Oxford University Press's Blog, page 852

In memoriam: Pete Seeger

By Allan M. Winkler

Pete Seeger, the father of American folk music, died on Monday evening at the age of 94. Wiry and spry, he still played his long-necked banjo with the same exuberance he’d shown for decades until the very end. Pilloried in the past, he was part of the celebratory concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Musicologist Alan Lomax once observed that modern American folk music was born the night Pete met Woody Guthrie at a benefit concert for migrant farm workers in 1940. Guthrie took Seeger out West, riding freight trains, thumbing rides, playing in bars for nickels and dimes. The homespun Oklahoman taught the Harvard-educated Seeger how to keep the music simple and accessible to an audience, a lesson he learned well

Singing first with the Almanac Singers, then the Weavers, and finally on his own, Seeger found himself in the forefront of every important social movement of the past 75 years. A tireless supporter of union organization in the 1930s, he joined the Communist Party, performing his songs with banjo and guitar accompaniment to promote worker solidarity.

Pete Seeger, 1955. Photograph by Fred Palumbo. Image courtesy of The Library of Congress.

He sang out against American involvement in the Second World War in the early 1940s, only to change his tune after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He even enlisted in the Army and served overseas in the South Pacific.

In the 1950s, he found himself under attack in the Red Scare for his radical past. He narrowly escaped a long jail term for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, when a contempt conviction for invoking his constitutional right to free speech was thrown out on a technicality.

In the 1960s, he became the minstrel of the civil rights movement, focusing its energy with songs that inspired protestors and challenged the nation’s patterns of racial discrimination. Indeed, he rewrote the song “We Shall Overcome,” and helped it become the anthem of the movement.

Toward the end of the decade, he turned his talents against the war in Vietnam, and, like many of its critics, drew fire from those who attacked his dissent as treason.

Finally, in the 1970s, he led the drive to clean up the Hudson River, which flowed almost literally through his backyard in New York State, and lent his voice to the growing environmental movement.

Seeger’s wonderful songs live on. Groups getting together to sing still know the words to “If I Had a Hammer,” or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” or “Turn, Turn, Turn,” along with hundreds, if not thousands, of others.

Seeger dedicated his life to getting people to sing together. In concerts, he enlisted the audience’s help. He revived old songs and taught them to people who had never heard them before. “I begin to feel like old Grandpa,” he once remarked. “But I’m proudest of all that I’ve been able to be a kind of a link in a chain for a lot of people to learn some good songs.” He taught them to all of us, and became the patron of such figures as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary, Tom Paxton, Arlo Guthrie, and dozens of others. In 1994, at the age of 75, he had the satisfaction of being awarded the National Medal of Arts, America’s highest official cultural honor. In 2006, Bruce Springsteen’s tribute – the Seeger Sessions , featuring songs that Pete sang – made him known anew to audiences around the world.

I got to know Pete about 10 years ago, when I was writing a short biography: “To Everything There Is a Season”: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song. I interviewed him half a dozen times, usually bringing my guitar along, for he was always willing to play together. Over time, as I got to know him and his family better, I brought my wife, and once my sister, along, and he was always welcoming. Just before the book was published in 2009, I asked if I could bring a couple of colleagues to his home in Beacon, New York on a Sunday afternoon in January to play music together. And so, with our wives with us, we sat in his living room with a fire blazing, looking over the Hudson River, two banjos, two acoustic guitars, for about two and a half hours. It doesn’t get any better than that. After the book appeared, I taught a senior seminar on Folk Music at Miami University, and on a beautiful fall day, I brought a dozen of my students to Beacon to meet Pete, talk with him, sing with him, and appreciate all that he gave us.

I miss him already.

Allan M. Winkler, is University Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University of Ohio, and author most recently of “To Everything There Is a Season”: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song.

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Dr. Mark Lazenby reflects on Jahi McMath’s surgery gone wrong

By Mark Lazenby

After waging a public battle to keep their 13-year-old brain-dead daughter, Jahi McMath, on the ventilator, the girl’s family still face the sadness of a simple surgery gone wrong — a routine tonsillectomy to cure sleep apnea. Of course, they signed the consent form that allowed the surgery to proceed. But surely they, as with most of us who have had so-called routine, minor surgeries, were told that the risks of anything going wrong were minimal. Probably they were given some odds, such as less than one percent of people who have this surgery die — odds so miniscule they are hard to comprehend. But Jahi and her family pulled the short straw. Jahi was that one. In that surgery-gone-wrong, Jahi stopped breathing. The doctors put her on a mechanical ventilator.

After this surgery-gone-wrong, Jahi’s brain showed no electrical activity. On this basis, three neurologists declared her dead. With this declaration, the ethics board of the hospital decided it morally acceptable to disconnect the ventilator that keeps her lungs moving and bodily tissues oxygenated. Jahi’s parents objected. They are “Christians with firm religious beliefs that as long as the heart is beating, Jahi is alive,” their lawyer states in an article in the 3 January 2014 edition of the New York Times. Few of us have experienced this sort of tragedy. It is a tragedy with so many facets — medical, ethical, and legal — that it seems hard to get hold of a central issue. Some people, such as Jahi’s family, do not turn to the medical profession to understand the fates of their loved ones. They do not trust bioethicists who defend the rightness of medical experts to declare their loved ones dead. And they do not see the validity of a legal argument stating that they signed a document that informed them that, though improbable, death was possible. Rather, they turn to their religious beliefs to navigate the treacherous waters surrounding decisions about death, especially unexpected death.

Yet surprisingly, in the broad discussions that have ensued, few experts have brought up the issue of religious beliefs, except to give explanation to what seems to them crazy behavior. A faith-based long-term care facility that accepts patients on ventilators offered to take Jahi, hoping with the family for her recovery. In a 14 January 2014 article in the Los Angeles Times, a bioethicist describes the operators of this long-term care facility as, “from a medical point of view,” displaying “disordered thinking…. There is a word for this,” the bioethicist says. “Crazy.”

When religious beliefs are viewed as the source of craziness, we compound the tragedy by forcing families to wage public battle to do what they think they must do as believers. After all, the stakes for these families are higher than mere medical facts, bioethical principles, or the law. The stakes are God’s eternal judgment of whether they were faithful in matters of life and death.

What might have happened if, in caring for Jahi’s family after the surgery-gone-wrong, the focus had been on helping them to be faithful believers? What if, instead of focusing on medical facts, bioethical principles, and legal precedents, we “went with” Jahi’s family’s beliefs — even if we didn’t hold these beliefs ourselves? Perhaps we could have recited with them their own belief that God raises the dead to new life. What if we had shared with them the words of the Apostle Paul? “There are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another…. So will it be with the resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor. 15:40-42 RSV). Perhaps then they might have been more willing to turn Jahi’s now lifeless body over to God, and not to the mechanical ventilator that the very profession who declared her dead trusted in themselves in the operating room when they hooked her up to it in the first place. More important, the healthcare professionals involved might have realized that they do not have power over life and death.

If healthcare providers, bioethicists, and jurists could have joined with clergy to engage the faith of Jahi’s family and encouraged them to trust God to resurrect her now shattered earthly body into a glorious heavenly one, perhaps a public battle would not have ensued, and perhaps we wouldn’t have felt the need to have called people who came to their aid crazy. Speculation of what might have happened aside, if we do not engage families’ religious beliefs in the profound moments of making decisions about death we run the risk of compounding their tragedy in a very public battle — a battle of our making, not theirs.

Dr. Mark Lazenby is an Assistant Professor at Yale University School of Nursing, and co-author of Safe Passage: A Global Spiritual Sourcebook for Care at the End of Life.

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Image credit: National Institute of Mental Health, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Why do polar bear cubs (and babies) crawl backwards?

By Siu-Lan Tan

This YouTube video of a three-month-old polar bear taking his first wobbly steps at the Toronto Zoo was viewed over 4.5 million times in the first four days of it being posted, and is sprouting up all over the internet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Something I noticed immediately is that the baby polar bear is mostly crawling backwards. Many (human) infants do the same – crawling backwards for a few weeks before they crawl forwards. Why is it common for polar bear cubs, human infants, and the young of many other four-limbed species to initially crawl backward?

Playing it backwards

A key to this puzzle is to understand that early physical development follows a cephalocaudal principle. In other words, muscle strength and ability to control movement progresses from head to foot. What this means is that early in life, the upper limbs are much stronger and more well-coordinated than the lower limbs.

This is clearly demonstrated in the polar bear cub. His front limbs are outstretched and already good at supporting his heavy head, while his back limbs are much more frail, often crumpling and collapsing beneath him.

Cub’s front limbs are much stronger than hind limbs. Image from Toronto Zoo video.

As we see in the video, with stronger front legs pushing forward, and with much weaker hind legs, the cub’s movements shift his body backward. Notice especially the cub’s weak right hind leg, which remains almost anchored to the ground. This is the main reason the polar bear pivots to his left during the backward crawl.

Putting it all together

People are often surprised or puzzled to see infants moving in reverse. But this is a normal phase of learning to self-locomote.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For instance, although this baby coordinates her arms, each arm pushes up away from the body (which slides her back) rather than down toward the body. Although she’s moving fast, she’s still going backward.

To crawl forward, one must develop enough strength and control in the legs to propel the body forward, and arm movements must change from simply pushing away from the body to a more complex pattern that resembles reaching with alternating left and right arms.

The polar bear cub does the same thing. At first, he is mainly pushing outward with his front legs, which moves him backward. He then switches to bringing one front paw down in a swinging motion toward his belly, which could propel him forward. However, the momentum from the hind legs is still too weak, and he makes little forward progress.

The stronger upper body and weaker lower body trend of muscle development (cephalocaudal) does not apply throughout life. In humans, as babies develop weight-bearing abilities such as standing and taking first steps upright, the lower limbs rapidly become stronger and more controlled.

No two are exactly alike

As I often tell my Developmental Psychology students, if you look closely enough, every infant self-locomotes in a unique way. No two crawlers, rollers, or scooters are exactly alike. The placement of hands, angle of feet, order of movement of the four limbs, and a myriad of other factors, vary in subtle ways based on the baby’s own unique attributes and adaptation to its individual physical and social environments. Even when taking our very first steps in life, polar bear cubs and human babies show remarkable individual variation, ingenuity, and versatility.

 Siu-Lan Tan  is Associate Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, USA. She is primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (Oxford University Press 2013), the first book consolidating the research on the role of music in film, television, video games, and computers. A version of this article also appears on Siu-Lan Tan’s blog entitled What Shapes Film: Elements of the Cinematic Experience on Psychology Today.

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Rethinking European data protection law

By Dr Christopher Kuner

On the occasion of International Data Protection Day on the 28th of January, I would like to explore how European data protection law can become more efficient and effective, and better tailored to the needs of individuals.

The European Commission’s proposal of January 2012 to reform EU data protection law has been the subject of intense discussion. It had been hoped that the legislative process would be completed by now, but the EU institutions have yet to agree on a final text. With upcoming elections to the European Parliament and selection of a new European Commission later in 2014, finalization of the proposal may be delayed by European politics, which provides the chance to reconsider how the law needs to change.

Since its development in the late 1990s, EU data protection law has become both indispensible and unsupportable. Indispensible, because the central and ubiquitous role of personal data processing has made a strong legal framework crucial both to protect the rights of individuals and to allow the development of the digital economy. And unsupportable, because the current framework delivers a poor level of compliance; is confusing for both individuals and data controllers; and is difficult to apply and understand in practice.

These problems have long been recognized, but a consensus on how to remedy them has yet to emerge. Attempts at reform (including both legislative proposals and papers developed by experts and think tanks) have often suffered from various flaws. For example, excessive attention has been paid to a small number of important normative questions (e.g., what constitutes personal data, and the distinction between data controllers and data processors) that has distracted attention from achieving a high level of compliance in practice. Some initiatives have also suggested amendment of the underlying principles of the law, even though they are anchored in the constitutional framework of the EU and are not subject to change.

Many proposals (including the one from the Commission) contain laudable elements, but their structure and language are too complex for individuals to understand and apply. There has also been a “flavor of the month” approach to reform, with attention focused for political reasons on specific sectors or types of data processing (e.g., search engines, online social networks, cloud computing etc.), while other issues of equal or greater importance have received less attention.

Finally, the EU data protection framework is comprised of a combination of different directives, case law, Commission decisions, recommendations of data protection regulators etc., the interface between which can be difficult to understand even for experts. And the broad exemptions in data protection law for areas such as data processing by law enforcement leave large gaps in protection.

It is time to explore a new approach to reform of the EU data protection framework that would result in legal instruments that can be understood by ordinary individuals, and focuses on their needs. This means that main concerns should include intelligibility and the avoidance of jargon, as well as allowing individuals to assert their rights easily and effectively.

The fundamental normative rules of data protection law have proven their worth, and attention should be focused on how effective compliance approaches can be implemented. This means that greater attention should be paid to the developing standardized compliance tools (checklists, training procedures etc.); facilitating the recognition of codes of practice and trustmarks; using technological solutions to protect privacy; and working with existing institutions in other areas with strong ties to individuals and data controllers (e.g., local chambers of commerce and consumer protection organizations). The compliance needs of smaller organizations have also been largely overlooked, and more attention should be devoted to helping them integrate data protection into their everyday practices.

A legal framework for data protection should avoid inflation in the number of legislative instruments; provide better coordination between the different sources of law; and avoid wide-ranging exemptions from the rules. A key concern in this regard should be to develop a framework that provides legal certainty for individuals, data controllers, and regulators. More imagination should also be shown to involve the public in the drafting of legislation (e.g., through the use of focus groups or wikis).

These goals will have to be addressed if the EU is to adopt a data protection framework that is future-proof, protective of individual rights, and supportive of the digital economy.

Dr. Christopher Kuner is editor-in-chief of the journal International Data Privacy Law. He is author of European Data Protection Law: Corporate Compliance and Regulation, and the new book Transborder Data Flow Regulation and Data Privacy Law. Dr. Kuner is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for European Legal Studies, University of Cambridge, and Senior Of Counsel at .

To read more on data privacy, Oxford Journals has made a collection of papers on the topic free to access for a limited time.

Combining thoughtful, high level analysis with a practical approach, International Data Privacy Law has a global focus on all aspects of privacy and data protection, including data processing at a company level, international data transfers, civil liberties issues (e.g., government surveillance), technology issues relating to privacy, international security breaches, and conflicts between US privacy rules and European data protection law.

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Image credit: Many red opened locks around one closed blue lock. By maxkabakov via iStockphoto.

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Composer Martin Butler in 10 questions

We asked our composers a series of questions based around their musical likes and dislikes, influences, challenges, and various other things on the theme of music and their careers. Each month we will bring you answers from an Oxford University Press composer, giving you an insight into their music and personalities.

Here’s what OUP composer Martin Butler had to say:

Martin Butler, credit: Katie Vandyck

Which of your pieces are you most proud of and/or holds the most significance to you?

Tough question! The most personally significant piece is probably Night Machines, an electronic piece from 1987 that opened up all sorts of musical landscapes and pathways for me – not least improvisation as one means of composition – and which I found incredibly liberating. But overall I’m probably most proud of my opera for English National Opera, A Better Place. It was a great collaborative effort (as operas should be) and I think we hit all our targets after a lot of very hard work.

Which composer were you most influenced by and which of their pieces has had the most impact on you?

As usual with this question, the answer tends to change on a daily basis! But overall: Beethoven. I only realized this in more recent years: I keep coming back to his spirit, preoccupations and technique whenever I need a jolt. To me, he’s the composer’s composer: blood and guts on the page, every corner, transformation and twist in the argument sweated over, every problem majestically overcome.

Can you describe the first piece of music you ever wrote?

From the age of eight I was always improvising, making up pieces at the piano. But the first thing I remember committing to paper was a Handelian fanfare for recorder – I must have been 9 or thereabouts. It really wasn’t much more than a rehash of the sort of thing we all played on recorders every week at school; but it was *my* rehash.

Have the challenges you face as a composer changed over the course of your career?

If you think of composing as a ‘career’, then yes – like any other. I suppose success brings new opportunities, experience makes new things possible and familiar things easier. But the important challenges, as with any creative endeavour, remain the same: to stay true to an idea, to resist one’s habits, to reach for higher levels of meaning and pertinence, and to get out of bed each morning and just keep doing it.

If you could have been present at the premiere of any one work, which would it be?

Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus. So many people I know who were there have said it was a life-changing experience, and I can well imagine it. Brilliant, intoxicatingly powerful music theatre – even on disc. And it seems in retrospect like the pinnacle of a whole era of opera/music theatre that has since receded and most likely will never recur.

What is the last piece of music you listened to?

A number of songs by the folk singer Chris Wood; and only partly because I’m starting work on a big collaborative project with him. I think his is a wonderful, honest and utterly distinctive musical voice and I admire his work enormously.

What might you have been if you weren’t a composer?

At the age of 10, I thought either a footballer or a bishop. Since then my inability to make a meaningful contribution to anything outside music has become painfully and increasingly obvious.

Is there a piece of music you wish you had written?

Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Does that count as a single piece? It is, of course – despite being written over a 25-year span. It’s musical story-telling of such a high order, so imaginative, patient, innovative, disciplined, politically charged, passionate and confident. It’s not so much a ‘piece’ as a manifesto – a game-changing achievement.

A playlist of music by Martin Butler:

Martin Butler is a composer and pianist, published by Oxford University Press. His music is widely performed, broadcast, and recorded. Butler has been commissioned by the BBC (O Rio), Orkest de Volharding (Hootenanny), and the London Sinfonietta (Jazz Machines), amongst others. His opera, A Better Place, was commissioned and premiered by English National Opera at the Coliseum in July 2001 and received a second production in Manchester in December 2003. Martin is pianist with the new music improvisatory group Notes Inegales.

Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the USA by Peters Edition.


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Getting back in Blackstone’s game

By Steve Sheppard

In a recent post on Volokh Conspiracy, George Washington University law professor Orrin Kerr writes that we have passed the “Golden Age of Treatises.” Considering an obituary of a law professor who had written a law treatise, Securities Regulation, Kerr observed how its author, Louis Loss, had been seen as giving shape and direction to a whole field of law. Yet in 1993, Professor Loss already feared that some scholars disregarded these books that had “shaped the law”, books that had essentially “made a field of law that didn’t exist before.” Professor Kerr, writing two decades later, sees writing a treatise is akin to blogging. That is, he thinks it is valued by his colleagues not as serious scholarship (like law review articles) but more as service (like blog writing). In this he is, for now, quite right. The great American treatise — works like the securities volume of Louis Loss as well as the great monographs by authors from Joseph Story to E. Allan Farnsworth — evolved and then, largely disappeared.

Many readers will be surprised to learn that the monograph form of legal treatise has grown rather rare in the United States. The treatise in law, after all, is still influential in England and Scotland, and of course treatises are essential legal materials in all the civil law countries. There are still a few commercial presses that publish or republish treatises, but most of these books have grown from one volume by one or two authors into monstrous references of many volumes and many voices. Indeed, Professor Loss’s Securities Regulation treatise, now curated by others, takes eleven volumes, consisting of a staggering 5,740 pages.

Most of the recent editions of US treatises narrate the law from various approaches in different jurisdictions, rather than arguing to organize concepts and resolve disputes among competing sources. The one-volume student editions that are cut from these massive slabs of law, oftentimes retain their generic multi-jurisdictional feel without ever reintroducing the particular voice of the original authors. (There are rare exceptions.) Such books are sources for footnotes rather than broad and explanatory syntheses of their fields. They have become a staple of commercial presses because their many volumes and annual supplements generate more revenue than would more traditional, more focused, and less generic law books. Anecdotally, it would seem that the academic disdain for the treatise followed the publisher’s abandonment of the monograph treatise. Once the contracts had dried up, the academics disdained them. It is a story like the fox and the grapes.

Yet the need persists for genuine treatises, books on American law in the tradition of books by Justice Joseph Story, Dean William Prosser, and Professor E. Allan Farnsworth. These were books like Professor Loss’s first edition (in 1951, of only 1300 pages), that could explain and illuminate a field or a topic with sufficient art and pith to be read and absorbed by a reader, and with sufficient clarity and analysis to support an argument at law. Even in its unwieldy modern form, the treatise remains important to the bench and bar. In 2012 treatises were cited, by that title, over 1800 times by US courts.

Therefore, it is a great pleasure to be involved in Oxford University Press’s return to the world of the treatise. The Oxford Commentaries on American Law is a new series of law treatises, written by scholars for the use of judges, lawyers, academics, and students, to explain and reform the law of the United States. These monographs will restore the place of scholarly legal books as a tool for the interpretation and application of the law by the bench and bar.

The first title, The Law of the Executive Branch: Presidential Power by Louis Fisher, explores the law and custom of the powers of the American presidency and their legal limits. While exploring US constitutional law, it also reframes that law by organizing it in a non-traditional way. The hope will be that this sort of re-framing of the law — a hallmark of the treatise tradition — will help restore the role of the treatise as a source of legal clarity and reform while at the same time conserving a traditional basis of legal analysis.

Though the Oxford Commentaries on American Law is new, it is not truly novel. Rather, it might be better to see this as the re-launch of a very old Oxford series, one that has been silent for over two centuries. The original series had been published under the auspices of the press in the 1760s, by the Oxford professor who famously reformed OUP in the eighteenth century. Oxford University Press published Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on English Law, a volume a year from 1765 to 1769. It had a profound influence on the American bench, long after US independence. The Oxford Commentaries on American Law is in its tradition, though, of course, it will ultimately be written by many hands. Ultimately, it will be these hands that will, as Professor Loss said, that now shape the law.

Steve Sheppard is the Judge Enfield Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas and the Editor of the Oxford Commentaries on American Law. His books on OUP include E. Allan Farnsworth, An Introduction to the Legal System of the United States, Fourth Edition (Steve Sheppard, ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2010); Karl Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: The Classic Lectures on Law School and the Law (Steve Sheppard, ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2008); and George P. Fletcher & Steve Sheppard, American Law in a Global Context: The Basics (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is also the author of the Wolters-Kluwer Bouvier Law Dictionary (Steve Sheppard, General Editor) (2011-12) and Steve Sheppard, I Do Solemnly Swear: The Moral Obligations of Legal Officials (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Image credit: William Blackstone via Architect of the Capitol.

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International Holocaust Remembrance Day reading list

To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we present a reading list of books and articles that look at all aspects of Holocaust scholarship, including remarkable stories those who risked their lives to save Jews, post-Holocaust Jewish theological responses, and the challenges of recording oral histories.

I come from a people who gave the ten commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shalt not be a perpetrator; thou shalt not be a victim; and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.

–Yehuda Bauer, Czech-born Israeli historian: speech to the German Bundestag, 1998, quoted in his own speech to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, 26 July 2000. From Oxford Essential Quotations.

“Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at Auschwitz

A Thousand Darknesses by Ruth Franklin

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be “truthful”–that is, faithful to the facts of history? Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust writing.

Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust by George Faithful

After the Allied bombing of Darmstadt, Germany in 1944, some young Lutheran women perceived their city’s destruction as an expression of God’s wrath–a punishment for Hitler’s murder of six million Jews, purportedly on behalf of the German people. Some of these women went on to form the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary in order to embrace lives of radical repentance for the sins of the German people against God and against the Jews.

Why Should Jews Survive? Looking Past the Holocaust toward a Jewish Future by Michael Goldberg

Rabbi Michael Goldberg asserts that the twin pillars, the Holocaust and Israel, are brittle and have already begun to crumble: they will not be enough to support or sustain the next generation’s Jewish identity. In an urgent warning to the Jewish people, Goldberg argues for a refocus on the original Exodus story and with it a deeper and more positive sense of what it means to be Jewish.

After the Evil: Christianity and Judaism in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Richard Harries

The evil of the holocaust demands a radical rethink of the traditional Christian understanding of Judaism. This does not mean jettisoning Christianity’s deepest convictions in order to make it conform to Judaism. Rather, Richard Harries develops the work of recent Jewish scholarship to discern resonances between central Christian and Jewish beliefs.

The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies Edited by Peter Hayes and John K. Roth

At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars.

Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust Edited by Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg

Presenting a wide-ranging selection of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust, it is one of the most complete anthology of its sort, bringing together a diverse selection of topics that represent virtually every significant theological position that has been articulated by a Jewish thinker in response to the Holocaust. Included are rarely studied responses that were written while the Holocaust was happening.

Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich

Holocaust is perhaps most remarkable for its extensive use of the 1930s archives of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, which re-emerged in the 1990s after years languishing in Moscow. The letters and reports from this archive document in detail the attacks suffered by ordinary Jewish people from their German neighbors. They show how, contrary to what has been believed in the past, the German populace responded relatively enthusiastically to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America by Michael L. Morgan

Morgan offers the first comprehensive overview of Post-Holocaust Jewish theology, looking at the background of the movement in the postwar period, its origins, its character, and its legacy for subsequent thinking, theological and otherwise.

The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators by Katharina von Kellenbach

The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany’s coming to terms with a guilty past by drawing on letters exchanged between clergy and Nazi perpetrators, written notes of prison chaplains, memoirs, sermons, and prison publications to illuminate the moral and spiritual struggles of perpetrators after World War II.

Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis by Suzanne Vromen

In the summer of 1942 in Belgium, when the Nazis began the brutal roundup of Jewish families, a group of Jewish children found sanctuary with other families and schools–but especially in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages. We read the stories of the women of the Resistance who risked their lives in placing Jewish children in the care of the Church, and of the Mothers Superior and nuns who sheltered these children and hid their identity from the authorities. Read ”The Children” from Hidden Children of the Holocaust on Oxford Scholarship Online.

Oberammergau in the Nazi Era: The Fate of a Catholic Village in Hitler’s Germany by Helena Waddy

Looking at Oberammergau’s unique history to explain why and how some villagers chose to become Nazis, while others rejected Party membership and defended their Catholic lifestyle, Waddy explores the reasons why both local Nazis and their opponents fought to protect the village’s cherished Catholic identity against the Third Reich’s many intrusive demands.

“Case Study: ‘Above all, we need the WITNESS’: The Oral History of Holocaust Survivor” from The Oxford Handbook of Oral History on Oxford Handbooks Online

Holocaust survivor and witness accounts began long before the Second World War ended. Diaries, journals, letters, notes hidden, buried, and stuffed into jars or between floor boards were mostly lost and destroyed, but those that have been recovered express desperation to tell, to document, to bear witness, and to commemorate. This article records the oral history of holocaust survivors. Together with the countless thousands of testimonies that would be recorded during the next sixty years, these eyewitness accounts would change the face of research and education, not only in the field of Holocaust studies but across academic boundaries.

“Constricting and Extinguishing Jewish Life” by Truder Maurer in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945

As of summer 1938 more extreme persecutions peaked in the pogrom of November 9-10 and the arrest and internment of about 30,000 men in concentration camps. This made the defenselessness and isolation of the Jews clear-cut. Even at that time they received little help from non-Jews. Emigration seemed the only remaining option. But this option became virtually impossible once the war started and was finally prohibited entirely in October 1941. At the same time, forced labor and the withdrawal of almost all food stripped Jews of the material basis for survival and all psychological strength.

“‘On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re A Nazi’: Some Comparative Legal Aspects of Holocaust Denial on the WWW” by David Fraser in Extreme Speech and Democracy

Legal regulations in Canada and Australia provide two frameworks under which Holocaust Denial can be outlawed. Canada has chosen to proceed by way of complex analyses of the content of the ‘speech’ and its reception by an intended audience. Australia, conversely, has adopted a legal framework which examines the possible adverse impact of the ‘speech’ on an identified victim group. What unites the two, and the aspect which is perhaps most troubling from a variety of perspectives, is a distinct rejection of any claim that the Holocaust actually happened, as an underlying normative basis for legal regulation.

“Writing to Remember: The Role of the Survivor” by Zoë Vania Waxman in Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation

This chapter charts the path of the ‘liberated prisoners’ and their gradual re-categorization over time, first as ‘Displaced Persons’, and eventually as ‘survivors’. It shows how the post-war introduction of the concept of ‘the Holocaust’ to describe survivors’ experiences, and the adoption of the post-war identity of the survivor as witness, acted as organizational frameworks for survivors’ experiences, enabling personal experiences of suffering to be viewed as essential components of a collective historical event.

“On the Global and Local Representations of the Holocaust Tragedy“ by Jeffrey C. Alexander in Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate

The universalization of the Holocaust is alive and well, even as the collective consciousness continually addresses fears of forgetting. This chapter provides a historical context for “The Social Construction of Moral Universals”, and examines how the movement, from a progressive tragic trauma narration created moral particularism alongside universalism, and fueled social splitting and antagonism at the same time as cooperation and expanded solidarity.

“Perpetrators With a Clear Conscience: Lying, Self-Deception and Belief Change“ by Ralph Erber in Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

This chapter focuses on psychological mechanisms underlying perpetrator behavior, by looking at the possibility that a specific form of self-deception may play an important role. It also examines what Hannah Arendt calls “lying self-deception”: the effects of telling lies repeatedly on subsequent belief change.





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Protecting children from hardcore adult content online

By Julia Hӧrnle

In the offline world the distribution of pornography has been strictly controlled. Age-verification and rating stems ensure that minors cannot access hardcore pornography. The British Board of Film Classification rates cinema and DVD content; content rated as R18 can only be shown in specialised cinemas with strict age-verification standards and certain pornographic content will not be rated for cinema or DVD distribution. On television, the Ofcom Broadcasting Code provides that the equivalent to R18 pornography cannot be broadcast at all and softer forms of adult content have to be scheduled at such a time that children are less likely to watch it.

While there has always been disagreement about what content falls into which category, by and large, the offline rating system has worked. The arrival of the Internet and its integration into mainstream media consumption in particular through the world-wide-web, peer-to-peer applications, video-sharing platforms and powerful search engines has provided easy access for children to hardcore pornography which includes explicit sex, sado-masochist practices, bondage, and fetish material. Children’s access may also include illegal materials which would not be rated by the BBFC, including those depicting rape and other violence, necrophilia, and bestiality. Not only has access to pornography become easier with the arrival of the Internet, the materials themselves have also become more extreme and more specialist. One of the most frequently accessed porn websites boast 63 different categories under the “straight” tab alone (interestingly only one of which is “female friendly”).

Surely the main responsibility for ensuring that hardcore adult content is not seen by children must be with the providers of such content. This is not about restricting adults’ access; it is about keeping children out (even though age-verification has a price tag attached to it, which eats into the profits of the adult industry; this is not the same as censorship). In fact, many UK providers are supportive of age-verification.

The Authority for TV on Demand (ATVOD) co-regulates TV on Demand on the basis of legislation, which provides that on-demand programmes which “seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors” are subject to age-verification such as using a credit card or reputable age-verification provider. This regulatory step introduced in 2010 has already achieved some UK compliance, successfully driving standards up in this industry through co-regulation.

However, many (if not most) hardcore porn services are “delivered” from outside the United Kingdom directly to UK computers. In particular in the United States, where freedom of speech is sacrosanct, there seems to be little appetite (or legal scope) for introducing age-verification measures for hardcore porn.

Hence from a UK perspective, it is timely to explore what other measures should be taken by regulators, governments and civil society to counter the harmful effects of such material.

Unfortunately there is no “magic bullet” solution to this problem. The government’s opt-out filtering system which requires householders to choose what type of content they wish to filter out from their home Internet access may be one tiny puzzle piece of this jigsaw. It requires householders to positively opt-into non-child friendly content such as pornography. But it will not be particularly effective.

Filters are notoriously inaccurate, as they are over- and underinclusive. They block harmless materials (and indeed material which may be helpful for teens in this context, such as sex education, medical, and sexual health information). Perhaps worse, filters let materials through which should be blocked. A recent study commissioned by the EU funded Safer Internet Programme testing parental control tools showed that underblocking for adult content ranged from 5-35%. Five percent of millions of adult websites is a large number. And who decides precisely what type of content is or is not family friendly? Filters are set by private companies in a process which is not transparent, nor accountable. This may be less of a problem, as fortunately these filters are voluntary and householders can simply opt-out of them, if they do not work for them. This may explain why just over half of parents in the UK have parental control filters in place (54%) and why less than a third (28%) of parents in Europe (average).

Filters may also encourage parents, schools, and educators to stay passive relying on technology instead of teaching teens about sex and relationships, however difficult that is. Keeping children away from porn must be part of the solution, but education and awareness raising are just as important. The government should invest serious money and efforts in educational campaigns and support. Internet access filtering just won’t do the trick.

Julia Hörnle is a Professor in Internet Law at Queen Mary, University of London, where she has been teaching and researching Internet Law since 2001 and is the Director of Taught Programmes at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies. She has taught Internet law internationally, for the prestigious British Council funded European Young Lawyers Scheme at the College of Law, at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, the University of Vienna, and the National University of Singapore. She is the Managing Editor of the International Journal of Law and Information Technology.

The International Journal of Law and Information Technology provides cutting edge and comprehensive analysis of Information Technology, communications and cyberspace law as well as the issues arising from applying Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to legal practice. International in scope, this journal has become essential for legal and computing professionals and legal scholars of the law related to IT.

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Commemorating the Holocaust in Europe

By Rebecca Clifford

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Britain is certainly not the only country that observes this commemorative day; since the turn of the twenty-first century, countries across Europe have made 27 January an official day of remembrance of the Holocaust, and even supra-national entities such as the UN have official obligations to hold commemorative ceremonies on this day. Supporters of and participants in these commemorations believe that the day holds both a moral and a pedagogical purpose: it exists to ensure that citizens – the young in particular – are aware of the consequences of genocide and strive to prevent its re-occurrence. Yet twenty years ago only one European nation had an official Holocaust memorial day. That nation was France, and the story of how its memorial day came into being tells us much about how, in addition to serving an educational purpose, these memorial days shed light on the politics of the past in contemporary society.

If one were to take seriously the grumblings in some of Europe’s right-wing newspapers, one might believe that Holocaust Memorial Days are created through pressure from Jewish ‘lobbyists’ or from progressive politicians. Yet in France, as elsewhere, this was not the case. Rather, France owes the creation of its memorial day to the efforts of a small group of activists working in the very particular context of the early post-Cold War years. These activists, most of who cut their political teeth in the student unrest of 1968, were concerned with the direction that the collective memory of the Second World War was taking in the unsteady climate in Europe after 1989, and they launched a concerted bid to force the French state to recognize its role in wartime crimes against Jews.

The spring of 1992 was a moment of uncertainty in France, as it was elsewhere in Europe. As the Cold War geopolitical system gave way to a renewed European Union, powerful questions emerged about how this new Europe could and should face its wartime past. In France, this process was brought into sharp focus by the trial of Paul Touvier, the first French person to be tried for crimes against humanity for his role in the murder of Jews in the Lyon area during the war. In April 1992, the Paris Court of Appeals declared that there were ‘no grounds’ for prosecuting Touvier, because he had been acting under the auspices of the Vichy state, and the court did not believe that Vichy had practiced ‘ideological hegemony’. The court thus passed judgment not only on Touvier but on the Vichy regime itself – and that judgment was profoundly inaccurate. To many observers at the time, the decision seemed to constitute an official white-washing of Vichy’s anti-Semitism.

Among those angered by the decision was a Parisian immunologist named Anna Senik. In its wake, Senik brought together a small group of activists, most of who knew each other from their time in left-wing student organizations in the late 1960s, to petition president Francois Mitterrand to offer a formal recognition of the state’s role in wartime crimes against Jews. Mitterrand refused. In essence, the debate between Senik’s group and the president was a clash between two conflicting readings of France’s wartime and postwar history: Mitterrand argued that the postwar Republic should bear no responsibility for the crimes of Vichy, and Senik’s group challenged this notion. Throughout the summer of 1992, France’s national media kept the issue in the public eye, particularly after 16 July, the 50th anniversary of the largest wartime roundup and arrest of Jews on French soil (the Vel’ d’hiv’ roundup), when Mitterrand attended a public commemoration of the event but refused to speak. Ultimately embarrassed by the increasingly negative public attention that the issue had drawn, Mitterrand’s government offered to turn the Vel’ d’hiv’ anniversary into an official Holocaust memorial day. The new commemoration was created by presidential decree in February 1993.

This was, of course, not what Senik’s group of activists wanted. In creating the new memorial day, Mitterrand’s government had avoided the larger issue of recognition of the state’s responsibility for wartime crimes against Jews – nothing in the new memorial day explicitly addressed the matter of state responsibility. It was not until Mitterrand’s successor Jacques Chirac came to power in 1995 that this formal recognition took place. Chirac, a child during the war, approached the issue from a different generational standpoint, and his willingness to recognize the state’s administrative culpability was applauded from every political quarter save the extreme right and a handful of stalwarts in Mitterrand’s own party. Its success as a political gesture was also noticed abroad, and in its wake activists in other countries began to demand similar recognitions of responsibility from their heads of state. It was the beginnings of a process that has brought us a pan-European Holocaust Memorial Day.

So as we mark Holocaust Memorial Day, it is worth remembering its history. It may have moral and pedagogical functions (although the broader question of what these are precisely is worth asking, especially as the borders of the commemoration shift to encompass the ‘memory’ of genocide in a very wide sense), but it most certainly also has political ones. It reminds us not only of the genocide of Europe’s Jews seventy years ago, but of the continued importance of this history and memory in the political landscape of Europe today.

Rebecca Clifford is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Swansea University. She is author of Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy, and is also a contributor to another recent OUP publication, Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt.

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Image credit: Plaque commémorative de la déportation des Juifs sous l’Occupation. By P. Poschadel [CC-BY-SA-3.0] via Wikimedia Commons.

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Long-term causes versus explanatory contexts of the English Civil War

By Tim Harris

Historians have been arguing over how far back to trace the origins of the civil war that broke out in England in 1642 ever since the war itself. Should we start with the accession of Charles I in 1625, and the controversial policies Charles pursued in Church and state: the promotion of Arminianism, rule without Parliament from 1629, the imposition of prerogative taxation, and the brutal suppression of critical dissent via the prerogative court of Star Chamber? Do we go back to the reign of James VI and I (1603 in England; 1567 in Scotland), or even earlier, to explore the fiscal weaknesses of the English crown and the religious divisions and tensions bequeathed by the Reformation? Or no further than 1641, since it was not until the second half of 1641 that the nation was to polarize into the two sides that were to fight the civil war?

Part of the disagreement stems from how we define a ‘cause’. Lawrence Stone, who began his account of the causes in 1529, nevertheless stressed the importance of medium-term precipitants and short-term triggers. Revisionists, who favour short-term explanations, tend to treat only the triggers as direct causes, holding that whatever underlying problems may have bedevilled the early Stuart polity it was not inevitable that it would collapse and that civil war remained avoidable until quite late in the day.

I find the logic of the Revisionists’ case compelling up to a point. Those who were opposed to Charles I’s style of kingship and to his religious policies wanted reform not revolution. They were not looking to re-model the system or to seize control of the machinery of government for themselves, by force if necessary. A peaceful settlement was still what everyone hoped for in 1641. Nothing is inevitable until it happens; different choices by key actors could have produced different outcomes. If pressed on what literally caused the civil war to break out, I would reply Charles I’s decision to raise his standard at Nottingham in August 1642. Yet this hardly gets us very far. It does not help us understand why Charles I made the choice he did, nor why, when the triggers came, the situation proved so volatile.

The Eve of the Battle of Edge Hill, 1642 by Charles Landseer

This is my quibble with the quest for causes. Historians, I would suggest, are less interested in identifying causes (at least ‘causes’ so narrowly defined) as they are in understanding why things happened in the way that they did. Factors that don’t possess causal significance might nevertheless possess explanatory significance. The search for understanding and explanation forces us to address the long-term.

The need for longer-term explanations is immediately obvious when we include Scotland and Ireland in our account. Revisionist scholars who felt there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the English polity in the 1630s tended to stress the prior revolts in Scotland (1638-40) and Ireland (1641) as key in bringing about the eventual collapse of Charles’s regime in England. Yet both the Scots and the Irish saw their grievances as long-term. The Scottish Covenanters were unhappy about developments in the Kirk that had started with the revival of episcopacy and the intrusion of Anglican-style ceremonies under James VI and I, as they made explicit in their numerous declarations. For the Irish, a major grievance was the system of plantation that the English had been promoting in Ulster and elsewhere since the Flight of the Earls in 1607, as can be discerned from both the manifestoes and the actions of the Irish rebels in 1641.

We also have to explain why the English polity was so fragile that it collapsed so easily in the face of the prior revolts in Scotland and Ireland. England was much larger and wealthier than Scotland and should have been able to defeat the Scots in war. The fact that it could not is tied up with what was going wrong in England — both during Charles I’s personal rule of the 1630s and over the longer-term (since the English state’s fiscal and military weaknesses had deeper roots). Why had the English government become so unpopular by the late 1630s that many English people, traditionally rather Scotophobic, wanted the Scots to win? Why did some of the soldiers recruited to fight against the Scots instead mutiny and start pulling down altar rails in churches in England? With regard to Ireland, why did the Irish Rebellion of 1641 divide the English and not unite them against a foreign Catholic threat?

There are less direct ways in which longer-term contexts can be said to possess vital explanatory significance even if they have little causal significance. Take the rise of royalism, for example. Civil war could not have broken out in 1640 because Charles I did not yet have a party; it took a skilful propaganda campaign from late 1641 onwards to build up enough support for Charles to make civil war a possibility. But it is impossible to understand where royalism came from without appreciating that royalist propagandists sought to tap into and build upon a latent hostility towards Puritans that already existed in English society, the roots of which can be traced back to the late sixteenth century. Indeed, royalist authors deployed the same stereotype of the hypocritical, uncharitable, and subversive Puritan that we find portrayed on the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and reflected in anti-Puritan libels from that time. The development of this stereotype is thus vital to our understanding of the emergence of royalism in 1641-2; yet no one would suggest that late-Elizabethan anti-Puritanism was in any way a cause of the English civil war. The political, religious and cultural contexts that need to be explored across three kingdoms to explain why things reached the crisis point they did in 1642, in other words, all require examination over the longer term.

Tim Harris is Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History at Brown University. He is the author of numerous essays, articles, and books on British history in the early modern period, including most recently Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567-1642.

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Image credit: The Eve of the Battle of Edge Hill, 1642 by Charles Landseer. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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