In this moving account of the life, work, and ethics of four
Jewish women intellectuals in the world of the Holocaust, Rachel
Feldhay Brenner explores the ways in which these women sought to
maintain their faith in humanity while aware of intensifying
destruction. She argues that through their written responses of
autobiographical self-assertion Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne
Frank, and Etty Hillesum resisted the Nazi terror in ways that defy
its horrifying dehumanization.
Personal identity crises engendered the intellectual-spiritual
acts of autobiographical self-searching for each of these women.
About to become a nun in 1933, Edith Stein embarked on her
autobiography as a daughter of a Jewish family. Fleeing France and
deportation in 1942, Simone Weil examined her inner struggle with
faith and the Church in her "Spiritual Autobiography." Hiding for
more than two years in the attic, Anne Frank poignantly confided in
her diary about her efforts to become a better person. Having
volunteered as a social worker in Westerbork, Etty Hillesum
searched her soul for love in the reality of terror. In each case,
autobiographical writing becomes an act of defiance that asserts
humanity in a dehumanized/dehumanizing world.
By focusing on the four women's accomplishments as
intellectuals, writers, and thinkers, Brenner's account liberates
them from other posthumous treatments that depict them as symbols
of altruism, sanctity, and victimization. Her approach also
elucidates the particular predicament of Western Jewish
intellectuals who trusted the ideals of the Enlightenment and
believed in human fellowship. While suffering the terror of
physical annihilation decreed by the Final Solution, these Jews had
to contend with their exclusion from the world that they considered
theirs. On yet another level, this study of four extraordinary life
stories contributes to a deeper understanding of the postwar
development of ethical, theological, and feminist thought. In
showing concern about a world that had ceased to care for them,
Stein, Weil, Frank, and Hillesum demonstrated that the meaning of
human existence consisted in the responsibility for the other, in
the protection of the suffering God, in the primary value of
relatedness through empathy. Arguing that their ethical tenets
anticipated the thought of such postwar thinkers as Levinas,
Fackenheim, Tillich, Arendt, and Nodding, Brenner proposes that the
breakup of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment in the
Holocaust engendered the postwar exploration of humanist potential
in self-givenness to the other.
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