Minutes & Plans & Moons
I first came to the work of Charles Reznikoff in 2008 when I read his terse “poems” in Holocaust. He had read thousands of pages of war crimes trials transcripts to produce condensed, jarring, essential…
Category: Jewish Tradition
Raising the Alarm, Or Not
I just finished the book Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger and found this interview segment on Wiesel and Palestinian Rights. Burger quotes Wiesel as follows, which reminds me of Israeli journalists Gideon Levy…
The Ideal Text
“My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I love the idea of parallel texts, with long, discursive footnotes and marginal commentary, texts commenting on texts.” –Noam Chomsky, Mother Jones, 1987
Scholem on Buber
Today I was rereading Gershom Scholem’s From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memoirs of My Youth, and came across this criticism of Martin Buber: The laconic brevity of those rabbis, their absolute precision of expression, attracted me…
A Letter from Israel Shahak
—Israel Shahak performed a vital service for many years with his translations “From the Hebrew Press,” which gave an accurate picture of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. A survivor of Bergen-Belsen, he was…
Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets
Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…
Present Moment, Only Moment
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how…
A Feat of Reading and Writing
1. [T]he sheer enormity of what took place between 1933 and 1945 beggars our powers of description and understanding. The more one studies this period and its excesses, the more one must conclude that for…
A Poem, a History, a Novel
This fall Dianne, Lynette and I are reading the following books:
“Everything Must Be Told and Written Down”
Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012). Laura Rockusch has performed an inspiring service in producing her book, Collect and Record. Contrary to many people’s assumptions…