Is the Holocaust Unique?

Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide

Author	Alan S. Rosenbaum
Publisher	Westview Press
Publication date	1995, 2000 (reprinted)
Media type	Print (paperback)
Pages	288
ISBN	0-8133-3686-4
Dewey Decimal	940.53/18/072 21
LC Class	D804.348 .I8 2001

Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide is a 1995 book about the Holocaust uniqueness debate, edited by Alan Rosenbaum. In the book, scholars compare the Holocaust to other well-known instances of genocide and mass death. The book asks whether there are any historical parallels to the Jewish Holocaust and whether Armenians, Romani people, Native Americans, or others have undergone a comparable genocide.

As Alan Rosenbaum stated in regards to the book:

Any attempt by any group to keep a monopoly on language is doomed to failure... Because anybody can use any language they want. And the term Holocaust has such power—as the paradigm case of genocide—that any group wanting to make a superlative case for its own experience would naturally want to borrow it. ^[1]

A second edition was printed in 2000 and a third edition was released in 2009. ^[2]

Contents

• The ethics of uniqueness by John K. Roth
• Religion and the uniqueness of the Holocaust by Richard L. Rubenstein
• From the Holocaust: some legal and moral implications by Richard J. Goldstone
• The uniqueness of the Holocaust: the historical dimension by Steven T. Katz
• Responses to the Porrajmos: the Romani Holocaust by Ian Hancock
• The Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust: a comparative analysis by Seymour Drescher
• The Armenian genocide as precursor and prototype of twentieth-century genocide by Robert F. Melson
• The comparative aspects of the Armenian and Jewish cases of genocide: a sociohistorical perspective by Vahakn N. Dadrian
• Stalinist terror and the question of genocide: the great famine by Barbara B. Green
• The Holocaust and the Japanese atrocities by Kinue Tokudome
• Applying the lessons of the Holocaust by Shimon Samuels
• The rise and fall of metaphor: German historians and the uniqueness of the Holocaust by Wulf Kansteiner
• Uniqueness as denial: the politics of genocide scholarship by David E. Stannard

See also

• Historic recurrence
• Holocaust trivialization
• Historikerstreit

Notes

1. Freedman, Samuel G. (December 13, 2008). "Laying Claim to Sorrow Beyond Words". The New York Times . Retrieved 11 July 2018.
2. "Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide". tesco.com. Retrieved 2008-05-05. Official sponsor of Westview Press book sales.

External links

• Is the Holocaust Unique? at Google Books (3rd edition; 2018)
• Jacobs, Steven L. (June 1998). "Holocaust and Genocide Studies: The Future Is Now". Center News. 3 (2). University of Nevada, Reno. Archived from the original on 2007-09-13.