Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture

By David G. Roskies

Against the Apocalypse explores how Jewish communities have historically responded to catastrophe, particularly through literature, memory, and cultural traditions. The book examines the resilience and creativity of Jewish writers and thinkers in the face of destruction, from ancient times to the Holocaust. Roskies delves into themes of mourning, survival, and the refusal to surrender, offering a scholarly yet deeply moving analysis of Jewish responses to historical trauma.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081560615X
• ISBN13: 9780815606154
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Jewish disaster and its interpretation

This is from the back jacket of the book, "The Holocaust in its enormity , has been viewed as an apocalyptic event- standing outside history, without analogy or precedent. Challenging this view David Roskies places the Holocaust , and the literary responses of victims and survivors, in the context of generations of Jewish response to persecutions , pogroms and communal catastrophes." This is the second last paragraph on the final page of the book. "Catastrophe, in fact , has always been a part of the process of rethinking the past. Like the rabbis of old who worked with any and all available materials- cultic, prophetic, apocalyptic,gnostic,mystic, platonic- so long as they could bridge the abyss left in the wake of the Great Catastrophe , the writers and artists of the nineteeth and twentieth centuries mixed symbol systems,juxtaposed sacred and profane, borrowed ferociously in order to face their ever- greater losses. Just as the Temple destructions were consciously fashioned into archetypes by the exiles in Baylonia and by the Tananaim and Amoraim, so the new destruction, the Holocaust, was lifted from the straight line of allusions back to the old archetypes and inaugurated into its own archetypal nature." pp..310 I understand that the interpretation of Disaster has been a fundamental element in Jewish life down the centuries. But I still think it is necessary to maintain that there was something wholly singular in the Shoah i.e. the attempt at total extinction of the Jewish people and attempt to totally deny our humanity.