Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University, author of Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France : In Aversion and Erasure , Carolyn J. Dean offers stunning insight into the enormous influence the concepts of victimhood and suffering bring to bear on current debates in history, identity, and human rights, as well as in political controversies. She allows the richness and complexity of issues including the iconic status of the Holocaust and the category of Jewish victimhood to unfold over the course of the book. Peter E. Gordon, Harvard College ProfessorDepartment of HistoryHarvard University, author of Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos : All too often, and with the cool assurance of intellectual sophistication, it is said that post-Holocaust culture has entered upon an era of traumatic excess--an apotheosis of a victim whose moral stature has grown so exorbitant that no representation can ever be adequate and no reparation can suffice. Suffering, we are told, has been fetishized, then instrumentalized, and finally displaced by its simulacrum. But even if such complaints merit consideration, the question is rarely posed as to just why we are so quick to doubt the reality of the victim's experience: What covert investments underlie the very critique of suffering? And what are the paradigms that shape our expectations of 'proper' or 'proportionate' suffering such that when confronted with actual testimony we suppress our empathy and avert our gaze? These are only a few of the questions that animate Carolyn J. Dean's provocative and critically agile reflections in this new book on the place of the victim in post-Holocaust theory and historiography.

Aversion and Erasure simply abounds with originality and insight. This is a thoughtful scholarly work--clearly written, accessible and stimulating for a wide audience. Dean's insightful study of the ongoing historical refashioning of Western cultural attitudes to victims is not about questions of Holocaust representation and memory, but about ideological hypocrisy, moral blind spots, and the limitations of historical and theoretical methods in confronting the affective dimension of institutionalized violence, and its impact on victims' experience and on how victims choose to testify to their suffering. More important than Dean's judgment concerning the success or failure of any given historian she discusses is her belief that the present state of writing on victims of the Holocaust. has for the most part neglected important analytic questions concerning how our affective relations to victims are mobilized and institutionalized in the first place. The underlying ethical impulse that drives the work of Dean and others not to accept normalization is one that commands respect and attention, even if we have yet to discover how to meet its representational requirements. The pervasive discourse on suffering and identity in French and American debates about Jewish victims in the Holocaust is the starting point for Carolyn J. Dean's thoughtful, provocative, and original study of the victim in post-Holocaust theory and historiography.