John Roth's The Failures of Ethics is anything but a resigned, world-weary confession of helplessness before the iniquities of the Holocaust and other terrible wrongs. To the contrary, this latest book by one of America's senior and widely respected Holocaust scholars is a resolutely ethical reflection on his four decades of scholarship and teaching in the field, looking back over his professional and pedagogical confrontations with some of the most vexing questions of our times. Better than most, Roth knows that the twentieth century has seen an unprecedented collapse of ethical standards in the face of the Holocaust, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. Less focused on the perpetration of these horrors, however, Roth concentrates on “indifference, silence, bystanding and complicity,” those “failures of ethics” by “people who try to be ethical” but who nevertheless must acknowledge their failures to do so” (7).

Throughout, Roth's “their” turns into “our,” and his book assumes both the language and the posture of an ethical admonition to all those who are willing to receive it. Recognizing this is essential to an appreciation of this volume. Roth's book is not an analysis of why or even how modern-day ethical catastrophes happened as they did; or is it an argument about counterfactual history, i.e., about how things might have happened. It is rather an engagement with how things ought, by ethical standards, to have transpired. Roth takes on this weighty moral task by exploring two themes: first, protesting the failures of ethics on the part of those who have acceded to great wrongs; and second, what he calls resisting these failures, i.e., finding better paths than those chosen by the actual participants in those events.

Protest entails the clear-eyed recognition of the horrific character of particularly egregious wrongdoing. Roth writes sensitively of torture, rape, racism, and mass murder, giving voice to the suffering of victims and acknowledging how such crimes have often been overlooked, their perpetrators enabled, or the extent of their wrongs unappreciated. Fully conversant in the scholarly literature on these crimes, Roth weaves into his critical narrative elements of his family background (his father was a Presbyterian minister deeply involved in civil rights issues), as well as the influence of his teachers (very significantly the religious philosopher Rabbi Richard Rubinstein and the Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel) and the political environment of his formative years as a philosopher (the contentious academic milieu of the 1960s and 1970s). A sophisticated and widely read comparativist, Roth also avoids the inclination to preach. “All religious traditions,” he writes, “individually and even collectively are incomplete, fallible, in need of correction and revision as they encounter one another, probe themselves, and expand their horizons” (85).

In the second half of his book, Roth stakes out his views on the responsibilities of the ethicist in the face of the horrors he or she studies. Central to his own work as a philosopher preoccupied with the Holocaust is his encouragement of Christian responsibility. His message is that “Christians have not yet come to terms fully with the Holocaust's implication that Christianity can no longer take itself to be superior to Judaism,” and that the subject as a whole carries with it an implicit ethical admonition of religious pluralism (127). Just as important, Roth emerges from his studies of the Holocaust and other instances of state-organized persecution and mass murder with a reinforced determination to oppose persisting elements of genocide. His search for meaning in a career spent in the study of the Holocaust and other great wrongs concludes with a personal profession of commitment: “Working together with others, and standing in solidarity with those who resisted and rescued during the Holocaust, I can try my best to be sure that memory of the Holocaust and other atrocities continues, that education about those catastrophes advances, and that the purposes of those activities include equipping us to resist injustice, to protest when life is disrespected, to live in ways that, in spite of mass atrocity crimes, still seek to mend the world, and to find and encourage joy when those steps are taken” (203). This is a veteran scholar's mature reflections on the meaning and ethical imperatives of historic wrongs.