Publisher's Synopsis
The author claims in this book that close readings of stories, from Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Guenther Grass's The Tin Drum through Bernard Malamud The Fixer and Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows' The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, uniquely situates us to understand the clash of religious values that led to genocide in World War II Europe (including Great Britain). Most of the stories respond directly to this enormity, but some involve writers such as Shakespeare and Herman Melville, who, avant la lettre, pointed to seismic conflicts in law and religion. "Law and Literature" methods uniquely permit the author to justify this assertion. Just as his work of history, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, grew out of a deep interest in Albert Camus (who also plays an important role in this manuscript), and just as it proceeded to analyze as texts various authoritative statements that contradicted each other and lied about Jews, but that found their way into French law books and theological discourse during Vichy, so throughout this book series, once closely examined, open the door to fathoming the violence caused by religious differences. Inspired in particular by James Carroll's Constantine's Sword and Harold Bloom's Jesus and Yahweh, the book provokes its reader to seek answers to millennia of atrocities disguised as "Judeo-Christian" affinity and at the same time to re-engage with a series of superb stories. The author is already seen as a pioneer of the modern "Law and Literature movement" and is associated with connecting stories to fraught questions about history. The book continues to impart actual data from the wartime period, innovated in Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (NYU), but it is a work of law, literary criticism, and comparative religion. Weisberg has a PhD French and comparative literature from Cornell, taught those subjects on the graduate faculty of the University of Chicago, practiced and taught law at Cardozo Law School in NYC and in many venues around the world. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his work "on behalf of victims of the Vichy regime". His previous books have been translated and reviewed widely. "Richard Weisberg's standing as a sage of the Law and Literature Movement is augmented in this masterful book." Anthony Julius, Deputy Chairman Mishcon de Reya LLP, Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London. "In this masterful book, Richard Weisberg brings his extraordinary learning to bear on a group of stories, written both before and after the Holocaust, to explore some of its deepest, and most hidden causes. The Holocaust, Weisberg argues, was fueled by Christianity-infused interpretations of religious and legal texts, which have been deployed for centuries against Jewish traditions, intellectual histories, customs, Jewish Law, and legalist ideals. Weisberg builds his case through literary and legal analyses of (among others) Malamud's The Fixer, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Melville's Billy Budd Sailor, Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, The Old Testament, Nietzsche's meditations on morals, and holocaust-era legal texts from Germany, Britain and Vichy France. We are ill-served by attempts to paper over and distort this history with bromides about "Judeo-Christian" values and shared aspirations. Weisberg's elegant and straightforward scholarship takes us on a path toward a truer accounting." Professor Robin West, Georgetown Law. "Richard Weisberg has written an incisive critique of the idea that there is a coherent "Judeo-Christian" tradition. Instead, he emphasizes both the chasms that separate the two religions and goes on to suggest that classical Christian mischaracterization of Judaism contributed to the zeitgeist that made the Holocaust possible. One need not agree with every aspect of his argument to find it illuminating and very much worth extensive discussion. That is especially the case with regard to his truly brilliant analyses of The Merchant of Venice, which is compelling and transformative with regard to the oft-debated assertion, which Weisberg denies, that the play is "anti-Semitic." Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School, author of Written in Stone: Public Monuments and Changing Societies.
