THE HOLOCAUST
“The Poles, the Jews, and the Holocaust: Reflections on an AME Trip to Auschwitz,” in Journal of Moral Education, vol. 33, #2 (June, 2004): 131-148
Two trips to Auschwitz (in 1989 and 2003) provide a context for reflection on fundamental issues in civic and moral education. Custodians of the Auschwitz historical site are currently aware of its responsibility to educate about the genocide against the Jews, as a morally distinct element in its presentation of Nazi crimes at Auschwitz. Prior to the fall of communism (in 1989), the site’s message was dominated by a misleading civic narrative about Polish victimization by and resistance to Nazism. I discuss the attempts of many Polish intellectuals in the past twenty-five years to engage in an honest and difficult civic project of facing up to their history, as it is entwined with anti-Semitism, with the centuries-long presence of Jews in Poland, and with their current absence. An interaction with a tour guide in the 2003 trip, who took me to be criticizing Poles for their failure to help Jews during the Holocaust, prompts further reflections on the difficulties of grasping the moral enormity of genocide, on the dangers of stereotyping, on the conditions under which it is appropriate to proffer and to withhold well-founded moral judgments, and on the moral importance of (appropriate) emotions when moral action is extraordinarily risky or dangerous.
“The Holocaust in American Life as a Moral Text,” in Eve Garrard and Geoffrey Scarre (eds.), Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003): 257-274
"The Holocaust and Moral Education," Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy (School of Public Affairs, Univ. of Maryland), Spring/summer 1995 - reprinted in Verna Gehring (ed.), Philosophical Dimensions of Public Policy (Policy Studies Review Annual, volume 13) (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002)
"Schindler's Motives", Psychoculture: Review of Psychology and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, #2, spring, 1997
"Community and Virtue," in Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live? (Oxford University Press, 1996)
"Altruism and the Moral Value of Rescue: Resisting Persecution, Racism, and Genocide," in L. Baron, L. Blum, D. Krebs, P. Oliner, S. Oliner, and M.Z. Smolenska, Embracing the Other: Philosophical, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives on Altruism, New York: NYU Press, 1992