This is a collection of essays written in the 1980s in response to those who deny the reality of the Holocaust. The writer, a scholar of ancient Greece who teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris, is torn by the dilemma of how to provide a necessary critique of academics who reject the genocide of European Jewry without at the same time dignifying them as a possibly legitimate "revisionist" school of intellectual thought. Vidal-Naquet writes persuasively and often passionately in response to Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature, whose arguments have appeared in Le Monde and other outlets for French intellectuals, and also takes to task American linguist Noam Chomsky, who wrote a preface to one of Faurisson's books. Vidal-Naquet offers an interesting perspective on a debate that should not have taken place. For informed readers. Library Journal In these essays the eminent French classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet engages the issues raised by the denial of the Holocaust with an extraordinary fusion of moral passion and historical vigor.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Columbia University