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…
Category: Jewish Tradition
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…
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…
Today’s Yiddish Proverb
Sleep faster, we need the pillows. –I learned of this from Harold Bloom.
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. …