Old friends—one a Jew, the other a Christian—Leonard (Lenny) Grob and John K. Roth are philosophers who have long studied the Holocaust. That experience makes us anxious about democracy, because we are also Americans living in perilous times.The 2020s remind us of the 1930s when Nazis destroyed democracy in Germany. Carnage followed. In the 2020s, Donald Trump and his followers endanger democracy in the United States. With Vladimir Putin’s ruthless assault against Ukraine compoundi...

In July 1943, the Gestapo arrested an obscure member of the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Belgium. When his torture-inflicting interrogators determined he was no use to them and that he was a Jew, he was deported to Auschwitz. Liberated in 1945, Jean Améry went on to write a series of essays about his experience. No reflections on torture are more compelling.Améry declared that the victims of torture lose trust in the world at the “very first blow.” The contributors to this ...