Elie Wiesel and Worthy Remembrance
See, Wiesel has often made this claim quite explicit: I am above politics, my message is so precious and pure it cannot afford to be sullied by compromise. Such is the transcendent dignity of the…
Category: Jewish Tradition
Hold It All/37
In the last thirty years of his life, [Jacob] Glatshteyn’s poetry became an incessant, internalized conversation on Jewish history, the lost world of European Jewry, the birth of Israel, assimilation in America, the tragic demise…
A Second Bible by Melech Ravitch
Why shouldn’t a second Jewish Book be put together and edited and canonized, on the lines of our Bible? 377 A Bible is not an anthology, nor a history, nor a collection of documents. It…
Note to a Friend Who Surprised Herself Last Month by Reading Ten Various Historical Critical Political Theological Books about Jesus
Dear Flannery Jesus Jee-zus Yesh Son o’ God Messiah Numero Uno Christ the King Son of Man Son of Mary and Joe Champion of the poor Pre-incarnation of Che Founder of the Church? Believer in…
Max’s Ire
Dear Bella I receive daily or weekly emails from Algemeiner, the Forward, Chabad, Mondoweiss, Jewcy, ZNet, and Tikkun, which gives me interesting spectrum of opinion on what’s going on. I thought I’d share this with…
Dr. Mengele’s Granddaughter
In one of my talks, in the Droste Huelshof Gymnasium in Freiburg, I spoke about my own Holocaust-related experience, as well as about my work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg trial of the…
Kafka
I am looking, as I write of Kafka, at the photograph taken of him at the age of forty (my age)—it is 1924, as sweet and hopeful a year as he may ever have known…
Five Thousand Years of Jewish Creativity
I learned Hebrew by dint of much effort. It is a difficult language, severe and ascetic. Its ancient basis is the proverb from the Mishna: “Silence is a fence for wisdom.”…If it weren’t for Hebrew,…
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…