A Mission
After the Holocaust, no further doubt was possible. Isaac said so explicitly: the work he wanted to fashion would also be a surviving testimony to a murdered people, a vanished culture, and a dying language. …
Category: Jewish Tradition
Today’s One-Liner (#137)
If we search for God and we are good to human beings, we are doing more or less our job. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell
Getting Free
Olga Katunal [was] a political activist who eventually left the Communist party and returned to Judaism via German philosophy. …[She] made more radical choices when she abandoned Trotsky for Moses in the interwar years. –Judith…
Today’s One-Liner (#132)
We must collect all kinds of sayings and proverbs. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945 , edited by David Stromberg
Today’s One-Liner (#129)
My idea in my story telling is to make Jews better Jews, and Christians better Christians, and in general, if possible at all, make man a little bit warmer, so he will not feel crushed…
More Recent Reading
Dear L., Here is a list of some books I’ve read in the past few years. Given my pretty rigid leftist mindset, Simone Weil’s maxim was often on my mind in reading the following……
Today’s One-Liner (#117)
The more man plans, the harder God laughs. –Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Today’s One-Liner (#115)
There are three crowns: the crown of learning, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of royalty; but the crown of a good name excels them all. –R. Simeon, in Joseph Hertz, Sayings of the…
Today’s One-Liner (#114)
Nothing is more dangerous, either for an individual, or for a people, than to confess to sins of which one is innocent. –Ahad Ha’am, quoted in David Mamet, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the…
A Poet’s Life
Yankev Glatshteyn worked in over fifty sweatshops. –Janet Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn