BiblioVault - Books about Lifton, Robert Jay

American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares

Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965

Kirsten Fermaglich

University Press of New England, 2007

To a great extent, Holocaust consciousness in the contemporary United States has become intertwined with American Jewish identity and with support for right-wing Israeli politics -- but this was not always the case. In this illuminating study, Kirsten Fermaglich demonstrates that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many American Jewish writers and academics viewed the Nazi extermination of European Jewry as a subject of universal interest, with important lessons to be learned for the liberal reform of American politics. Fermaglich analyzes the lives and writings of Stanley M. Elkins, Betty Friedan, Stanley Milgram, and Robert Jay Lifton, four social scientific thinkers whose work was shaped by a liberal perspective. For them, the Holocaust served as a critical frame of reference for a particular issue: Elkins on slavery's legacy, Friedan on the oppressions of domesticity, Milgram on the willingness to obey, and Lifton on war's survivors. In each case, these thinkers were deeply influenced by their Jewish backgrounds, whether by early encounters with antisemitism or by the profound sense that only fate and an ocean had spared them death in Hitler's Europe. Thus, each chose imagery from the concentration camps, albeit utterly devoid of a particular Jewish association, to illuminate themes that advanced liberal politics, including civil rights, the nuclear test ban, feminism, and Vietnam veterans' rights. Rather than being offended by these authors' comparisons between American institutions and Nazi concentration camps, American audiences of all ethnic and religious backgrounds during the late 1950s and early 1960s generally cheered these authors' Nazi imagery and adopted it as part of their own political ideology. Fermaglich demonstrates that liberalism in the United States in the 1960s was more substantially shaped by the Holocaust than we have previously recognized.

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In a Dark Time

Robert Jay Lifton

Harvard University Press, 1984

In a Dark Time is an anthology for the nuclear age, created by two professional psychologists who have ordered their material so that the successive selections reflect and comment on one another, compelling the reader to think about the insanity of war. This book draws on thoughts and writings from more than two millennia: poets from Sappho to Robert Lowell, dreamers from Saint John the Divine to Martin Luther King, Jr., statesmen from Seneca to Winston Churchill, soldiers, churchmen, writers, leaders. Along with them are mingled the voices of people who have faced appalling danger in their own lifetimes--an American schoolchild, a Hiroshima grocer, a plague survivor, a Turkish dissident. Human beings appear at their best and at their worst: as savage warriors, as helpless victims, as dupes of "Nukespeak" and warlike propaganda, and finally as individuals with the courage to say no.

In a Dark Time will shock, warn, and ultimately inspire those many people who share the perception that humankind now stands on the brink of self-annihilation but who believe, with Theodore Roethke, that "in a dark time, the eye begins to see."

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The Protean Self

Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation

Robert Jay Lifton

University of Chicago Press, 1999

"We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of the past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the 'protean self,' after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms."—from The Protean Self

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The Web of Violence

From Interpersonal to Global

Edited by Jennifer Turpin and Lester Kurtz

University of Illinois Press, 1996

Violence is a topic of concern everywhere--in the media, in churches, in the halls of governments. In every land and in every culture violence is considered by most to be taboo, a last resort. Yet under certain conditions, from the level of the family to the level of nations, violence is used as a mechanism of social control. Various rationalizations thus emerge to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence.

The Web of Violence explores the interrelationship among personal, collective, national, and global levels of violence. This unique collection brings together a number of internationally known contributors to address the genesis and manifestations of violence in the search for a remedy for this confounding social problem.

As the global community becomes more intimate, we must better understand the nature of violence. The Web of Violence supports this aim by examining the dangerous human phenomenon from many perspectives, at different levels, and using multiple methodologies.

Contributors: Robert Jay Lifton, Christopher G. Ellison, John P. Bartkowski, Yuan-Horng Chu, Philip Smith, Robert Elias, Birgit Brock-Utne, Riane Eisler, Johan Galtung

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