Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (2017)
In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust’s status as humanity’s most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a “surfeit of Jewish memory” is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. Dean’s latest book summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of “deserving” and “undeserving” victims on those who have suffered.