Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Volume XXI

Volume XXI of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry marks sixty years since the end of the Second World War and forty years since the Second Vatican Council's efforts to revamp Church relations with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History offers a collection of new scholarship on the nature of the Jewish-Catholic encounter between 1945 and 2005, with an emphasis on how this relationship has emerged from the shadow of the...
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Volume XXI of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry marks sixty years since the end of the Second World War and forty years since the Second Vatican Council's efforts to revamp Church relations with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History offers a collection of new scholarship on the nature of the Jewish-Catholic encounter between 1945 and 2005, with an emphasis on how this relationship has emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust. Essays touch upon the immediate postwar years in France, Italy, and America, where Cold War tensions, Vatican reticence on the Church's wartime record, and the recent memory of the Holocaust together formed a complex backdrop to demands for doctrinal and institutional change within the Church. The discussion continues with an exploration of the impact of democratization on post-Communist Poland, as reflected in the renewed discourse about the nexus between Catholicism, Judaism, and Polish identity. Other contributors investigate recent developments in the United States, where Catholic and Jewish political preferences, once thought to be converging, appear to have drifted further apart, despite the rise of Catholic-Jewish intermarriage and the prevalence of both populations in the urban Northeast. The volume also includes a monograph-length survey of Holocaust literature that definitively maps the field and contextualizes its central controversies. Throughout all of the essays, contributors address the way that the memory of the Holocaust has defined the tenor of Jewish-Catholic relations, from theological writings to popular interactions, in the last half-century.