War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in…
Last night I asked Dianne Lee if she’d heard about the Whoopi Goldberg controversy earlier this week when she said the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism, but rather “man’s inhumanity to man.” …
Recently, the Persian scholar and poetry translator Matt Miller sent me condolences upon the death of one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh. I mentioned to him that the several of the teachers I first…
A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night: A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life [A commentary on Shantideva’s great manual], by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. We Were in Auschwitz / 6643…
Sunday 11 April 2021 Dear Sarah, Thanks for your question about what I’ve been reading. Sometimes I make a plan, then other times I act entirely on instinct. So what follows are examples of each….
Joseph Leftwich, Great Yiddish Writers of the Twentieth Century The writer wakens you, the reader, he rouses you out of your indifference, he shows you the things you had not seen before, he makes your…
Dorothee Soelle, Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian A series of short 3-6 page chapters proceeding chronologically from growing up in Germany, through the war years, to her education, her intellectual influences, especially, existentialism;…
H. Leivick I have often felt that instead of writing my autobiography I would like to write the biography of my poems. I mean, tell the life story of some of my poems… Sholem Aleichem…
Shabes morning I fix a period for reading My three “rabbis” recently deceased— Harold Bloom, whose extended family on both sides perished in Europe Every boy but one in George Steiner’s lycée lived after the…
The Daily Mailby Hedy Epstein In those first years of the Nazi regime, it was hard for me to grasp the import of politics writ large. However, I would soon come face to face…