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The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich

How did the academy react to the rise, dominance, and ultimate fall of Germany's Third Reich? Did German professors of the humanities have to tell themselves lies about their regime's activities or its victims to sleep at night? Or did they look the other way, whether out of deliberate denial or out of fear for their own personal safety? The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich is a collection of groundbreaking essays that shed light on this previously overlooked piece of history.

The Betrayal of the Humanities accepts the regrettable news that academics and intellectuals in Nazi Germany betrayed the humanities, and explores what went wrong, what occurred at the universities, and what happened to the major disciplines of the humanities under National Socialism.

The Betrayal of the Humanities details not only how individual scholars, particular departments, and even entire universities collaborated with the Nazi regime but also examines the legacy of this era on higher education in Germany. In particular, it looks at the peculiar position of many German scholars in the post-war world having to defend their own work, or the work of their mentors, while simultaneously not appearing to accept Nazism.

624 pages, Paperback

Published September 6, 2022

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About the author

Bernard M. Levinson

22 books2 followers

Bernard M. Levinson is a professor of Classical and Near Eastern studies and of Law at the University of Minnesota and holds the Berman Family Chair of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. He is a specialist in biblical and cuneiform law; Deuteronomy and the history of interpretation; and literary approaches to biblical studies. He is the author of Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel and "The Right Chorale": Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation. In 1999 Bernard was the co-recipient of the Salo W. Baron Award for Best First Book in Literature and Thought by the American Academy for Jewish Research for his book Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation.

The interdisciplinary significance of Bernard Levinson's work has been recognized with appointments to the Institute for Advanced Study (1997); the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (2007); and the National Humanities Center, where he served as the Henry Luce Senior Fellow in Religious Studies during the 2010-2011 academic year. He was also recently elected to be a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR), the oldest professional organization of Judaica scholars in North America.

Bernard Levinson seeks to bring the academic biblical scholarship to the attention of a broader, non-specialist readership. In this vein, he has recently written on the impact of the King James Version of the Bible upon the American Founding; drawn attention in the national press to the role of early feminist Bible scholars like Elizabeth Cady Stanton in helping win the vote for women; and, in his attention to language, has been cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.

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