Homer, Humanism, Holocaust

This book examines how Jewish intellectuals during and after the Second World War reinterpreted Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey , in light of their own wartime experiences, drawing a parallel between the ancient Greek genocide of the Trojans and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The wartime writings of Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Bespaloff, Hermann Broch, Max Horkheimer, Primo Levi, and others were attempts both to understand the collapse of European civilization