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…

Remembering Is Not Enough

Hilene Flanzbaum, The Americanization of the Holocaust The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 The following  note is from summer 1999 when I was reworking my dissertation to what would become my first book, Elie Wiesel…

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,…

To Have Been Exiled by Exiles

I was rereading Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, which is a great collection of essays on literature and  culture with exploration of the experiences of dislocation, exile, migration, and empire as well…

“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…

Yiddish Writers/4

I looked at myself in the mirror. A skeleton stared back at me. Nothing but skin and bone. It was the image of myself after death. It was at that instant that the will to…