After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system?
To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust. Drawing on her great erudition and painstaking archival research, she explores how views changed during and after the war--and in following decades when justice and vengeance came to seem potentially compatible, especially if revenge could be rendered an aesthetic or imaginative phenomenon.
Mentioned in the episode
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
Seekers for vengeance and also justice: Eli Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal
The killing of Ernst Vom Rath (pretext for the Night of Broken Glass)
Aeschylus, The Oresteia (5th century B.C.)
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, no episode of RTB would be complete without it...)
Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)
Tony Judt Postwar (2005)
Recallable Books:
Zalman Gradovsky, The Last Consolation Vanished
Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities
Filip Müller Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers
Kleist, Michael Kohlhass (1810)
Read a transcript here.
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