Category: Jewish Tradition

Appreciating Kafka

The marvelous thing is that the bareness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language,…

On Moshe-Leib of Sassov

  Before we leave Sassov, let us take a minute to ask ourselves these last questions:  Was Reb Moshe-Leib the forerunner of all those helpless men and women who, generations later, eternities later, continued to…

Among the Survivors by Hedy Epstein

In June 1981 I attended the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Israel. I frequently overheard survivors asking other survivors, “in which camp or ghetto where you? When were you there?” When told, the…

What To Do/14

There was nothing to do but wait it out. My mind has to become accustomed to loneliness. And when one is alone there is nothing to do but study. — I.B. Singer, In My Father’s…

Remembrance as Resistance

“Jews felt that to forget constituted a crime against memory as well as against justice:  whoever forgets becomes the executioner’s accomplice.  The executioner kills twice, the second time when he tries to erase the traces…

Responsibility

“But we all learn from the Midrash the essential lesson of human and social responsibility.  True, we are often too weak to stop injustices; but the least we can do is to protest against them. …

A Jewish Vocation

This week I finished Marcel Reich-Ranicki‘s autobiography,  The Author of Himself.  He was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the foremost literary critic in post-war Germany.  As I read him, I thought of my…

List/27

I recently read David Roskies’ book, The Search for a Usable Jewish Past, and from its pages I noted the following books or authors to read: Ahad Ha’am S. Y. Agnon, The Bridal Canopy, A Simple Story,…