Confronting genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (original) (raw)

2010, Choice Reviews Online

The continuously growing literature on genocide-both in the form of anthologies and monographs-is often comparative in scope, looking at various genocides from different historical and geographical locations and through particular frames of reference. For example, in 2009, when the book under review was published, two other works appeared: Cathie Carmichael's Genocide Before the Holocaust, which argues that genocidal conflicts before the Holocaust (especially the Balkan wars) were the result of collapsing empires (Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman) and the rise of nationalism, and Allan Cooper's The Geography of Genocide, which applies a feminist analysis of masculine ideologies that characterize perpetrators of different genocides. With respect to anthologies, the 2004 volume Century of Genocides (edited by Samuel Totten, Williams S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny) and the 2002 volume In God's Name: Genocide and Religion and the Twentieth Century (edited by Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack) can be mentioned as points of comparison to Steven Jacob's Confronting Genocide. Whereas Totten, Parsons, and Charny pay hardly any attention to religion because they look at genocide from the perspectives of the historical, social, and political sciences, Bartov and Mack address religion but remain primarily focused on the Holocaust. Jacob's new anthology aims at a middle path: it wants to engage the "all-too-prominent role of religion in [the] horror" of genocidal atrocities, beyond the more usual Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust (p. x). Hence, the eighteen chapters (all except two were written especially for this volume) cover genocides against Rwandans, Armenians, Bangladeshis, Native Americans, residents of the former Yugoslavia, and Jews during the Holocaust.