Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss (review)

Abstract

vanquished in 1945. As Crim puts it, “It is not [The Omen’s] Damien, or even Satan, who should frighten us; it is our complacency, our powerlessness, and ultimately our complicity in making the Antichrist’s victory inevitable” (125). In his conclusion, Crim crystallizes his case for a rigorous examination of works of the imagination as keys both to our collective postHolocaust consciousness and to our understanding of the past. Holocaust imagery forms a cultural “reservoir,” Crim writes, an “archive comprising indelible and recyclable images” (196). What happens to those images once they are released and recombined is unpredictable and can be profoundly disturbing. Not all science fiction and horror films that take the Holocaust as their theme are worthy of discussion in quite the same way or qualify equally “as a form of ethical confrontation” (6). Crim is very candid about that fact. But he also underscores Dan Stone’s key point that while historians talk about the Holocaust as the event that puts the lie to the idea of “Western civilization,” we often write about it in “aloof, methodical” terms that “may inadvertently normalize genocide” (2). After all, knowing “the facts” does not necessarily produce empathy or enlightenment. But sometimes, perhaps, fiction can.