Eric D. Weitz

Samuel Moyn and the new history of human rights

Human rights is suddenly a booming field for historians. Political theorists, international relations specialists and legal scholars for years have explored the intellectual and political concept of human rights with acuity. But not historians. Legions of histories cover rights struggles in particular settings. Intellectual histories abound that locate the origins of rights in Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence or 17th-century Britain or, perhaps more fantastically, in Mesopotamia and the Hammurabi Code. But a history of human rights in a broad sense, one that places the near-present in historical context, that explores the political and social as well as the intellectual history of rights, all with a global dimension and in critical fashion – that has been sorely lacking, although we are on the cusp of a small wave of interesting works. Certainly, the phrase human rights now pops up in countless dissertations and as the title of articles in numerous issues of historical journals. In North America, every undergraduate and graduate curriculum, it seems, has introduced, just in the last few years, a rich pallet of courses on human rights. Into this slowly boiling cauldron comes Samuel Moyn with the first critical history of human rights. The book is a significant achievement. The very small collection of histories that we have – literally a handful, though that is fast changing – has been linear and triumphalist and, very often, focused nearly exclusively on the United States, as Moyn rightly argues. Instructive they have been, and many historians and human rights scholars in general have benefited greatly from the works of Paul Gorden Lauren, Micheline Ishay, Mary Ann Glendon, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Lynn Hunt and Jean Quataert, to name some of the most prominent examples. But their histories have been written as if a straight line runs from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Or the founding moment is seen to be 1941 and the Atlantic Charter or 1945 and the establishment of the United Nations, both expressions of the high tide of

Weimar Germany and its Histories

Years later, after the catastrophes of the Third Reich and World War II, Arnold Zweig remembered how he had returned home from another disaster, World War I. “With what hopes had we come back from the war!” he wrote. Zweig recalled not just the catastrophe of total war, but also the elan of revolution. Like a demon, he threw himself into politics, then into his writing. “I have big works, wild works, great well-formed, monumental works in my head!,” he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl in April 1919. “I want to write! Everything that I have done up until now is just a preamble.” And it was not to be “normal” writing. The times were of galloping stallions and wide-open furrows, and talent was everywhere. War and revolution had drawn people out of the confining security of bourgeois life. “The times have once again placed adventure in the center of daily life, making possible once more the great novel and the great story.”

The Realms of Identities: A Comment on Class and Politics in Milan

At the very end of Giuseppe di Lampedusas The Leopard the priests come and remove the relics preserved and protected by the Prince of Salinas aged daughters, virtually the last survivors of the family. Nothing is left of the fabled world of the Sicilian aristocrats. Even the material and symbolic artifacts of their eminence--the religious relics they guarded and the palace over which they presided--have turned into rubble or taken on the musty air of decay. The world of the Prince of Salina, a world of inherited wealth

Genocide and the rigor of philosophy: a comment on Paul Boghossian

Paul Boghossian has written a most thoughtful and provocative article about the concept of genocide. Virtually every scholar of the phenomenon knows that the definition of genocide that has come down to us from the UN Convention is deeply flawed; few have taken it apart with the razor sharpness of Boghossian. On every count, from the famous ‘as such’ clause to the problematic definition of victim groups, Boghossian points out the unclarities and confusions. Little is left of the term when he is finished with it. There is much to admire here in the philosopher’s rigor. Boghossian clearly demonstrates that the term genocide is applicable to events that preceded the invention of the word. His commentary on Bruno Latour, tuberculosis, and the dinosaur is brilliant and provides great comic relief in a field that, for very understandable reasons, is not much given to laughter. At the same time, Boghossian pushes us to think hard about the concept we bandy about with such assuredness, keeping out doubts hidden or shrugging our shoulders with the conviction that every definition is a construct and no term ever perfectly captures an event. Boghossian is not satisfied with the proverbial shrug of the shoulders, the rejoinder that the definition as it stands is ‘pretty good,’ so let’s just leave things alone. As much as I admire Boghossian’s challenge, his unrelenting drive for clarity, I am still left with the question: what then? After the term genocide has literally been deconstructed (though Boghossian might not like this characterization), how do we begin to capture the enormity of the violation that, since Raphael Lemkin, we have called genocide? More than in most scholarly endeavors, the political dimensions here are even more profound than the research problems. Boghossian’s most important contribution is his delineation of the three ‘constitutive purposes’ that comprise the definition of genocide. In his elaboration, genocide is a particular phenomenon that is morally wrong and distinctly Journal of Genocide Research (2010), 12(1–2) March–June 2010, 101–104

In Memoriam: Stephen Feinstein 1943-2008

“Art From the Concentration Camps: Gallows Humor and Satirical Wit” is a perfect expression of Stephen Feinstein’s multiple talents. It demonstrates his extensive knowledge of the Holocaust and his abiding concern with issues of representation. Anyone who knew Steve would not at all be surprised that he devoted part of his scholarly interests to humor and satire, because he was a master comedian and satirist, who could break up the most somber gatherings with his quick wit. Not rarely the comments moved into an inappropriate realm. Only Steve could tell Holocaust jokes and get away with it, because everyone understood that underneath it all he had a deeply humanitarian strain, and this also comes across in the article: a determination to relate the history of the Holocaust, to ensure that survivors’ voices are heard, and, for those who did not survive but left traces of their lives in writings or art works, to keep that legacy in public view through his own publications and the many art exhibits he curated. As devoted as Steve was to the history and memory of the Holocaust, his commitments did not stop with the tragedy of Jews. It is noteworthy that “Art From the Concentration Camps” begins with a story from the Rwandan genocide. Steve’s understanding of the Holocaust made him highly attentive to other genocides around the globe, and he demonstrated the same commitment to those histories, the same determination to give voice to survivors or to those victims who left some traces, that he did to the Holocaust. Steve Feinstein died very suddenly and unexpectedly on March 4, 2008. True to form, he was giving a lecture at the Jewish Film Festival, held annually in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul) of Minnesota, when he suffered an aortic rupture. The weeks since have been very difficult for his family, his wife Susan, son Jeremy, daughter Rebecca and her husband Avi and their two children, and for all of his colleagues, in Minnesota and beyond, who worked with him and counted him as a friend. Steve brought an outsize energy level to everything he undertook, whether his legendary train set that took up a good part of the basement in the Feinsteins’ Minneapolis home, his somewhat manic pace of lectures and museum consultations, or his exuberant teaching. Journal of Jewish Identities July 2008, 1(2)

In the Age of Genocide

In the late 1950s, a survivor recounted his experience of deportation during World War II: At 2:00 AM in the morning… homes were suddenly broken into by… troops armed with automatics. They dragged sleeping women, children, and old people from their beds and, shoving automatics in their ribs, ordered them to be out of their homes within ten minutes … [T]rucks picked them up and drove them to railroad stations. They were loaded into cattle cars … The agents and armed troops swept through these homes, taking these people’s valuables … all the while calling [them] ‘swine’… [and] ‘scum.’ These people left their homes naked and hungry and traveled that way for a month; in the locked, stifling freight cars, people began to die from hunger and illness. The… troops would seize the corpses and throw them out of the freight car windows.