Widely regarded as one of the most profound critics of our time, Rene Girard has pursued a powerful line of inquiry across the fields of the humanities and the social sciences. His theories, which the French press has termed "l'hypothese girardienne," have sparked interdisciplinary, even international, controversy. In The Scapegoat, Girard applies his approach to "texts of persecution," documents that recount phenomena of collective violence from the standpoint of the persecutor-documents such as the medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut's Judgement of the King of Navarre, which blames the Jews for the Black Death and describes their mass murder. Girard compares…
I could not write about scapegoating without writing about perhaps history’s ultimate example of scapegoating: the Nazi persecution of the Jews. I focused on this volume because I wanted to understand how Hitler turned the German population against a small minority in their country. I appreciated how Friedländer takes his time and carefully traces the ideological and cultural steps that go into creating a scapegoat. Volume II covers the horrendous result: the Years of Extermination, 1939-1945.
A magisterial history of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the regime's policies towards them in the years prior to World War II and the Holocaust. Written by arguably the world's leading scholar on the subject.
Himself a survivor, Friedlander has been a leading figure in Holocaust studies for decades and this book represents a definitive summing up of his research and that of hundreds of other historians.
NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION is perhaps the richest examination of the subject yet written, and, crucially, one that never loses sight of the experiences of individuals in…
It has been called the greatest American novel. Its lessons about slavery and racism still resonate today because of the two great characters, Huck and Jim.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective). It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The book is noted…
From Amazon: Who gets blamed when societies feel under threat and why? In Persecuted, journalism scholar Jack Lule examines the deep roots of scapegoating as essential to human society. Scapegoating helps explain how and why people unite, shaping the ways groups define belonging, exclusion, and collective identity.
Drawing on the work of Kenneth Burke and René Girard, Lule argues that scapegoating is not a social malfunction but a core mechanism through which communities are formed. Nations rely on scapegoating to draw boundaries between "us" and "them." What makes the modern era especially volatile, he contends, is the role of media—from early messengers and newspapers to contemporary social platforms—in manufacturing crises, amplifying accusations, identifying targets, and accelerating cycles of blame.
