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Though the bulk of this book was written during my 2019 spring sabbatical, Unsettling Empathy has been in the making for a long time. I have published smaller pieces on reconciliatory processes and unsettling empathy over the years, but I always found it daunting to write a more comprehensive account of my work with groups in conflict. People familiar with or curious about my work kept asking about such a book because they wanted to learn more about how trust-building intergroup processes unfold in conflict settings. They wanted to understand the dynamics that make or break a process in which people explore adversarial relations due to past and present injuries and injustices. I hope that Unsettling Empathy meets their expectations.

Twenty-five years ago I published my first monograph, Remembrance and Reconciliation: Encounters Between Young Jews and Germans (1995). In that book I tried to make sense of how the Holocaust affected relationships between non-Jewish Germans and Jewish Americans born after 1945. I reported on various encounters between these two groups, relying on examples from the then-available literature as well as on my own experience as active participant and facilitator. I situated and contextualized these encounters within the intellectual and public debates of the 1980s and 1990s on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The book emphasized the vital role of memory in dialogue and reconciliation settings. Without fully acknowledging the past, I argued, trust would be impossible to establish, thus thwarting the restoring of relationships between the Jewish community and German society.

I still consider the acknowledgment of an unjust and traumatic past essential for reconciliatory processes, but I have since realized that memories can be as much a stumbling block as a building block when working with groups in conflict. Memories tied to large-group identifications, iterated in national narratives, embraced as chosen cultural traumas, and recounted in personal storytelling have the power to fixate our gaze on the past in such a way that we are no longer capable of imagining a different future. Since the 1995 publication, I have arrived at a more nuanced and complex understanding of the (psycho)social and (psycho)political dynamics that obstruct or advance our efforts of seeking alternative pathways in protracted conflicts.

In this light, Unsettling Empathy can be seen as a companion volume to Remembrance and Reconciliation. Each book has been written in a different moment in time. Remembrance and Reconciliation was completed in the optimistic spirit and enlightened certitude of the 1990s when coming to terms with the past coincided with real signs of political progress: the fall of the Berlin Wall, glasnost, and the expansion of liberal democracies. Unsettling Empathy has come into being during a period of increasing cultural pessimism, where we are witnessing the spread of populism and the rise of illiberal democracies that hark back to nationalist and ethnocentric narratives of the past. Because of this changed landscape, Unsettling Empathy, I believe, is more important today than it would have been twenty-five years ago.

I could not have completed this book without the inspiration, encouragement, and support from many people and organizations over the years. First and foremost, I want to thank those who have collaborated with me as cofacilitators, friends, or in facilitator-mentor teams. Among them, in alphabetical order, are Sybol Anderson, Karen Baldner, Marco de Carvalho, Avner Dinur, Wafa Ebenberi, Michal Hochberg, Elke Horn, Tara Kohn, Antwan Saca Saleh, and Michael Sternberg. For lively conversation, wise guidance, caring support, and warm hospitality, my thanks go to Mehnaz Afridi, Alexander Alvarez, Elizabeth Anthony, Sami Awad, Andreas Beier, Sharon Benheim, Julia Chaitin, Melissa Cohen, Lisa Green Cudek, Jackie Feldman, Janice Friebaum, Moti Gigi, Dorota Glowacka, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Amos Goldberg, Beata Hammerich, Doa Hassouneh, Andrea Leute, Albrecht Mahr, Brigitta Mahr, Hanns Maul, Naomi Morrison, Samson Munn, Sondra Perl, Johannes Pfäfflin, Peter Pogany-Wnendt, Gerburg Rohde-Dahl, Shifra Sagy, Srdjan Sremac, Erda Siebert, Zilka Siljak, Joram Tarusaria, Jacob Tor, and Wilhelm Verwoerd. There are numerous other people who have helped me to understand complexity when I could not see or appreciate differences. Even though they will remain unnamed here, their love, labor, and patience are not forgotten.

Special gratitude goes also to the following organizations with which my work has intersected: Bridge of Understanding; Center for Reconciliation Studies at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany; Friendship Across Borders; the Martin-Springer Center for Conflict Studcies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; the Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights in New York City; Stephen Weinstein Holocaust Symposium in Wroxton, United Kingdom; and the Study Group on Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust, Germany. Special thanks also to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia and Tigran Mkrtchyan for their invitation to Yerevan for the 2018 Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide, where I was able to present my work on unsettling empathy.

Two fellowships were particularly helpful in advancing my research on this book. In December 2016 and June 2017, I received a research fellowship through CLUE+ at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and in March 2019, I received a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute’s program “Truth and Reconciliation” in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Without the sabbatical granted by the College of Arts and Letters and the support of the Martin-Springer Institute, both at Northern Arizona University, this book would have taken much longer to complete.

On a personal note, I would like to mention my daughters, Zadekia and Tabitha, who demonstrate their care and curiosity about the world in their own brave ways. At the completion of this writing, one is guiding travelers through Alaska, Patagonia, and along the Danube and has (solo) biked across Cuba, Hawaii, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos; my other daughter spent several weeks in refugee camps in Uganda and Germany while completing her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and international relations and is now availing herself of opportunities to work in the international arena.

In this book I have integrated some previously published materials in thoroughly revised, rearranged, and expanded form. These publications include “Introduction” and “Interpersonal Reconciliation with Groups in Conflict,” in Reconciliation in Global Context, edited by Björn Krondorfer (SUNY, 2018); “Unsettling Empathy: Intercultural Dialogue in the Aftermath of Historical and Cultural Trauma,” in Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition, edited by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2016); “From Pulp to Palimpsest: Witnessing and Re-Imagining through the Arts,” in Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, edited by Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro (University of Washington Press, 2013); and “Reconciliation: A Commitment to Unsettling Empathy,” in The Holocaust and Nostra Aetate: Toward a Greater Understanding, edited by Carol Rittner (Seton Hill University, 2017).