"Cataclysms "is a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop.
Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis, "Cataclysms" chronicles twentieth century history as a "universal civil war" between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West.
Diner's interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and "ethnic cleansing," situating the Holocaust at the core of the century's predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.

In this essay, German-Israeli historian Dan Diner argues that the European consciousness uses America as a metaphor for the dark sides of modernism. He finds an especially aggressive variant of this negative judgement in Germany, the roots of which he traces back to the Romantic period.

The myriad debates on restitution and memory, which have been going on in Europe for decades, indicate that World War II never ended. It is still very much with us, paradoxically re-invoked by the events of 1989/90 and the expansion of Europe to the east in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and economic globalization. The growing privatization and reprivatization in Eastern Europe revive pre-war memories that lay buried under the blanket of collectivization and nationalization of property after 1945. World War II did not only result in the death and destruction on a large scale but also in an a far-reaching revolution of existing property relations. This volume offers an assessment of the problematic of restitution and its close interconnection with the discourses of memory that have recently emerged.

Von Europa über Amerika bis zum Vorderen Orient, Nordafrika und anderen außereuropäischen jüdischen Siedlungsräumen erschließt die Enzyklopädie in sechs Bänden und einem Registerband die neuere Geschichte der Juden von 1750 bis 1950. Rund 800 Stichwörter präsentieren den Stand der internationalen Forschung und entwerfen ein vielschichtiges Porträt jüdischer Lebenswelten - illustriert durch viele Karten und Abbildungen. Übergreifende Informationen zu zentralen Themen vermitteln ca. 40 Schlüsselartikel zu Begriffen wie Autonomie, Exil, Emanzipation, Literatur, Liturgie, Musik oder Wissenschaft des Judentums. Zuverlässige Orientierung bei der Arbeit mit dem Nachschlagewerk bieten ausführliche Personen-, Orts- und Sachregister im siebten Band. Die Enzyklopädie stellt Wissen in einen Gesamtkontext und bietet Wissenschaftlern und Interessierten neue Einblicke in die jüdische Geschichte und Kultur. Ein herausragender Beitrag zum Verständnis des Judentums und der Moderne.

"Lost in the Sacred" poses questions about the Muslim world that no other book by a Western writer has dared to ask. Focusing on the Arab Middle East, Dan Diner asks what caused the Muslim world to lag behind so dramatically. Is Western dominance to blame? Or is the problem even with Islam itself? These questions, however unsettling, need to be asked--and they are being posed all across the Muslim world today. This book provides cautious answers that are no less disturbing than the questions.

Diner argues that Islam's cultural stasis is not due to the Muslim faith itself, but to the nature of the sacred it is infused with and that penetrates every aspect of life--spiritual and material. He reveals how the sacred in Islam suspends the acceleration of social time, hinders change, and circumvents secularization and modernity. Diner takes readers on an unforgettable intellectual journey, from today's global conflicts back into the distant past. He describes the Muslim encounter with the emerging West in early modernity, the challenges Western imperial expansion posed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the time-suspending impact of Arabic as a sacred language, the prevention of print, the classical age of Islam with its dazzling heights of learning and culture--and much more. Diner traces an entangled perspective, combining the spiritual with the social, and the cultural with the political. Throughout, he draws our attention to the urgent need for secularization and modernization in Islam.

The Muslim world is in crisis. "Lost in the Sacred" explains why.

The major essays of Dan Diner, who is widely read and quoted in Germany and Israel, are finally collected in an English edition. They reflect the author's belief that the Holocaust transcends traditional patterns of historical understanding and requires an epistemologically distinct approach. One can no longer assume that actors as well as historians are operating in the same conceptual universe, sharing the same criteria of rational discourse. This is particularly true of victims and perpetrators, whose memories shape the distortions of historical narrative in ways often diametrically opposed.
The essays are divided into three groups. The first group talks about anti-Semitism in the context of the 1930s and the ideologies that drove the Nazi regime. The second group concentrates on the almost unbelievably different perceptions of the "Final Solution," with particularly illuminating discussions of the Judenrat, or Jewish council. The third group considers the Holocaust as the subject of narrative and historical memory. Diner focuses above all on perspectives: the very notions of rationality and irrationality are seen to be changeable, depending on who is applying them. And because neither rational nor irrational motives can be universally assigned to participants in the Holocaust, Diner proposes, from the perspective of the victims, the idea of the counterrational. His work is directed toward developing a theory of Holocaust historiography and offers, clearly and coherently, the highest level of reflection on these problems.

The memory of mass crimes constitutes the parameters of universal ethics. The memory of the Holocaust was the reason for this. The annihilation of European Jews was of paradigmatic importance. In the meantime, other memories of mass crimes are also calling for public memory and thus recognition. Such a pluralism of memories holds a not inconsiderable potential for conflict, especially if the different misfortunes are attributed to one and the same historical event - the Second World War. Then opposing constellations and competitions of memory appear - not only between the political cultures of western and eastern Europe, but also and especially between European and colonial memories. Dan Diner's essay, now available in a bilingual edition, takes up the problem of conflicting memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust in terms of history and memory. By reaffirming the meaning of "Auschwitz" as a breach of civilization, the conditions of historical judgment and recognition are reflected in the memory against this very background. Dramatic differences, even contradictions, between Western and non-European cultures - especially that of Islam - are heralded here.