ABSTRACT
"World Jewry has a special responsibility". This hectoring trumpet call blared forth from the midst of a New York Times op-ed piece by Flora Lewis entitled "Save Lives in Bosnia". For Lewis, the lesson of the Holocaust is that Jews now have a responsibility to behave particularly well because their ancestors suffered so much persecution. Lucy Dawidowicz observed that the lesson most frequently taught by high-school Holocaust curricula centered on the theme of moral choice between obedience to authority and following the dictates of one's own conscience. Nevertheless, the lessons that Primo Levi drew from the Holocaust fit the evidence so skilfully assembled by Christopher R. Browning better than Browning's own conclusions do. Browning's book is very much a product of what in Holocaust studies might be called the school of Raul Hilberg. In reading Hilberg's new book, the authors get a sense, once again, of the Holocaust as historical actuality, moral quagmire, and theological stumbling block.
