The Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught for more than forty years and was the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights). He is a Protestant Christian with Presbyterian and Methodist ties. Long friendships with Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein, Eva Fleischner, and Franklin Littell impressed on Roth how deeply the Christian tradition has been implicated in antisemitism and the Holocaust.
In books such as The Failures of Ethics (2015), Sources of Holocaust Insight (2020), and Warnings: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy (2023), Roth looks for ways in which Christians and Jews can work together to resist anti-democratic authoritarianism and to defend human rights. Against long odds, he remains hopeful that a two-state resolution, which he has long supported, can be found for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Hamas-Israel War.
John K. Roth is renowned for his work in Holocaust and genocide studies. He has authored and edited over fifty books. In 1988, he was honored as the U.S. National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
by John K. Roth An American Protestant Christian philosopher, I have studied, written, and taught about the Holocaust for more than fifty years. Early on, that life-changing work showed me how tragically my Christian tradition led to Nazi Germany’s genocide against the Jewish people. No Christianity = No Holocaust—that is the devastating connection. It compels…
John K. Roth 