Minutes & Plans & Moons

I first came to the work of Charles Reznikoff in 2008 when I read his terse “poems” in Holocaust. He had read thousands of pages of war crimes trials transcripts to produce condensed, jarring, essential…

Sara Roy speaks to Germans

Your sense of guilt, if that is the correct word, should not derive from criticizing Israel. It should reside in remaining silent in the face of injustice as so many of your forebears did before,…

The Political Economy of Memory

Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide I read this book for my treatment of Wiesel and it gave me plenty of perspectives, arguments and insights. The question of the…

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…

A Feat of Reading and Writing

1. [T]he sheer enormity of what took place between 1933 and 1945 beggars our powers of description and understanding. The more one studies this period and its excesses, the more one must conclude that for…

“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…