Public awareness of the Holocaust has grown strikingly in recent years, resulting in a widespread appreciation of the enormity of that single historical event as well as its implications for our understanding of the most horrendous possibilities in human behavior. But this beneficial growth in Holocaust awareness has been paralleled by a growth in efforts that have seriously damaged Holocaust memory. Repeated attempts have been made to exploit and even hijack the Holocaust’s moral power in the service of a variety of political, diplomatic, personal, and even military agendas. The scope and reality of the Holocaust has been denied or twisted by groups seeking to promote competing victimizations or to attack Israel and the Jewish people. Presentations of the Holocaust in the arts, in movies, on television, and in other arenas, ranging from the political to the academic, have often served to distort, trivialize and in other ways undermine the integrity and fidelity of Holocaust memory. Well-meant efforts at universalizing the Holocaust—playing down its specificity in order to teach general lessons about human rights and man’s inhumanity to man—have emptied the Holocaust of the power and truth that reside precisely in its focus on the genocidal elimination of a particular group. Even some sincere attempts to memorialize the Holocaust have damaged not only that memory but also the physical remains of the dead themselves. In this lecture, Professor Reich, a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will discuss these trends and examine their implications for the future of Holocaust memory and for the task of memorializing any human catastrophe.
Walter Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics, and Human Behavior and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University; a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center; and a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Reich is also a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University; a professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences; and a contributing editor of The Wilson Quarterly. Dr. Reich has written and lectured widely on the Holocaust and genocide, human rights, national memory, terrorism, Israel and the Middle East, Russia and the Soviet Union, Jewish affairs, psychiatry, medical ethics, and national and international affairs. He is the author of A Stranger in My House: Jews and Arabs in the West Bank and the editor of Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind. His articles and essays have appeared in scholarly and scientific publications as well as in such newspapers and magazines as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Harper's, Commentary, The Atlantic, and The New Republic.
This event is part of the 2005-2006 Bradley Lecture Series. The charge for subscribing to the series is $35 ($25 for students) and $5 for individual lectures.
