In Shoah: The Paradigmatic Genocide: Essays in Exegesis and Eisegesis, Zev Garber writes that Jews must protect themselves from supersessionism, or the historical/religious absorption into the Christian realm, as if the Jews were merely incomplete Christians. Supersessionism is a danger to both Christians who would even subconsciously espouse it, and who would be antisemitic in doing so, and to Jews whose religion could be weakened by the view. Supersessionism, inadvertently or not, is a force aligned with the forces which created Nazi Germany, although it comes disguised as a sign of Christian sympathy for the suffering of Jews.
The dangers of supersessionism are exemplified in the attitude of the Catholic Church to the converted Jew Edith Stein who was murdered by the Nazis. The Church has declared that it did not intend to usurp the suffering of the Jews by honoring Edith, but the act still causes distrust among Jews. At the same time, where there is conflict, there is the hope of ongoing dialogue, and Garber makes clear that the Catholic Church has tried to explain the meaning of its actions from its perspective, and Jewish leaders have shown appreciation for that. Both religions believe in God's redemption of human beings, but in different ways.
"Recognition of this difference" (that is, between the "like" and the "unlike") (93) is a major step toward understanding and acceptance of one another, replacing distrust. The basic question Garber asks is how one can believe in God and have any trust in man's capacity for reason after the Shoah. Man made the Shoah because he chose to "dislike the unlike," to see "the other" as less than human, as contemptible, or even, "beneath contempt." Obviously, it makes it easier to slaughter "things" that you hold in contempt, as less than human, as so unlike yourself that they are of another species than you. That "dislike of the unlike" was taken to such an extreme by the Nazis that the...