Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust

by Carolyn J. Dean

In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit of Jewish memory" is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds.

She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of "Never Again": as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality because of who they are.The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s.

Dean argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis. Dean's latest book summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of "deserving" and "undeserving" victims on those who have suffered.

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Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2010

Reviews

[Piker7977 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aversion and Erasure is a highly stimulating, yet esoteric, historiographical analysis of French and American Holocaust studies that focus on victimhood. Carolyn Dean takes an intellectual approach to this topic which is a appropriate means of highlighting controversies from associations with victims and the pitfalls of definition, suspicion, and relation. This study does a fine job of tracing the origins of this school of thought in French and American history while at times losing the reader in arguments that would only be coherent to a Holocaust historian who minored in philosophy.

All in all this is worthwhile as the book, in my case, provides a benchmark of historiographical understanding that I hope to posses in the future.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking, yet more a critique of other scholars' work than a presentation of an original argument. Good summary of key issues in Holocaust Studies, including cross-cultural comparison of French and American conceptions of "victim," and how the concept of a "surfeit of memory" can mask a strain of modern antisemitism.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading Dean's book for sometime but it is one of those academic texts that spends too much time citing the work of others. Reading like a dissertation turned into a monograph it is to specific and dense offering little real analysis of its subject.