup, which sees the glory of human existence in winning partial victories against darkness, and which celebrates the hope that even a journey moving into darkness has dimensions of hope within itself.