Professor John Roth, the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, is focusing his summer research on a number of Holocaust studies projects before launching into a busy schedule this fall.
He recently returned from teaching in the 11th annual Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization held at Northwestern University, and will travel in September to the Cape Town Holocaust Centre for a series of lectures in South Africa. The fall semester will be highlighted by Lessons and Legacies, a four-day conference on the Holocaust, which will take place mainly on the CMC campus, Nov. 2-5. This conference is sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation and CMC's Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, with assistance from the Department of Sociology and the Office of the President at Pomona College.
While spending his summer in Washington state, Roth also is at work on three book projects. One of these, Anguished Hope, features discussion among Jewish and Christian Holocaust scholars as they reflect on the protracted Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He also is editing a multi-volume review of the history of Christian writing, which includes novels and poetry as well as biblical studies and theology. Scheduled for publication in 2009, the third book, The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, is being edited by Roth and the distinguished Northwestern University historian Peter Hayes.
"Oxford University Press has commissioned us to obtain about 45 essays from leading scholars, who will identify and assess where the field of Holocaust studies stands currently and where it needs to go in the future," Roth says.
Hayes organized the recent Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern, which was directed at college and university professors and graduate students in the early stages of teaching or preparing to teach about the Holocaust and its implications. In addition to Roth, the faculty also included scholars Christopher Browning, the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author of Ordinary Men, which examines a unit of men in the German Order Police who murdered Jews during the Holocaust, and Sara Horowitz, a professor of humanities at York University and author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction.
Roth's involvement in the Summer Institute focused on the ethical and philosophical implications of the Holocaust.
Roth says he is energized by the continuing relevance of Holocaust studies and by the challenges that this work presents. "One of the challenges is to relate that history to current events and to humanity's future," he says. "In multiple ways, our work at the Center is focused in those directions."
Recent examples, he says, include last May's academic travel program to Berlin. Organized primarily by Jonathan Petropoulos, who is the Center's associate director as well as the director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, the Center provided an important academic experience for 13 CMC students, who studied the history of the Holocaust as well as contemporary human rights issues during a project that was also supported by CMC's Keck Center for Strategic Studies.
During the upcoming Cape Town project, Roth will give lectures and assist with workshops for Holocaust educators in South Africa. The seeds for this project were sown in the summer of 2004 at Yad Vashem Israel's national Holocaust memorial when Roth met Richard Freedman, who directs the Cape Town Centre.
Freedman invited Roth to lecture and says he is particularly interested in the professor's work on the ethics of forgiveness, a topic that is relevant to the reconciliation efforts that have taken place in South Africa in recent years.
"There is a significant Jewish population in South Africa as well as numerous Holocaust survivors who have settled there," Roth says. "The Cape Town Centre has long been a leader in advancing Holocaust education and research in South Africa."