Jesuit Kaddish and I

Abstract

James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish about Jews and Jesuits in the shadow of the Holocaust is not a work of ordinary secular history. It is grounded in two distinctly Jesuit spiritual practices. This essay grapples with how to translate so avowedly Jesuit an account into a more universal one. It uses this work to think about how one might use its insights to think in more secular terms about the great wrong that haunts America: the legacy of racism. Finally, it understands Bernauer’s book as insisting that we reflect on broader questions: of complicity, of obligations to repair the wounds of the past, of responsibility. A book devoted to Jesuit versions of these sorts of issues invites a more general consideration. The contrast between a more secular and a Jesuit account of all these matters is refracted in part through the author’s personal relationship to the Holocaust.