Narration, Oblivion, and Violence: Two Decades On

Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism (2013) has widely been regarded as standing in tension with Communities of Violence, if not as an outright renunciation of it. Nirenberg himself counters in the new preface to Communities of Violence that readers who see in one a retraction of the other “have not quite understood either book.” Does the later Nirenberg indeed lurk in his early work? Should the one alter our view of the other? At stake in the question is more than just one historian’s oeuvre.