"An essential moral, philosophical, and practical reckoning with the laws we put in place to address the problem of sexual abuse and harassment. In this pathbreaking book, Martha C. Nussbaum brings necessary clarity to the societal challenges of sexual abuse and harassment, illuminating the pride and greed that lead men to objectify and dominate others, and the thirst for revenge that can distort the aims of justice. In the context of a clear and bracing legal history of accountability for sexual assault and the legal recognition of sexual harassment, Nussbaum confronts three "citadels of pride"-the judiciary, the arts, and sports. Exposing prideful privilege in the intellectual world, unpunished narcissism in the arts, and toxic masculinity and corruption in American sports, she discusses egregious cases of male entitlement leading to sexual abuse and exploitation. She examines both successful and unsuccessful efforts to address these situations, and proposes solutions; most controversially, that Division I football be disbanded. Laying out a hopeful way forward, Nussbaum offers a path to accountability without malice, and generosity without capitulation"--

Every week on the public radio show On the Media , the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day’s events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls—and what so many of us can acknowledge having—“trouble with reality.” Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was—there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point . The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not. And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it. Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity.

"A probing look at one of the most incendiary subjects of our time--the relationship between the United States and Israel. There has been more than half a century of raging conflict between Jews and Arabs--a violent, costly struggle that has had catastrophic repercussions in a critical region of the world. In Genesis, John B. Judis argues that, while Israelis and Palestinians must shoulder much of the blame, the United States has been the principal power outside the region since the end of World War II and as such must account for its repeated failed efforts to resolve this enduring strife. The fatal flaw in American policy, Judis shows, can be traced back to the Truman years. What happened between 1945 and 1949 sealed the fate of the Middle East for the remainder of the century. As a result, understanding that period holds the key to explaining almost everything that follows--right down to George W. Bush's unsuccessful and ill-conceived effort to win peace through holding elections among the Palestinians, and Barack Obama's failed attempt to bring both parties to the negotiating table. A provocative narrative history animated by a strong analytical and moral perspective, and peopled by colorful and outsized personalities, Genesis offers a fresh look at these critical postwar years, arguing that if we can understand how this stalemate originated, we will be better positioned to help end it"--

'Neighbors' - Jan Gross's Stunning account of the brutal mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors - was met with international critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States. It has also been, from the moment of its publication, the occasion of intense controversy and painful reckoning. This book captures some of the most important voices in the ensuing debate, including those of residents of Jedwabne itself as well as those of journalists, intellectuals, politicians, Catholic clergy, and historians both within and well beyond Poland's borders. Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic introduce the debate, focusing particularly on how 'Neighbors' rubbed against difficult old and new issues of Polish social memory and national identity. The editors then present a variety of Polish voices grappling with the role of the massacre and of Polish Jewish relations in Polish history. They include samples of the various strategies used by Polish Intellectuals and political elites as they have attempted to deal with their country's dark past, to overcome the legacy of the Holocaust, and to respond to Gross's book.

From 1955 to 1987, the year of his suicide, Primo Levi wrote a series of articles that appeared in newspapers and journals. This volume contains a selection of these writings which shows at once the range of his interests and the skill, thoughtfulness and sensitivity he brought to his subjects, whether writing from the point of view of an eye-witness of the holocaust, of an author of novels and short stories, or of a chemist. The first part of this collection brings together Levi's articles about the holocaust and the concentration camp. In With Anne Frank history spoke, Levi rails intelligently and eloquently against what he saw as the yearly assault on the veracity and moral weight of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. The second part contains a representative selection of Levi's essays on his own status as a writer and his profession of Chemist, and the many prefaces he wrote to others' histories and novels.

Not all racial incidents are racist incidents, Lawrence Blum says. "We need a more varied and nuanced moral vocabulary for talking about the arena of race. We should not be faced with a choice of 'racism' or nothing." Use of the word "racism" is pervasive: An article about the NAACP's criticism of television networks for casting too few "minority" actors in lead roles asks, "Is television a racist institution?" A white girl in Virginia says it is racist for her African-American teacher to wear African attire. Blum argues that a growing tendency to castigate as "racism" everything that goes wrong in the racial domain reduces the term's power to evoke moral outrage. In "I'm Not a Racist, But . . .", Blum develops a historically grounded account of racism as the deeply morally-charged notion it has become. He addresses the question whether people of color can be racist, defines types of racism, and identifies debased and inappropriate usages of the term. Though racial insensitivity, racial anxiety, racial ignorance and racial injustice are, in his view, not "racism," they are racial ills that should elicit moral concern. Blum argues that "race" itself, even when not serving distinct racial malfeasance, is a morally destructive idea, implying moral distance and unequal worth. History and genetic science reveal both the avoidability and the falsity of the idea of race. Blum argues that we can give up the idea of race, but must recognize that racial groups' historical and social experience has been shaped by having been treated as if they were races.

All investigators funded by the National Institutes of Health are now required to receive training about the ethics of clinical research. Based on a course taught by the editors at NIH, Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research is the first book designed to help investigators meet this new requirement. The book begins with the history of human subjects research and guidelines instituted since World War II. It then covers various stages and components of the clinical trial process: designing the trial, recruiting participants, ensuring informed consent, studying special populations, and conducting international research. Concluding chapters address conflicts of interest, scientific misconduct, and challenges to the IRB system. The appendix provides sample informed consent forms. This book will be used in undergraduate courses on research ethics and in schools of medicine and public health by students who are or will be carrying out clinical research. Professionals in need of such training and bioethicists also will be interested.

"This book collects some two dozen pieces from bestselling author Adam Hochschild, written over the past 25 years. All have been published before, most in the New York Review of Books but also in the New Yorker, Harper's, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. They are a mixture of essays about books, authors, one film, and the writing of history and on-the-ground journalism based on reporting from India, Africa, and elsewhere"--Provided by publisher.

Zusammenfassung: "Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." Primo Levi's words disclose a chilling truth: assigning blame to hideous political leaders, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, is necessary but not sufficient to explain how the Holocaust could have happened. These leaders, in fact, relied on many thousands of ordinary men and women who made the Nazi machine work on a daily basis -- members of the killing squads, guards accompanying the trains to the extermination camps, civilian employees of the SS, the drivers of gas trucks, and the personnel of death factories such as Auschwitz. Why did these ordinary people collaborate and willingly become mass murderers? In Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers, Guenter Lewy tries to answer one of history's most disturbing questions. Lewy draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources, including letters and diaries of soldiers who served in Russia, the recollections of Jewish survivors, archival documents, and most importantly, the trial records of hundreds of Nazi functionaries. The result is a ghastly, extraordinarily detailed portrait of the Holocaust perpetrators, their mindset, and the motivations for their actions. Combining a rigorous historical analysis with psychological insight, the book explores the dynamics of participation in large-scale atrocities, offering a thought-provoking and timely reflection on individual responsibility for collective crimes. Lewy concludes that the perpetrators acted out of a variety of motives--a sense of duty, obedience to authority, thirst for career, and a blind faith in anti-Semitic ideology, among others. A witness to the 1938 Kristallnacht himself and the son of a concentration camp survivor, Lewy has searched for the reasons of the Holocaust out of far more than theoretical interest: it is a passionate attempt to illuminate a dismal chapter of his life -- and of human history -- that cannot be forgotten. -- Provided by publisher

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Germany's changing historical memory of World War II and its aftermath, as reflected in the official and public remembrance of the German war dead, exposes an unresolved tension between a discourse of guilt and a discourse of national suffering and victimization. In Germany, under the auspices of the Allied occupation, remembrance honored the victims of the Nazis and those who had fought against the regime. After the partition of Germany, a new culture emerged, memorializing the civilian dead and fallen German soldiers. Despite the fierce ideological rivalry between East and West Germany, however, certain similarities existed. The political leaderships who shaped these cultures ceased to confront their citizens with the question of guilt and instead depicted the German people as victims. In Guilt, Suffering, and Memory —whose Israeli edition was awarded the Jacob Bahat Prize for best original book—Gilad Margalit discusses the official remembrance ceremonies for the German war dead, the memorials erected to commemorate them, the public discussions of these disparate cultures, and their treatment in postwar German literature and film.

"The virtue of prudence suffuses the writings of Edmund Burke and Abraham Lincoln, yet the demands of statecraft compelled both to take daring positions against long odds: Burke against the seemingly inexorable march of the French Revolution, Lincoln against disunion at a moment when the Northern situation appeared untenable. Placing their statesmanship and writings in relief helps to illuminate prudence in its full dimensions: inflected with caution but not confined to it, bound to circumstance, and finding expression in the particular but grounded in the absolute. This comparative study of two thinkers and statesmen who described themselves as "Old Whigs" argues for a recovery of prudence as the political virtue par excellence by viewing it through the eyes, words and deeds of two of its foremost exemplars. Both statesmen deeply informed by the life of the mind, Burke and Lincoln illustrate prudence in its universal but also contrasting dimensions. Burke emphasized the primacy of feeling, Lincoln the axioms of logic. Burke saw British prudence emanating from the mists of ancient history; for Lincoln, America's soul lay in a discrete moment of founding in 1776. Yet both were moved by a respect for the mysterious and customary. Each maintained the virtue of compromise while adhering to immovable commitments. At a time when American politics, and American conservatism in particular, teems with a desire for boldness but also an innate resistance to schemes of social or political transformation, this book answers with a fuller and richer account of prudence as it emerges in the thought and action of two of the great statesmen and thinkers of modern times"--

In this first comprehensive history in English of the Jews of Hebron, Jerold S. Auerbach explores one of the oldest and most vilified Jewish communities in the world. Spanning three thousand years, from the biblical narrative of Abraham's purchase of a burial cave for Sarah to the violent present, it offers a controversial analysis of a community located at the crossroads of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over national boundaries and the internal Israeli struggle over the meaning of Jewish statehood.Hebron Jews sharply challenges conventional Zionist historiography and current media understa

For more than a half-century, Israel has been forced to defend its existence against international political disapproval, racist calumny, and violence visited upon its citizens by terrorists of many stripes. While nations have always been made to defend their moral, political, economic, or social actions, Israel has the unique plight of having to defend its very right to exist. Covering Israel’s struggle for existence from the British occupation and the UN’s partition of Palestine, to the dashed hopes of the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, Yaacov Lozowick trains an enlightening, forthright eye on Israel’s strengths and failures. A lifelong liberal and peace activist, he explores Israel’s national and regional political, social, and moral obligations as well as its right to secure its borders and repel attacks both philosophical and military. Combining rich historical perspective and passionate conviction, Right to Exist sets forth the agenda of a people and a nation, and elegantly articulates Israel’s entitlement to a peaceful coexistence with its surrounding Arab neighbors and a future of security and pride.

Preeminent philosopher, Naomi Zack, brings us an indispensable work in the ethics of race through an inquiry into the history of moral philosophy. Beginning with Plato and a philosophical tradition that has largely ignored race, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy enters into a web of ideas, ethics, and morals that untangle our evolving ideas of racial equality straight into the twenty-first century. The dichotomy between ethics and mores has long aided the separation of what is right with ideas of equality. Zack tackles the co-existence of slavery with the classic moral systems and continues to show how our society has evolved and our mores with it. An ethics of race my not exist yet, but this book gives us twelve discerning requirements to establish it.

In this media driven age in which private has become public we have seen the Stonewall riots, which launched the gay rights movement, Hair on Broadway with a nude cast, art from Mapplethorpe to Madonna, AIDS and safe sex campaigns, drag gone mainstream, and adolescents engaging in sexual activity at increasingly younger ages. At the same time, society continually tries to eradicate open expressions of sexuality and harass those who ignore the mandated modes of permissible sexual expression. Taking on those who would limit sexual freedom, New Sexual Agendas challenges the notion that there are fixed sexual behaviors for men and women. This engaging collection draws on a number of disciplines including women's studies, literature, gender studies, cultural studies, history, politics, and education, sociology, and psychology. Including well known thinkers such as Jeffrey Weeks, Leonore Tiefer, and Mary McIntosh, New Sexual Agendas explores our sexual legacy, from turn-of-the-century sexologists to the inequalities of sexually invested social structures, from the rise of the Right and its portent for sexual freedoms to the myth of women as the subordinate sex. Along the way it explores the limits of trust in intimate relationships, the escalating AIDS epidemic, and the dangers of prescribed sex roles for both heterosexual and homosexual relationships.

Esteemed American journalist David Rieff argues against our passion for the past. He looks at how memory serves nationalistic history every ANZAC Day and annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli, and how memory of past horrors inflame deep-seated ethnic hatreds, violence and wars.

In 1931, Simone Weil read an article by Louis Roubaud in the Petit Parisien that exposed the Yen Bay massacre in Indochina. That article opened Weil's eyes, and from then until her death in exile in 1943, she cared most deeply about the French colonial situation. Weil refused to accept the contradiction between the image of France as champion of the rights of man and the reality of France's exploitation and oppression of the peoples in its territories. Weil wrote thirteen articles or letters about the situation, writings originally published in French journals or in French collections of her work. J. P. Little's fluid and clear translations finally introduce to English-speaking scholars and students this important element of Weil's political consciousness.

Torture has lately become front page news, featured in popular movies and TV shows, and a topic of intense public debate. It grips our imagination, in part because torturing someone seems to be an unthinkable breach of humanity—theirs and ours. And yet, when confronted with horrendous events in war, or the prospect of catastrophic damage to one’s own country, many come to wonder whether we can really afford to abstain entirely from torture. Before trying to tackle this dilemma, though, we need to see torture as a multifaceted problem with a long history and numerous ethical and legal aspects. Confronting Torture offers a multidisciplinary investigation of this wrenching topic. Editors Scott A. Anderson and Martha C. Nussbaum bring together a diversity of scholars to grapple with many of torture’s complexities, including: How should we understand the impetus to use torture? Why does torture stand out as a particularly heinous means of war-fighting? Are there any sound justifications for the use of torture? How does torture affect the societies that employ it? And how can we develop ethical or political bulwarks to prevent its use? The essays here resist the temptation to oversimplify torture, drawing together work from scholars in psychology, history, sociology, law, and philosophy, deepening and broadening our grasp of the subject. Now, more than ever, torture is something we must think about; this important book offers a diversity of timely, constructive responses on this resurgent and controversial subject.

What are the ethical responsibilities of the historian in an age of mass murder and hyperreality? Can one be postmodern and still write history? For whom should history be written? Edith Wyschogrod animates such questions through the passionate figure of the "heterological historian." Realizing the philosophical impossibility of ever recovering "what really happened," this historian nevertheless acknowledges a moral imperative to speak for those who have been rendered voiceless, to give countenance to those who have become faceless, and hope to the desolate. Wyschogrod also weighs the impact of modern archival methods, such as photographs, film, and the Internet, which bring with them new constraints on the writing of history and which mandate a new vision of community. Drawing on the works of continental philosophers, historiographers, cognitive scientists, and filmmakers, Wyschogrod creates a powerful new framework for the understanding of history and the ethical duties of the historian.