'Hartman's essays are a sustained and nuanced critique of realism's refusal, carried in the name of 'truth,' to set limits to representation. It is a book that carefully analyzes and weighs complex issues; it is infused with a sense of moral responsibility and passion without falling into either pathos or moralizing.' - Judaism 'Hartman has been among the American intellectuals who have struggled most fruitfully with the question of 'forgiveness' or 'reconciliation.'' - The Nation 'The concerns discussed here are concerns for us all.The Longest Shadow illuminates the dangers inherent in representations of the Holocaust and of the obverse, the denial, of that unique part of our history.' - Pauline Elkes, Staffordshire University '[Hartman] lucidly evokes the damage done by the Shoah to our trust in language and social institutions, and the defence of art that he offers is all the stronger for his recognition of the historical abyss that it can neither evade nor represent adequately.' - Times Literary Supplement 'Perhaps of most interest to historians in the literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman's collection of essays, is the recurring theme of the value of survivor testimony as a source.But there is more than simply a sense of functional utility to the historian in collecting oral testimony.

For Hartman there is an ethical imperative to listening to the stories of the survivors in the present.' - History Today.