‘Perhaps Redeemed’: Literature, the Holocaust and the Survivor’s Need for a Radical Humanism

Kitty Millet’s presentation examines authors studied in the Holocaust and Literature course. Ruth Klüger, Imre Kertesz, Primo Levi, Jean Améry and Charlotte Delbo trace a “radical humanism” that emerges in literature when survivors act as the subjects of their own narratives. Free.

Presented by the Department of Jewish Studies as part of the Fall 2020 Lectures in Jewish Studies. Co-sponsored by the Classics Department and the Jewish Community Library.

Kitty Millet

Kitty Millet is professor of comparative Jewish literatures and Holocaust studies and chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association research committee on religion, ethics and literature.

Millet is the author of “Fault Lines of Modernity: The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics and Literature” (Bloomsbury, 2018) and “The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution” (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her next book is “Kabbalah and Literature,” to be published by Bloomsbury in late 2021. It will be the first volume in Bloomsbury’s series on comparative Jewish literatures, for which Millet is editor in chief.