307 - Ending Auschwitz: The Future of Jewish and Christian Life

Ending Auschwitz: The Future of Jewish and Christian Life
By Marc H. Ellis
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994. 162 pp. $16.99.

"Ending Auschwitz" has three meanings for Marc Ellis, each provocative and disturbing. The narrowest of these represents a challenge to Judaism and Israel: Ending Auschwitz here means to stop using the memory of the Holocaust to justify Israel's continuing oppression of the Palestinian people. In advocating this, Ellis elaborates a theme central to his earlier works, especially Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power.

For Christianity, ending Auschwitz would mean not only cleansing itself from the anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism that provided historical precedent and foundation for the Holocaust, but-even more difficult-abandoning the broader triumphalism that assumes that the gospel should be imposed upon other religions and cultures. Ellis uses the date 1492 as an effective symbol for this militant European Christian expansionism.

The third meaning constitutes an even more radical challenge to Christianity and Judaism: to acknowledge the necessary fallibility of one's tradition, the abuse of power that inevitably accompanies any claims of finished orthodoxy and unquestionable norms. "Were not Auschwitz and 1492 attempts to sort out and destroy the other, to impose a uniformity on the other, a uniformity that is not even present in ourselves?" Ellis appeals, instead, for "a new discipline, a new crossing of boundaries," by which Jews and Christians may find the courage (which he believes Jesus exemplified) to meet as equals the many others who surround them.

William H. Becker
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA.