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I recently read David Roskies’ book, The Search for a Usable Jewish Past, and from its pages I noted the following books or authors to read: Ahad Ha’am S. Y. Agnon, The Bridal Canopy, A Simple Story,…
Category: Khurbn
A Reader to an Author
“A whole world collapsed before my very eyes, but you, my favorite author, are bringing it to life again.” –Miriam, in I.B. Singer’s Meshugah
Western Civilization
The uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto began in the spring of 1943 and lasted about twenty days. Of the thousands of Jews still in the ghetto when the uprising began perhaps a…
The Way It Looked in 1996
The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be…
Face to Face with Elie Wiesel
This short review was originally published in the bulletin of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, April 1993. My book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, was published in spring 2001….
A Nation of Words
Miriam Weinstein’s Yiddish: A Nation of Words is a compelling book. Go to Amazon.com and type in “Yiddish” and many books will come up whose titles are cheap, sentimental, ridiculous, goofy. Weinstein has a sense…
A Nobody with Whom You Should Get Acquainted
Dear Shimmelstoy After our conversation yesterday afternoon I wrote the following lines Thanks for your encouragement If you want to pass it on To some of your students Go right ahead Bella Levenshteyn He…
Lessons
The lesson of the Holocaust is the facility with which most people, put into a situation that does not contain a good choice, or renders such a good choice very costly, argue themselves away from…
Burning Children and the Duty to Resist
In May 1968 Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote a statement on behalf of the Catonsville Nine as to why they were performing an act of civil disobedience in protest of the Vietnam War. It reads,…
The Way It Looked in 1999
Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss and dispossession by the very people who have taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus, ironically, we are the victims of…