Publication date 1995, 2000 (reprinted) Pages 288 Dewey Decimal 940.53/18/072 21 Originally published 1996 Page count 288 OCLC 45024496 | Media type Print (Paperback) ISBN 0-8133-3686-4 LC Class D804.348 .I8 2001 Publisher Westview Press | |
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Similar Alan S Rosenbaum books, Genocide books | ||
Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide is a 1995 book edited by Alan S Rosenbaum. In the book, scholars compare the Holocaust to other well-known instances of genocide and mass death. The book asks, are there any historical parallels to the Jewish Holocaust? Have Armenians, Gypsies, American Indians, or others undergone a comparable genocide?
Contents
As Alan Rosenbaum stated in regards to the book, "Any attempt by any group to keep a monopoly on language is doomed to failure...Because anybody can use any language they want. And the term Holocaust has such power -- as the paradigm case of genocide -- that any group wanting to make a superlative case for its own experience would naturally want to borrow it."
A second edition was printed in 2000 and a third edition was released in 2009.
Politics of Editing the Book
Ward Churchill writes:
An excellent topical example of what is at issue is described in a recent article by Christopher Shea in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the controversy attending preparation of a Westview Press collection, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives in Comparative Genocide, a book which was supposed to be a free and open exchange between those holding to exclusivist principles and scholars expressing comparativist views. As Shea observes, the problem devolves upon the fact that volume editor Alan S. Rosenbaum provided advance copies of all submissions to one contributor -- and only one -- Cornell University professor Steven T. Katz, author of the massive three-volume Holocaust in Historical Context and a leading advocate of exclusivism in its pure form.Upon reviewing what some comparativists had to say with respect to his work, Katz whipped off a laundry list of changes and deletions he wanted to see made to their critiques. Rosenbaum in turn fronted these "suggestions" as if they were his own. Only when the editor accidentally faxed a memo intended for Katz to one of the more trenchant critics, historian David Stannard, was the subterfuge revealed (the missive outlined various contributors' compliance with Katz's secret manipulations). After a series of meetings with the publisher and its lawyers, most of the essays were returned to their original form -- a matter Katz, apparently waxing indignant at having been caught calls "a disgraceful business" -- and the book was sent to the press.
Reception
Jewish Book World called the book "a thought-provoking inquiry into the Holocaust."