Lessons and Legacies IX ─ Memory, History, and Responsibility: Reassessments of the Holocaust, Implications for the Future

Memory, History, and Responsibility contains the highlights from the ninth Lessons and Legacies Conference, held at the height of the genocide in Darfur. The contributors reexamine how the darkness of the Holocaust continues to shadow human existence more than sixty years after World War II left the Third Reich in ruins.

The collection opens with a prologue by Saul Friedlander, whose keynote address at the conference was a call for interdisciplinary approaches to Holocaust research. The essays that follow draw on the latest methodologies, integrating diverse fields, including history and literature, philosophy and religion, and film and gender studies. Together, leading scholars and the next generation of Holocaust scholars engage the difficult reality---as noted by editors Petropoulos, Rapaport, and Roth in their introduction---that the legacies of the Holocaust, have not been sufficient to mitigate, much less prevent or eliminate, mass murder.

Jonathan Fetropoulos is John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College.
He is Henry Snyder Professor of Sociology at Pomona College.
He is Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Center for Human Rights Leadership) at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught from 1966 through 2006.