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This week in my seminar on the Holocaust and genocide at California State University, I wrote two words on the board before discussion began: Law and Witnessing. Beneath them, I sketched two different agendas.

Under Law: inclusion, generalization, categorization, prevention.

Under Witnessing: memory, moral ambiguity, particularity, human experience.

We had just read the story—and controversy—of Raphael Lemkin’s development of the concept of genocide; the week before, we had discussed Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz along with an excerpt from "The Grey Zone." The contrast between Lemkin and Levi was initially subtle but quickly became the animating tension of the class.

Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the term genocide, sought to name and codify, as he aspired to prevent the destruction of groups via a universal legal framework. Law, as legal scholar Mark Osiel has observed (a point highlighted by our reading from Andy Rabinbach), aims at inclusivity and generalizability. It creates categories broad enough to encompass multiple cases. It seeks standards that can travel across time and place. Essentially, law must flatten experience in order to function.

Levi’s project could not be more different. In Survival in Auschwitz, and especially in his reflections on the “grey zone,” Levi resists flattening. He insists on distinctions, on moral gradations, on the deeply uncomfortable ambiguities of life inside the camp. History, as Rabinbach puts it, aims at differentiation. It complicates. It particularizes. It unsettles.

At first, my students—most of whom are training to become teachers—saw........

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