This volume by Professor Daniel Goldhagen has aroused a great deal of scholarly controversy. It has been fiercely attacked by such renowned Holocaust historians as Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer. It has also been widely reviewed with favor in some quarters and with significant disfavor in others (e.g., The New Republic and The New Yorker). We may well ask, what is the fuss all about?

Goldhagen has undertaken to study the one group of Holo-caust participants that he claims has been understudied by historians, namely, the perpetrators, who he shows were far more numerous than previously recognized. These murderers, says Goldhagen, were able to perform their hideous deeds not only without compunction but also with a degree of unimag-inable enthusiasm. He focuses on the police battalions that did the actual killing (consisting of ordinary personnel as opposed to elite SS units, etc.) and on the gratuitous cruelty with which the slave labor camps and the death marches at the end of the war were carried out.

Goldhagen insists that the ultimate explanation for this unex-plainable bestiality is the unique brand of anti-Semitism that evolved in Germany through the centuries, which he calls "eliminationist" and which became "exterminationist" under Hitler. It was the power of this evil virus that enabled ordinary Germans to become extraordinary, unhesitating butchers of Jews. The teaching of anti-Semitism in Germany had a historic popular appeal and was able in Nazi Germany to transform tra-ditional disdain for Jews into a lethal ideology.

Clearly, no one can dispute the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazi enterprise as a driving demonic psychic force. How-ever, explaining the Holocaust by reducing it to one root element, no matter how relevant, comes close to simplistic reductionism. Goldhagen's critics, in my view, rightly challenge his monochromatic interpretation of a technicolor historic real-ity as well as the shrill, repetitive hammering of his main theme. Nonetheless, his book does make a contribution by virtue of focusing on the frightening enigma of how decent people who loved their families and who went to church could turn into monsters who acted with barbarism and without shame or embarrassment. Facing up to this history is a sacred challenge for all religious people to confront.

Mr. Douglas Becker, President, Sylvan Learning Systems: The Road Ahead by Bill Gates. "Gates makes interesting predic-tions about future technologies and the impact of today's technologies in years to come."
Ms. Rebecca Hoffberger, President, American Visionary Art Museum: Hope, Human & Wild by Bill McKibben. "In this new book, the lucky reader marinates in global reports on the power of the individual to accomplish big miracles: undoing pollution, reclaiming forests, replenishing wildlife long though lost, and transforming the worst urban jungles into modern day utopias ... "
The Rev. Arnold Howard, Pastor, Enon Baptist Church, and President, Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance: The Nehe-miah Plan by the Rev. Dr. Frank M. Reid, III. "This is a book for those involved in institutional building who desire to help people help themselves and others rebuild their lives."
Dr. Delores Kelley, Maryland State Senator: The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism. "This monograph, with a forward by Marc Saperstein, surveys the extent to which organized reli-gion and governments reinforced chilling stereotypes reflected in many cultural forms, including public architecture."
Dr. Judy Jolley Mohraz, President, Goucher College: Burning Bright edited by Patricia Hample. "A MacArthur Prize-winning novelist has selected profound but often unfamiliar poetic voices from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in search of the sacred."
Rabbi Gila Ruskin, Congregation Chevrei Tzedek: Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story by Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer. "Kates and Reimer offer new literary, philosophical, and feminist perspectives on the char-acters and themes of this well-known biblical tale."