| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Carolyn J. Dean. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2004. Pp. ix, 203. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95.

Carolyn J. Dean's thesis is at once direct and oblique. She is explicitly agnostic on "whether or not there has been a real failure of empathy" in the aftermath of the Holocaust (p. 5); obliquely, however, she claims an alleged loss of empathy, basing that on four post-Holocaust narratives that, she finds, demonstrate a moral "numbness." Methodologically, this conjunction raises persistent problems. In addition to what seems the importance of determining whether "Holocaust-fatigue" has in fact tainted current moral thinking—apparently Dean's own view, despite her disclaimer—the four narratives to which she restricts her account leave little space for the counter-evidence of an intensified post-Holocaust moral empathy. This omission—for example, of the remarkable historiography of the Holocaust or the post-Holocaust development of international legislation against genocide—limits the force of her analysis. (It also precludes a likely explanation for the moral "numbness" alleged: that it may be the price paid for the widespread empathetic attention that the Holocaust has received.)

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