Scholarship

Ethics During and After the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
John K. Roth
Questions shape the Holocaust's legacy. "What happened to ethics?" looms large among them. The Holocaust may have renewed awareness about the importance of ethical standards and conduct, but Auschwitz continues to cast its shadow over basic beliefs concerning right and wrong, human rights, and the hope that human beings will learn from the past. We human beings are responsible for evil twice over: we produce it; we must deal with it. First and foremost, the Holocaust shows that nothing good should be taken for granted.

Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Jonathan Petropoulos
The link between Hitler's Third Reich and European royalty has gone largely unexplored due to the secrecy surrounding royal families. In Royals and the Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos uses unprecedented access to royal archives to tell the fascinating story of the Princes of Hesse and the important role they played in the Nazi regime. Permitted access to Hessen family private papers and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, Petropoulos follows the story of the House of Hesse through to its tragic denouement--the princes' betrayal and persecution by an increasingly paranoid Hitler and prosecution and denazification by the Allies. Royals and the Reich is a startling and unique portrait of the vanished world of prewar aristocrats and a royal family caught in one of the most tumultuous periods in history.

Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Berghahn Books, 2005)
Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, eds.
Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi’s reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture.

Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
John K. Roth, ed.
Genocide is evil or nothing could be. It raises a host of questions about humanity, rights, justice, and reality, which are key areas of concern for philosophy. Strangely, however, philosophers have tended to ignore genocide. Even more problematic, philosophy and philosophers bear more responsibility for genocide than they have usually admitted. In Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, an international group of twenty-five contemporary philosophers work to correct those deficiencies by showing how philosophy can and should respond to genocide, particularly in ways that defend human rights.