Product Description: Natan Sznaider nos ofrece en este su ultimo libro un detallado registro de la memoria judia antes y despues del Holocausto apuntando especialmente sobre la constante tension entre particularismo y universalismo que caracterizo a sus principales intelectuales comenzando por Hannah Arendt...read more

Product Description: Natan Sznaider offers a highly original account of Jewish memory and politics before and after the Holocaust. It seeks to recover an aspect of Jewish identity that has been almost completely lost today - namely, that throughout much of their history Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, they lived in a constant tension between particularism and universalism...read more

In The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider examine the distinctive forms that collective memory take in the age of globalisation. Levy and Sznaider examine the way the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel, and the US during the last fifty years, and show how this singular event has been detached from its precise context and instead used as a way of focusing abstract questions of good and evil, and how this use has given the Holocaust a resonance across the global stage, as responses to other injustices, like ethnic cleansing in Bosnia have depended on a collective understanding of the Holocaust to justify such actions.

The argument of this book is that it is in the nature of modernity to foster compassion. Most critics tend to think of modernity as corrosive of moral sentiments. They see clearly the way in which modernity breaks down older social bonds, but they are much less attentive to the ways in which it also builds new ones. This book offers an historically informed corrective to this common view. Sznaider demonstrates that compassion, understood as the organized campaign to lessen the suffering of strangers, is a distinctly modern form of morality. It played an important role in the rise of modern society, and it continues to play an important role today. And when waves of compassion break out into demands for political action, these demands need to be understood rather than criticized as excuses or irrelevancies. Incorporating and critiquing the work of Arendt, Foucault, and other social theorists, this book is both erudite and historically rich―sure to be both controversial and influential among those who debate modernity, morality, and social justice.